AI watches millions of cars and tells cops if you’re driving like a criminal

https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2023/07/17/license-plate-reader-ai-criminal/

by thehoff • 3 years ago

83 95 3 years ago

forbes.com

supportengineer• 3 years ago

It seems like this goes directly against the Constitution.

recursive4• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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.

freedomben2• 3 years ago

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.

titanomachy3• 3 years ago

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?

einpoklum2• 3 years ago

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?

indymike3• 3 years ago

But none of that seems to be happening.

Google civil asset forfeiture.

floxy• 3 years ago

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.

2OEH8eoCRo03• 3 years ago

Which part?

jjtheblunt• 3 years ago

Do you refer to the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution?

That prohibits unreasonable searches, but can the AI define what counts as "reasonable"?

bottom999mottob• 3 years ago

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...

recursive4• 3 years ago

"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.

titanomachy3• 3 years ago

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.

NoMoreNicksLeft3• 3 years ago

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.

2OEH8eoCRo03• 3 years ago

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.

foomatic2u2• 3 years ago

What judge? Like ~third paragraph states system operates with no judicial oversight.

foomatic2u2• 3 years ago

Most of these new data surveillance tools don't have a judge in the loop.

kdamica• 3 years ago

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.

barbariangrunge2• 3 years ago

Criminals like mothers who buy abortion pills for their daughters?

FloatArtifact2• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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.

FloatArtifact2• 3 years ago

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.

dang• 3 years ago

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

Havoc• 3 years ago

Time to re-watch minority report

Tozen• 3 years ago

We are getting closer to Pre-crime Units, with each passing day. Except that instead of precogs (mutant humans), we will replace them with the almighty infallible AI.

"Sorry, Joe, but our AI says you will commit a crime sometime in the near future. So we have decided to charge, convict, and sentence you to 10 years."

FinnKuhn• 3 years ago

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.

avar3• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

I am pretty confident that having a higher hit rate doesn't have any affect on whether it's reasonable grounds.

jacquesm7• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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...

nine_zeros• 3 years ago

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.

TZubiri• 3 years ago

Minority report was a great prediction

gigel822• 3 years ago

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).

JohnFen7• 3 years ago

(like the backup cameras became required in 2018 for example)

But there's no law saying you can't disable the backup camera.

tomrod• 3 years ago

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.

JohnFen7• 3 years ago

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.

jacquesm7• 3 years ago

What makes you convinced that it still can swing the other way?

JohnFen7• 3 years ago

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.

bob1029• 3 years ago

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.

gigel822• 3 years ago

LOL... they're boiling the frog while we wait for things to get better.

Spoiler: we're the frog.

JohnFen7• 3 years ago

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.

causality04• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

You’re glossing over the fact that the dogs are trained to respond to the officers commands, and the officers can make a trained K-9 alert on any car.

Essentially parallel construction. Know their perp from other means, make dog alert on it, continue to abuse your power.

CPLX2• 3 years ago

Stopping people due to AI reports and having dogs smell them is kind of the problem everyone is concerned about.

causality04• 3 years ago

He wasn't stopped due to AI. He was observed due to AI. He was stopped for speeding 15-20mph over the limit, illegally passing on the right, and changing lanes without signaling.

anigbrowl2• 3 years ago

Dog alerts are about as objective as UFO witnesses. Having trained multiple working dogs of multiple breeds, nonverbal communication between dog and human is very easy to establish.

newZWhoDis2• 3 years ago

Unfair take, UFO witnesses actually have a chance of being credible.

newZWhoDis2• 3 years ago

That’s even worse, since K9’s have failed every independent test ever done on them.

They alert when their owners want them to, and make a mockery of the 4th.

Scoundreller• 3 years ago

I, like other intelligent criminals, break only 1 law at a time, so this should be fun

EdwardDiego• 3 years ago

So, stay for longer at your dealer's house, occasionally bring over a cake, got it.

barbariangrunge2• 3 years ago

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

mikrl• 3 years ago

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.

einpoklum2• 3 years ago

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 :-\

archo• 3 years ago

https://archive.is/2tfCC

janalsncm• 3 years ago

I’m not in favor of predictive policing. It’s not illegal to be suspicious. So I can’t get on board with this program.

But I am a huge fan of speed cameras from a public safety perspective. Excessive speed is a huge contributing factor in accidents yet I rarely see it enforced. There’s no point in having a law if it’s only going to be enforced against the poor or minorities. I don’t see it as a privacy violation since any person can plainly see you’re speeding.

I’m also in favor of more cameras to catch criminals. The first order effect of this is immediate: fewer criminals are around to crime. The second order effect is that fewer crimes will be attempted as the chance of being caught and punished approaches 1. This actually decreases the amount of police work that has to be done.

Having cameras is effectively the same as having a police officer. Except cameras don’t shoot people, and footage is a lot more reliable than sworn testimony.

Incipient• 3 years ago

Except cameras don’t shoot people

Obvious photography jokes aside, this seems like a case of bad police training, or excessive guns in the US causing police to need to 'shoot before being shot'.

If someone is looking a bit dodgy standing outside a kindergarten, I'd absolutely want "predictive policing" to go have a chat to the guy. May just be a case of someone excessively caffeinated waiting for their kid, in which case no foul.

However the appearance of the police keeping on top of things deters others from committing actual crimes. I'd rather police prevent abductions than solve them.

vogon_laureate• 3 years ago

I live in the UK with a high use of cameras for everything. For speed it clearly works where there is an actual camera (it works less well between cameras).

For crime there’s some evidence it might have a deterrent effect on property crime and drug crime.

There is very little evidence to show that it has had any effect on violent crime, public disorder offences, and the like.

There’s also an argument that over-reliance on cctv has reduced the kind of policing people most favour – community policing.

The government has recently banned Hikvision cameras (one of the most ubiquitous brands) from its buildings over concerns about the Chinese company’s use of data and their role in the oppression of Uyghur Muslims in Chinese state run “re-education camps”.

Cameras can be useful in certain circumstances, but their efficacy is often overstated, and there are many downsides.

croes• 3 years ago

How many false positives?

AI watches millions of cars and tells cops if you’re driving like a criminal

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