> As police cars patrol the city, they ping on license plates associated with the fees. The officer then pulls the driver over and offers them a devil’s bargain: go to jail, or pay the original fine with an extra 25% processing fee tacked on, all of which goes to Vigilant.
So, they're planning to turn the Texas prison system into de facto debtors' prisons, and the Texas police system into de facto highwaymen. One more factor to add to the giant pile of reasons for ill-will that the US state and Federal governments have been collecting. That pile can't get much taller without toppling, and while I do greatly hope the blowback happens through the democratic process, that process is pretty severely damaged and this looks less and less likely every year.
> they're planning to turn the Texas prison system into de facto debtors' prisons
Whoa there, hold on a second. That's not what's going on at all. The plates are being run to detect if the car's owner has outstanding court fines, which are not akin to a simple debt. These are (probably) justified, punitive fees imposed on an individual for some kind of offense against the law (and by extension, the public). It's not the case that the police are extorting people that are behind on their rent/credit card payments or something.
That said, this behavior is still troubling insofar as it is likely to disproportionately result in the targeting and punishment of the poor, which is in itself a rather problematic issue. And it's certainly troubling that the additional fee being imposed to process payment for the fines collected is far above what seems to be (at a glance, anyway) a reasonable margin for operating costs.
> These are (probably) justified, punitive fees imposed on an individual for some kind of offense against the law (and by extension, the public). It's not the case that the police are extorting people that are behind on their rent/credit card payments or something.
I think the common complaint here is that there are plenty of "crimes" that are committed on a daily basis like minor speeding (going 1-5 mph over the speed limit), jaywalking, etc, that are nearly impossible to entirely enforce. This gives police the ability to selectively enforce said laws simply because they can't totally enforce it. As you noted this can be used to punish the poor far more than others. The combination of all of these factors and the ability to track these "offenders" down more easily, it isn't a far shot from what the parent poster was saying by comparing it to a debtors' prison.
Worth asking: Why do they punish the poor more so than others?
I really doubt it's because those in poverty give fewer fucks about following traffic law.
I doubt it's a matter of education since you're supposed to demonstrate that minimum competence before you get a license anyways, and if you're not, we've found the problem.
I believe you're looking at the wrong part of the equation. It's not about the relative rates of traffic violations among the poor vs everyone else; it's about the relative impact the same fine has.
If you have comfortable amounts of wealth and/or income and get hit with a $500 fine you might be annoyed but you can pay it and go on your way.
But for the poor it's not so simple. First, that $500 represents a much larger burden. Even if they do scrape together the money to actually pay the fine, it might mean other bills would have to go unpaid, for example. And if they don't or can't get the money to pay the fine, those outstanding fines can get additional fees tacked on like Vigilant's 25%.
So it's not about seeking out the poor disproportionately more than the rich; it's about how the same punishment is actually more punishing.
I can accept that, but then we're left right back where we started.
Income based fines would be (rightly) struck down based on the equal protection clause to the constitution. They might even survive introduction to state legislation, but the moment someone with the resources contests it, it'll fall.
Not having the fines is not tenable, seeing as how it's the only way the law has any teeth.
Between a rock and a hard place. And seeing as how these laws are generally to society's benefit, just dropping them isn't valid either.
If the fine is an equal percentage for all, one could make a compelling constitutional argument that it applies equally to all. The same argument has been made against progressive tax and have been ruled without merit.
Negative. While the debtor's prisons thing misses it, you missed it also. FTA:
"...handing Vigilant all of the data they gather on drivers for nearly unlimited commercial use..."
Debt collectors thrive on collecting every scrap of information they can about debtors: where they live, where they work, their cell numbers, and so on. This LPR database could quite easily build up profiles about debtors that collectors in the past could only dream of. One immediate application is watching where a car is driven and parked in order to repo it. That's probably the most acceptable use I can think of.
It gets worse from there: think data mining for alimony and custody battles, use by private investigators in infidelity cases, locating and stalking former lovers, and so on.
First, I don't think you can make the distinction between whatever you are calling "simple debt" (care to at least define things that you make up?) and the various fees associated with the United States and particularly the Texas legal system.
Second, even if you grant there is a difference between the debt types, how can he be wrong about it being de facto "debtors prison"? Who cares what the debt type is, it would still be a debtors prison, and there are a myriad of very good reasons we got rid of such things!
Third, the legal system is extremely unfavourable to the middle-class and poor, to the extent that I would also argue with your claim that the fees are "(probably) justified"... Another thing to remember is that fees have become revenue generators, and to look at them as punitive damages to be payed to the public for offenses is a naive take on the ways fees have developed in the legal and justice systems.
For example, I (in Texas btw) who almost never gets tickets, got one last year. Normally I have a paralegal friend do the deferred adjudication, I take a class, and move on. Well this last ticket they missed the deadline, I forgot about it, and the original $160 fee ballooned eventually to $700! Not only that, but technically, until I payed it, there was a warrant out for my arrest!
Do you think that kind of percentage increase is warranted or the warrant for arrest for not paying a fee is justified, because I certainly don't. I managed to pay it off, but for someone earning less would have had a very hard time paying that big of a fee, much less the financial impact of being fucking arrested...
" It's not the case that the police are extorting people that are behind on their rent/credit card payments or something."
Please explain how this is correct now, because it seems obviously false. (aka, they are extorting people because they are behind on payments (just because you made the false distinction of credit cards/rent and court fines does not make that fact magically go away...), and the police are even doing it for a third party!)
That's not even getting into the privacy and other issues the eff raises. For example, my paralegal friend has access to the TLO system and can look up plates and their geo/time data. While she wouldn't abuse it, the barriers to entry for paralegals can be pretty low in some firms...
"Third, the legal system is extremely unfavourable to the middle-class and poor, to the extent that I would also argue with your claim that the fees are "(probably) justified"... Another thing to remember is that fees have become revenue generators, and to look at them as punitive damages to be payed to the public for offenses is a naive take on the ways fees have developed in the legal and justice systems." I couldn't agree more.
The penalty for civil infractions is a fine and/or jail time. We've become so use to just payig fines we think it's a debtors prison if the law breaker doesn't pay the fine so we opt to penalize then with jail time. Perhaps we should just great everyone fairly and use jail time penalties only. That could lead to some reforms read quickly. The bigger offense and issue I have is when the state then charges the inmates for room and board. That's wrong.
The distinction you seem to take such issue with is not entirely of his own creation. For one, judicially enforced financial penalties cannot be discharged in bankruptcy.
>I don't think you can make the distinction between whatever you are calling "simple debt" (care to at least define things that you make up?) and the various fees associated with the United States and particularly the Texas legal system.
The law already does. In the former case, we're talking about debts established in the course of various financial transactions between private parties. In the latter case, we're talking about fees (or more specifically in this case, what would colloquially be known as fines) that are imposed by the state for punitive and administrative reasons. Skipping out on the former will (generally) result in ruined credit scores and civil suits; skipping out on the latter is an civil or criminal offense against the state.
>even if you grant there is a difference between the debt types, how can he be wrong about it being de facto "debtors prison"? Who cares what the debt type is, it would still be a debtors prison, and there are a myriad of very good reasons we got rid of such things!
The term 'debtor's prison' is a loaded term, perjoratively describing historical cases of imprisonment of persons for failing to pay private debts. Barring edge cases (i.e., fraud), this has largely been eliminated in the USA. Imprisonment for failing to pay fines imposed for offenses against the law, on the other hand, is not a practice that has ever been (nor is likely to be) eliminated. And I don't buy that there are 'good reasons to get rid of such things', but that's a different discussion than the one at hand.
>Another thing to remember is that fees have become revenue generators, and to look at them as punitive damages to be payed to the public for offenses is a naive take on the ways fees have developed in the legal and justice systems.
Be that as it may, it's not germane to whether or not it's okay for the state to use creative ways to collect on previous assessed fines.
>I (in Texas btw) who almost never gets tickets, got one last year. Normally I have a paralegal friend do the deferred adjudication, I take a class, and move on. Well this last ticket they missed the deadline, I forgot about it, and the original $160 fee ballooned eventually to $700! Not only that, but technically, until I payed it, there was a warrant out for my arrest!
Do you think that kind of percentage increase is warranted or the warrant for arrest for not paying a fee is justified, because I certainly don't.
Actually, I do think it's justified. Dealing with low level tickets is hardly difficult or burdensome, and the state has excellent reasons to create strong disincentives for dodging punishment. Further, paying a steep premium for irresponsible handling of your incident seems far preferable to serving actual jail time, or facing some other less dignified form of corporal punishment (as you might receive in a less westernized nations).
> they are extorting people because they are behind on payments
There's no extortion going on. It's implicit that the state's agents possess the means to impose compliance with the law; in cases where the law dictates that individuals pay a fine, it's reasonable for the state's agents to collect that fine or initiate further punishment for noncompliance with the law. Given the choice between jail + the courts and paying a high fee (some of which is to cover the costs associated with payment collection), a 25% premium hardly seems unreasonable.
I think tacking on a 25% processing fee is 100% in the "extorting people" category. The people caught for the purpose of paying a court fee are being forced to pay for the hardware, instead of it going through proper LEO budgets.
You'd be surprised, I recommend you look into it a little bit it's pretty disturbing how a simple traffic ticket can be a ticket to prison for people who are too poor to pay it.
It can absolutely lead to jail. Don't pay the fine in time, suspended license. Driving on a suspended license? Arrestable offense. Miss your court date? Warrant. Even if you go to court and they put you on a payment plan, that gives you a few months to pay it, costs even more, and if you don't pay in time you've violated a court order.
If you don't pay a probation fine in time, you can quickly go right back to jail to serve the remainder of your sentence.
governments take advantage of poor people on purpose. they don't pay enough into the system to be profitable as an individual member of society, so they're harassed and fined until insolvency and imprisonment, at which point they become profitable again (thanks to private prisons).
I'd really like to see some state attempt step up and tackle totalitarianism organically.
In this case, imagine a registrar of convenience (as I believe South Dakota is often used for Ruins Views), that issues eink-based license plates that generate a new identifier every few miles. Only the registrar could decode those nonces into the long-term vehicle record, with an accompanying legal process and technical audit trail.
(Of course such technical workarounds do nothing to fix the ultimate problem of corruption, it only releases the pressure a bit. Unfortunately the logical foundation of this country is based on outrunning tyranny, and in the age of abundance complexity knows no bounds. So to avoid collapse we really need every approach we can fathom)
> I'd really like to see some state attempt step up and tackle totalitarianism organically.
The state closest to what you're looking for, I suspect, is New Hampshire. I don't know how much of it is due to their Free Stater influence or what, but among other things, they have relatively low burdens for living a legal life. There are some stupid laws (namely, not being able to pull backward into certain types of parking spots), but for the most part, they take their "Live Free or Die" motto pretty seriously.
I'm personally lukewarm on NH. My general take is that their foundation of freedom heavily skews towards dismantling local organization while tacitly approving larger power concentrations.
I'd obviously welcome any pushback against USG or private surveillance, it just feels more likely they'll destroy more municipal services. While everyone having a generator is self-reliant and robust, it's also indicative of infrastructure collapse.
I've found the contrary to be more true. They do have, perhaps, a different view of what the local legislature ought to look like than most, in that the legislators are only paid $200 per two year term (to keep it from being a career position), but they also have the best representation in the nation, as each legislator only has ~3200 constituents. Compared to California's ~450,000 constituents per legislator, it's much, much easier to imagine getting a lunch date with your lawmakers so that your ideas are heard.
Meanwhile, on infrastructure, New Hampshire has a better rating than the national average. On top of that, there's no sales tax, no income tax (though a higher than average property tax probably makes up some of the difference), has the highest overall quality of living, is the second healthiest state in the union, the most livable, the safest, and has the lowest poverty rate in America.
Certainly, everywhere has its perks and pitfalls, but if totalitarianism is what you're looking to escape, New Hampshire considers mandatory seat belt laws too authoritarian to pass.
NH has an income tax that starts at 25%, but none of it goes to the state government (therefore it has one of the highest proportions of wasteful tax burden). The speed limit is still capped at 65mph (even though motorcycle helmets are not required). And I doubt one can simply walk into a pharmacy and buy whatever they'd like.
The general response to these points is the root of my objection to the NH ethos. The few times I've heard about the FSP from the locals, it was not positive. Of course the mostly-accountable local government is easily gutted! Meanwhile the larger and more resource-draining tyranny remains intact, and perhaps even more supported due to less immediate intrusion. This seems less like actual freedom, and more like a sandbox for pretending to escape.
Hit-and-run. And even if it isn't statistically important, that will be the argument.
The entropy required by nonce plates might also be prohibitive (a witness will have a hard time memorizing 20 digits), but a clever encoding should make the start or end of the number be significant enough when combined with the date.
At a minimum, the state would use insurance requirements to foil this (by requiring declared residents to buy insurance for the state of residence and not allowing that insurance to be tied to an out of state vehicle).
People seem to "get away" with it for ruins views, and rental companies generally have convenient ownership of their vehicles (eg a surplus of rental cars from Arizona, Penske trucks from Indiana).
The only place I've heard of people actually having issues with longer-term out-of-state registration is Mordor^wDC.
The core of the idea relies on developing one sane state. But it could be rural (leaders not so corrupted by economic power) and low-population (easier to effect change).
If we want to prevent the collapse of our broken society, we must create institutions that usurp the existing broken ones. License plate tracking cannot be solved by private organization (/local "exit") alone, as the problem stems from the government mandated tracking placards.
I'd like to point out that the Texas law cited allows on-the-spot collection of fines to extinguish existent warrants [0]. That is, without this law, the options would formally be "be detained" and "be detained" [1]. This is strictly providing additional options.
[0] The name used by the EFF is accurate but somewhat incomplete; these would be capias pro fine, which is a specific subset related to failing to comply with judgements.
[1] I won't indulge the EFF's language of Monopoly-style "go to jail" here, as that's a pretty loose interpretation. You will be detained to appear before a judge in order to plead your case.
Yes, your additional option is to be extorted into paying a 25% fee.
Let's do a root cause analysis of the problem, since it goes much deeper than mere small fines.
First, the leveraging of state fines, backed by government force, disproportionally affects the poor. The poor are damaged most, because they do not have the money to pay the fines.
Second, unable to pay their fines, many members of the poorest segment of the population are incarcerated for their inability to pay.
Third, this results in a system where those that are incarcerated for debt lose employment, and are driven deeper into poverty.
Finally, the most important part of this piece is that the state of Texas has set up a massive dragnet surveillance operation at the state level.
Their goal is not national security. It is domestic surveillance.
This technology should never be deployed on American soil, at this scale, and especially not for collecting debt.
>First, the leveraging of state fines, backed by government force, disproportionally affects the poor.
As a Texan with family in law enforcement, I get to watch this unfold daily. But here's a question for you, why is law enforcement levy and collect so many fines? The individual officer does not directly benefit from giving out so many tickets (other than keeping his job).
One of the large issues we have now is the court system financed via these fines. There have been many attempts to collect more tax dollars to directly fund the court but that is almost always shot down by groups such as the grassroots movement. This is a direct failure of not the poor people, but the middle class taxpayer that has now put the burden on the poor. The middle and upper class want (I'd say even demand) effective law enforcement, and this is how they've figured out to keep it running without causing to much political strife.
There is blowback from these actions. Much like the blowback from intelligence operations it often manifests in unusual ways. For example, deposing the elected leader of Iran through Operation Ajax led to the coup by religious extremists, and funding the Mujahideen in Afghanistan led to the rise of the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
Right now the blowback is in the form of a total and utter lack of faith in the political elites by the majority of the population. The military has overwhelmingly more approval, and 23% of the population says that they would support a military coup.
If people don't feel that their votes actually matter... Well, I don't want to think about what happens if the world's largest democracy becomes a non-rational actor.
You're right, this is an upper class attempt to clamp down on the lower classes and keep the societal wheels turning. I don't understand the desire to give tickets, but it probably comes from the warrior mindset in law enforcement culture. It's about personal dominance.
Note that I also have relatives in law enforcement. This isn't an indictment of all police. There are many good people in law enforcement. But in aggregate there certainly has been a lurch toward aggressiveness.
Well, I don't want to think about what happens if the world's largest democracy becomes irrational.
Oh, hey, don't forget that we have 300M privately-owned guns distributed throughout the country, and have plenty of veterans around with combat experience.
If America snaps, it isn't going to voluntarily commit itself for psychiatric evaluation. It'll be a full-on schizophrenic break, with lots of bloody bodies.
I humbly suggest that a congressional approval rating of 11% and a congressional re-election rate of 95% are not the sort of incompatible numbers that promote continued sanity.
> I humbly suggest that a congressional approval rating of 11% and a congressional re-election rate of 95% are not the sort of incompatible numbers that promote continued sanity.
There is actually a logical explanation for that.
The people in corn country want ethanol subsidies. The people in Hollywood want draconian copyright laws. The people in coal mining districts don't want clean air laws.
So the Congressman from Iowa votes for draconian copyright laws in exchange for the Congresswoman from California voting for ethanol subsidies and every terrible thing which is bad for the whole country nevertheless comes to pass, causing the approval rate for Congress to fall below that of Vogon poetry and dirty latrines. Yet everyone is satisfied with their own member of Congress because they got that thing the district cared most about getting.
Fixing that is probably going to require some kind of structural change (like proportional representation in the House of Representatives).
> Fixing that is probably going to require some kind of structural change (like proportional representation in the House of Representatives).
Can you define what you mean here? I was under the impression that the House is proportional to population, and that the Senate is not. Unless, do you mean direct populace voting on Congressional acts, as opposed to the indirect representation we have now?
The number of seats in the House is proportional to the population (or it was, until there would have been "too many" seats and they... look it up, it's crazy), but the seats each have a "district" where the people in that district elect one specific representative.
As a nation, we have had it very good for a very long time. Economic growth is considered a given, there is a social safety net, and major conventional war is widely thought to be an impossibility. We would not fare well if there was a societal breakdown.
I would predict the military and national guard would step in to stop domestic unrest if the national societal fabric unravelled. But what we really need is to convene a new Constitutional Convention, which will never happen unless there is blood in the streets, at which point things will already be very far out of hand.
I'm actually convinced that this is already happening, and the first eruptions of populist anger (Occupy, Black Lives Matter, the Tea Party) are being stamped out. For example, the National Guard was mobilized not long ago in Maryland to quell the population.
If your foil hat is made of the correct metals (and mine probably is), you may have noticed that government agencies and paranoid citizens alike have been quietly preparing for armed rebellion for at least a decade.
Ignoring entirely the Chicken Little bleating from the professional rabble-rousers and conspiracy theorists that say stuff like "ZOMG why do Post Office and Agriculture needs all teh ammos?!", the mistrust-of-government businesses are booming, and many of the fnords in the mainstream media point to a coordinated propaganda campaign against not just people who defy government, but also against those who merely question it too deeply.
When I take off the foil hat, everything is still okay. It isn't good, but it isn't irretrievably broken, either.
I used to believe more easily that I wasn't really living in the real world when I had the foil hat on. But lately...
I was thinking that Martin O'Malley struck a deal with the Democratic Party to be the hand that Hillary Clinton claps against through the primary season, in exchange for a high level executive position in her government. Bernie Sanders is running for the Democratic Party nomination only because running for PotUS as an independent is futile. He was never given any benefit from the party large enough to convince him to give Clinton her the title shot with only token resistance. And he's so unexpectedly popular that they can't squeeze him out of the media coverage quietly enough to make him drop out.
And then I go to take off my foil hat, and find that I thought that stupid conspiracy theory up bareheaded. When I actually put the foil hat on, it just gets ridiculous.
Something is very wrong when my rational mind notices "there should be more people up on that stage contesting the nomination now, months before the early states start to pick," and comes up with a completely plausible explanation that is rather blatantly anti-democratic. I can't tell if my BS detector needs to be recalibrated, or whether US politicians have just stopped putting forth reasonable efforts toward passing it off.
You don't even want to hear my theories about the Republican Party nomination races.
I'm not convinced a foil hat is necessary. The rise and fall of both nations and civilizations isn't the exception. It's the rule.
Whether from pressures from within or without, states inevitably degrade or even collapse. One of the typical patterns of collapse for a democracy is regression to dictatorship. It's not implausible.
Now, when looking at the nation as it is, rather than as it could be, I'm rather comforted. By all appearances the government continues to provide basic services, the military has unwavering loyalty to the civilian government, and the government is run by politicians chosen by popular election.
But government deficits are exploding, the sovereignties of the world are gobbling up private debt to prop up large financial firms, and the financial sector is so disconnected from the real economy that it has become one giant martingale that is due for a 25% downward correction.
What worries me most is that previously, there could be no permanent dictatorship. The United States has both the power and the infrastructure to become one. A few legal judgements here, a few electoral tweaks there, and our democracy becomes mere government theater, advertising that distracts us from the actual sovereigns and their interests.
I believe the current pattern of creeping statism from the left and steady erosion of Constitutional protections from the right are a lethal combination for a democracy.
There's some paranoia here, sure. But I find that when dealing with political matters recently, a healthy dose of skepticism is warranted.
> Yes, your additional option is to be extorted into paying a 25% fee.
How is offering a previously non-existent option extortion, again? Now, if the officers are not stating it as an option, then that is of course a complaint to be made. But nothing in the EFF article indicates this as a problem, so I don't know where this language is coming from. The subject (for lack of a better word here) is perfectly welcome to not take the roadside payment option, be detained, and pay after detainment without any additional fee. Which is exactly what would have happened without any of this.
> First, the leveraging of state fines, backed by government force, disproportionally affects the poor. The poor are damaged most, because they do not have the money to pay the fines.
The fines being discussed are only those related to copias pro fine, which means that a judgement was already delivered through a court and that judgement was not satisfied. If you want to argue for inequality against the poor in judgements, that's fine, but it's at best a tangentially related point and one I'm not interested in arguing. This system is purely in the realm of after all that has happened, and has no effect there.
> Finally, the most important part of this piece is that the state of Texas has set up a massive dragnet surveillance operation at the state level.
The data sharing is of course an issue, and I support the EFF in fighting against that. But that is also a separate issue than the option being provided to extinguish these warrants without being detained.
>How is offering a previously non-existent option extortion, again?
Say I go to a third world country and find some orphan who has been left to fend for themself. I make them an offer to effectively become a slave in return for being given basic care. Say I do this in which ever country gives me the most power to in-debt them to me. They can refuse and continue what ever life they were living.
I'm going to assume a generous use of the word "slave" here, as simply a parallel for the loss of freedom that would be experienced by being detained. As opposed to associations of that word to terribly abusive situations, because abuse is never OK.
> extortion - the practice of obtaining something, especially money, through force or threats.
> exploitation - the action or fact of treating someone unfairly in order to benefit from their work.
Well, since you're not threatening the person nor forcing them to enter into this arrangement, I don't really see how you can call it extortion. Unless you want to call leaving them in their current situation a threat, which would be kind of stretching the intent, as that would imply that I am performing violence (the execution of a threat) against every person in need that I am not helping.
You could certainly call it exploitation, with the reasoning that providing only basic care in exchange for the services they render is unfair treatment. This would along the same lines as the justification for minimum wage and other employee protections -- that there is some standard minimum that must be met for these relationships.
Of course, there are plenty of flaws with this analogy. I can gloss over most of them, except for the nuance that there is a reason as a matter of law that this person is in their original situation to begin with. I think a better parallel would be an exile, perhaps?
* Definitions derived from Google. Feel free to provide your own if you feel they are inaccurate and I will reevaluate.
How can it be exploitation if they have fully freedom in choosing to forgo the deal?
>As opposed to associations of that word to terribly abusive situations, because abuse is never OK.
Even if it was as bad as the association you are making, it is merely a choice.
>Unless you want to call leaving them in their current situation a threat
Here is where most people's moral systems break down. If their current situation involves death, then any deal where you benefit is seen as exploitation unless they think the exchange is fair. But doing absolutely nothing, offering nothing and taking nothing, is seen as a neutral choice. But only to an extent. If you turn away a starving child at your doorstep, the action is seen as abhorrent. But if don't donate money to help feed a starving child elsewhere, even though such an action is easier than helping the child at the doorstep, that is just normal.
There almost seems to be some moral corollary to the bystander effect.
> How can it be exploitation if they have fully freedom in choosing to forgo the deal?
I detailed my reasoning in the response. Specifically, that the exchange of basic care for the services rendered may not be considered a "fair" exchange [0], and thus being unfair treatment, and thus being exploitation.
In regards to morality, I agree with your sentiments. Bystander effect isn't the right word for it, but it feels very similar. More of an out-of-sight-out-of-mind, willful-ignorance thing. You can't claim ignorance when the child is at your doorstep asking you for help, but you can when they're somewhere else. There could also be an angle there with protection of one's own social / familial group over others, even if it means preventable harm to the other group.
Also, I'd like to thank you for this reasonable and engaging exchange.
[0] This would, of course, be a culturally sensitive judgement.
Who cares whether a judge issued the judgement? The fact is that most of the poor cannot take time off to travel to a courthouse at an appointed date and time, thus those judgements are entered without any defense.
It shouldn't come as a shock that the poorest citizens are the least likely to show up to a hearing where they will be forced to pay money.
Even from a strictly legal perspective, detainment for a civil judgement based upon evidence from a massive domestic surveillance dragnet is very Constitutionally suspect.
But to be totally honest, I don't care what legal mechanisms allow this.
I'm not appreciative of your continued attempt to conflate very separate issues in order to attempt to prove some "this is bad" point.
I'll reiterate: If you want to engage someone about unfair judgements against certain classes, I'm not that person. It's only relation to the situation at hand is that it is a source of copias pro fine warrants.
> Even from a strictly legal perspective, detainment for a civil judgement based upon evidence from a massive domestic surveillance dragnet is very Constitutionally suspect.
The enabling part of this on the officer's side is not a "massive domestic surveillance dragnet". It's OCR tied to a database query. It's automation of a search the officer could already perform, if he could type fast enough.
As I've already stated, I agree with the EFF's position about the sharing of data back to Vigilant Solutions. Especially because sharing this data back is not necessary for the technology as used by the officers.
I'm not interested in engaging in a legalistic argument without considering the societal implications.
The enabling part of this on the officer's side is not a "massive domestic surveillance dragnet".
How else would you describe a state wide system that automatically records the movement of the population and stores it in a database other than dragnet surveillance? And Texas is bigger than many nations. So yes, I would count that as massive.
It's OCR tied to a database query. It's automation of a search the officer could already perform, if he could type fast enough.
Yes, and that is a tremendously important difference. A computer can log and store every license plate in real time. A single officer cannot do that at scale.
The courts have not caught up to this implication of computing technology. This is due to a failure to recognize that a change in quantity can be a change in quality.
For example, the occasional overflight to check for drug operations is qualitatively different from surveilling a whole city with areostats and drones. Both involve observation of public areas and are thus currently Constitutional. But one is far more invasive.
Your reductionist approach fails to consider any of the factors put forward. There is no conflation of issues. You are simply parroting back obsolete precedent, and refusing to acknowledge the implications of your argument.
Take a camera, have it run OCR, do a database lookup, alert on a positive result. None of those steps requires logging. Therefore the use of this technology to execute copias pro fine warrants is perpendicular to the data collection use of this technology.
I don't agree that the use of the technology to service outstanding warrants is a bad thing. I do agree that the data collection portion of this technology is a bad thing. Not agreeing with you is not equivalent to refusal of anything, other than the refusal of agreeing with you.
Game theory. If you think you might in the future be threatened by an extortionist, you're better off if you can remove your ability to pay because then they won't have the incentive to extort you in the first place, and so they won't. The same principle applies here. You get an additional option in a bad scenario, but it makes you much more likely to end up in that scenario in the first place.
You're going to be detained to appear in front of a judge who is going to say 'you have outstanding unpaid court fines - you can pay them now or be subject to imprisonment'.
All that is happening in that case is changing the location of the credit card swipe.
When I was very young and stupid, I had a car impounded for unpaid parking tickets after being pulled over for a burnt out tail light. I would have gladly accepted a 25% fee for the option to pay right then and there to avoid the impound procedure. It would've cost less than what the court and impound yard charged me for letting it escalate that far.
And not being able to pay the 25% fee, what would have normally happened, would have happened.
I'd be totally fine with the idea that outstanding fines could be paid Right Then if they were more reasonable. It's the extra 25% that effectively Funds the Program that I don't like... well that and that it's effectively a dragnet for poor people. :(
If you're expecting that pile to topple any time soon or if ever, I think you're going to be very disappointed.
You see, the modern police state has learned from the mistakes of Stazi, and technology has made the police-state surveillance very seamless. Most citizens don't even realize what's going on, and when told, they have too much to worry about.
That their's no external force working against the interests of our system makes it all the more hopeless.
Seat back, folks, and enjoy whatever freedom you have now.
The majority is fine with surveillance, because the majority believes it will decide the usage of the surveillance. And to a first approximation, it's correct.
The collapse occurs because of the resulting top-down groupthink. There are plenty of external forces working against our system, just on the time scale of several generations.
> The majority is fine with surveillance, because the majority believes it will decide the usage of the surveillance. And to a first approximation, it's correct.
Wishful thinking. Just keep dreaming.
If by "first approximation" you're referring to voting, then, yes, majority gets to vote their favored lawmaker into office. However, because of political lobbying, the laws that are passed will not necessarily be in the interest of the majority.
Lol @ "wishful" - my statement was utterly cynical. The laws that are passed are not in the interest of the majority, but that doesn't mean the majority didn't want them. Especially after being thoroughly soaked in propagandas.
When I'm a place I have a right to be looking at something I can see with my eyes, I can take a picture of that thing and I can do what I want with that picture. The courts have validated this again and again as a facet of my right to free speech.
To ban this kind of surveillance you need to take the extremely authoritarian step of telling me I am legally obligated to forget what I saw, to not record it, to not speak of it. You have claimed ownership for the state of he photons landing near my camera, and are now trying to hold me to a license agreement on their use. This is an unconstitutional violation of my freedom.
ANPR comes from an abundance of freedom, not a shortage.
The surveillance isn't the issue, the database is. None of my privacy is compromised when a random person remembers seeing my car at a pharmacy at a specific time. It's completely violated when you collect a list of everywhere anyone has seen it in the last six months.
Sure, but if you attempt to criminialize my recording of said observation in a shared database, you are violating my freedom of speech to protect your privacy. It's not immediately clear which is worse.
Waiting for the cost to reduce, performance and battery tech of semiautonomous drones to improve to the point where crowdfunded watchdog groups could begin to afford to follow every police officer with a camera, live streaming and recording them almost all the time while on duty. It could be possible, at least start off with problem cops while they're patrolling on foot. I think that's one of the most effective ways to hold them accountable and provide a direct, counterveiling force against pervasive, unbridled hubris that most resembles a mafia. Not like confrontational YouTubers, but change the thinking to "we're watching you."
The pile will topple, you're right. It's just a matter of how. Even people I respect a lot like Radley Balko are not on the right page about fixing the current problems with police. He talks a lot about community policing, literal foot patrols (vs. cars), etc. And that'd be all great, except our society is way beyond that. Maybe such tactics would have worked in the '60's, before the relationship between citizens and police became one of either hate or ignorance. At this point, without dismantling a huge part of the police and corrections system (because calling it "criminal justice" is just plain absurd) nothing will change. But that can still happen through the democratic process. I hope ...
>giant pile of reasons for ill-will that the US state and Federal governments have been collecting.
Lets please not attack the other states because of Texan shenanigans. The fifty states are each semi-autonomous and as such can implement programs like this. This is an exception, not the norm.
>blowback happens through the democratic process
Why should it? Maybe Texans who work hard and pay their fines want the scofflaws to be caught like this? Democracy doesn't mean "things I like." It often means "things the average voter likes." Maybe this is "ill will" to you, but to a red state with a strong law and order culture to it, it may not be very controversial at all. You can't clamor for states rights in Texas, but also expect liberal soft-on-crime values. All politics is local.
Also, these people have capias warrants out for them at the time of this collection. Deadbeats who don't pay child support, ignore a civil judgements, ignore fines, etc get these. I don't really see a problem with this. If there's abuse here, it lies with how capias warrants are given out, not the technology used to enforce them. Why aren't we addressing the root issue here? Is there really an issue here other than SJW wankering?
You and I disagree on the root of the issue. The ease of enforcement is going to encourage the already despicable behavior of imposing fines that people aren't able to pay. This technology isn't going to effect middle class people that get the occasional speeding ticket. This is going to ensure that people who couldn't afford the fine are caught and fined again, then thrown in jail.
What should happen is that suspects should not be forced to pay the court costs associated with trying them. This eliminates the perverse incentives associated with this technology.
> Democracy doesn't mean "things I like." It often means "things the average voter likes."
That seems like a misrepresentation of the post. jrandomh didn't say "this is undemocratic", but rather (paraphrasing) "this generates ill will". Hoping that mass ill will will (not a typo …) lead to change is not anti-democratic; it is exactly the idea of democracy.
I can't say I'm surprised that this is happening. As technology progresses, it only makes sense that government becomes more efficient at doing things that we like and don't like. As soon as red-light cameras became OK, or any license plate reading systems, this eventuality was on the table.
I'm only saddened by the fact that they've been essentially duped by some private sector company into selling private citizens' data (and allowing them to retain it even after expiration of the contract) instead of trying to develop this technology themselves, and actually innovating. This move reduces citizen privacy, and costs citizens privacy all at the same time.
The next thing I look to see happen is automated speeding tickets. There's no reason radars shouldn't be set up in conjuction with license plate readers, or actually just pulling speed data from cars with in-car transmission ability and tickets being auto-generated to constituents.
Imagine trying to argue against why your car shouldn't be monitored for speeding infringements -- surely you're either a speeder trying to kill kids and families, or you're a getaway driver trying to commit crimes. Then the law goes into place (of course, save the kids), then people realize some car companies transmit location info by accident/on purpose, and people can now pretty much watch you drive places.
Thanks to people noting that this is already happening to some degree in Europe/UK (didn't even stop to consider what was happening there already, gotta widen my world view).
What I'm worried is having it just be instant. Some regulation that requires speed-checkers in every car built, and reporting to find out any time your car goes over the speed limit, regardless if there's a camera in sight. But maybe driver-less cars will come first, and manual driving itself will be outlawed (or made prohibitively expensive).
It's a balance -- it would seem to me that speed traps are stunningly effective at protecting a given intersections (if people have been speeding through it too much), but the logic applies pretty much everywhere, just waiting for someone to try and apply it.
This is going to prompt some interesting soul searching from the populace. Yeah, you want the speed limit to be 35 (for the kids, of course), but now that you get penalized instantly when you break the rule you agreed on, the fine won't be so enjoyable. Or, laws will pass as they normally do without the majority of the populace thinking, caring, or getting a say.
Just wait til you get the average speed check systems. Those are real bastards. Cameras at the start and end of a stretch of motorway which read your licence plate and catch you if your average speed is over the limit.
Those seem entirely more reasonable to me than the "snapshot in time" system generally employed.
There will no doubt be a painful transition period as driver's expectations of behavior adjust. Do you honestly think that if drivers know they will be ticketed for driving 36 in a 35 zone, every time, that they won't slow down to at least 34 as the new normal?
> The next thing I look to see happen is automated speeding tickets. There's no reason radars shouldn't be set up in conjuction with license plate readers, or actually just pulling speed data from cars with in-car transmission ability and tickets being auto-generated to constituents.
I'm fairly certain that this happens already in the UK.
The system I witnessed set up in the UK seems reasonable, if you allow that such a system can ever be reasonable. The cameras capture plates entering and exiting a multiple mile stretch of highway and if your average speed exceeds the threshold, you get cited.
No worries about momentary speeding and no need to immediately slam on the brakes as happens with single location cameras in the US.
They have single point checks as well (some of which are variable). Personally I quite like the average speed checks+ as they keep people driving at the speed limit which I like to do myself.
+ When they are used properly. Often they are used in conjunction with spurious roadworks and a very low limit (I've seen 30mph on a motorway).
Why do you like to drive at the speed limit? Do you find it just happens to be reasonably set, and it happens to be a speed at which you feel comfortable?
Have you driven vehicles in which the speed limit feels dangerously fast, as well as vehicles in which the speed limit feels somewhat low?
Do you find the speed limit to be a reasonable "upper bound" for travel, with a fair number of people traveling below it? Or do you find it to be an artificial upper bound, with many vehicles traveling very close to that speed? If the latter, how do you feel about the clumping of traffic and inability to complete passes, change lanes for exits, and the like?
I actually have experience driving in multiple countries so I think I can add something to this.
In Poland, where I am from, speed limits are retarded. Seriously, the speed limit can change several times on the distance of 1km. Seriously, pick any Polish street on Google StreetView and follow it for a bit - it will keep on going between 90km/h to drop to 40km/h to then go to 60km/h for 100m or so, to go down to 50km/g to go up to 90km/h again. So people sort of pick a middle speed somewhere between those and end up driving over/under the speed limit for 90% of the time. Of course the police knows this so they are usually waiting at this one bit where the speed limit drops for literally 50m of the road for no reason at all. I saw the speed limit falling from 90km/h to just 50km/h in the middle of nowhere, with nothing in sight, and a police car waiting just behind the sign to catch you speeding.
In the UK on the other hand, it's much much much better. I never feel like the speed limits don't make sense. As you approach a city, the speed limit goes from 70mph to 50mph, then to 40mph, to finally fall down to 30mph in the city and 20mph in residential areas. I have never seen a situation where the speed limit would change multiple times on one stretch of road. Even driving in the countryside, the speed limit is always 60mph even if the road is not good enough to actually support that speed - you are expected to use your own judgement, if you go into a blind corner going 60mph you are an idiot, there's no need to set up speed limit before every single turn and tree like they do in Poland.
> The next thing I look to see happen is automated speeding tickets. There's no reason radars shouldn't be set up in conjuction with license plate readers, or actually just pulling speed data from cars with in-car transmission ability and tickets being auto-generated to constituents.
This seems like a Catch-22, though. Any state that actually enforced speeding laws systematically would wind up ticketing (almost) all drivers, (almost) all the time, and the selective nature of current enforcement of speeding limits would become so glaringly apparent that (one hopes) the problems with it couldn't be ignored.
Especially in a state like Texas, where "no regulation" is a religious mantra, it's hard to imagine that the result would be anything but raising the speed limits on the road to reflect actual driving conditions—which, I'd argue, is a good thing. (I don't know anything about the reason, but I do know that, on a stretch of I-35 that I have driven regularly for a few years, the speed limit has increased; and the trend statewide seems to be towards higher limits, with much of I-10 having a speed limit of 80 mph—beyond which I, as a Prius driver, wouldn't go significantly even if I were legally allowed to do so.)
I've heard the argument before, not sure if it was backed with any real data, that perfect enforcement leads to wiping out tickets as a source of revenue, because people start actually obeying the law.
In some cases it actually makes things more dangerous, like red-light cameras appear to cause accidents, because people afraid of tickets start slamming on their brakes when the light turns yellow, and get rear ended.
Also I don't think that kind of meta-analysis lasts some rounds of conditioning.
Right now the "meta" is to not slam on your brakes at a yellow turning red because the person behind you might be expecting you to go through it. But if the expectation changes -- which could very well be caused by no one wanting to receive automated tickets any more, the person behind will most likely stop expecting you to go through it, as they're very aware of the risk of getting auto-ticketed too.
It's a bit more subtle than that: they tend to decrease the incidence of side impact collisions (which have a high injury potential), and increase the incidence of rear impact collisions (which have a somewhat lower, but non-zero injury potential). Overall results vary depending on your definition of success (less total collisions? less injuries? less side impact collisions?) and the characteristics of the intersection (approach speed, sight lines, etc).
Yeah I think this is the kind of thing that would actually happen -- people would have to actually confront what speed limits were/should be more practically.
My other comment was a little more pessimistic (as the probability that people don't get outraged enough to set practical limits is non-zero) -- but it would be nice if people took more of a critical/practical view towards the current speed limits, and whether they reflect the abilities of modern cars (and their own tolerances for receiving tickets).
Small Texas towns do this by the way (and are famous for it/well known) -- but AFAIK limits were placed on the percentage of revenue that a town can make from tickets from their stretch of highway.
Radar guns have been around for many decades. They cost a few hundred dollars and can generate revenue of $1000/day. So why doesn't every police car in existence have a radar gun? The author I was reading claimed that local politicians would not stand for it, I guess because it would be too hard to fix that many VIP tickets. I wonder what the power elite is doing with automated ticket-issuing machines? Maybe the systems come with the ability to erase specific auto-generated tickets for "special" people.
"We’re unlikely to get answers from the government agencies who signed these contracts. To access Vigilant’s powerful online data systems, agencies agree not to disparage the company or even to talk to the press without the company’s permission"
How is it possibly legal for a government, which is supposed to be transparent, to contract with a private company and accept a term saying they cannot talk about the private company without company approval?
To me the most disturbing part is that Vigilant can keep the data for as long as they want:
> According the company's usage and privacy policy, Vigilant “retains LPR data as long as it has commercial value.” Vigilant can sell or license that information to other law enforcement bodies, and potentially private companies such as insurance firms and repossession agencies.
Just when you think it can't get worse. It gets worse.
I guess in a crazy kind of way it makes sense. Government has been mooching off commercial data collection for some time. It's about time the commercial sector got to use government agents as sort of a contracted private intelligence agency.
<sarcastically>And hell, you could bump this up a notch. Just start paying for body cams on all federal agents. If the agent needs the data in court you save it, otherwise it can magically disappear (without any kind of judicial overview). Better yet, lying to a federal agent is a felony! So just text the guy and give him some sample questions he might want to ask. It'd be like a magic button to privately deposition anybody you'd like.</sarcastically>
I apologize for the hair-on-fire reaction. Good grief, it's blatantly obvious that the players here, both commercial and governmental, are going to push this thing as hard as they possibly can until somebody stops them. I'm still trying to figure out who somebody is going to be.
ADD: A plug: I rant about this often on my FB page. God knows I try to keep it off HN but it's a long-lasting news story that's intricately related to the things we do. (FB page is https://www.facebook.com/Freedom-or-Safety-405551942874575)
Well, the historical response to being robbed by armed thugs is to get bigger weapons and your own thugs. And in Texas, it's easier to get guns that it is to get water (as far as I can tell, observing from Canada). The only thing I don't understand is why an open shooting war between the police and the citizens hasn't broken out already.
AFAICT, the citizenry that votes loves law enforcement and "tough" regulations; the people most comfortable with guns are also in love with this government. Further, voter turnout in the last major election was ~28% (or 34%, depending on whom you ask) so the ability to work the democracy angle is quite limited.
The government keeps the populace happy by making noises related to "lowered taxes", which is accompanied by the reality shown by this extortion gambit, skyrocketing fines in general, and generally regressive taxation policies. It is a sad state of affairs, no pun intended.
I had a friend in NYC just hit by a case of mistaken identify with ALPRs being used by roving repo men looking to reclaim vehicles. It certainly isn't restricted to the realm of law enforcement...
Am Canadian, so my legal understanding may not match American law. My understanding of Canadian law is that that situation would not have had mens rea (a guilty mind); the repo man was repossessing a car which he believed was one that he was entitled to repossess. However, the repo man would like be guilty of civil negligence and the owner court would ensure that the owner was made whole (no towing fees, rental fees covered, maybe a bit of extra cash to cover the hassle/lost work/whatever).
Basically the repo guy was negligent. They got a reader hit for a car they were looking for and he just drove to that block and looked for a white make X model Y and went up to the first one he found (my friend's) and tried to tell him he was going to take the car without ever looking at the VIN #. The cops were called and the guy admitted he never checked the VIN, which was obviously not a match for what he was looking for.
For sure... But was it civil negligence or criminal negligence? Civil negligence is exactly what I'm talking about, with the courts coming up with an adequate remedy to make the car owner whole.
In Canada, criminal negligence is defined as: "219 (1) Every one is criminally negligent who
(a) in doing anything, or
(b) in omitting to do anything that it is his duty to do,
shows wanton or reckless disregard for the lives or safety of other persons."
It'd be a pretty hard sell here for him to meet that definition, but the common law/civil definition would certainly fit.
Forgive me my ignorance... What am I supposed to do with this information other than get angry? (Double that for non-Texas residents.) What is the point of this if there's no call to action?
I'm a rage-aholic! I'm addicted to rage-ahol!!!" -- Homer Simpson
I think the point of these releases by the EFF is to call attention to an issue. It's not supposed to present both sides of an issue or offer an objective, reasoned, solution or response. (Other EFF releases have been scorned here on HN for being too hyperbolic.)
The EFF is an advocacy organization with a distinct viewpoint and they produce these releases to bring about attention, discussion, and hopefully news media coverage, to an injustice.
If I might suggest, channel your anger toward a letter to your representatives or perhaps a letter to the editor of your local news publication. Frequently the EFF will call out specific politicians who support troubling legislation so you can express displeasure to them directly.
Awareness of governmental overreach and tax funding for police helps us make informed votes. For instance, if (when) your local representative pushes a bill like this you now have some information to fight it.
I live in Europe, we have similar problems but not at this level. I will just add one quote from Greece:
> New bill lowered fine from 400 euros to 50 euros, as long as offender presents vehicle at KTEO for inspection within 10 days of
violation. Traffic wardens were hesitant to issue fines with debt crisis.
Between this and cops simply stealing money, also known euphemistically as asset forfeiture, it's a huge risk to drive anywhere these days. How can ordinary, law-abiding citizens have respect for the law when the law is written to specifically hurt them? I suppose on our way to fascism, privacy is only a small bump in the road, barely even worth this comment.
You're missing the point. Of course he has to pay. The punishment of spending a night (or weekend, if you get unlucky) in jail so you can see a judge in the morning is disproportionate to either losing or neglecting to pay a small fine.
It should not be the choice between go to jail for the night, or pay a third party private company an extra 25%.
Basically why does this exist? Those that can afford to generally pay these fines eventually when they go to renew tabs/get pulled over/whatever. Those that can't afford them won't pay them either way, and this just makes their already shitty lives shittier by likely putting them out of work.
There were times I got to work and back barely making ends meet when I had outstanding warrants for unpaid tickets. I did what I had to do to feed my family, got back on my feet, and paid them off. Automated scanners at every turn would have put me out of work, and minimum out of the bottom rungs of the career I currently enjoy.
At some point you need to stop kicking people while their down, and use a little common sense. Extorting them another 25% or ruining their lives is ridiculous.
I agree you need a way to go after scofflaws, but the they are a very small minority in a very wide sea of folks kind of caught up in a system they are unlikely to get out of. If you think Payday loan stores are bad, just get in debt to the government.
It should not be the choice between go to jail for the night, or pay a third party private company an extra 25%.
Considering how it works in literally every other state, where you're arrested with no ifs ans or buts if you have outstanding violations on your record (and have let them lapse that far)...
Okay, you want to remove the ability for people to pay the fines on the spot? Because that is literally the only difference here. An option where one did not previously exist.
Now let me try to get in front of this thread. The answer to people being between a rock and a hard place with regard to traffic fines is, quite simply, to not get them in the first place, something which many people are able to do remarkably well.
This is not a popular statement of fact, the response to which is usually a list of edge cases about how someone didn't see they were in the HOV lane, or rolled through the stop sign or did something else because "everyone else does it", or whatever.
Okay, what's your answer to that? Don't give poor people tickets for breaking the law / fine them less?
Bzzt. Unconstitutional on its face because equal protection, regardless of how you view the 99%/1% class warfare issue.
So it sounds like we're attacking this from the wrong side. The problem is not that perfectly legitimate fines are legally assessed and Bad Things happen to you when you don't pay them. That is the system working as it's supposed to.
I agree you need a way to go after scofflaws, but the they are a very small minority
The cavalier attitude with which people treat basic rules of the road would appear to indicate otherwise. You (again, random example) roll through a stop sign because you don't think a cop is going to see it and the extra couple of seconds are that important, you've rolled the dice with full knowledge and consent.
Same thing if you're not paying attention and miss something you're obligated to not miss. Well, it sucks, but you're in control of a multi-ton hunk of high speed metal and paying attention to your surroundings is kind of a big deal.
Sometimes the dice don't go your way. I'm not sure it's possible to concoct a law that is both constitutional in the sense of "the same laws/penalties for everyone" and also adaptable to meet the needs of the violators.
Look at it this way - self driving cars are coming sooner rather than later, and most of these things won't be a problem anymore.
A bunch of strawman and other logical fallacies I hope people don't fall for.
"Okay, what's your answer to that? Don't give poor people tickets for breaking the law / fine them less?
Bzzt. Unconstitutional on its face because equal protection, regardless of how you view the 99%/1% class warfare issue."
How about just not charging such ridicilous fines, and stop creating warrants for peoples arrests because they haven't payed a fucking fine? How about that there Mr. I kowtow to the totalitarian master?
stop creating warrants for peoples arrests because they haven't payed a fucking fine
Our entire legal system (and indeed the legal system of most countries) is based on incremental punishments for further noncompliance. You break the law, you get fined. You don't pay the fine, you lose the associated privilege. You ignore that loss, you go to jail.
This is necessary to ensure compliance. Without this, the law may as well not exist because people can violate it with absolute impunity.
How about just not charging such ridicilous fines
"Ridiculous" in the case of someone below the poverty line could be as small as a $20-$50 speeding/parking ticket.
We are subtly turning everyone into a criminal without their knowledge. It's pretty common to be fined for an infraction without immediate notification (red light / speed cameras, etc). The system is 100% effective at levying the fines, but not 100% effective at notifying people that they've been fined.
People absolutely do get wrongfully arrested or detained because of clerical errors related to fines.
The intent is not clear: did they not pay because they want to "stick it to the man" or because the mail was lost (no uncommon, especially in bad neighborhoods)?
You also need to realize police already drive around and randomly type into their computer license plate numbers to see what comes up. This system just makes it faster and red flags those who are really breaking the law.
Yeah. They do. That's not GPS stamped. It's not loaded into a commercial database for a company to sell to other companies for gain. And to add insult to injury, who pays for it?
I know that's going to be an unpopular opinion, and I'm not saying their debt collection strategy is kosher, but it's not like they're fabricating the fines.
Also, you could "call their bluff" so to speak and go to jail. It's probably just overnight, and it sounds like you're not actually charged with anything.
You've got lots of options, lots of levers to pull to fix this.
You've never been dirt poor I take it. Where the fines for something like out of date registration is the difference between rent. And you have to drive through a township where the cops are out like sharks. It piles up.
Very easy for you to say maybe, not everyone has the money to pay even <$100 fines before driving to work the next day.
I guess you could just go to jail, wonder who's going to watch the kids tonight though. Also hoping the boss will understand being late the next day, processing takes a fair amount of time. I'm sure they'll understand
Yes, I'm sure we can sit around conjuring up absolute worst case scenarios where a mother of 3 was fined for unloading her kid at school, and she can't miss work again because one of her kids has a medical condition so she sometimes has to take him to the hospital, which is 200 miles away, uphill in the snow, both ways, etc.
I'm not sure "having family obligations after working hours" or "having a job where you're expected to arrive more or less on time" are quite the absurd worst-case scenarios you envision them to be.
The "go to jail" option is what the individual would have faced if pulled over for any other normal traffic stop (ie. run red light, no turn signal, etc...). So I don't see anything wrong with this really... the individuals already broke the law by not paying their court fines, and this is just providing a mechanism to enforce that law.
"...more than half the courts in St. Louis County engage in the "illegal and harmful practices" of charging high court fines and fees on nonviolent offenses like traffic violations — and then arresting people when they don't pay."
That's not what Alupis is saying. You don't go to jail for running a red light or failing to signal. You get pulled over for those things. You go to jail because the cop ran your info and found that you were guilty of other crimes.
You also go to jail for being too poor to pay the fine for failing to signal.
Now, you might say that not doing so would just incentivise poor people to not ever obey traffic law... In which case I would have to ask - what incentive does a billionaire have to ever obey traffic law?
> ...what incentive does a billionaire have to ever obey traffic law?
I'm no billionaire, but I used to think along those lines: Just budget a couple grand a year for tickets and insurance hikes, then go wild. Unfortunately for me, there's more to traffic violations than fines. There's traffic school. There's getting your ride towed, leaving you standing on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere (this was pre-uber). There's waiting until Monday to get it back, because the impound lot is closed on Sundays. It's quite a hassle, so I don't speed or drive aggressively anymore.
> You also go to jail for being too poor to pay the fine for failing to signal.
Well... you don't immediately go to jail for failure to pay fines. For traffic stuff, it takes weeks before you're actually hit with a fine. Most courts also have payment plans or discounts for financial hardship. It's not as cruel of a system as you might think.
It's only slightly related, but paying the late fine on the spot was what I found so odd about the Texas bill. Cops never accept money. Asking a cop, "Can I pay the ticket here, right now?" is usually a veiled attempt at bribery. If the cop says yes, you're negotiating price. Then you use more veiled language like, "Is there is discount for paying it now?" Etc.
Yep. It's a huge pain in the ass - one that poor people would want to avoid even more then you do.
> It's not as cruel of a system as you might think.
Maybe not in nice middle-class suburban neighbourhoods... But it is in places like Ferguson - which has outstanding arrest warrants for 75% of its population... Almost entirely for not paying their tickets. [1] [2]
No, you don't immediately go to jail - but if you can't scrape up the money in two weeks, you can get an arrest warrant issued. And once they let you out, you'll still have the same unpaid fine, only now you're also out of a job.
I'm a little sick of the word "poor" being used in lieu of the word "stupid". There are genuinely poor people, and there are people who are too stupid to follow basic common sense laws.
Maybe some of these folks actually should go to jail, if they can't figure out that stopping at a stop sign is important. It doesn't really matter how wealthy/smart you are if you run full speed into another car.
No, this is not "just" providing a mechanism to enforce that law. They're creating a permanent record of every individual's travels, regardless of whether they're wanted for any crimes, and they are storing it indefinitely.
If you don't understand why that's a bad thing, and why intelligent people are freaked out about it, I strongly suggest you study history.
Holy crap this is alarming! I'm so glad that there are institutions like the eff that can catch these kinds of practices and predict how they can be mismanaged to serve rather ulterior motives.
As a side note, I have a sick feeling that this technology will be used to exclusively target the most vulnerable of society. In fact, it provides an incentive for police to patrol those neighborhoods, since they are (AFAIK) more likely to have outstanding debts or unlikely to have the means to pay them promptly.
Are your movements in public really private information? "John Smith as seen on the corner of 14th and Main Sts at 12pm today" doesn't really smack of private info that needs to be protected.
Yes, someone could analyze all the data and learn about your habits, but to what end? If you've got someone that dedicated to watching where you go, you probably have a larger problem than just the information existing in a database (i.e. a stalker, abusive ex, etc.) and that problem needs to be dealt with.
Your location in public has always been publicly available to anyone near you, it just wasn't recorded and stored.
I'm surprised that this isn't as appalling to others as it is to me. Yes, I'm very disturbed that every time a police car drives past my car, a record is created in a database. The government basically knows everything about you at that point, where you shop, who you are sleeping with, etc. If you were an activist the government would practically know everywhere you go and everyone you associate with. To me this is the meatspace version of the NSA collecting all of my internet traffic, which I thought was pretty universally disliked here on HN.
The information becomes more private the more aggregated it gets. If you have a stalker following you around everywhere, you can get a restraining order against them. If detailed information of your locations were to be available online, you couldn't stop anyone from looking at it.
This is backwards from how robberies work. Burglars go to a neighborhood and look for a house where nobody's home. They don't pick out a house before hand and wait until it's empty.
Even if they did, why would they try to crack into a government database instead of just sitting outside until you leave?
> If you've got someone that dedicated to watching where you go, you probably have a larger problem than just the information existing in a database (i.e. a stalker, abusive ex, etc.) and that problem needs to be dealt with.
Indeed. I've been trying to convince mine that their "affection" isn't appreciated, but I don't really know how I can avoid them. They're known to abuse many people, although most of their victims will actually defend them as not so bad as others. And since some of them own the courts, I can't even get restraining orders!
(The "recorded and stored" is the problem. Framing the situation as you've done is just unproductive, as it detracts from "dealing with" the new all-interested stalkers of governmental and private sector data mining)
Cute. If the government is using information to abuse people, then the problem is that the government is abusive, not that they have too much information. If you take away the information, but leave the abusive government in place, you haven't solved anything. The solution is not to limit the information, it's to limit the government's power.
Privacy is a way of limiting governments' power, and singular attempts to limit power don't seem all that effective. So why wouldn't we try everything we can? Readily giving up one protection in hope of replacing it with another is a great way to be left with neither.
Furthermore, the definition of "abuse" isn't universal. If 80% of people think some self-contained behavior should be prevented, then lacking privacy the remaining 20% will be abused with no way to change it.
> Limiting the government's power doesn't seem to be so effective, so why not try "both" [0]?
Really? It hasn't? Has your lord recently claimed his right of Prima Nocte with your new wife? Have you ever been conscripted into his army to fight against another lord? Have you seen many people summarily executed because they displeased a nobleman? I'd say we've come a fairly long way, historically, in limiting the ability of government to abuse citizens. Obviously, there is still room for improvement.
> If 80% of people think some self-contained behavior should be prevented, then lacking privacy the remaining 20% will be abused with no way to change it.
We have a way to change it. It's called "democracy". Letting unjust laws stand and trying to hide from the authorities instead of changing the unjust law is cowardly and ultimately ineffective.
At one point 80% of people thought such self-contained behavior as being gay or interracial marriage should be illegal. We didn't make stronger privacy laws so that you could hide that you're gay or married to someone of a different race, we made it so those things aren't illegal. That is the right fix. That is the only fix that will ever work.
I rephrased my comment a bit, because "privacy" versus "limiting government power" is a false dichotomy. The former is one avenue of the latter. And by saying that limiting power is somewhat ineffectual, I'm referring to the shorter term when a government will attempt to take all the power they can in an emerging area (eg mass surveillance), and only later be slowly pushed back as society slowly learns why the specific concentration is a bad approach.
> We have a way to change it. It's called "democracy".
Except that "democracy" describes the situation I outlined where the majority tyrannizes the minority. You're really saying that the way to change it is to simply wait, which is a complete disservice to anybody persecuted in the past, or anybody being persecuted today for things that are "still" unpopular.
If you believe progress is truly inevitable, why are you bothering to discuss this? IMHO, the way progress is created is through specific instances of people fighting for it. And a meta-issue like privacy is what enables those on the forefront to be the social change before it is accepted. You'd have no gay marriage if sodomy laws were enforced effectively.
> You're really saying that the way to change it is to simply wait, which is a complete disservice to anybody persecuted in the past, or anybody being persecuted today for things that are "still" unpopular.
That is not at all what I'm saying. The many activists for civil rights did not simply "wait". They protested, they petitioned, and most importantly, they made it very publicly known who they were and why and how they were being oppressed. Literally, the exact opposite of being private.
Most normal people (the 80% in your example) don't really want to be involved in oppressing or abusing anyone. It's easy for them to let it happen if they don't know the people it's happening to and see them as real human beings, but that's what happens so long as the main concern is maintaining privacy.
Look at what's happened since being gay has gone from private, closely guarded information to generally publicly available, or at least not explicitly hidden. Are gay people more oppressed or less oppressed now?
> normal people (the 80% in your example) don't really want to be involved in oppressing or abusing anyone
Salem Village? Persecution of hackers (ongoing)? Drug hysteria (ongoing)? "Terrorism" (ongoing)? Heck, the privacy issue is itself an instance. Even if we disagree about the utility of privacy, surely you should accept that it could have value to others!
In my experience, people are quite ready to support draconian "justice" against nonconforming behavior. They don't "see them as real human beings" because the victims are dehumanized as a different tribe. Direct violence based on traditional distinctions seems to be fading, but I'm not going to bet the farm based on short-term history. The general phenomenon certainly has found new avenues - eg the recent trend of bullying via social media.
If you haven't developed the intuition that group dynamics can turn horribly wrong, then I don't know how I could convince you that being able to hide from the majority is a valuable thing. Most people will not understand this - themselves being part of the oppressive majority (see: http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2346). No worries, I'll continue to preserve my privacy in every way possible!
> They don't "see them as real human beings" because the victims are dehumanized as a different tribe.
Exactly. And the way to counteract this is by speaking up and showing them that the victims are real people. Not by hiding the victims. As long as they never see or hear about or meet any real person that's a member of the oppressed class, they can maintain the illusion that they are "others".
It's easy for someone to hate "gays" as an abstract notion. It's a lot harder to hate your gay neighbor Fred, who waves hello in the morning and asks how your day is going and picks up the mail for you when you're out of town.
Maybe it's valuable in the short term for some individuals to be able to hide, but it only slows down the progress overall. Aside from that, my main point is that, valuable or not, hiding is not going to be an option. Digital information doesn't stay in one place. Even if you think it's really wrong that it doesn't, it still doesn't.
Music companies think it's really wrong that people can share copies of music files, but that hasn't stopped it from happening. Ignoring the reality of it and trying to legislate it away hasn't stopped it. It won't stop companies/governments from sharing information about you either. So, if that's what you're relying on to keep you safe, you're not going to be safe.
> And the way to counteract this is by speaking up and showing them that the victims are real people
How's that been working out for hard drug users, file sharers, and non-molesting pedophiles?
> hiding is not going to be an option
This is such an utterly defeatist conclusion. There will always be some types of information that are impossible to keep private and some that will be easy to, but there's a huge middleground that requires organization and resources (eg traffic cameras, credit bureaus) to collect, aggregate, and exploit. The entities currently doing are centralized, so they could easily be put out of business. Individual actions and peers will only leak certain things through eg mass photos, and to presuppose omniscience on the part of a would-be decentralized reconstructor is to ignore how that capability would be bootstrapped - the economic advantage from private surveillance that currently goes unregulated.
Obviously the existing power structures have a lot more to gain by developing surveillance than prohibiting it. But a decently secured computer containing one's private files is a shining beacon of a Schelling point as well. I really don't see the point of capitulating early and backfitting it into a philosophy of openness. I guarantee our rulers won't be quick to do so either.
Defeatist? No. I don't think it's defeatist to avoid relying on something that has been proven, time and time again, to be unreliable.
> How's that been working out for hard drug users, file sharers, and non-molesting pedophiles?
Hard drug users: many countries and jurisdictions are moving towards decriminalization and legalization, as well as emphasizing treatment over jail time for non-violent drug offenders.
File Sharers: File sharing continues unabated as far as I can tell. The most successful efforts to stop it have been offering attractive paid alternatives rather than hunting down file sharers.
Non-molesting pedophiles: Admittedly, an uphill battle. But you're here, on a public forum, mentioned them as an abused, oppressed class, so that's something. Not the first time I've seen such an opinion either.
Privacy is nice, but it's not a security measure. Even the NSA, with thousands of people working full time to find secrets and keep them, cannot keep their information secret.
> The entities currently doing are centralized, so they could easily be put out of business.
Theoretically, yes, Congress could pass a law making credit bureaus illegal. I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for this to happen.
I never said "don't secure your computer". There's a big difference between making sure a keylogger doesn't grab your bank account number and worrying yourself stupid because a list of places you were last week is in a database somewhere that, in all likelihood, nobody is ever going to look at. The former is a reasonable precaution against a verified threat that you can personally take useful action on. The latter is just pointless stress about some vague danger that you have little immediate control over.
Sure, ambiguous "progress" is being made, but the individuals in those situations don't benefit by publicly broadcasting their activities.
This entire "progressive" attitude that everything continually gets better, besides being based on this recent most-peaceful time in history, relies on individuals pushing forth and being the change to their local social groups while simultaneously hiding from the larger social machines that would quickly squash them. The individuals in these situations would be ill-advised to widely broadcast their activities and, if pushed to do so, would pull back from their lives rather than become martyrs.
I'll openly tell you that I consider it immoral to support the copyright cartels hell-bent on destroying the Internet. But I'm certainly not going to further details as doing so would only increase my risk.
> list of places you were ... nobody is ever going to look at
An extreme straw man that the NSA is also fond of. The information is being collected so it can be churned over by algorithms for very deliberate purposes. The distilled results are then used, by somebody, to investigate and persecute outliers, engage in price discrimination, and implement commercial psychological warfare (advertising).
It's not a matter of non-actionable stress, it's a matter of being aware of the privacy preserving/revealing choices one makes, and casually looking for alternatives.
This license plate issue is a great example of what your viewpoint directly enables - a problem caused solely by government requiring people to publicly broadcast their identity, putting them at the mercy of private surveillance. Government obviously has an inherent interest in tracking everything and everyone down to the last quark (all organizations seek more control), but it would be foolish for individuals to acquiesce in hope of some singularity of enlightenment and tolerance.
> This entire "progressive" attitude that everything continually gets better, besides being based on this recent most-peaceful time in history,
That seems to be pretty clear evidence that things get better. If some time in history were more peaceful than now, then I could see saying that there hasn't been progress. But by definition, if we're making progress, of course the present would be more peaceful than any time before it.
> relies on individuals pushing forth and being the change to their local social groups while simultaneously hiding from the larger social machines that would quickly squash them.
At some point the larger social machine has to be challenged. The longer it takes for that to happen, the more entrenched and harder to change it will get.
> The distilled results are then used, by somebody, to investigate and persecute outliers, engage in price discrimination, and implement commercial psychological warfare (advertising).
Outliers like people who don't pay fines they were legitimately assessed? Is it really persecution to find someone who owes money and ask them to pay it?
Price discrimination? Is this really a problem? If you're not willing to pay the asking price for something, don't pay it. The fact that somebody else might have gotten a better price is irrelevant. Price is determined by how much the buyer values the thing they're buying. That's how markets work. If anything this is a social benefit, as it makes people with money to spare subsidize goods for people without. If one guy willing to pay $600 for a plane ticket makes it possible for the airline to sell tickets at $200 to people who wouldn't have otherwise been able to afford them, that seems like a net benefit.
And advertising? Really? That's the big boogeyman here? Someone is going to collect all my data and use it to show me an ad? Heaven forfend, I might look at an ad. Oh, the persecution. "Commercial psychological warfare" is needlessly dramatic. It's an ad. Mostly, it's just stupid, and online easy to block.
> a problem caused solely by government requiring people to publicly broadcast their identity, putting them at the mercy of private surveillance.
I've still never once heard what the actual problem is. Every time this issue comes up, there's never been a single explanation of what somebody is going to do with an archive of my location data. Is the government going to use it to persecute me? How? The government already knows where I live and where I work. If they want to find me and persecute me, they'll do it. They don't need a list of every license plate camera I passed in the last 6 months to do that.
Some anonymous stalker is going to hack into the database and figure out I have a 76% chance of being at a particular coffee shop on a Wednesday afternoon and they're going to wait for me there? Really? They wouldn't just, I don't know, wait outside my house? Wouldn't that be easier? I've yet to see anyone explain how a database of past location data enables anyone to do something to you that wouldn't be more easily accomplished by other already available means.
The fluidity of information works in both directions. It's also easier for us to collect information about the government and expose abuse and corruption (e.g. the previously mentioned NSA leaks).
> Government obviously has an inherent interest in tracking everything and everyone down to the last quark
"Government" doesn't have an interest in anything. It's an abstract concept with no will of its own. Some individuals have an interest in tracking certain things (like delinquent fines) and others have other interests.
> That seems to be pretty clear evidence that things get better
There have been many collapses throughout history and attitudes of invincibility usually precede them. There's also the evidence of us being born in this period of history, implying it is likely the most populous. I'm not asserting that collapse is going to happen, simply arguing against confidence in either outcome. Past performance does not guarantee future returns.
> The longer it takes for that [challenging the social machine] to happen, the more entrenched and harder to change it will get.
So yeah, let's get those non-molesting pedophiles to stand up next week and publicly proclaim their desires. I'm suuuure there will be some enlightened discourse, after which they will be accepted. (BTW, if you don't want the social machine to become entrenched and harder to change, doesn't giving it omniscience seem like a poor idea?)
> Outliers like people who don't pay fines they were legitimately assessed
Outliers like people who drive too much. Or go to too many fast food restaurants. Or hit the liquor store in the middle of the week. Or who don't go to church. Or who do go to chuch. Or who play hooky from work. And yes, outliers who are going to work so they can afford to pay a ticket. Every specific situation has a direct "fix", but the entire point is that these things should not have to be lobbied for for decades to change everyone's perceptions (or people can simply never agree). Our society is kept moving by white lies that reconcile the difference between reality and the prescriptive model dictated by social norms/government. Your viewpoint assumes that perfect enforcement will cause the prescriptive model to have to adjust to match reality, but would-be social engineers have never worked that way - the entire reason the present model is far off from reality is because they believing that imposing top-down visions is desirable.
> [Government is] an abstract concept with no will of its own
The organisms we call governments do, like all organisms, whether conscious or unconscious.
Getting back to the crux of the matter, we are never going to see eye to eye. The "example" I keep stating and you keep brushing aside is simply that _I_ would like privacy where possible - for at least self-contained situations. I simply do not wish to trust everyone else to completely empathize with me (having similar computational power, how could they possibly simulate me?), but really I need no further justification for my desire. If you cannot respect my (and others' like me) desire, then you are yet another social engineer with a grand plan for everyone - exactly the type of person I desire privacy from!
>Getting back to the crux of the matter, we are never going to see eye to eye. The "example" I keep stating and you keep brushing aside is simply that _I_ would like privacy where possible - for at least self-contained situations. I simply do not wish to trust everyone else to completely empathize with me (having similar computational power, how could they possibly simulate me?), but really I need no further justification for my desire. If you cannot respect my (and others' like me) desire, then you are yet another social engineer with a grand plan for everyone - exactly the type of person I desire privacy from!
You continue to mistake my point completely. I'm not saying that your privacy should be gone, I'm saying that it is gone.That ship has sailed, and continuing to rely on it in order to protect yourself from tyranny is not going to work. If you want to sit idly by, clinging to privacy, while tyrants rise to power, you're going to eventually end up in the situation you fear.
Fast food restaurants, church/no church, etc. These are not currently legitimate reasons for the police to pull anyone over or detain them. It's not because the police don't have the ability to collect that data, it's because we have laws limiting what the police can and can't do and we have a court system that punishes bad actors on both sides of the law. That is what we need to protect, not whether there a list of fast food restaurants you visited. The amount of information the government has is irrelevant if they are forced to act transparentlyrics with appropriate checks and balances.
As anyone that has dealt with data on a large scale attest, data purity is hard to maintain at scale and over time.
Vigilant has already had to issue apologies for incorrect warrants being served. The consequences of "oops, my bad" are asymmetrical and not tilted in favor of error. One might argue collateral damage but I do not believe this is acceptable at all.
>Anyone who is not an anarchist agrees with having a policeman at the corner of the street; but the danger at present is that of finding the policeman half-way down the chimney or even under the bed.
On one hand, having law enforcements make money for private organizations sound really terrible; on the other hand, letting people get away with breaking rules will create a terrible culture that I experienced first hand.
A bit on the later, if the rules are too strict, or punishment(fines) too high, then rules should be challenged/modified. Whereas if you create very strict rules, but only enforce it selectively, either due to officer's personal judgement or lack of policing resources, it creates incentive for police officers to become corrupt, less deterrent for people breaking rules and making bad rules more tolerable (because most people do not get personally affected).
You could argue the "privacy" factor and I get it, but I don't really see a problem with this. You're already registered with the state, and the license plate identifies you. You chose to break, evade the law, and not pay your fines. Everyone else obeys the law. So you get pulled over, pay the fine, and be done with it.
I'd consider taking it a step further in the efficiency department. If someone doesn't follow up with a ticket after ninety days or whatever, auto debit their account. Thoughts?
The privacy issue isn't about you being identified as someone who has an outstanding fine to pay. The privacy issue is that the readers are collecting and storing data about EVERY vehicle on the road. That data is then used not only by the police, but also by a third party private company that can do with it as they will. As the article clearly states it is entirely possible to extrapolate where a person goes to the dentist/doctor/work/sleep/etc from this data. And, to top it all off, the private company that receives the data reserves the right to keep the data for as long as it is 'commercially viable' to do so... i.e. as long as there's someone else out there willing to pay them for it.
That "efficiency department" wants 25% over the debt amount AND unlimited usage of the collected data until it's "commercially viable". The latter part is especially outrageous.
Any idea how much simple tickets cost after compounding for months/years? They'll end up costing multiples of the original. This sounds like a win for both sides.
Nobody said it's a 'lease to own' situation with the system. Never mind that it includes computing time and server-side calculations and database access so chances are it is a system that is simply being 'leased' to the police at the cost of 25% added value to all transactions made possible through it.
Although such behaviour has gone on in one way or another for as long as there have been police/soldiers, this is not part of the Orwell 'Big Brother' script. In most Dystopian futures the apparatus of Police state is paid for with some type of other taxation, not the police officers doing highway robbery.
So, they're planning to turn the Texas prison system into de facto debtors' prisons, and the Texas police system into de facto highwaymen. One more factor to add to the giant pile of reasons for ill-will that the US state and Federal governments have been collecting. That pile can't get much taller without toppling, and while I do greatly hope the blowback happens through the democratic process, that process is pretty severely damaged and this looks less and less likely every year.