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Does anybody have info on how this works on a technical level? I.e., is it an actual report of the phone’s GPS position, or is it tower-side triangulation? If the former, do all devices support it?
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21088576/march-2019-f... (PDF page 57)
This is all under a warrant. Of course police can and do get location records from cell companies with a warrant, and it doesn't seem like a huge stretch for a warrant to require the cell company to "ping" to get the most quality location data. The problem here is the judges granting the warrants. Judges in Virginia are chosen by legislatures [1], which means they're accountable to political establishment who in turn…
> judicial elections are needed These aren’t a panacea. I’ve helped get judges elected in Manhattan. The primaries swung by tens of votes in some cases, usually no more than a few hundred. A few clubs, or one large tenant association, could decide the vote. (Counterfactual: judicial elections attract disproportionately-informed voters if they happen off cycle and without party affiliations, which in the context of pr…
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how about sticking to the speed limit? Because the speed limit in much of the US is below the “natural” speed of that roadway. We have highways where 80+mph is the norm, but the posted limited can be anywhere from 55-70mph (I-95 along the east coast). Driving the speed limit actually becomes dangerous. At this point, speed enforcement becomes a hit-or-miss affair, where you’re at the mercy of the police officer. Bett…
> Driving the speed limit actually becomes dangerous. I've lived in VA for decades and have driven all over the state. There is no highway where driving the speed limit is actually dangerous and there certainly isn't a highway where the norm is 20 over.
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> but my car going 10mph over is SIGNIFICANTLY less dangerous to the public than that hoopty going the speed limit To the driving public, specifically. Pedestrians and cyclists will still be goop on your windshield 50 feet into your 100 foot braking.
Of which there are none on the roads where people want to go particularly fast.
(There is no such thing as a road where people "don't want" to go fast, because "fast" is disjointed in meaning: there's the legal speed that drivers regularly and unsafely exceed, and there's the "fast" speed at which drivers perceive how unsafe they're being.)
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Virginia as a whole has some pretty absurdly pro police laws, at least re: driving. The lesser of either 20 over the speed limit or any speed over ~80~ 85 miles an hour (thanks jmisavage) in Virginia is a misdemeanor, and at least one auto journalist has been jailed in Virginia. https://jalopnik.com/never-speed-in-virginia-lessons-from-my... It's also the only state to prohibit radar detectors.
> Virginia as a whole has some pretty absurdly pro police laws, at least re: driving (Full disclosure: have never driven in the USA), but without wishing to sound like a know-all, how about sticking to the speed limit? I've been dinged exactly twice for speeding since getting my licence almost exactly 30 years ago this month. No points in either case. It's not hard, honest. My wife might disagree, but her licence, he…
Perhaps you are in Europe, where speed limits are generally just the natural speed for the roads they're posted on, and the roads are designed for natural speeds that are appropriate for their uses. Lucky you, if so. Here in the U.S., speed limits are set to give police probable cause to stop anyone, any time.
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> but my car going 10mph over is SIGNIFICANTLY less dangerous to the public than that hoopty going the speed limit To the driving public, specifically. Pedestrians and cyclists will still be goop on your windshield 50 feet into your 100 foot braking.
There are typically two kinds of roads these speeds are reached in the US: 1. Expressways, where pedestrians and cyclists are not allowed. They are walled off with specific entrances and exits. 2. Country highways, where pedestrians and cyclists are nearly unheard of, and are typically very easy to spot from a distance and adjust accordingly. There is a third area where these speeds are sometimes reached in urban are…
Edit: The upstream thread even has an article where the author describes doing 93 on a 55 backroad in VA and subsequently getting arrested[1].
[1]: https://jalopnik.com/never-speed-in-virginia-lessons-from-my...
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Last time I was in Texas, it was legal to drive 80 miles an hour on certain highways. If you needed to make a u-turn while driving on the highway, you could pull into special areas in the median of highways to make those turns. The same places highway patrol often use to sit, wait, and monitor traffic. Both of those things are illegal in Virginia.
I don't remember what the exact number was (maybe 75mph) but I had a rental for a business trip out west somewhere--maybe Arizona--and it turned out the car had a governor set to whatever the number was--which at the time was presumably significantly over a lot of speed limits but was right at the speed limit where I was driving. It was very annoying as the car would suddenly drop the throttle and slow down. Only tim…
Been that way for at least a decade.
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I regularly drive at speeds in excess of 100mph when highways are empty and waze shows no police. What would be the fate of a person caught at those speeds in Virginia?
What if the police use Waze though? Last time I used it -and it was many years ago- it was clearly possible to use it to find speeders using it.
This is all under a warrant. Of course police can and do get location records from cell companies with a warrant, and it doesn't seem like a huge stretch for a warrant to require the cell company to "ping" to get the most quality location data. The problem here is the judges granting the warrants. Judges in Virginia are chosen by legislatures [1], which means they're accountable to political establishment who in turn…
Warrants to get a third party to take actions to make your devices do things that can be logged is another.
There is, at the very least, a very significant difference between the two cases. Whether we can all agree to pretend that there is non is certainly a political question.
T-Mobile is charging police $900/customer/month to track us? I want a rebate on my cellphone plan.
Agreed. I think we need to put as much blame on the carriers providing these capabilities to anyone , let alone the police. That the police are publicly funded and are buying this data with my money is also a huge issue to me, but if I had to pick one thing to change, I’d make selling this data illegal. That way, no one could have it.