Virginia police routinely use secret GPS pings to track people’s cell phones
insidenova.comThis is all under a warrant. Of course police can and do get location records from cell companies with a warrant, and it doesn't seem like a huge stretch for a warrant to require the cell company to "ping" to get the most quality location data.
The problem here is the judges granting the warrants.
Judges in Virginia are chosen by legislatures [1], which means they're accountable to political establishment who in turn have good political cover from being responsible for judicial actions.
Judicial oversight and judicial elections are needed.
Warrants to get logged data are one thing.
Warrants to get a third party to take actions to make your devices do things that can be logged is another.
There is, at the very least, a very significant difference between the two cases. Whether we can all agree to pretend that there is non is certainly a political question.
> judicial elections are needed
These aren’t a panacea.
I’ve helped get judges elected in Manhattan. The primaries swung by tens of votes in some cases, usually no more than a few hundred. A few clubs, or one large tenant association, could decide the vote. (Counterfactual: judicial elections attract disproportionately-informed voters if they happen off cycle and without party affiliations, which in the context of primaries, applies.)
Judicial elections also directly introduce lobbying into the judicial branch. Successful judges now have to pay for their campaigns and more money tends to equal more success in elections.
How judges get picked is a huge issue that most of the population have no education in. Having them selected by the populace leads simply to judges that enormously punitive. The population as a whole believes that criminals should be destroyed/deleted from society, and the judges that can deliver that are the ones that get elected.
This generally means very-police-friendly judges that will issue warrants without any cause, and will deny any attempts to later fight the illegality. These judges then move up to the appeals courts and support the same policies by the friends they left behind in the lower courts.
I do prefer appointments for judges, and I prefer those appointments to expire after the elected official's term would end. I believe typically this is 4 years for elected and 6 for appointed.
The unfortunate reality is that law enforcement can track you 24/7 without a warrant. A warrant is only necessary if they use the location data against you in court. Otherwise, it is open season. The tech companies, etc have shown many times that there is a revolving door between advertisement/surveillence, and so on. Often they maintain very close relationships.
Even if it isn’t that bad now, and a warrant is absolutely required without proving the case in court, a warrant could still obtain historical data. So the end result is the same. We are being tracked all of the time and it is stored and sold, sometimes illegally.
Finally, consider the pratice of parallel construction in law enforcement and how easily this entire process can take away your basic constitutional rights.
Good luck proving any of this by the way. Gaslighting is becoming the norm when rights are violated.
> Judicial oversight and judicial elections are needed.
If you think judicial elections will produce less authoritarian judges, you probably fail to realize that most of the people who care deeply about electing judges are a tough-on-crime light-on-civics bloc.
T-Mobile is charging police $900/customer/month to track us? I want a rebate on my cellphone plan.
Agreed. I think we need to put as much blame on the carriers providing these capabilities to anyone, let alone the police. That the police are publicly funded and are buying this data with my money is also a huge issue to me, but if I had to pick one thing to change, I’d make selling this data illegal. That way, no one could have it.
That’s what the warrant requirement is all about, that’s where it’s broken. This technique should only be used for major felonies.
On the flip side, if you want to commit major felonies, don’t take your phone!
> technique should only be used for major felonies
Doesn’t the crime they were pursuing, dealing heroin in connection with an overdose, rise to that level? (No comment on the merits of the law. Just the facts of the investigation.)
The article says the police didn't describe the man as a suspect in the warrant application. By this logic, the police could investigate any acquaintance of someone even peripherally involved in a crime (which is a huge chunk of the population.)
> if you want to commit major felonies
That's not how it works. Sometimes the police suspect people who are innocent, and they work hard to get them on technicalities if need be, and meanwhile, the risk of inadvertently and unintentionally committing obscure crimes is substantially higher than zero, so...
Or rather, please do.
This one has been the case for years. Even when the technical capabilities were only at theoretical level, any criminal with some brain used to switch off their phones+ take out batteries before even having any discussions, not to mention commiting crimes. Today's phones can't be used anywhere in any context if people are involved in some criminal activities.
I assume they target these people because they can seize assets. And drug dealers often deal in cash. Why else would they be so absolutely inept solving or prventing most crimes (looking at just about any metric available), yet still be laser focused on these certain crimes.
Asset forfeitures can be beneficial to police departments, but not usually of much concern to individual police officers, except in ad hoc situations where they can easily pocket cash they take during a search (happens very frequently from my experience).
And to add to that, a lot of jurisdictions have cracked down massively on forfeitures (technical term: civil in rem forfeiture) because of how badly abused the system has been in the past by prosecutors and police departments.
In some places the arresting cop is legally given a percentage of the money
The carriers probably don't have a choice.
It’s public money, so they’re already grifting all of us.
Good point - they are double-dipping
Trying to steer this thread back on topic. This article is incorrect. Cellular services aren't polling GPS data from the device, they're using imei and subscriber identification triangulation from the towers which the FBI and law enforcement overlay on google maps.
It works with big providers albeit I feel like this parlour trick becomes tougher if your target is using a resell carrier like mint or cricket.
Devices can and will report AGPS positions to carriers, it's part of several 3GPP protocols. Other people in comments have mentioned location sharing with emergency services, but it's also used for network quality telemetry. It's implemented at the baseband firmware level and there's nothing you can do about it.
As sibling comment has pointed out the protocol for a cellular service to request GPS data directly RRLP, is part of the LCS (LoCation Services) section of 3gpp.
And if you run your own cellular service using OpenBSC you can try it out...
> RRLP is not just a theoretical feature specified in the GSM/3GPP specs. It is implemented by numerous high-end smartphones. There is no authentication of the network. There is no notification of the user. There is no way for the user to disable this [mis]feature.
> Impact: Public debate about this feature is needed. Operators probably need to consider working on some terms about how they use this feature in their privacy policy.
https://web.archive.org/web/20160106074623/http://openbsc.os...
Does anybody have info on how this works on a technical level? I.e., is it an actual report of the phone’s GPS position, or is it tower-side triangulation? If the former, do all devices support it?
This is better than the OP link! Let's get this to the front page.
This is unbelievable. Some of the sensitive information like phone numbers are censored by drawing a box on top, rather than replacing certain digits by * or something else.
Reader can get the digits by simply copying them underneath.
How can someone miss this?
Both, depending on what features are supported by the handset and/or network. Earlier phases of e911 compliance did it with triangulation, and later phases do it with GPS location.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_9-1-1#Wireless_locati...
Hunh. Does this definitely use the e911 system for tracking? If so, there’s sort of a well-poisoning thing going on here. Most people would like 911 be able to figure out where they’re calling from in an emergency, but if this is going to be abused for surveillance purposes people are going to want to disable the phone-side portion of it - which prevents it from helping in an emergency. On that note, can this even be disabled on iOS/android? I didn’t see anything obvious in iOS settings (not that I’m itching to disable it - just curious if I even can!).
In any case, I would like my device to report whenever the network does something unusual, like request my location or put in a no-ring call. I wonder if you can make a pinephone or Android do that.
As I understand it is mostly handled by the chipset firmware these days, and no options are available to disable it because it is a legal requirement. But even if you were able to disable the functionality, the carriers towers can triangulate you.
It's revolting that we've allowed functionality to betray its owner to be legally mandated into "our" devices. It's no surprise that they keep this so very discreet.
Edit: I am specifically referring to the e911 ability to without owner interaction or knowledge send GPS coordinates, not to network-side triangulation, or even to sending GPS coordinates when the owner initiates a 911 call.
It's "your" device but you're using it to communicate with things that are not your cell phone tower or telecoms network. One can have a reasonable discussion about the circumstances under which the telco doesn't/shouldn't know where your phone is but clearly there's some point where it's a function of using your phone.
(As others have noted there may be some confusion here between GPS data and cell tower triangulation.)
I remember seeing it talked about on local news when it was being implemented. It was normal to list “e911 support” on the outside of phone boxes when it was a new feature. Just checked my desk drawer and it is listed on the box of one of my HTC phones and one of my Samsung phones.
E911 can also use triangulation which is isn’t “in” your phone anyway. It’s possible with any type of radio transmission due to plain old physics.
Hmm. Re: chipset firmware, the GPS chip and the cellular modem are typically separate and not directly connected, right? So doesn’t that mean there is necessarily something in the main phone software that’s handling passing GPS data from the gps to the modem chip on-demand from the modem firmware?
I believe it is pretty common for LTE modems to include GNSS support these days. I know many modems for even for data-only applications do. And it sounds like Qualcomm does it on their phone modems from this description: https://www.qualcomm.com/news/onq/2021/07/27/qualcomm-locati...
Good info. Thank you.
No. We would use the baseband PMIC and DMA to move the info out of the AP if they were not integrated.
I thought the kernel had the ability to restrict DMA on modern devices. But a sibling comment indicates that modems integrate GPS support these days so I guess it's irrelevant.
It's possible the technical details were lost on the journalist. I mean, maybe this secret ping really exists or perhaps they're just using the tower based phone location system that they developed for Phase I of e911 support.
Simple improvement: ban carriers from charging for this surveillance. Could even introduce it as a pro-cop anti-corporate measure, which should take care of the political fringes. That removes the incentive to make it easy.
Next, some manner of heightened threshold for more than N consecutive tracking requests or M requests in a twelve-month period. Maybe probable cause? This will be harder, politically, particularly in a law & order cycle. (Maybe it could be accomplished through rulemaking at the FCC.)
> Simple improvement: ban carriers from charging for this surveillance. Could even introduce it as a pro-cop anti-corporate measure, which should take care of the political fringes. That removes the incentive to make it easy.
I like the idea of motivating cell companies to be less of a pushover, but reducing cost does _directly_ reduce the disincentive to the police to make these requests.
> Next, some manner of heightened threshold for more than N consecutive tracking requests or M requests in a twelve-month period. Maybe probable cause?
These requests already have a warrant, so meet probable cause.
Not surprising, since the entire telecommunications industry continues to work hand in hand with all the alphabet agencies to gobble up as much data on everyone that they can. Laws and rights to the government are but mere suggestions.
This guy’s friend died of an overdose and that was enough justification to track him?
That seems like way too low of a bar.
As someone who has read a fair number of granted search warrants, I can attest to the fact that 100% had obvious technical, logical, or factual errors (under penalty of perjury) that were granted by the judge anyway.
The bar/basis to successfully receive a search warrant is hilaribad. It's pretty close to a rubber stamp. The courts just believe whatever crap the cops spew out.
> we will use all lawful tools at our disposal
Interpreted precisely, this sentence doesn't rule out the possibility that they use unlawful tools too.
Correct. A little parallel construction[1], and no one will ever know.
It also doesn’t rule out that their favorite flavor of ice cream is chocolate.
But it also is just a statement about something else.
Ok, ok, I get it. Next time I'll go commit a crime, I'll leave a cellphone at home. Or will give it to my accomplice to taxi it around at a significant distance from a location where I'll engage in some heinous activity.
Chesterfield County, Va. can be generally understood as one of the most, if not the most, pro-cop (densely populated) counties in the whole country. You don’t want to be arrested there
Edit: not sure the reason for the downvotes, this fact is useful context and first-hand
Virginia as a whole has some pretty absurdly pro police laws, at least re: driving.
The lesser of either 20 over the speed limit or any speed over ~80~ 85 miles an hour (thanks jmisavage) in Virginia is a misdemeanor, and at least one auto journalist has been jailed in Virginia. https://jalopnik.com/never-speed-in-virginia-lessons-from-my...
It's also the only state to prohibit radar detectors.
I am someone who's extraordinarily sympathetic to journalists. But I don't think there's really any excuse for going 93 miles an hour on a country road marked for 55, as this author did.
Should he have been sent to jail for it? I don't think so. But it's remarkable how acceptable that behavior seems to be.
Eh, I don't think speed limits really should exist in any context. If you want people to go slow, design the roads for slower driving, don't just impose arbitrary limits.
> Eh, I don't think speed limits really should exist in any context. If you want people to go slow, design the roads for slower driving, don't just impose arbitrary limits.
In the realm of ego orientated commenting, this one really stands out.
I do not want to put my life in your unregulated hands. I want you regulated to hell and back when you operate a tonne of steel at thirty metres per second heading in my general direction.
Actually: Can you, especially you warning26, catch a bus?
Narrow roads to improve safety are a proposed (and increasingly adopted) regulation. They’re not privatized roads.
Are you familiar with the autobahn?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autobahn
Parts of highway with unrestricted speed are not only possible, they're not particularly dangerous either.
It's a limited access highway, not an ordinary road with at grade intersections and inadequate sight lines.
Except in Germany cars need to undergo an roadworthiness inspection every 24 months and the driving test is much more strict there. If you have a pulse, you can get a license in America.
American cars get safety(and emissions) inspections too and the second part is just not true. I think there's more to it than just casually dismissing americans as too "unregulated" and dumb to handle high speed roads. In the case of Germany's autobahn, after the reunification, road accidents initially increased in former East Germany so it's not like Germans are inherently superior drivers.
I am familiar, and have been on the Autobahn many times.
From the speeding journalist's article:
>These roads weren’t anywhere near schools or towns, and have lots of curves and very little traffic.
This is hardly like the Autobahn (except for the schools and towns bit). The parts of the Autobahn with speed restrictions are exactly the parts that are most dangerous, meaning parts with curves, or hilly parts (as you cannot see what's going on on the other site of a hill). The unrestricted parts are basically straight lines. And the Autobahn very much only goes in one direction only (with the other direction physically barricaded off), so oncoming traffic is practically not an issue - except for the rather rare cases of "ghost drivers". You have no pedestrians or cyclists and no wildlife crossings (thanks to barricades); only vehicles which can do at least 60 km/h (~37 mph) are allowed. Trucks and other large vehicles, as well as vehicles with trailers do have speed limits. The Autobahn has a lot fewer crashes and fatalities than rural motorways in Germany, because of that.
As the poster you're responding remarked: "I want you regulated to hell and back when you operate a tonne of steel at thirty metres per second heading in my general direction." That's just not a thing on Autobahn.
The person who was responded to initially also advocated to design "slow roads" instead of having regulations. That's basically the opposite of the Autobahn, which was designed for fast travel. My guess would be that if you designed roads to be slow, a lot of people just wouldn't go slow, but cause crashes. We see that already on roads which just happen to be relatively "slow" without being specifically designed to be that.
Aside from that, German drivers got to have a lot more certified training by law (compared to the US), pass a lot more strict and comprehensive theoretical and practical exam (compare to the US) before getting a license, and cars have to be inspected every two years for road-suitability (including working safety features).
I wouldn't want some reckless driver coming at me on a curvey, rural road at 93 miles per hour, some 35 mph over the limit. Because that's literally what is is: reckless and dangerous, with disregard for anybody else who might be on the road. Jail time, however, seems too harsh, as there was no victim (this time). If I did the same on a German road as the journalist did on that Virginia road, I'd have to pay 600 EUR, have my license suspended for 2 months, and get 2 points in the register. Which I find rather fair and justified.
>In the realm of ego orientated commenting, this one really stands out.
>I do not want to put my life in your unregulated hands.
It takes an impressive amount of cognitive dissonance to insult him and then drivel about "putting your life in unregulated hands" when the regulation in question is speed limits, a type of regulation to which compliance is low to the point of it almost being comical. If the regulation were something like standards of cleanliness for canned food or something else that's pretty much always adhered to you might have a point but it's not and you don't.
It's not the regulation that's keeping your naive self safe. Your life is pretty much already in unregulated hands because pretty much nobody is minding the regulation. It's that most people are reasonable and drive reasonably that keeps you as safe as you are. People are driving the speeds they drive because those speeds are reasonable to them. They are not whizzing by you at triple digit speeds because those speeds to not feel reasonable to them. It has nearly nothing to do with the number on the sign.
The whole subject of this thread is someone going 93 in a 55. I guarantee 93 is not some kind of everyman median speed on that road. This is actually a pretty good example where someone was doing something unsafe and big bad spooky regulation stopped them.
Context matters. A while back, a 4 lane (in one direction) piece of I-80 in Oakland had an inexplicable speed limit of 45. People routinely went 80-85mph in the left lane, and the cops didn't seem to care.
Edit: To be clear, the 45mph sign was not obvious at all. Most cars assumed it it was a 55 or 65 zone, and went at about 70. I drove the road two dozen times before noticing the speed limit dropped so far down. Going 45 on that stretch would have been dangerous.
Anyway, I can imagine a road that should be 75 in some other state being posted at 55, and also for going 15 mph over to be common in that state.
Speed limits are a blunt instrument, because "slow" isn't the real goal: the goal is to get people to drive safely, and one way they currently don't do that is by driving at reckless speeds (regardless of what the limit happens to be.)
You don’t know which speeds are actually reckless. Using speed limits to inform your opinion is circular. It depends on the design and condition of the road, the quality and features of the car, and traffic, weather and environmental conditions.
I didn’t say that I did know. It’s a general point, one that I can make by pointing to any particular example of reckless driving (of which there are many, including ones I have been personally subjected to.)
Yes, you did. You said you didn’t think there was any excuse for going 93 in a 55.
The context is important: the author describes their joyride through a collection of twisty backroads in Virginia. It’s not the speed itself that makes it inexcusable.
Well we have the stats and at 30mph already a pedestrian has a low chance of survival. So there is a perfectly good case to be made that just exceeding 20mph is reckless. Maybe we just limit cars there, then at least we are not "circularly informed", whatever that means.
It means to use posted speed limits to decide what is a safe speed, rather than to evaluate the actual risk or at least have some model for what makes a number unsafe other than what the sign says. Your method, picking a number based on pedestrian survival rate, wouldn’t be that.
Ah, but posted limits are a terrible signal of safety, at least in all the states I've lived in.
One state likes speed traps for out of towners, so the speed limit is 55mph (and not enforced) on 1.5 lane gravel country roads, but 35 for four lane divided roads just outside city limits.
The other state decided to upgrade the roads in affluent cities/towns so existing speed limits would be 10-20 mph too low, but then didn't raise speed limits afterwards. So you need to know what the road budget was a few decades ago in order to compute safe speed from the speed limit signs. (Or, just use common sense...)
Exactly so. And those particular examples (lowering them for revenue or aesthetic purposes) can actually mean decreases in safety and wellbeing, beyond the ordinary dangers of arbitrary set speeds, as stakeholders internal or external to the police department pressure officers to spend too much time tending the road.
Pedestrians don't walk on country roads.
Some do. And those that do know what they signed up for and behave accordingly.
It's like walking along a rail line. When traffic does show up you stay well out of its way.
Pessimise roads because people cannot stick to basic rules? That's silly. Instead, take away their ability to drive if they can't do it responsibly.
If an ambulance has to go that way, you'd want that to be able to drive fast.
Also, people can drive poorly on any type of road.
I'm fine with the ambulance driving safely, rather than causing more emergencies from driving too fast.
If you care about the time to get to an emergency room, get hospitals closer to people?
People can drive poorly on any road, but they'll do it more if the road guides them to misbehave.
At least in Arizona where the top end is 75MPH, speed limits on highways seem reasonable for the environment. There are plenty of opportunities to go careening off the side of a mountain or into oncoming traffic because a ¼ mile earlier nothing would suggest that the natural momentum from the grade of the mountain road was excessive for the upcoming switchback.
So they could set up some arbitrary obstacles to slow people down prior to the natural contour of the terrain, or, you know, throw up a sign which indicates a safe speed for the upcoming section of highway.
You play pick your speed limit in the wrong place in Chesterfield county, you'll discover that those speed limits are where they are because the roads haven't been updated since they originally had asphalt laid down.
It was a very specific road near where I grew up. Nice and flat. Looked like you could do any speed you wanted. People routinely did 55. Posted was 30.
Near one end of the road was a tree slowly pushing a tree root underneath the road. This followed into a sharp curve bordered by a second, ancient tree.
The neighborhood lost about one person every 6 months who got complacent driving that road faster than speed limit and then got decapitated when they hit that tree root, their car went airborne, rotated 90°, and the top half of the passenger space intersected the ancient tree down the road.
DOTs get no budget to reshape a bad road and do the best they can to try and keep us from killing ourselves out there.
If DOT has no budget, that sure sounds like those people are good decapitating somebody every 6 months.
Funny thing about governments by, for, and of the people.
Honestly... Yes. That's how it appeared to work.
The group that petitioned most consistently not to reshape the road were the people who lived in that neighborhood. They didn't want their main thoroughfare shut down and they didn't want people driving that road faster.
Eventually, two volunteer firefighters died when a fire truck flipped doing lights-and-sirens down that road. Then the county stepped in, declared eminent domain on the tree, and cut it down to remove the root and reshape the road.
Democracies don't always vote in everyone's best interest. Or plenty of Americans are comfortable with one vehicular death every six months. Many possible explanations.
Speed limits exist because stupid people exist. When I was young, I was stupid. I thought it’d be cool to count how many streets I’d on which I’d driven at least 100kph. Soon after that I got into an accident because I was going too fast and couldn’t slow down in time.
Speed limits exist entirely because of World War era gas and rubber rationing, and were never repealsed due to their LE revenue producing nature.
Virginia has a lot of deer, especially on interstate roads flanked by forest - 90mph is a death wish when one of these deer pop into your path.
So we should make roads more dangerous instead of using speed limits? That seems backwards.
You're out of date as of 2020. Reckless driving is 20 mph over the speed limit or over 85 mph now. It's a class 1 misdemeanor.
Most of Virginia has 65 mph as the stated speed limit which usually drops to 55 mph around cities. There are stretches of I-95 and I-81 were the speed limit is 70 mph.
But anyone who drives here knows that the speed limit is generally considered the slowest you should go on the road. Speeding around here is common. And for anyone who lives in Richmond people run red lights all the time even in front of cops. We're all just practicing for the next Mad Max movie.
Huh, didn't know that upped that. Guess I missed that with everything else happening in the world.
Speeding is the normal, definitely. And funny that I have seen traffic flowing faster during rush hour, when everyone is going well over. And then mid day you have someone from out of state passing through slowing everyone else down.
Richmond police force is understaffed (many have left to Chesterfield and Henrico) and the city has serious crime problems in many neighborhoods.
I regularly drive at speeds in excess of 100mph when highways are empty and waze shows no police. What would be the fate of a person caught at those speeds in Virginia?
Reckless driving in VA is a class 1 misdemeanor. Punishable by confinement in jail for not more than twelve months and a fine of not more than $2,500, either or both.[1]
That said, many things are a class 1 misdemeanor. Usually reckless driving is a fine similar to that of speeding. I've seen judges with stances like "1 day in jail for every mph over X" where X is usually 90,95, or 100. I think the most I've ever heard of was like 3-5 days for 100mph+, and even that was served on weekends.
Well, I heard of one guy who was given 3 months for 76 in a 55 by a very old substitute judge, much to the defendant's, Trooper's, and clerk's shock. The Trooper made it a point talk to the defendant and inform he could talk to the court clerk about the appeal process. The defendant appealed it down to a fine of around $150.
[1]https://law.lis.virginia.gov/vacode/title18.2/chapter1/secti...
Realistically you'd be out a grand because it'd cost you $500 of lawyer to get it plead down to a $500 non-criminal offense.
VA only cares about the money. Individual cops will stop people they see doing stuff that warrants a "that's seriously unsafe, I can't just let that slide" response but the courts just see it as a revenue stream and will gladly let people plead down as long as the total shakedown is about the same. They don't care if a large chunk winds up in the lawyer's pockets because it's a giant revolving door.
In Virginia?
Death.
But it will be enforced by the velocity squared proportionality of kinetic energy and chronically underfunded highway maintenance coupled with old highways, not the police.
That's the part I chuckle at - what do you think your braking distance is at 100MPH? Most places do NOT have roads that are conducive to this as a regular practice.
What if the police use Waze though? Last time I used it -and it was many years ago- it was clearly possible to use it to find speeders using it.
Can you explain how? Waze doesn't show your speed to others on the map.
It's been like eight years. I don't recall exactly, but what I recall is that Waze showed me other Waze users on the road, including their positions, and these were updated in something close to real-time, which means one could estimate their speed. I imagine a police officer waiting to "ambush" a speeder they know is coming.
I have never seen anything close to real time updates on Waze, even 10 years ago. Its always very delayed jumps and never seeming to be actual accurate positions.
If a police uses Waze to find me and catch me he can go ahead and just throw me in jail.
Depends on the county and the judge. There’s a judge in Loudoun who is known for giving, at minimum, three days in jail for reckless driving. He allows for work-release so people don’t miss any days of work, but still.
That's reckless driving, which is a class 1 misdemeanor punishable by a fine of up to $2,500 and up to a year in jail.
At over 100, you would have a pretty high chance of spending a weekend in jail.
Potentially a misdemeanor. Big waste of your time and money, with potential career impacts.
I grew up there and remember the fear of hitting 81mph and how the police just hid on the side of the road off 95 and 81 waiting to shove a ticket into your window.
My friend once got a ticket for going 81mph downhill on highway 81 in the middle of nowhere southwest VA and had to trek out there for a court date.
I don’t ever miss living in Virginia
> It's also the only state to prohibit radar detectors
Which is arguably outside of the state’s jurisdiction. Only the FCC has the authority to regulate the airwaves and specifically transmitters and receivers.
I bet that cop’s radar gun has an FCC sticker on it.
Maybe they are not regulating radio receiver usage, but the just the possession of it, which would be a separate kind of regulatory space.
All radio receivers have local oscillators built into their receiving circuitry that actually transmits energy that can be detected by specialized receivers.
Not only are there radar detector detectors, but then there are radar detector detector detectors, and radar detector detector detector detectors. A hilarious arms race.
You should be fine with a trace buster.
> All radio receivers have local oscillators built into their receiving circuitry that actually transmits energy that can be detected by specialized receivers.
All efficient radio receivers....
It is possible to build radio receivers without such. I built a crystal set as a child that could power an air piece without a battery using only the AM signal.
Not so much with modern ADC based receivers, it is possible that the only oscillator is at a fixed frequency and the only “tuning” happens in a computer.
That is accurate. Your vehicle is not allowed to be equipped with a radar detector that is powered or accessible to the driver.
The police even have radar detector detectors.
I can’t be the only one thinking “so how do you build a radar detector detector detector?”
It's basically just a more sensitive radar detector. Instead of picking up the main frequencies radar guns use, it picks up the harmonics emitted by the oscillating crystal inside the radar detectors. All radar detectors leak on harmonic frequencies of the frequency they pick up on, it's just a matter of how much. Those cheap Walmart radar detectors leak so badly they detect each other. Pricier ones are more sophisticated in how they shield.
Could one build an SDR version of a radar detector that doesn't have a detectable oscillator? (Or, if it does, it's oscillating at a much higher frequency?)
I'm no RF guy, so I'm clueless on this stuff. But my understanding is that SDRs aren't radio receivers in the traditional sense. That's the whole "SD" part of it, the device scoops up everything and FFTs it or something.
Radenso Theia does that.
But they are suffering from the chip shortage. I was interested in using it as an X-band and K-band capable SDR receiver, which is a supported use case according to their media. But we'll see when it ships.
It would be way cheaper to design the radar detector to have better RF isolation than to go towards an SDR solution.
A modern radar gun operates in the Ka-band, Google says between 33.4 and 36 GHz. Assuming 12 bit samples, your proposed solution needs to process a minimum 3.9 gigabits per second, or ~500 megabytes per second. To do this work in software would require a workstation.
Not to mention I'm not even sure if you can operate most ADCs above the 1st Nyquist zone like would be needed here.
> To do this work in software would require a workstation.
These days hardware capable of that throughput can be had for less than $500 and draws less than 50W. 3.9 gigabits really isn't all that much by modern standards.
You could tune an antenna to trip a detector detector (side note: which would be some great civil disobedience!), but I don’t think you can get to the detector detector detector without an interaction with law enforcement. Layer eight problem.
Some Troopers have a Radar-detector detector (such as the VG-2).
There are Radar Detectors that have VG-2 (Radar detector detector) detectors on them.
I haven't heard of a radar detector detector detector detector. Such a thing would be pretty useless for a cop's intent and purposes.
How do radar detector detectors work? A video.
Which is stupid if the goal is safety. A radar detector makes the user slow down for a much longer area than the sight of a cop car does.
Golly.I read that article.
What a hideous person.
Who drives so fast on country roads? Very selfish people who do not care about their own lives let alone the lives of others.
What a good punishment! Much better than a fine. We should use short prison sentences much more for the sorts of crimes rich privileged reprobates like this do.
Then the winging! It seems gaol is not pleasant. Does the writer want sympathy? None from me!
I so wish the officer had impounded the car and left these two people on the side of the road. The officer did not. But still the winging!
The 101 through Sonoma/Humboldt/Mendocino counties is, at some places, a 2-lane highway weaving its way through a twisty curvy Redwood forest at 55-65mph, and up to 75mph when it's a six-lane highway. And here in Southern California I regularly get away with 80-85mph in front of CA highway patrol. Most places I've been to in the US seem to consider 5-10 over the limit to be acceptable. I have even heard of freeways in Texas permitting 80 MPH! So these speeds are not unheard of (maybe on a country road but you'd expect the kind of treatment that guy got for 100MPH+)
Judging by your writing you sound British, IMO speed limits in a lot of Europe are ridiculously low; our highway speeds shown in MPH are often a larger number than your highway speeds shown in KPH.
For someone so ready to leap to conclusions, you don’t sound particularly informed about British attitudes to road speed (notably, Britain still uses mph, not km/h). You might be surprised to discover that outside built up areas in the UK the national speed limit on an undivided road is 60mph. Not an undivided highway - an undivided road.
Here’s an example of a random British B road with a 60mph speed limit: https://goo.gl/maps/2jetrMeoWbuTvShN9
Most of my experience is on continental Europe, where it seemed like multilane highways topped out at 55-65 km/h. So you're probably right.
No need to go on the offensive though. "Gaol" is a pretty dead giveaway of Britishness.
Sorry to burst your preconceptions, but... no, it isn't. 'Gaol' is barely used in British english outside of affecting an olde-worlde charm for tourists. British usage tends to words like 'prison', 'custody', 'cells', 'remand', 'detention'... barely even use the word 'jail', let alone an archaic spelling of it (and the pretrial/postconviction jail vs. prison distinction common the US system doesn't apply to the terms in the UK). HM Prison Reading might have a sign outside noting that it is the eponymous "Reading Gaol" that Oscar Wilde wrote about, but nobody's calling it that outside of a guidebook.
I think you’re conflating P(Is British|Uses “gaol”) with P(Uses “gaol”|Is British), the latter of which I would expect to be much higher than the former.
(Oh, and to put you out of your misery, a more recent comment by OP contains the clue: "Where I live (Aotearoa)", which suggests they're a New Zealander. So, you missed your guess by around 11,000 miles, and apparently 80 years or so in terms of English language usage.)
Slow golf clap from me I guess. Pedantry is super impressive.
And here's an unclassified road with a 60mph limit: https://goo.gl/maps/LNmtw44z8BQXatXu9
I don't know precisely what countries you're indicating, but I've driven in the UK, France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Hungary, Slovakia, Czechia, and Poland, all in the past five years. Some of the country roads had what seemed to be fairly low speed limits (e.g., 80 km/h), but freeways are much higher in general - usually 120-130 km/h.
There are a few stretches of highway near Austin that have 80 posted and people absolutely fly on that road. I was in a shitty rental trying to do 80 and people were passing me like I was driving slow. It was wild
Nitpick: I think you meant to write “whinging” rather than “winging”
Considering the effects of driving at these speeds, I'd say the legal absurdity is the other 49 states not having similar punishments for people who drive at these incredibly dangerous speeds. An enormous amount of people die or acquire permanent, life-altering disabilities at the hands of people who were speeding and crashed.
This kind of absolute thinking is not helpful. The US is a HUGE place. Each location has different driving conditions, types of roads, driving habits etc...
Affluence also factors in significantly both on a community level and personal level.
Driving 80mph through a small town with significant environmental debris on the roads where everyone is driving trucks from the 60s? That should be a felony.
Driving 80mph on a clean, straight highway where everyone is driving a relatively modern car? There should be _no problem_.
Separately, IMO, vehicle should factor in at the judgement level of law enforcement. My car can stop from 60mph in <100ft, will pull >1g on skidpad, has a full bevvy of features to alert me of surrounding conditions and will intervene in certain dangerous scenarios. The idea that such a vehicle should be equally treated as a 1992 unmaintained civic is ridiculous. Yes, the laws should be consistent in a given area, but the application of those laws should be just not blindly applied. There's clearly a boundary to be crossed, but my car going 10mph over is SIGNIFICANTLY less dangerous to the public than that hoopty going the speed limit.
> but my car going 10mph over is SIGNIFICANTLY less dangerous to the public than that hoopty going the speed limit
To the driving public, specifically. Pedestrians and cyclists will still be goop on your windshield 50 feet into your 100 foot braking.
There are typically two kinds of roads these speeds are reached in the US:
1. Expressways, where pedestrians and cyclists are not allowed. They are walled off with specific entrances and exits.
2. Country highways, where pedestrians and cyclists are nearly unheard of, and are typically very easy to spot from a distance and adjust accordingly.
There is a third area where these speeds are sometimes reached in urban areas that Strong Towns calls "stroads", and these have a whole host of problems. Going 10mph over the speed limit in these areas probably doesn't make a huge difference, because the are already so pedestrian and cyclist unfriendly to begin with. Not Just Bikes has a great video about them here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORzNZUeUHAM
It's not uncommon to see people go 20 over on country roads (including mountain roads) in Virginia. That means 55 in a 35, or 60 in a 40. Those roads don't have great visibility, and I've had more than a couple of unnecessarily close calls because of recklessly speeding drivers.
Edit: The upstream thread even has an article where the author describes doing 93 on a 55 backroad in VA and subsequently getting arrested[1].
[1]: https://jalopnik.com/never-speed-in-virginia-lessons-from-my...
Sure, but that isn't what we're talking about.
The comment that this thread branched off of is about the relative difference in danger of 10mph with a modern vehicle, not 20, 30, or 40mph. I don't think I agree with that user's overall point, but I also didn't think your response to it was particularly on point either.
I think our transportation infrastructure needs a massive overhaul to be more pedestrian, bike, and even motor-vehicle friendly, but I think speeds limits are such a poor answer to that problem that arguing about +10mph is merely a distraction.
That was my point. There's A LOT less distance covered by one car than the other, and the speed in that time as well.
An old pickup trick will still be going 35mph at 100ft. I will be completely stopped.
The severity of injury at 80ft for the two is quite different as well.
Of course... I'd never be driving at 60mph if there was a chance of pedestrians. However, the 30-0 difference is even more staggering between older mass market vehicles and modern sportscars.
Of which there are none on the roads where people want to go particularly fast.
I take it you've never cycled in Virginia. I have (on "slow" roads no less) and I've had no less than a dozen people buzz me at over 20 miles above the speed limit.
(There is no such thing as a road where people "don't want" to go fast, because "fast" is disjointed in meaning: there's the legal speed that drivers regularly and unsafely exceed, and there's the "fast" speed at which drivers perceive how unsafe they're being.)
You are making an argument for different places having different speed limits. Yes places should match their limits to the local conditions, but people should still get in trouble for breaking the law.
The person I responded to only talked about punishments for "these speeds", and that is why I responded specifically to begin a discussion about the nuance of speed limits across areas.
There should be punishments for exceeding reasonable limits. There should not be punishments for "these speeds" as they exist in Virgina compared to another location. Heck, even just across virginia it doesn't make sense to have a single set of speed limits.
With you on "driving to the conditions". Although just because your vehicle can stop quickly doesn't mean that unmaintained civic can do the same when you go flying past and then hard brake.
My one hope for self driving vehicles is that it normalizes efficient traffic flow.
To add to the other comment, your idea ignores the history of speed limits and how they aren’t just for safety. For example how the highways were reduced to 55mph during the 70s oil crisis as an indirect way to ration gasoline. Or how small towns will lower sections of road for the specific purpose of creating a revenue-generating speed trap.
Virginia is ranked 35th in deaths per 100 million miles (0.96), and it's not as if people don't drive either, as it's ranked 12th in miles driven. Michigan, Illinois, Ohio, New York all log more miles driven and less people dead per million miles.
So it doesn't really seem like Virginia's insanely restricting laws are actually helping.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/fatal-car-a...
I once got a ticket from a Virginia state trooper for driving in the HOV restricted lanes, with two passengers in a two seater. I took the ticket (like there is a choice) thinking I would go to court and contest. While looking for where to appear I came across the FAQ stating no exceptions for two passenger vehicles in the HOV. Nothing illegal, just feels wrongheaded in public safety and service are the priorities of the organization.
The purpose of HOV lanes is not safety directly, but reducing traffic and pollution. It is rational with regard to those goals that cars are not granted exceptions for having only two seats.
Some of the other exceptions, such as motorcycles and hybrids (but not exceptionally efficient cars with conventional gasoline engines) are less rational.
> Virginia as a whole has some pretty absurdly pro police laws, at least re: driving
(Full disclosure: have never driven in the USA), but without wishing to sound like a know-all, how about sticking to the speed limit?
I've been dinged exactly twice for speeding since getting my licence almost exactly 30 years ago this month. No points in either case. It's not hard, honest. My wife might disagree, but her licence, her problem :)
how about sticking to the speed limit?
Because the speed limit in much of the US is below the “natural” speed of that roadway. We have highways where 80+mph is the norm, but the posted limited can be anywhere from 55-70mph (I-95 along the east coast). Driving the speed limit actually becomes dangerous. At this point, speed enforcement becomes a hit-or-miss affair, where you’re at the mercy of the police officer. Better hope he’s having a good day and you don’t “look suspicious”, etc. Making it even worse, that same interstate (I-95) has the limit vary from 55-70 depending on state/town - the highway itself didn’t change, just the jurisdiction. And yes, the states with the lower limits are notorious for ticketing out-of-state drivers.
And that’s just the highway. Secondary roads through small towns are just a racket. https://www.newsweek.com/police-chief-quits-after-report-rev...
As someone who grew up and drove in Germany and being used to 160+km/h on highways moving to Australia made quite a positive change to my driving. In Germany outside of cities everyone drives at least 10%over the limit. You also constantly look where to overtake and be a little faster (and I was by no means a speeder or very fast driver) .
Australia on the other hand is very strikt about speed limits and even being 10% over can be a significant fine, so people gereally adhere much closer to the limits. Having to stick to the limit is actually liberating, I just stopped trying find some extra time by e. g. overtaking yet another car, and instead my driving experience is much more relaxed, I just put on cruise control and that's it. I seriously encourage you to think if you really need to be speeding, because the time you save is miniscule, while the driving is significantly more stressful.
> Driving the speed limit actually becomes dangerous.
I've lived in VA for decades and have driven all over the state. There is no highway where driving the speed limit is actually dangerous and there certainly isn't a highway where the norm is 20 over.
>here is no highway where driving the speed limit is actually dangerous
That's only true if you're oblivious to other traffic to the point of being dangerous to said traffic.
I used to zip down I95 in my personal car, get in a commercial vehicle and then proceed to get in a commercial vehicle and be a rolling obstruction at 55-60. The latter was way less safe than just being another ant in line like I was in my personal vehicle.
Sure, if someone clipped me while I was driving the truck it would have been their fault but I was though my actions still creating a bunch of unnecessary danger. There was a constant stream of people having to merge to go around me. It was all the problems you get at an on-ramp with merging traffic. I will cut some slack to heavily laden vehicles, big slow trucks and shitboxes that can't maintain traffic speed. But some self-righteous jerk in his Camry or whatever has no excuse.
>There is no highway where driving the speed limit is actually dangerous and there certainly isn't a highway where the norm is 20 over.
I95, literally every weekday morning and evening just before and just after rush hour clogs things up. Sign says 55. Most traffic goes 75+/-5 with the occasional fast and slow vehicles well above/below that speed.
I was referring to the interstates in general, and I-95 specifically. Not just within Virginia. Particularly stretches through South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida.
But the context was VA's reckless driving laws. There is no stretch of 95 in VA (I've driven it across the entire state many times) where it is unsafe to drive the listed limit.
in Atlanta there's a stretch of interstate at 50mph, and the traffic flows at 70+mph. driving the posted limit is dangerous, and possibly even illegal (delaying traffic.)
Are the loaded semi trucks also driving 70+?
Since when is a speed limit not a rule/law but a 'feeling' for a 'natural' speed? That doesn't make a lot of sense to me. That essentially just escalates as everyones 'naturally' speeds up as a herd and then the whole point of having rules is moot.
> That doesn't make a lot of sense to me. That essentially just escalates as everyones 'naturally' speeds up as a herd and then the whole point of having rules is moot.
You'd be wrong. If you remove all speed limits and all enforcement, people won't be driving 180mph on small roads.
Turns out for the vast majority of the drivers, a combination of awareness and experience will lead them to correctly judge a highest actually safe speed and they'll just drive that and no more.
This is codified in the rules that state that speed limits are supposed to be set to 85th percentile of natural traffic flow, not lower. That way for nearly everyone on the road the speed limit will make sense and not be oppressively low (laws are supposed to make sense, not just be arbitrary enforcement).
That's the rule on paper. Of course, if the speed limit matches the natural speed, it means hardly anyone will ever be speeding, which cuts the revenue source of speeding tickets. So jurisdictions play all kinds of games to set the posted speed limit far below the 85th percentile, which increases ticket revenue.
Roads tend to have a speed where people feel comfortable. In theory, road engineers design roadways to match the desired speed. In practice, that doesn’t always happen. Even worse, cities/towns have been known to lower the speed limit to drive revenue.
Edit, some links: https://beyondtheautomobile.com/2021/02/08/what-is-design-sp...
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2021/8/6/the-key-to-slow...
Usually, when people talk about the topic, they’re trying to calm local traffic. But the concept applies to highways where speed limits can be pretty arbitrary. Plenty of interstate where 80+mph feels safe, but is posted at 55 or 65.
Your common sense is wrong here. If you replace speed limits with "go a safe speed" then people don't go faster indefinitely, they'll find a speed that depends on road design. It doesn't escalate, and it's only notably faster than the speed limit when something has gone wrong with the road planning.
You're ignoring the fact that many people's perception of what is "a safe speed" is not at all reliable. (Compare: what percentage of people would claim to be better-than-average drivers? https://www.smithlawco.com/blog/2017/december/do-most-driver...)
We have speed limits because trusting people to "go a safe speed" doesn't work, in general.
Objectively, the group settles into a particular speed.
It's based on both safety and perceived safety, and it's not perfect, but it works out pretty well.
If the road is designed properly it's the top few percentile that you need to restrain, not the masses.
If you make a super wide straight shot of asphalt down a residential neighborhood, and people go too fast, that's the road designer's fault.
> it's the top few percentile that you need to restrain, not the masses
And how do you propose to "restrain" them, if not by enforcing a speed limit?
I don’t think anybody is arguing speed limits should be abolished. At least not in any general sense. But, it’s plain enough to see that speed limits on some roads are wrong.
I-495 in VA is a prime example. It’s posted at 55mph and traffic regularly flows faster (or slower, during rush hour). It really needs variable limits based on traffic volume instead of a dumb 55.
Dylan16807's comment about
> If you replace speed limits with "go a safe speed"...
sounded to me like a suggestion that speed limits could be abolished in favour of a "use your judgement" rule, which I don't think is a sensible idea.
It wasn't.
I'm not suggesting getting rid of speed limits.
I was objecting to the idea that there is no natural speed, and that the group will "just escalate". Nothing else.
As we're sitting calmly, reasoning about safety, sure. But when the rubber meets the road, you get problems. People learning how to drive don't know the limits of their vehicles; hope you like dead teenagers. Then, you've got somebody in a hurry to get someplace, and their cost/benefit analysis says going an extra 30mph is totally worth the 2 minutes it will shave off their trip.
You obviously have not seen any of the many posted videos of some guys racing on public streets. Or are you saying the natural speed is a personal thing and everyone should be allowed to drive as fast as they personally feel comfortable with?
There are outliers in any group. Nobody is debating that. All we’re saying is roads tend to have a speed where the vast majority of drivers are comfortable and they’ll tend to go that fast.
Most times you’re on a road and traffic is flowing significantly faster than the posted limit, either the limit is wrong or the road is poorly designed and not fit for purpose. And that happens a lot in the US.
> You obviously have not seen any of the many posted videos of some guys racing on public streets.
Speed limits are supposed to be set to the 85th percentile of natural flow speed for the road.
The very few people racing on public streets are well above the 85th percentile, so that's a straw man argument.
You could also ask when is walking across the street against a red light or outside of a crosswalk a "feeling" about whether it's a safe thing to do that doesn't impede traffic--even though it violates the law?
The fact is that there are plenty of laws we somewhat violate on a daily basis. This has its own set of problems but it's the way things are essentially everywhere.
The problem with this line of reasoning is that the 'natural' speed limit of a freeway is a death sentence in the event of a crash.
I have zero sympathy for this. If you're doing 20 mph over the limit, you shouldn't be driving, whether it comes from taking away you car, or from putting you in a cage for a few weeks.
In that case, the road isn’t fit for purpose.
It's not the road that isn't fit for purpose, it's the human body plus the modern automobile that's not fit for safely handling a crash at 80 mph.
Either build better humans, better automobiles, or slow down.
I think in most places, the speed limit is set to the 80th percentile speed. If there is a road where people routinely drive much faster on, you might want to ask for your county to do a speed study on that road.
In some places, you may be able to use the lack of an up-to-date speed study as a defense against a speeding charge.
A modern car with cruise control, either adaptive or not, will make the task of keeping to the speed limit a breeze.
The only improvement would be that the car always knew the speed limit for any stretch of road.
Many modern cars have traffic sign recognition systems that extract the speed limit. The BMW system is fairly amazing to watch work as the speed limit display changes juuuust as you pass the sign and are surprisingly good at reading signs that are even partially obscured. Although I can't remember exactly which cars feed the detected speed limit into their adaptive cruise control systems, I think some of the Range Rover models do. Some even allow you to set a percentage or absolute speed value above or below the speed limit that you want the car to travel.
Others use a speed limit database and GPS/accelerometer system to establish the speed limit.
When I was driving in the EU I had a car that used gps to pull the limit (but never actually enforced that you followed it). It was really cool to hop on the Autobahn and see a symbol for none pop up in the indicator. It looked like a nonsmoking sign without the cigarette in it.
I haven't used (non-adaptive) cruise control in years. I find that a lot of the time in the Northeast US roads are busy enough that you have to be constantly dropping out of cruise control or end up driving in ways that are suboptimal other than for keeping the cruise control active. To be honest, I just stopped using it at some point and just don't think to use it even when it's a match for conditions.
When I get adaptive cruise control--presumably when I eventually get a new car--I may well change my tune.
Adaptive/traffic aware cruise control makes life so much easier, especially in heavy stop-go traffic. Tesla's Autosteer works really well.
Teslas recognize speed limit signs. Driving on Autosteer my Model S respects speed limits unless it recognizes that it is on a dual carriageway (divided highway for US readers) in which case it allows you to speed if you want to but warns you that you are over the limit.
Mercedes have had this feature as an option for many years.
American highways for decades now have been designed for very high speeds, often 100mph or more, but the speed limits are set much much lower than that.
Perhaps you are in Europe, where speed limits are generally just the natural speed for the roads they're posted on, and the roads are designed for natural speeds that are appropriate for their uses. Lucky you, if so. Here in the U.S., speed limits are set to give police probable cause to stop anyone, any time.
> Perhaps you are in Europe, where speed limits are generally just the natural speed for the roads they're posted on, and the roads are designed for natural speeds that are appropriate for their uses. Lucky you, if so.
What are you talking about? With the exception of Germany all countries in Europe have maximum speed limits and I have no idea what you mean by natural speeds. Sweden which has highways that are in better condition than pretty much all US roads I've driven on has a maximum speed of 110 km/h (as has Australia btw) , Spain has 120 km/h, France 130 km/h. All lower than the US 85 miles/h.
85 mph is on one road skirting Austin, Texas. It's 146 km long. That's it.
Everything else is 80 (~130 km/h, actually a little slower) or less, and even 80 only applies to western roads with pretty much nothing around. But if you drive in the parts of the US where most people live, you're looking at 70 (a bit over 110), or 65 (~105) in rural areas. But those 105-112 km/h limit roads are in most states, even when the European example would suggest that 75 (which is almost exactly 120 km/h) would be far more appropriate.
You're talking about posted speeds. There are long stretches of other highways in the Austin area where, if traffic conditions allow, you can safely drive much faster than the posted speed limits. This is and has been true over much of the U.S. for decades.
One time I was driving on the NJ turnpike, passing a car at about 100mph, and far behind me, on my rearview mirror, I saw cars gaining rapidly on me and flashing their highbeams almost desperately. I barely managed to get in the right lane ahead of the car I was passing, and those cars that had been far behind passed me at what must have been 150mph. They were all beemers and such. Now, I wouldn't do that, but apparently that was a common sight at the time -- young drivers driving rich New Yorkers cars between NY and FL when their owners were flying to FL to spend the winter or back to NY for the summer. I've driven on quite a few highways in the U.S. where 80mph wasn't breaking a sweat and where I believe 100mph would have been perfectly safe weather and traffic allowing. I'm quite certain that our highways are simply designed for much higher speeds than posted.
Your roads are often designed with natural speed control devices. Things like making them narrow, or lining them with trees, etc.
Highways certainly have not, and for other roads it highly depends, just like in the US. But the Bundestrassen in Germany (the next larger roads after highways) have a speed limit of 100km/h and are very straight and definitely not artificially narrowed.
I'm actually not aware of any roads without a specific lane separator (like highways) that have speed limits above 100km/h in Europe (I certainly could be wrong though).
Reading your comment makes me think you’ve never driven in Europe whatsoever. Driving on your typical E road (say E6 or E4 in Sweden) is no different in design than any US interstate. In fact, driving on regional highways is mostly roughly equivalent in design with USA state highways, except roundabouts are often in place of street lights.
Some highways in Sweden go up to 130 kph. E4 in Halland is an example. Still not 85mph but close.
Really, TIL. I live in the Gothenburg area and in all my driving I only encountered 110 km/h so I assumed that was the maximum. Should have looked it up, thanks for correcting me.
>how about sticking to the speed limit?
Remove speed limits on the highways and you have a deal sir.
Because im and places it is designed to catch you. But I got a ticket in Zurich for doing 16 kph in a 15 kph zone.
> I've been dinged exactly twice for speeding
Not to be a know-all but why not stick to the speed limit?
Because it is very dangerous to drive at the speed limit on a 55-65mph interstate.
You'll get 18-wheelers harassing you, even if you stick to the slow lane and don't mind paying extra attention to the on-ramps every mile. And those semi trucks almost never get pulled over; their job is hard enough.
Funny, I've run that line in front of a judge, challenging a ticket for 45 in a 35 that feels like 50 should be safe. He said "That's the most lethal road in the city. Next time, turn up your radio and ignore the honking." I paid full price.
The person you replied to is being sarcastic. Their response to the quote is a also a near quote of the parent post.
> You'll get 18-wheelers harassing you, even if you stick to the slow lane and don't mind paying extra attention to the on-ramps every mile. And those semi trucks almost never get pulled over; their job is hard enough.
Where I live (Aotearoa) trucks do not act like that. They are heavily policed and drive to the speed limit.
It is very common to see a truck stopped on the side of the road with a police officer checking it.
Good
I thought Connecticut also prohibited radar detectors.
Apparently not.
"• Under federal law, the use of radar or laser speed detectors is illegal in all commercial vehicles over 10,000 pounds.
• Radar detectors are illegal to use in any vehicle in the District of Columbia.
• Radar detectors are illegal to use in any vehicle in the state of Virginia.
• Radar detectors are illegal to use in any vehicle while on any military installation."
Do you really need to guess why a vague, difficult-to-prove, politically divisive statement is downvoted?
Can you elaborate? What does "pro-cop" mean in this geographical context and why do I not want to be arrested here versus somewhere else (assuming I wanted to be arrested)?
Cops get more benefit of the doubt there than anyplace I’ve seen. And the cops, prosecutors and judges are in close coordination.
Just for maximum pedantry: it's normal for cops and prosecutors to coordinate (it's their job). Americans frequently treat state attorneys as if they're not fundamentally "in law enforcement," which is absolutely not the case.
But I do agree with you about Virginia (from personal experience as well), and there should be a firewall between the police and actual trial judges.
Should judges be working with enforcement? Aren't there meant to be checks and balances?
Eh, police can't even pull you over for no head lights, expired tags and many other things here. The previous legislature over corrected.
I see, thanks. I suppose I too live in a pro-cop area then. The police, judges and county attorneys all know each other and work together quite a bit. I know them and they know me.
I suppose the way I handle the situation is to not break the law and not treat them like we inherently have an adversarial relationship. From my perspective, having the local community support first responders is a good thing and works very well for us here.
This is rural Texas, btw.
Last time I was in Texas, it was legal to drive 80 miles an hour on certain highways.
If you needed to make a u-turn while driving on the highway, you could pull into special areas in the median of highways to make those turns. The same places highway patrol often use to sit, wait, and monitor traffic.
Both of those things are illegal in Virginia.
I don't remember what the exact number was (maybe 75mph) but I had a rental for a business trip out west somewhere--maybe Arizona--and it turned out the car had a governor set to whatever the number was--which at the time was presumably significantly over a lot of speed limits but was right at the speed limit where I was driving. It was very annoying as the car would suddenly drop the throttle and slow down. Only time I've ever seen that though there may be governors set to speeds I just don't hit in other cases.
There is a gentleman's agreement between many manufacturers of street legal cars to produce vehicles that will not accelerate to faster than 120-130mph unless some special conditions or limits are met.
Been that way for at least a decade.
Speeds within many highway speed limits (like 75mph) are not 120-130mph however.
Not all laws are best enforced by manufacturer collusion. I assure, if you want an corporate oligopoly, that's the way to go about it.
Make things. Let people figure out how to use them. Keep semiconductors neutral.
I'm assuming the police is primarily using GPS to prove guilt, but are there any recorded cases of someone using GPS to "prove" their innocence, as an alibi?
That's a good question. There are plenty of people who have proved the GPS is wrong.
For instance, I am on 24/7 GPS/cell tower surveillance because I am poor. The police regularly (3 times this week) come to my home, pull me out onto the street, cuff me up and arrest me because they believe (from the GPS data) that I am not in my home. Then they will have me stand on the street corner in handcuffs until the GPS matches what they see with their eyes.
Those of us who are under constant surveillance for our poverty have taken to installing cameras that record onto the cloud so that we can later prove in court we were where we said we were (not where the GPS thinks we are):
https://news.wttw.com/2022/03/16/designed-reduce-cook-county...
In a lot of cases by the time you learn you are being accused, the data is no longer retained/available from the carriers.
I don't know. I did a subpoena to Verizon once for a guy accused of murder who I knew was innocent. There's a long story about how the guy didn't want to admit to police he wasn't at the scene of the crime because it would have to out him as having a gay lover, which he was worried about. He'd been in jail for 6 years at this point. I said we should subpoena his cell tower records to prove he was away from the scene, and we did, but Verizon came back and said they deleted them after 5 years.
tl;dr: they do delete them, but Verizon said it has a 5 year retention
As part of a GDPR data access request, my mobile ISP denied having access to data such as which cell towers I am or have been connected to. Wasn't sure what to make of that. They are a virtual provider but, like, surely if the police comes knocking they suddenly find a way to that data... or does the police not knock at theirs but at the network operator's? Is the virtual operator then not the data controller, should I send access requests to suppliers? But then the data controller is not required to give a list of suppliers, just a list of 'categories' of third parties they share my data with... so that doesn't really add up.
I know a thing or two about GDPR but it's still complex enough that I don't know what my rights / their obligations are in this case.
The best I could figure, my virtual operator was lying to me about not having my location data 24/7 recorded, but I'd be interested if anyone can tell me more.
Why are drug dealers still using an easily trackable phone number for communication? Why not a 3rd party messaging and voice app like Matrix/Element? Am I incorrect in assuming that local police would not be able to easily track it?
You are going to miss out on potential sales asking people to download and figure out some weird app and honestly the likelihood of getting caught is pretty low. I know people who have been selling drugs without even so much as changing numbers for many years.
Also even using these apps you are still on the cell network and there are methods for determining your phone number / IMSI. You wouldn't be immune to this type of tracking.
Most criminals aren't very smart.
Most criminals who are caught aren't very smart.
Sampling bias in the extreme.
A common response to why criminals sometimes do stupid things, but I haven't actually ever seen this substantiated.
"We recognize you are attempting to access this website from a country belonging to the European Economic Area (EEA) including the EU which enforces the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and therefore access cannot be granted at this time."
Oooh, wait until they hear about CCPA... (but anyway, I'm sure the 'secret GPS pings' are just plain-old stealth SMS, and we're all better off not reading TFA in any case)
https://web.archive.org/web/20220416175850/https://www.insid...
> I'm sure the 'secret GPS pings' are just plain-old stealth SMS
Worse: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28991641 (depending on the carrier)
And look who takes the cake again this time: "Sprint offered the cheapest prices to report locations back to law enforcement, charging a flat fee of $100 per month."
No, it looks like a 2 years location dragnet warrant issued against someone for merely being around someone experiencing an overdose. IMO, this should be completely unconstitutional.
Where is it stated that he was tracked for 2 years?
It doesn't, it says 30 days and renewable by the court.
which if allowed in perpetuality sounds an awful lot like a general warrant.
I never understood these concerns in the US, for US web sites. What do they even care about our laws?
If there was a US law stating something similar for people connecting connecting to my French site from the US I would just smile and live on. I do not expect the CIA to kidnap me and bring me in front of a US court.
They may do business in the EU, want to have that option at a later point, or may want to make it easy to be acquired by a multinational company.
Or it’s just a low-effort CYA move recommended by a lawyer.
> They may do business in the EU, want to have that option at a later point, or may want to make it easy to be acquired by a multinational company.
This is a possibility though I have usually seen these blocking pages on small, local web sites.
Specifically, only on "independent local" news sites. I have to wonder if they, or the entity who operates the website on their behalf, all belong to the same multinational. Like the "independent local" TV stations that are all owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group.
I can't think of any other reason that so many local news sites would be affected, and so few other sites.
Most of these local news sites with the same corporate owner all have the same site reskined for locality. So it would make sense they all behave the same way.
If the CIA were to kidnap you, I doubt it would be so they could bring you in to face a US court. It would be some site totally not on the map in a country with a higher tolerance to see if you can breath with water in your lungs.
> Oooh, wait until they hear about CCPA...
Actually Virginia has its own data privacy law now, modelled on CCPA.
So an article about corporates violating our privacy doesn't comply with laws on privacy?
You probably want this phone which will merely alert you of such cellular activities not commonly detected by most commercial cellphones.
It is only an alerting mechanism, nothing avoidance there (as far as I can read of their marketing papers go).
I agree that laws and procedures should be tighter, but I don't expect any change. I don't even know the number attached to my SIM card. I bought it anonymously for $16 a month. I rarely turn off airplane mode. I pay $1 a month per number at VoIP.ms. Privacy and security is cheaper for me.
Could the wireless carriers track phones even if they were carrier unlocked or factory unlocked?
Yes, this functionality is required by law and is done at the chipset firmware level these days. And even before phones supported this, it was done by triangulation at the carriers towers.
The cellular modem usually has GPS and SMS capabilities integrated in one hardware package.
Also, separately, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS#Silent_SMS
How would those two things be related at all?
People brought phones to Jan 6th protest, thats how many of the 800 people have been found and imprisoned. Should be a lesson to future political protestors.
A lot of shady stuff happens in Virginia law enforcement. It's a huge racket and sadly the taxpayers fund their shenanigans.
>routinely
This is frightening.
SCOTUS ruled in 2020 government agents can be sued for violating constitutional rights: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/19-71_qol1.pdf
> Held: RFRA’s express remedies provision permits litigants, when appro- priate, to obtain money damages against federal officials in their indi- vidual capacities. Pp. 3–9.
RFRA is an Act of Congress. Looking just the quote above, what SCOTUS found isn't a constitutional right but a statutory right, which means the statue can be amended or repealed, for example, and also that the statutory right is limited to whatever the statute says (or SCOTUS read in it). Without reading the rest of the opinion or the Act itself, I am probably justified in imagining that the right doesn't extend to violations of any constitutional rights so much as to violations of constitutional rights relevant to "religious freedom", which is mainly 1st Amendment rights, and maybe some others. I wonder, for example, whether RFRA would protect one's right to refuse a mandatory vaccine for religious reasons -- it might, though I don't have time to go read it (and related case-law) and find out (plus IANAL).
> SCOTUS ruled in 2020 government agents can be sued for violating constitutional rights
This…has always been the case? It’s a raison d’être for SCOTUS.
Look up "Qualified immunity" and "civil asset forfeiture"
Sorry, misread “agents” as “agencies.”
Sounds like they're doing it with court-issued warrants with probable cause, so it's not as horrifying as the title makes it sound. It's "secret" to the suspect but it's not like the police department has taken it onto themselves to start a new cellphone tracking program.
> with probable cause
It appears to be a lower standard; reasonable suspicion, perhaps.
How does that appear? The article says,
> Officers simply have to attest in an affidavit that they have probable cause that the tracking data is “relevant to a crime that is being committed or has been committed.”
The term "reasonable suspicion" doesn't appear in the article at all.
2 big problems: "relavent to a crime" is a very low standard.
Not a lawyer. Probable cause for a search warrant, to my understanding, means probable cause the target committed or abetted a crime. The target must be a suspect.
Probable cause for believing the target has information “relevant to a crime” sounds like something else, perhaps even lower than reasonable suspicion.
In this case not even. In this case the police indicated that surveilling the subject would help them find the dealer, but they did not indicate that they suspected the subject of being the dealer or even knowing the dealer. Or at least that was my takeaway from one reading, and I'm not going back for a second. Even if I failed at reading comprehension and recall, the important thing is not what happened in this case, but what happens generally, and I bet judges and magistrates routinely issue these warrants with weak or no probable cause.