"I'm not generally opposed to things that allow law enforcement to do a better job with fewer resources."
While I freely concede I'm making a "balance" argument and as such there can be reasonable disagreement on where the correct balance is, there is a bound on how far you want to take that. It is not a bad thing that law enforcement takes some effort, as it serves as a sort of natural counter on excessively zealous enforcement, one far more effective than any law or ACLU lawsuit could ever be. The goal isn't to make the police job as easy as possible, the goal is to serve justice.
This makes it easy to keep an eye on a much larger number of people with little increase in manpower, and the problem there is that by increasing the amount of data, while at the same time reducing the quality of the priors on the data that the person (or perhaps rather the vehicle) in question has committed some sort of crime, you will start encountering the classic signal processing problem where you will inevitably start to get more false positives. Requiring a warrant to drop these on somebody's car, and therefore requiring some sort of prior probable cause, isn't just good civil liberties (because those false positives hurt real people), it's good statistics.
Doing "the same thing as before, only more easily" is still an important qualitative change in law enforcement and security in general, and I think you need an argument more powerful than that to justify the change in question.
Should they be allowed to track everyone? No. I'm comfortable with the limitation that someone has to actually walk up to the subject vehicle and attach a device to it.
If you want to talk about things like dragnetting every car on the road through things like OnStar, this is going to be a very boring conversation, because I can't imagine anyone on HN --- myself included --- is comfortable with that idea.
(Even though it's inevitably going to happen, not because law enforcement is grasping, but because technological progress is going to make access to that information the default).
Falling costs and shrinking size mean that over time, your standards of 'walking up and attaching' and 'detection and removal is allowed' will become less meaningful over time. They could become so cheap, ubiquitous, and nearly undetectable that your 'same activity just more resource efficient' standard will allow a quantitative difference to become a qualitative difference.
And I'll be right there with you when that happens. But right now, what's happening seems to this particular liberal who is generally concerned with his civil liberties to be reasonable.
I think the problem is then: how do you decide, and build a consensus, about how much use is too much use? Especially given that the use is covert, you might not even know when it passes the threshold you might find abhorrent.
That's why my preferred kind of civil liberty protection relies on bright-line rules. Saying, "it's OK until it starts to feel excessive" is an invitation to law enforcement to go up to, and then beyond, that abusive line – in secret – waiting for some sort of delayed backlash as the only check.
"Falling costs and shrinking size mean that over time, your standards of 'walking up and attaching' and 'detection and removal is allowed' will become less meaningful over time."
Not to mention co-opting devices like those employed by OnStar. No way to remove that one.
You can be pulled over anywhere at any time without a court order or even the permission of an officer's supervisor. All it takes is a reasonable suspicion that you've violated any of hundreds of fiddly traffic laws. People generally don't have a problem with this; you learned about this when you were 15 and in the classroom part of driver's ed.
There are places where you can be pulled over for no reason, by default, because everyone is being pulled over. These are usually "sobriety checkpoints", but sometimes they come right out and call them "compliance checkpoints". In some states, they're lawful; in others, their lawfulness is more questionable.
I have a problem with checkpoints. Lots of people do. So there's a bright line: you can pull some people over (you hopefully have a reason, but we accept the notion that nobody has time to make sure and then if you're an officer and abuse that privilege there is a process for disciplining you). You should not be pulled everyone over.
There's a slope, I agree, but I dispute that it is as slippery as you say.
There are places where you can be pulled over for no reason, by default, because everyone is being pulled over.
This is the case in Canada, and I don't know anyone who has a problem with it. The police can't pull everyone over and demand that everyone provides a breath sample for alcohol analysis -- but people accept that if you've got 10 police officers stopping cars, it's a heck of a lot safer to stop everybody than to have them jumping into and out of traffic picking out individual cars.
I'm not certain what you mean by a false positive (what happens?) in this case, so it's hard to assess how harmful false positives would be.
wrt excessively zealous enforcement, it may be the case that more efficient police work improves the situation. Right now, the police have an incentive to arrest somebody even if they aren't sure who to arrest. If technology means they can arrest more real bad guys more easily, there won't be so much pressure to bend the rules.
I wonder what the data retention rules and/or policies regarding these devices under either warranted or non-warranted use (on the off chance that they're different).
Is there any guarantee in place that one of them might be attached to an innocent persons vehicle, only to have some budget-desperate bureaucrat decide to datamine his departments last 2 years worth of archived GPS tracking data in search of fineable offenses?
"Your car was detected exceeding the speed limit 63 times on 101 southbound on weekday mornings, and 59 times on 101 northbound on weekday afternoons between 01 Jan 2011 and 31 Mar 2011. We are offering you a one-time opportunity to settle all 122 speeding offences for $45 each, a 75% reduction on the minimum fine amount, if you pay $5,490.00 online by creditcard and waive your rights to appeal by 5pm on Fri 11th Nov. Failure to pay in full by Fri 11th may result in issue of 122 speeding fines @ $180 each resulting in a total fine of $21,960.00. Regards, your local cash-strapped local government area police department."
See data retention is (to my mind) a great point to bring up here, as opposed to arguments in principle about whether law enforcement should be allowed to do anything because war! on! terror!
I would tend to think that investigations are "active" or "not active", have case numbers, have a process for being closed and open probably documented in the police General Orders or whatever the FBI equivalent is, and I think the police should not be able to retain information from vehicle telemetry past the closing of a case unless they are actual format subjects of the investigation, and then only consistent with the existing policies on retaining information.
I DO NOT think it is reasonable to use GPS telemetry to passively fine people for speeding or running red lights.
In addition to what tptacek said, I would say that since the data was collected without a warrant, you could defend against it. My understanding is that the tracking data is used to get a warrant to get real evidence which then becomes the basis of the case. The tracking data is not itself the entire basis for the case.
I fully understand and respect why people want to protect their rights.
But often times I think people are too strong in fighting to protect their rights. It's as though reducing/eliminating the _minor_ inconvenience of a false positive is more important than stopping/preventing a false negative.
But often times I think people are too strong in fighting to protect their rights.
I'm sorry, but I can't even parse that into anything that makes sense. How could you ever fight too hard to protect your rights?!?? I mean, what could possibly be more important than protecting our innate, individual rights?
Maybe it's just me, but in my world-view, the whole "give me liberty or give me death" thing is not just a tagline. The only reason I can see for not fighting tooth-and-nail to defend your rights at any particular moment in time, is if you're faced with overwhelming force to the point that trying to defend yourself would amount to suicide, and you're willing to exercise discretion and "live to fight another day" when the odds may be more favorable. But that's a strategic decision, not abdication of your rights...
I mean, what could possibly be more important than protecting our innate, individual rights?
Lots of things. If you are on a lifeboat and are terribly paranoid and aggressive, then the other passengers may be quite justified in tossing you into the water. The existence and general primacy of individual rights does not negate the existence of collective rights; see an overview of these issues going back to Thomas Jefferson at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Constitution_is_not_a_suici...
Well, a lot of people consider that it is indeed more important. You've surely heard the notion that it's better for ten guilty persons to go free than for one innocent person to be convicted; this is not merely defense-lawyer rhetoric, but was enunciated as a basic principle of criminal justice by Sir William Blackstone (widely considered the architect of the common law system which underpins the anglophone legal tradition).
While I freely concede I'm making a "balance" argument and as such there can be reasonable disagreement on where the correct balance is, there is a bound on how far you want to take that. It is not a bad thing that law enforcement takes some effort, as it serves as a sort of natural counter on excessively zealous enforcement, one far more effective than any law or ACLU lawsuit could ever be. The goal isn't to make the police job as easy as possible, the goal is to serve justice.
This makes it easy to keep an eye on a much larger number of people with little increase in manpower, and the problem there is that by increasing the amount of data, while at the same time reducing the quality of the priors on the data that the person (or perhaps rather the vehicle) in question has committed some sort of crime, you will start encountering the classic signal processing problem where you will inevitably start to get more false positives. Requiring a warrant to drop these on somebody's car, and therefore requiring some sort of prior probable cause, isn't just good civil liberties (because those false positives hurt real people), it's good statistics.
Doing "the same thing as before, only more easily" is still an important qualitative change in law enforcement and security in general, and I think you need an argument more powerful than that to justify the change in question.