Police are using AI to pull over drivers for 'suspicious' behavior
gizmodo.com363 points by gumby 13 hours ago
363 points by gumby 13 hours ago
"'I just had to be sure because I’m not a regular cop, I’m part of the FBI, and when I scanned your plate I could see you had suspicious travel patterns,' I think is how he worded it" [1].
This isn't traffic cops, it's federal police. And it isn't suspicious driving patterns, e.g. weaving, it's full-on movement tracking.
[1] https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/ai-driven-polic...
More likely they are regular cops participating in some joint task force. There are more state, county, and local police agencies in this country than there are FBI Special Agents.
I see a lot of police bodycam videos on YouTube of cops stopping drug traffickers for bullshit reasons (5 over speed limit on highway, crossing the line, following too closely) and it's usually a state or county cop that's on a federal task force or they'll have a "civilian ride along" in the car that gets way more involved than any civilian would ever be. They aren't actually an employee of the FBI but they have credentials from the FBI due to their task force job, it gives them access to FBI databases and bulletins while they still maintain their normal police job.
It's really bizarre to watch those videos because they are very routine. They stop the person for marginal lawbreaking, ask them to step out and sit in the front of their cruiser, then the traffic violations turn into warnings, cop makes basic small talk while writing warning and pretty much ignores everything suspect says, cop asks about any contraband in the car and asks to search, suspect usually (stupidly) agrees to search, cops pretty much instantly find the drugs. And if the suspect says no to the search, the K9 unit is already pulling up behind them because they were called before the cop ever turned on their lights and siren.
It's incredibly obvious these are pretextual stops. There is definitely a national program tracking license plates because there's no reasonable explanation for cops getting this lucky on pulling over random people that are driving completely unremarkable.
I'm pretty sure that's how they caught that megachurch pastor smuggling drugs for the cartel, they look for travel patterns for license plates and especially look at rental car registrations. You can't pull over every car but you can definitely look for cars making repeated trips, especially those that are made to known trafficking cities.
I had a friend from highschool that got pretty involved with his mom with drug trafficking. They caught him at some Indian reservation that overlaps upstate NY and Canada. The arrest affidavit states the cops saw a car parked for a couple hours at a casino and then followed the car to the border of the Indian reservation. Then they waited for the car to leave and then pulled him over for crossing a line. Of course they found significant ketamine in the car. The cops already knew who they were looking for because a car parked at a casino for a couple hours is not suspicious and definitely not suspicious enough to follow.
> because there's no reasonable explanation for cops getting this lucky on pulling over random people that are driving completely unremarkable.
Wouldn't you need to know how often random people are stopped for no reason?
People in poor neighborhoods and near e.g. reservations get stopped all the time for no reason at all.
My small town newspaper had a police blotter - almost all the dui arrests the pretext is failure to stay in lane (eg they touched either the yellow line or the white line on the right, the town is on the country and it is practically (if not literally) to never touch a line driving (sometimes I try it just for fun and it takes an insane amount of concentration on winding roads)
Point being is that if you drive there is a pretext for a stop.
> There is definitely a national program tracking license plates
They track everyone's phone. The plate cross reference is only needed to nab someone in traffic.
I don't own a cell phone, and I don't display a plate on my generic vehicle.
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No illusions that I'm not also traceable. Tracked.
> I don't display a plate on my generic vehicle.
So, no need for a pretextual stop. You are giving them a real reason to pull you over at any time.
Now I'm wondering what it's like for people whose lives naturally involve "suspicious travel patterns" but aren't actually doing anything suspicious.
Like, how often do people who live on that rez get pulled over?
> The cops already knew who they were looking for because a car parked at a casino for a couple hours is not suspicious and definitely not suspicious enough to follow.
The above is key to understanding that part, they KNEW who the smuggler was. They just needed a legal reason to pull them over.
It's a known smuggling epicenter because the reservation covers both sides of the border and doesn't have normal border controls at crossings.
How do we know they don't stop a ton of random people for 5-miles-over speeding and let them off with a warning?
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So illegals can vote? How does that work. I did not know they could do that in the US.
This has to be a troll account. You're admitting to cooperating with ICE so that both of you could meet your quotas? You collaborated to have ICE pick up people at the courthouse, where they were because they were presumably trying to obey the law?
And no, illegal immigrants aren't voting in US elections, stop that.
It's not going to be a popular take because you're defending pretextual stops and you're repeating the lie that illegal immigrants vote.
If that ever happens to you then document on a Blockchain that you have first-hand knowledge that someone has committed a crime against you, specifically 18 U.S. Code § 242. By not reporting a crime like that you could leave your fellow Americans exposed to a criminal by leaving that criminal undocumented. But, be very careful as in doing so you are liable for your spoken or written utterances.
18 U.S. Code § 242 - Deprivation of rights under color of law
Whoever, under color of any law, statute, ordinance, regulation, or custom, willfully subjects any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth, Possession, or District to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or to different punishments, pains, or penalties, on account of such person being an alien, or by reason of his color, or race, than are prescribed for the punishment of citizens, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both [..]
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/242> document on a Blockchain that you have first-hand knowledge that someone has committed a crime against you
Farting into a wind is about as effective with the difference of being free.
If someone wants to actually fight this, a dash cam streaming somewhere offsite and secure (cloud is fine) is a million times more effective. It provides direct, court-admissible proof of the claim in a way a personal diary entry, in a notebook or on a blockchain, never could. Barring that, an audio recording on your phone. (Would check your state and local laws first, however.)
The Blockchain part is the for the notary part. No one is going to store a video file or the relevant PDF files of sworn testimony on a Blockchain itself, and an S3 bucket is fine of course ; I would have already thought this was extremely obvious.
The notary part is absolutely essential. Renowned Blockchains are the ULTIMATE for this use case. Sorry that you didn't already know this and the other part wasn't already obviously to be assumed by you.
I thought I was posting on a site called Hacker News, I was obviously being too assumptive. I'll spell things out more elaborately in comments in the future.
A court could care less about blockchain hashes unless the society of lawyers and judges decide it is legitimate. Did they? Last I heard blockchain hashes were as useful as any random bunch of numbers on a printed page.
Notary service is an essential component to proceedings.
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.
I understand where you're coming from, but until the math is accepted by a court and a procedure for validating authenticty is established within the society of judges, the burden for introducing this kind of evidence falls on whomever decides it is essential enough for their case to succeed. That's a very expensive proposition, so you can't really say that it is the process until a plaintiff or defendent with large enough pockets to afford the conversion of the legal society takes up the cause. Until then it's just random gibberish, and unavailable to the average person as a court admissible statement of authenticty for a digital artifact. The fact is that the "loose consensus" of "private societies" DOES determine acceptability, when that private society is the law society. Judges are only subject to the rules and regulations that other judges and prosecuters decide apply. There's nothing cosmic about it - it is very much rooted in the people who apply the law.
The case that Craig Wright lost was years ago. The evidence that was posted to the Satoshi Blockchain was recognized by the court.
It's already happened.
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>> Judges are only subject to the rules and regulations that other judges and prosecuters decide apply.
The last thing a state judge wants is a federal lawsuit against him where a federal judge reviews accusations that he/she didn't follow essential procedure.
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>> it's just random gibberish
The plentiful expert witnesses from math departments and computer science departments from Harvard, MIT, Stanford, and the like who will gladly show up to defend their fields (albeit will want to be paid), would say otherwise, if that were necessary, which it's not, because like has already been pointed out at least twice now
it already happened.I researched your claim as best I could, and I did not find any evidence that the Craig Wright case hinged in any way on the on-chain events. The UK high court appears to have accepted other forensic evidence that he fraudulently produced documentation.
However, there are many cases that DO use blockchain events. Transferring the blockchain event into court admissible evidence is not at all straightforward, but some jurisdictions have established standards for how to do it. This comes up especially often in inheritance cases.
See: https://truescreen.io/articles/blockchain-evidence-court-adm...
It has been an interesting rabbit hole. Notably, on-chain evidence is only one of many different kinds of evidence that courts will accept, so focusing entirely on this mechanism to the exclusion of all others is not so helpful. Transferring on-chain events into a winnable court case can be a fairly expensive way to establish facts.