[HN Gopher] AI watches millions of cars and tells cops if you're...
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AI watches millions of cars and tells cops if you're driving like a
criminal
Author : thehoff
Score : 54 points
Date : 2023-07-17 21:32 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.forbes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.forbes.com)
| kdamica wrote:
| IMO there should be strict controls on who can access this data
| and for what, and how long data can be retained, but given those
| limits, this is exactly the type of thing we should be doing to
| catch criminals.
| barbariangrunge wrote:
| Criminals like mothers who buy abortion pills for their
| daughters?
| causality0 wrote:
| Almost every article about this has glossed over the fact that
| probable cause for the vehicle search was a K-9 unit alerting on
| the car, not the traffic AI.
| s5300 wrote:
| [dead]
| CPLX wrote:
| Stopping people due to AI reports and having dogs smell them is
| kind of the problem everyone is concerned about.
| einpoklum wrote:
| In Soviet Russia, police chase your car and has to stop traffic
| to get you.
|
| In Capitalist America, traffic stop AI chase your car and has
| police get you.
|
| ... hmm, not quite there :-\
| FloatArtifact wrote:
| To me this smacks of guilty until proven innocent. AI or any
| automated enforcement assumes checks everyone all the time. Put
| simply data like this should never be collected in the first
| place as that's the only way it will never be abused.
| xwdv wrote:
| Clam down. No one is making an accusation of guilt, they're
| just keeping an eye on an individual the way you might keep an
| eye on someone pacing around erratically. In most cases, they
| know it could mean nothing.
| dang wrote:
| Could you please stop breaking the site guidelines? We
| eventually have to ban accounts that keep doing so, and we've
| had to warn you multiple times already
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35558518).
|
| Your comment would be fine without that first bit.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| FloatArtifact wrote:
| No, I disagree. It's the fact that they do check everyone.
| The same logic can be applied to automated speed traps and
| red light cameras. (Which do assume guilt)
|
| The only difference here is a ticket isn't sent in the mail
| or an officer showing up at the door.
| Havoc wrote:
| Time to re-watch minority report
| FinnKuhn wrote:
| This system seems to work by using the locations a car has been
| to compare see if other cars with a similar location history are
| more likely to be used to transport drugs if I understand
| correctly.
|
| Assuming that this is how that system works I can't see how this
| is legal. Let's say police is only searching cars between place A
| and place B, but not between place A and place C. Therefore they
| find drugs in cars that drive between A and B. This system
| therefore is now flagging all cars that drive between A and B as
| suspicious due to the bias of the searches the algorithm was
| trained on. It could be that there are more drugs being smuggled
| between A and C, but the system wouldn't know due to data
| containing no searches on cars between A and C.
|
| If we now say A=downtown, B=lower income area and C=high income
| area I think it becomes very obvious how such a system that
| allows police control cars based on past searches is
| discriminatory and everything but fair. It enables searches
| without any reasonable grounds and I have honestly no idea how
| any of this could hold up in court, but what do I know.
| avar wrote:
| How are you making the leap from discrimination to the search
| being without "reasonable grounds"?
|
| Let's say I'm driving from A to B and the police stops me with
| a trunk full of heroin.
|
| I'm supposed to argue that if they'd only searched drivers
| travelling from A to C they'd find trucks full of cocaine
| instead?
|
| Maybe that's true, but I'm still breaking the law.
|
| You could argue that police attention should be more
| distributed. But surely "reasonable grounds" for a search
| should be measured primarily on the basis of the "hit rate".
| gleenn wrote:
| I am pretty confident that having a higher hit rate doesn't
| have any affect on whether it's reasonable grounds.
| jacquesm wrote:
| This argument has been made time and again with respect to
| racial profiling. Even if it works that doesn't make it
| right. You either have an actual suspicion or you're just
| engaging in profiling of some sort and that means that
| everybody is suddenly a suspect. This is why dragnet
| surveillance is such a bad idea.
| 01100011 wrote:
| This has been done for a decade. If you regularly drive between
| San Diego and Seattle, say, you will eventually get pulled over
| for some made up infraction(i.e. parallel construction) because
| the DEA has informed the local/state police that you're likely
| a drug mule.
|
| https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2015/0127/US-car-spyin...
| Scoundreller wrote:
| I, like other intelligent criminals, break only 1 law at a time,
| so this should be fun
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| So, stay for longer at your dealer's house, occasionally bring
| over a cake, got it.
| nine_zeros wrote:
| It is getting clearer by the day that humans will use AI for laws
| written for humans. And this will cause a lot of grief for the
| people on whom these laws are imposed.
| barbariangrunge wrote:
| We are officially no better than china when it comes to mass
| surveillance now. We're just a few years behind on deployment
| compared to Xi
| TZubiri wrote:
| Minority report was a great prediction
| gigel82 wrote:
| Most new cars come with telematics, some have always-on cellular
| connectivity for data collection (and supposedly for automatic
| crash notifications).
|
| It's only a matter of time until that becomes required (like the
| backup cameras became required in 2018 for example), and then
| it's only a matter of time before accurate / GPS positioning
| becomes part of the "required telematics" that get automatically
| shared with authorities (in addition to data brokers, advertisers
| and so on).
| JohnFen wrote:
| > (like the backup cameras became required in 2018 for example)
|
| But there's no law saying you can't disable the backup camera.
| tomrod wrote:
| Ugh. Their model will guaranteed to be borked: PR(is criminal |
| visited locations) != PR(visited locations | is criminal).
|
| In other words, drug traffickers probably follow patterns typical
| for a larger subset of the population, which in of itself is not
| an indicator of guilt.
| mikrl wrote:
| The title is ominous but we have had speed cameras for years and
| I can guarantee that if I do 15 over the limit I'll still get
| passed by someone doing 25 more.
| supportengineer wrote:
| It seems like this goes directly against the Constitution.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Which part?
| recursive wrote:
| I'm no constitutional scholar, or lawyer of any kind. But, I
| don't see how.
|
| The closest thing seems like "searches and seizures". But none
| of that seems to be happening. That would probably be
| applicable if it was deployed on private roads or something.
|
| Or maybe there's some other part of the constitution you had in
| mind.
| killdozer wrote:
| Searching through a database of license plates to determine
| cause for a stop is plainly a warrantless search, SCOTUS is a
| dumpster who bend over backwards for LE but lets not pretend
| there's any merit to most of these decisions.
| recursive wrote:
| But it's not a search _of the citizen_. Presumably the
| owner of the database consents.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Pulling over the vehicle to search it on that basis _is_
| a search of the individual.
| freedomben wrote:
| Yeah I hate what's happening, but I don't think it's
| unconstitutional (though I would strongly bet that the
| founders never could have imagined the capabilities that
| modern tech provides). It's more the equivalent of hiring
| billions of cops and having them watch every part of the road
| all the time and flagging when they see something
| "suspicious." I don't think the constitution would prohibit
| hiring billions of cops, if some jurisdiction were inclined
| to do such a thing. The mass surveillance is an extension of
| that principle.
| titanomachy wrote:
| In this case, they searched a person's car after the software
| system highlighted their behavior as suspicious. The
| constitutional issue would be whether the resulting search
| was reasonable or not.
|
| We can agree that if the system was very poorly made and
| flagged 90% of drivers, then the flagging wouldn't constitute
| "probable cause" in a legal sense... so how good does the
| system have to be before we're willing to accept searches
| based solely on the system's recommendation?
| einpoklum wrote:
| The US constitution did not address the matter of privacy,
| but US legal tradition - over the centuries - has interpreted
| it to _imply_ such a right, or some kinds of privacy
| protection.
|
| See:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_privacy#United_States
|
| Also, The search part, and perhaps even the inspection of
| cars using the cameras, may be considered "unreasonable
| search" of the kind forbidden in the 4th amendment to the US
| constitution.
|
| Still, remember that both law and policy are made by the
| state and applied by the state, in the service of state
| interests, which overlap the interests of subjects only to a
| limited extent. The US government already basically wiretaps
| most people's private communications (via Google, Apple,
| Yahoo, Microsoft etc. - Snowden revelations) - so why not spy
| on people on the roads?
| floxy wrote:
| Just imagine what John Madison would think of the British red-
| coats doing this.
|
| >The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses,
| papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and
| seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue,
| but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and
| particularly describing the place to be searched, and the
| persons or things to be seized.
|
| >The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall
| not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the
| people.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| Against the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution?
|
| That prohibits unreasonable searches, but it looks like the
| point is that the AI provides the "reasonable" argument here?
| JohnFen wrote:
| It seems like our world is getting more dystopian every week that
| goes by. I can't wait until this pendulum starts swinging the
| other way.
| jacquesm wrote:
| What makes you convinced that it still _can_ swing the other
| way?
| bob1029 wrote:
| You can still buy battery-powered angle grinders for $130 at
| your local hardware store with cash.
|
| All of these fancy AI systems rely on the sensors on the
| ground in your community (aka those solar panel + webcam pole
| combos randomly scattered about). It would take some
| teenagers on bikes one weekend to cripple a municipal
| minority report network. Sensors on major roadways are more
| difficult to tamper with, but not a whole lot of our land is
| a major roadway so that's not a huge deal.
|
| Some even argue all of our modern infrastructure will fail on
| its own _despite_ our best efforts. Complexity is a hell of a
| thing. A tiny bit of brute force applied might be all it
| takes in the end.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Mostly because history indicates that this is a pattern that
| repeats over time. But also because if I don't have at least
| that small hope, the despair would be hard to handle.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Ok. I'm a bit concerned that the ways the pendulum has
| historically swung back are more or less closed off because
| of all the ratchets in place now. You'd have to upset a
| very large number of applecarts to get to the point where
| you can reverse the swing because with these tools it is
| now possible to identify the agents that would cause the
| swing to reverse. Breaking that is very tough, essentially
| once power is entrenched to that level it is unassailable.
| The DDR comes to mind, they had an iron grip on the
| populace and if they had access to today's tools I have no
| idea how any kind of dissident could even begin to get a
| movement off the ground before being identified and hauled
| off. The same for the various underground movements during
| WWII, they wouldn't have stood a chance.
|
| China may well get there first, (if they aren't there yet)
| and we'll get to see how doable this is, I really fear the
| worst.
| more_corn wrote:
| It'll swing, I worry about how violently it'll swing.
| gigel82 wrote:
| LOL... they're boiling the frog while we wait for things to get
| better.
|
| Spoiler: we're the frog.
| JohnFen wrote:
| But you know that in the real world, that frog thing doesn't
| work, right? The frog will, in fact, get out when the water
| gets too hot no matter how slowly the heat increases.
| bottom999mottob wrote:
| There's no way searching someone's car, based off their legal
| driving behavior, could be misused!
|
| The police have no repercussions for sending warrants to Google
| for phone information. Is searching someone for their legal
| driving behavior any better?
|
| https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/google-geofence-warrant...
| recursive wrote:
| "Searching" a car is generally understood to mean looking
| inside of it.
|
| Observing the same car coming and going on public roads seems
| like it requires a lower bar. IANAL.
| titanomachy wrote:
| They _did_ search his car (based on his driving patterns) and
| found cocaine.
|
| The question isn't whether it was legal to observe the
| driving, but whether it was legal to search the car based on
| the observed patterns.
| causality0 wrote:
| They pulled him over based on his driving patterns. They
| searched his car based on a K-9 unit alerting on the
| vehicle.
|
| https://www.leagle.com/decision/infdco20221109635
| pseudo0 wrote:
| Why do we allow K-9s to count as probable cause when they
| can be roughly as accurate as a coin flip? Eg. U.S. v.
| Bentley, where the particular dog in question had a
| documented 40.5% false positive rate in the field.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| If I have my documents folded/crumbled up, stuffed into
| pockets... such that someone standing near me can see them
| sticking out, do they get to ignore warrant requirements to
| my person and papers because of that?
|
| I'm not a lawyer either, but I'm pretty sure the answer is
| no.
|
| Paper's not magical. If my behavior is sticking out of my
| pockets for everyone to see, they're not allowed to search
| through those unless they've got a fucking warrant. The
| amendment wasn't written with the express (or even covert)
| purpose of giving them ludicrous excuses to bypass its
| requirements. Reading it as if it were is wrong and
| deceitful.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| > The police have no repercussions for sending warrants to
| Google
|
| Yes, because judges, who are also human beings, love when cops
| flood them with stacks of bullshit requests.
| foomatic2u wrote:
| What judge? Like ~third paragraph states system operates with
| no judicial oversight.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| A warrant requires a judge, otherwise it's not a warrant.
|
| If Google wants to obey non-warrants, that's on them but
| not legally required.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| > The police have no repercussions for sending warrants to
| Google
|
| Those warrants.
| indymike wrote:
| The police cannot issue warrants. They can ask. Only a
| court can issue a warrant.
| foomatic2u wrote:
| Most of these new data surveillance tools don't have a judge
| in the loop.
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