Two competing arguments are making the rounds. The first is by a neurosurgeon in the New York Times. In an op-ed that honestly sounds like it was paid for by Waymo, the author calls driverless cars a “public health breakthrough”: > In medical research, there’s a practice of ending a study early when the > results are too striking to ignore. We stop when there is unexpected harm. We > also stop for overwhelming benefit, when a treatment is working so well that > it would be unethical to continue giving anyone a placebo. When an > intervention works this clearly, you change what you do...

The company Flok is surveilling us as we drive: > A retired veteran named Lee Schmidt wanted to know how often Norfolk, > Virginia’s 176 Flock Safety automated license-plate-reader cameras were > tracking him. The answer, according to a U.S. District Court lawsuit filed in > September, was more than four times a day, or 526 times from mid-February to > early July. No, there’s no warrant out for Schmidt’s arrest, nor is there a > warrant for Schmidt’s co-plaintiff, Crystal Arrington, whom the system tagged > 849 times in roughly the same period. > > You might think this sounds like it violates the Fourth Amendment, which > protects American citizens from unreasonable searches and seizures without > probable cause. Well, so does the American Civil Liberties Union. Norfolk, > Virginia Judge Jamilah LeCruise also agrees, and in 2024 she ruled that > plate-reader data obtained without a search warrant couldn’t be used against a > defendant in a robbery case...

Two articles crossed my path recently. First, a discussion of all the video Waymo has from outside its cars: in this case related to the LA protests. Second, a discussion of all the video Tesla has from inside its cars. Lots of things are collecting lots of video of lots of other things. How and under what rules that video is used and reused will be a continuing source of debate.

THE HISTORY OF HITCHHIKING SHOWS THE SOCIAL VALUE OF SHARING THE ROAD WITH STRANGERS AND FRIENDS ALIKE ~ Jonathan Purkis ~ Imagine, if you can, that hitchhiking was once again part of everyday culture. Imagine, if you will, economic incentives to share the road, and the social and mental health benefits of sharing the road with strangers. Imagine guerilla billboards declaring, ‘if you drive alone you ride with the Grim Reaper’. The history of hitchhiking shows the social value of sharing the road with strangers and friends alike, and has proved to be as inspirational for artistic creativity as it has been effective for solving short-term crises of resources and infrastructure. Access to global media has assisted public awareness not only in terms of what works (one thinks of the highly successful ‘casual carpooling’ or ‘slugging’ in the Bay Area of San Francisco to access High Occupancy Vehicle Lanes), but also the possibility of social connectivity in places of transport poverty (as often witnessed in the popularity of the BBC’s Race Across the World).  Studying the history of lift-giving for my book Driving with strangers: What hitchhiking tells us about humanity has revealed many moments where economic crises, wars or political upheaval led people into mass cooperative efforts, in ways that the British establishment in particular has been keen to mobilise. Yet anarchists have always pointed to people’s ability to switch into self-organising mode in spite of government decrees rather than because of them.  Take this amazing map pictured below, composed by Hungarian hitchhiker Ábel Sulyok, who in 2019 used data sent into Hitchwiki.org (the premier hitchhiking site in the world) to plot a representation of where it was easiest to get lifts within Europe. A cursory glance tells us that it is hard to get lifts around London, Milan, Paris and other urban centres, whereas rural travel is mostly easier. However, individual transport cultures also play a part.  The Netherlands has a long history of shared transport, installing liftplaats since the 1970s, so it scores highly. But consider Spain, where despite its long cooperative traditions, thumbing a lift has always been regarded as tricky.If we dig deeper, other cultural patterns emerge, such as places with a high throughput of adventure tourism or the existence of a tradition of intentional communities. These elicit a better rating. Across the world, small island communities or nations score well, presumably because there is a shared sense of place and trust defined by water.  For instance, the Canadian Gulf Islands off Vancouver each have had different forms of hitching relevant to the needs of the communities and catering for visitors (even protesting an attempt to remove a pick up point on Saltspring Island in 2017).   Mapping moments and movement of mutual aid helps us to understand the localities we live in, and whether it is possible to initiate car pooling or pickup points. In his book Seeing like a State, anthropologist James C. Scott talked about ‘practical knowledges’ rooted in the specific connections that people have to their immediate environments; a reminder that templates for social betterment cannot be imposed, they need to emerge. Useful then to consider the social dynamics of what occurs when forms of car sharing or hitchhiking have been ‘top down’ in their planning. Even the most celebrated of organised hitching – the Action Autostop voucher system which ran in Poland between 1957 and 1994 (allowing drivers to be incentivised to share their vehicles), was resisted by the existing hitching culture, who felt it tainted the purity and flexibilities of the social exchange.  Since 1990 in Cuba hitchhiking has been organised by government amarillos (yellow jackets) who flag down vehicles on major highways during office hours. This was a practical response to the drying up of Soviet oil money and coping with the ongoing American blockade of the island. Under such circumstances, the social exchange and negotiated aspects of hitching disappear, but one always get a lift and the wider sharing ethos allows women to feel more comfortable travelling alone. Why such snapshots of shared mobility matter in the metacrisis, is that forms of self-organisation will become increasingly vital as the existing systems of governance and formal flows of capital break down. We can see forms of ‘pro-social prepping’ emerging in many communities, focusing on local food systems, the growth of citizen’s assemblies and repair cafes. Plenty of these have evolved out of the spirit of the mutual aid projects during COVID-19, of the sort which both Rhiannon Firth and Simon Springer have written on. Unthinking the motor age and its organisation of life around individual car ownership will be harder. The cross generational capacity building which allowed hitchhiking in the 1940s to be part of public transport consciousness up until the neo-liberal era was based on an ethos of travel as a form of community.  The era of mass hitchhiking may well be past, but its continual flourishing through a diversity of small projects, linked to the needs of specific communities or circumstances, continues to inspire new generations of travellers as well as providing local solutions to wider systemic inequalities.  The post A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Revolution appeared first on Freedom News.

Not everything needs to be digital and “smart.” License plates, for example: > Josep Rodriguez, a researcher at security firm IOActive, has revealed a > technique to “jailbreak” digital license plates sold by Reviver, the leading > vendor of those plates in the US with 65,000 plates already sold. By removing > a sticker on the back of the plate and attaching a cable to its internal > connectors, he’s able to rewrite a Reviver plate’s firmware in a matter of > minutes. Then, with that custom firmware installed, the jailbroken license > plate can receive commands via Bluetooth from a smartphone app to instantly > change its display to show any characters or image...

Fifteen years ago I blogged about a different SQUID. Here’s an update: > Fleeing drivers are a common problem for law enforcement. They just won’t stop > unless persuaded­—persuaded by bullets, barriers, spikes, or snares. Each > option is risky business. Shooting up a fugitive’s car is one possibility. But > what if children or hostages are in it? Lay down barriers, and the driver > might swerve into a school bus. Spike his tires, and he might fishtail into a > van­—if the spikes stop him at all. Existing traps, made from elastic, may > halt a Hyundai, but they’re no match for a Hummer. In addition, officers put > themselves at risk of being run down while setting up the traps...

DeFlock is a crowd-sourced project to map license plate scanners. It only records the fixed scanners, of course. The mobile scanners on cars are not mapped. The post Mapping License Plate Scanners in the US appeared first on Schneier on Security.

An advocacy groups is filing a Fourth Amendment challenge against automatic license plate readers. > “The City of Norfolk, Virginia, has installed a network of cameras that make > it functionally impossible for people to drive anywhere without having their > movements tracked, photographed, and stored in an AI-assisted database that > enables the warrantless surveillance of their every move. This civil rights > lawsuit seeks to end this dragnet surveillance program,” the lawsuit notes. > “In Norfolk, no one can escape the government’s 172 unblinking eyes,” it > continues, referring to the 172 Flock cameras currently operational in > Norfolk. The Fourth Amendment protects against unreasonable searches and > seizures and has been ruled in many cases to protect against warrantless > government surveillance, and the lawsuit specifically says Norfolk’s > installation violates that.”...