Over the last century, the Land of the Free has slowly transformed into a land governed by endless laws, largely by cracking down on vices instead of actual crimes, creating a society that would render us all criminals if our behavior were constantly observed. Meanwhile, the state has steadily expanded its use of mass surveillance, largely under the pretext of fighting “terror.”
This is a toxic mixture.
You know, I’m not the biggest fan of personal vehicles, but if you want to talk about “death machines”, you might also spare some thoughts towards police brutality and whether cops can really be trusted to hijack people’s vehicles at will.
…nevermind that such a backdoor could be exploited by other parties also.
You can get rid of all those uncertainties by just rolling out a pilot and seeing how it goes. There’s no way cops being able to stop cars remotely causes any more trouble than them actually flipping cars over if they take .3 seconds too long to park for a traffic stop, like they did to that pregnant woman who died in 2022.
The police has also demonstrated many, many times that they can’t be trusted to rationally judge whether to indulge in hugely dangerous car chases or not, and they routinely end up making perps crash into random people/objects for traffic stop evasions that turn out to just be a guy fleeing because they have felony quantity of coke or a revoked license. You give it a pilot and see how it goes, if it does more good than harm, then you keep it.
For security, there are many remote-access-control security dances out there, and it’s a solved problem. Tons of them are just a certificate to authenticate, and do a little challenge to solve to be protected from repeat attacks. If one certificate gets leaked or abused you can revoke it and that’s that. If that somehow still has flaws - that’s why you’re doing a pilot.
You know, I’m not the biggest fan of personal vehicles, but if you want to talk about “death machines”, you might also spare some thoughts towards police brutality and whether cops can really be trusted to hijack people’s vehicles at will.
…nevermind that such a backdoor could be exploited by other parties also.
You can get rid of all those uncertainties by just rolling out a pilot and seeing how it goes. There’s no way cops being able to stop cars remotely causes any more trouble than them actually flipping cars over if they take .3 seconds too long to park for a traffic stop, like they did to that pregnant woman who died in 2022.
The police has also demonstrated many, many times that they can’t be trusted to rationally judge whether to indulge in hugely dangerous car chases or not, and they routinely end up making perps crash into random people/objects for traffic stop evasions that turn out to just be a guy fleeing because they have felony quantity of coke or a revoked license. You give it a pilot and see how it goes, if it does more good than harm, then you keep it.
For security, there are many remote-access-control security dances out there, and it’s a solved problem. Tons of them are just a certificate to authenticate, and do a little challenge to solve to be protected from repeat attacks. If one certificate gets leaked or abused you can revoke it and that’s that. If that somehow still has flaws - that’s why you’re doing a pilot.