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U.S. Spies on Millions of Cars

wsj.com

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Re: U.S. Spies on Millions of Cars

#161

Post by joering2 »

themartorana wrote: post #145
greeneggs wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A direct attack on this surveillance technology might be a losing battle. But what about passing laws to mitigate its effect, and possibly in the long run help fight it? Two examples: 1. A law requiring the government to delete this data after a certain amount of time. 2. Legal penalties for abusing this data. Perhaps standards for how the data must be protected.

The problem is even prescribed penalties against authority figures are rarely enforced. There are a few low-level people in jail for torture of prisoners, but not one administrator. Bush and Cheney should have been hauled before The Hague, much as they would have demanded of any leader of any other country that had unilaterally broken the Geneva Convention, but Obama wanted to "look forward," not backward. There is/w…

Further, the IRS is a great example how they are being "punished".

The only thing you can take from them is funding. So did Congress -- took away money from IRS and brought their operational budget to those levels from 2008.

And now - pick one that is correct:

A) The director of IRS cut off $80MM bonuses promised to all those hard working ants that scrutinized non-profit applicants and further lost backup tapes that have been miraculously found years later; OR,

B) The director of IRS cut off funds for customer support telephone line, forcing people to wait minimum 30 minutes on the line before a real person answers, admitting on the record that majority of taxpayers won't be able to reach out for help in this tax period.

Any solutions to this clear abuse of power and disrespect to fellow citizens??

Re: U.S. Spies on Millions of Cars

#162

Post by r00fus »

javajosh wrote: post #14

The USA is automatically photographing millions of cars and putting the data in a giant database used by all law-enforcement. It reads like the premise of a dystopian science fiction novel. I can't help but guess that the reaction is going to be a big shoulder shrug, because, to but it bluntly, things aren't that bad for most people. If you are white, have a good job, follow the law, and make sure to richly kiss ass…

> If you are white, have a good job, follow the law, and make sure to richly kiss ass if and when you come in contact with the police, life in the USA is rich, full; it's like heaven.

Sure, until any of the above changes. Or you piss off the wrong person with connections. Some of which you may have little control over.

And to be honest - to not be raked over the coals simply to exercise my right to freedom of movement is not exactly "heaven" to me, it's the basics of a free society based on laws.

Re: U.S. Spies on Millions of Cars

#163

Post by [deleted] »

stegosaurus wrote: post #6

Same deal in the UK with the national ANPR system (Automatic Number Plate Recognition). Ostensibly to reduce the amount of uninsured/untaxed drivers on the roads. Don't want to sit around in databases? Well, here's a nice list of just a few of the things you can't have: Bank account; Car/motorcycle; Mobile telephone; Internet-connected computer; Credit/debit card; Visible face (oh, we might be safe there, for a few y…

[deleted]

Re: U.S. Spies on Millions of Cars

#164

Post by rosser »

superuser2 wrote: post #142
wahsd wrote: post #103

Can we please stop acting like the USA is somehow a "good guy" anymore? We have to realize that the authoritarian demons have the battering ram at the door and I really don't want to find out what happens when the USA turns into an authoritarian militaristic regime. We're way more than half way there already and people support it. Our very own government is a threat to us all, or at least those who will find themselv…

Do you read the news? Because here are some things that other states are up to that we aren't (at least, not in this decade): - Systematic execution for the crime of belonging to a particular ethnic group or religion - Open and openly arbitrary disappearing, detention, and torture of intellectuals for the crime of writing articles critical of state-sponsored religious and political doctrine - Use of force against peo…

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Not_as_bad_as

Re: U.S. Spies on Millions of Cars

#165

Post by rosser »

flycaliguy wrote: post #148
superuser2 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you read the news? Because here are some things that other states are up to that we aren't (at least, not in this decade): - Systematic execution for the crime of belonging to a particular ethnic group or religion - Open and openly arbitrary disappearing, detention, and torture of intellectuals for the crime of writing articles critical of state-sponsored religious and political doctrine - Use of force against peo…

Can somebody good with their logical fallacies let me know if this falls under "Fallacy of relative privation"? This definition [1] even uses this very argument as an example: "The counter to the relative privation argument when applied, for example, to compare America with other more tyrannous countries is to note that the proper comparison to make should not be between America and other tyrannies but between Americ…

Yes, it's exactly the fallacy of relative privation.

Re: U.S. Spies on Millions of Cars

#166

Post by elihu »

nl wrote: post #82

This can cut both ways. Back in the early 2000's, plane spotters identified CIA planes used for extraordinary rendition by recoding registration numbers and locations. Maybe David Brin was right after all[2]. Automatic license plate scanning is trivial now. It would be pretty easy for anyone to build a node of a system like this. [1] http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2005/dec/10/usa.terrorism1 [2] http://en.wikipedia.org…

The weird thing about license plate scanning is that basically anyone could do it, and there's no obvious way to stop it. Any group of ordinary citizens (including private businesses) could create a distributed network of license plate scanners by installing devices in their cars and around their houses/buildings.

It would be an interesting act of protest to track the movements of powerful people, so as to compel them to take privacy more seriously.

Re: U.S. Spies on Millions of Cars

#167

Post by AnthonyMouse »

woodman wrote: post #159
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is no way to reverse this. It's easy to reverse some of this. If they're recording license plates and they or someone else will do it regardless, then stop having license plates. The justification for having them doesn't really apply to self-driving cars anyway. Your argument seems to be that you can't effectively prohibit something that technology makes practical. That clearly isn't the case -- the constitut…

> The justification for having them doesn't really apply to self-driving cars anyway. You seriously believe that? You think the government makes common sense decisions? So ok, no more plates. How long until we hear about them logging the serial numbers broadcast by our tire pressure sensors? Or what about the unique magnetic signature of our vehicles detectable by all the loops already embedded in the road? If the go…

> You seriously believe that? You think the government makes common sense decisions?

Decisions like that are made in the open. You can tell if your self-driving car has a license plate on it and keep lobbying to remove it until they do.

> How long until we hear about them logging the serial numbers broadcast by our tire pressure sensors? Or what about the unique magnetic signature of our vehicles detectable by all the loops already embedded in the road?

So it's a cat and mouse game. So what? If they want to log RFID tags they have to spend a billion dollars putting readers everywhere, at which point people rip the tags out and the readers are useless. Find some other way (and some other billion dollars) to fingerprint individual cars and people will realize that it's profitable to sign up their self-driving car to transport Uber passengers and suddenly tracking the cars is meaningless. And so it goes.

> Tampering with NIST, clipper chips, export controls. This is not sustainable, people will eventually tire.

All of those things failed. Nobody gets tired of winning.

> Also, the argument sounds very similar to what was said about TSA security theater

The analogous thing to not having TSA security theater is not having mass surveillance. You're arguing the opposite -- mass surveillance for everyone. You can't make the slippery slope argument when you want to start at the bottom.

> No, my point is that you can't prevent something technically practical while the government operates in secret, enjoying a monopoly on information.

Which I'm not disagreeing with. Government secrets should be aggressively minimized. But once again, governments being transparent to their people in no way requires people to be transparent to their governments. And there is apparently some dispute about what is technically practical.

> That is why warrantless home searches aren't extremely common, because it would be impossible to do in secret - old papers have very little to do with it.

Which is all we need to do here. Make it so that spying on you requires them to physically enter the space you're in so that it's only practical to do it according to the rules with probable cause rather than in bulk in secret.

Re: U.S. Spies on Millions of Cars

#168

Post by AnthonyMouse »

woodman wrote: post #160
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is secret about a moat, electrified fence or a stated policy of mutual assured destruction? Normal people don't have a moat. A major reason that e.g. home invasions are risky (and thus are deterred) is that the criminal doesn't know when the mark or the neighbors will be away from home, what security may be in place or whether there is anything worth stealing. If you put that information on the internet for an…

What is more likely: I was suggesting that people secure their homes with a moat; or I was demonstrating that, contrary to the post I was responding to, not all security relies upon obscurity?

And what good is physical security if you don't have it? If it doesn't exist in practice then pointing out that it exists in theory is just being pedantic.

Re: U.S. Spies on Millions of Cars

#169

Post by spain »

stegosaurus wrote: post #6

Same deal in the UK with the national ANPR system (Automatic Number Plate Recognition). Ostensibly to reduce the amount of uninsured/untaxed drivers on the roads. Don't want to sit around in databases? Well, here's a nice list of just a few of the things you can't have: Bank account; Car/motorcycle; Mobile telephone; Internet-connected computer; Credit/debit card; Visible face (oh, we might be safe there, for a few y…

> I used to think we could escape surveillance using technology. Fool's errand. We'd need an entire culture change. It's gone.

I seem to remember one of the Pirate Bay founders said something along those lines. Not even because it's "already lost" but because we need to start treating the cause and not the symptom. Yeah it's great that we can use encryption to avoid government snooping for now, but how long will that be feasible? The long-term solution would be to stop them from doing it in the first place.

Re: U.S. Spies on Millions of Cars

#170

Post by enraged_camel »

superuser2 wrote: post #142
wahsd wrote: post #103

Can we please stop acting like the USA is somehow a "good guy" anymore? We have to realize that the authoritarian demons have the battering ram at the door and I really don't want to find out what happens when the USA turns into an authoritarian militaristic regime. We're way more than half way there already and people support it. Our very own government is a threat to us all, or at least those who will find themselv…

Do you read the news? Because here are some things that other states are up to that we aren't (at least, not in this decade): - Systematic execution for the crime of belonging to a particular ethnic group or religion - Open and openly arbitrary disappearing, detention, and torture of intellectuals for the crime of writing articles critical of state-sponsored religious and political doctrine - Use of force against peo…

>>HOWEVER, HN sounds downright ridiculous when it declares that being listed in a database is comparable to being summarily executed for criticizing state religion.

Here's the thing: countries can transition into totalitarianism quickly.

1930 Germany was very, very different than 1940 Germany. Hitler's rise to power happened in the blink of an eye, before most people understood what was happening.

This is why "oh, being listed in a database is nowhere as bad as being summarily executed" should be consolation. Such mindsets breed complacency, whereas what we need is constant vigilance and an extreme intolerance for policies that grant the government more power without any oversight.

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