An old parking enforcement technique is to put a chalk mark on a car's tire: if you come back after two hours and see the same car with the marked tire you know that it has parked too long and can be ticketed.
The 6th circuit recently ruled that is an unconstitutional search[1]: a government agent is physically intruding on a private area (your car) and searching it for information (how long it's been there).
1) Illegal: Placing a mark on your tires that will quickly fade with time and invades your car just enough to reveal whether you adhered to the limits.
2) Legal: Monitor the area with video surveillance and take pictures of every license plate that ever parked there, with timestamps and a photo of the occupants, and store that information for eternity, to be shared with any LEO who wants it.
(2) feels a lot more invasive than (1), but courts consider (2) okay because it just uses stuff visible to the public, while (1) actually physically modifies your car.
Edit: See also the conflict with the long-standing, uncontested practice of leaving a fingerprint on a car's tail light at the beginning of a stop before observing any wrongdoing that warrants such a "search": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19730452
In fairness, the argument is about what you can do to a car before you have evidence of wrongdoing, and the sticker/tickets happen after they have observed an infraction, so that's less problematic in the context of the ruling.
Edit:
>To add: I'd personally much rather local LEOs use the chalk method than the camera method.
The ticket is legal, because by the time you get the ticket, they know you've committed the offense.
The chalk is only illegal because they have to mark your car before you've overstayed, and at that time, the search is unreasonable, since they're just assuming that you're going to overstay.
If the logic is that it's illegal to "modify" the car, couldn't they just get away with standing a domino or similar piece of wood behind one of the tires? If the car moves out, it topples the domino.
Kinda like the difference between wiretapping laws and recording what people say verses video recordings (which when in HD can have very rough audio encoded inside of the video).
I feel like because all of this is so new, we haven't had time to fully think about this stuff, and law enforcement is abusing this.
But if we take things one by one, we could see that some real restrictions could be put on the use of this technology, even in the context of existing laws.
For instance, "video surveillance is allowed because everything it sees is public."
But then you can go like "Okay, but..."
1) A regular person wouldn't remember everything it saw in public a year from now, a month from now, or even a day from now.
2) A regular person wouldn't try to build all sorts of automatic connections between various identities it sees in public over longer periods of time (say more than a few hours)
3) A regular person wouldn't be able to take punitive action with the might of the government and taking up weapons against crimes it sees happen in public (so perhaps someone like a government entity needs to be more restricted than regular people when doing certain monitoring activities, because of their inherit potential for abuse?)
Suddenly when you consider all three of these ideas, and there are probably more like them, we can realize that public surveillance doesn't have to be the "free for all" governments would like us to believe that it should be (because the more true that becomes, the more power they have against each individual, way before there's even a hint of a case against someone).
The court later issued a clarification basically upholding the logic of their ruling but stating that because the chalking was part of valid [regulatory] activities (below) the chalking is okay[0].
> Rather, we hold, based on the pleading stage of this litigation, that two exceptions to the warrant requirement—the “community caretaking” exception and the motor-vehicle exception—do not apply here. Our holding extends no further than this.
From the court's order[1]:
> Because we chalk this practice up to a regulatory exercise, rather than a community-caretaking function, we REVERSE.
I don't think that's the right reading. At least, that's not how I read it.
> Alison Taylor, a frequent recipient of parking tickets, sued the City and its parking enforcement officer Tabitha Hoskins, alleging that chalking violated her Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable search. The City moved to dismiss the action. The district court granted the City’s motion, finding that, while chalking may have constituted a search under the Fourth Amendment, the search was reasonable. Because we chalk this practice up to a regulatory exercise, rather than a community-caretaking function, we REVERSE
The sixth circuit has reversed the district court's dismissal that the search was reasonable. Both the sixth circuit and the lower court agree that marking the tire is a search; the lower court dismissed and held that the search was reasonable.
The amended decision says that once the case advances the city can argue that their actions fall under 4th amendment exceptions, but that their current motion did not sufficiently make that argument.
The chalking may be found OK during further proceedings, depending on how the city argued, but at the time that decision was issued it was not.
I was [lightly] researching this a few weeks back and am pretty sure I found that the net effect of the final ruling was that for the purpose of enforcing regulations [any] city could mark tires, and that because it the outside of the vehicle on public property it was not trespass...
So, am I understanding that right, that they're upholding the chalking-tires technique, but saying it holds up for reasons other than the vehicle and caretaking exceptions?
Also:
>>Because we chalk this practice up to a regulatory exercise
It should not be legal for judges to make puns like that.
(Edited to add substantive remark that belonged here as well.)
It was a very technical decision that clarified the parameters of the debate and sent it back to be re-judged. They didn't uphold/knockdown anything. They did say that chalking a tire is a "search" (using bad logic, IMO), but did not rule that it was "unreasonable".
For a while I have struggled with how vehicles in the US are treated. A national ID system and the requirement to ID onesself is opposed for many likely valid reasons but a national ID system for cars and the requirement to ID yourself is in some way materially different?
As I just recently commented elsewhere: There is a right to travel and a right to engage in interstate commerce. Sure, you can argue there is no right to drive a car, but only inasmuch as there is no right to operate a printing press and distribute leaflets.
Mixing the metaphor broke it. Starting again: I have a right to travel. Some travel involves vehicles, which are currently licensed. This is analogous to requiring permits and searches for specific kinds of speech.
It is debatable, has been debated by the courts and settled: you have a right to freely travel, but there is no right to use any particular mode of transportation without government regulation.
This is why sovcits who are “traveling in commerce” without license and insurance always lose their “legal” arguments. Because the issue is settled - there is no constitutional right to drive a car.
Okay, overturn the case law - state your thesis and advance a novel argument.
So far I’ve seen driving:traveling::printing:speech. Not only is that not an argument, it conveniently overlooks that we have restrictions on speech today - libel and slander, incitement, etc.
What is your thesis? Driving should be completely unconstrained by the state? Why? Or is it that we should have national IDs? Why?
It's going to be interesting how it will work with self driving cars. Arguably the police will push for some kind of police only "pull over and stop" feature they can aim at any car which I'm sure will get absued. If you're in a self driving taxi you'd arguably not be the one abliged to pull over, rather the taxi's virutal driver is the one that needs to pull over. In fact with perfect self driving the passenger might not even be remotely aware of being asked to pull over. They could be asleeep, watching video with headphones on, playing VR games, anything to pass the time.
Also scary to me is the ability to use a self driving car as a slow moving cruise missle. They have a much longer range than drones. It seems only a matter of time before someone decides to use one in that way or other scary ways.
> Also scary to me is the ability to use a self driving car as a slow moving cruise missle[sic].
I wouldn't worry about the spread of level 4/5-automation changing the calculus here on a small actor basis. VBIED's are already a serious threat, and require no significant technical innovation, but outside of conflict zones we don't see a ton of them.
Assuming we don't require physical failsafes though and truly airgap driving systems from any network connectivity (which we won't, I guarantee it) there's definitely a worry on the state level actor front.
I can totally imagine the first salvo in WW3 being the utility grid, cell networks, and crashing all the rooted cars, but that horse has likely already left the stable.
>Assuming we don't require physical failsafes though and truly airgap driving systems from any network connectivity (which we won't, I guarantee it) there's definitely a worry on the state level actor front.
I think it's quite plausible that any autonomous vehicle will have something akin to a big red STOP button, just like most other automated machinery.
This could easily be done without any automation, only using a FPV system similar to a drone. It's simple enough to do this with only a Comma.ai devkit and some FPV hardware.
Yes, I think it is a given that when actual self-driving cars become a reality they will have to include a system allowing police and emergency services to control them. It will no doubt be a criminal offence to temper with that system.
This is a reasonable adaptation to self-driving cars, though.
Well, owners will demand it because no-one will want their car to drive off and disappear and they don't know where it is. The question really is then how long before police forces lobby for access... Though indeed this may end up conditional on getting a warrant depending on the jurisdiction.
You can already buy a GPS tracker for your own car if you're worried about where it ends up. My guess that adoption of that technology is in the single digits. Not really seeing the demand for this.
Why do they even need to pull it over, their might be no one in the car.
And talk about being abused, cars are already being abused. They kill 40,000 people every single year, and injure or disable 2.5million in the USA alone. Somehow this is acceptable to people.
> Also scary to me is the ability to use a self driving car as a slow moving cruise missle
I don't agree it's no different to now. The difference is, availablilty, anonymity, and action at a distance. A bad guy can send a car a couple hundred miles away full of explosives or they can remotely drive it. When it's ubiqitous things maybe change. People were arguably not as jerky before the net. The ability it sit at a screen and type anonymous invective unleashed or amplified supressed behavior. Self driving cars (and drones) might do the same, make it so easy to do certain types of bad things that more people will do them than happens today.
Cars are an interesting area because I immediately thought of our digital presence as an even more modern area of struggle for an expansive interpretation of our rights. If cars are an area of contention, in a sense, as a portable piece of our homes and persons, then our data and digital presence should similarly be considered our persons, "papers and effects" under the fourth amendment.
If the fourth amendment doesn't apply to your phone, then your phone can be looked at anytime by authorities with no need to cite probable cause, nor a warrant. Or am I missing something?
I don't think digital technology needs to apply here at all. Before there were phones, were authorities able to stop you and look through your personal papers or briefcase or other personal effects you were carrying, without probably cause or a warrant? I don't think. A phone isn't any different, it's just a lot smaller than a briefcase.
The 6th circuit recently ruled that is an unconstitutional search[1]: a government agent is physically intruding on a private area (your car) and searching it for information (how long it's been there).
Neat stuff.
[1]http://www.patc.com/articles/2019_taylor_v_saginaw_chapman.p...