We have this odd fixation in the US (and perhaps elsewhere) that we believe we are powerful and smart enough to prevent all badness - Make It Never Happen Again. Never mind that smoking causes two orders of magnitude more deaths annually in the US, 3400 people die from distracted* driving! It could be your daughter next!
What's happened to critical thinking and moderate stances? Why can't people be reasonable any more? To echo a sentiment I first read here (the provenance of which I am unsure), "Our increased reliance on laws to regulate behavior is a measure of how uncivilized we’ve become".
*- Distractions also include: pets, sandwiches, passengers, and beautiful people.
> The legislation was prompted by intense lobbying from the group Distracted Operators Risk Casualties (DORCs). The son of its co-founder, Ben Lieberman, was killed in 2011 by a distracted driver in New York. The proposed law has been dubbed "Evan's Law" in memory of 19-year-old Evan Lieberman.
"Think of the children" isn't really what makes some arguments for increased surveillance or safety recalls so astonishingly powerful. It's when people think of their own child or children that laws get passed.
This is scope insensitivity: human brains are just plain bad at comparing millions of abstract unwarranted searches with the thought of their child dying because of a distracted driver. (More on this at http://lesswrong.com/lw/hw/scope_insensitivity/).
This is not a problem caused by a recent or American loss of critical thinking, moderate stances, or reasonability - it's a human, ancient bias. The effect is perhaps amplified because media allows politicians to use bias more effectively, but it is not new.
Very very good point about the other distractions. I've read stories in the news of people getting distracted driving tickets for eating a burger while driving.
The only thing about your argument (and I come from this side as a motorcyclist) is the odds of 2nd hand smoke killing me is pretty low. But the danger in which you put everyone else around you is magnitudes higher by distracted driving.
While I understand your concern, you are, statistically speaking (and according to the CDC), still 12x more likely to die from secondhand smoke than you are from another motorist's distracted driving.
The CDC states that smoking causes 480,000 deaths annually, 41,000 of which are from secondhand smoke. Dying from someone hitting you while they swill a triple mocha may sound scarier than dying from cancer, but dying is dying.
It's just pointing out that there's a certain sobriety that's needed when thinking about these things that is often absent these discussions.
Fewer than 250 people are killed each year by semiautomatic rifles, but proportionally, we hear many thousands of times more about them. This political vitriol makes it harder to actual address problems for which the commensurate amount of effort will likely actually make a difference.
It doesn't. Not sure of the official name but Appeal to Worse fallacies are some of the worst I've come across. The smoking example is pretty much one of the worst ones considering what we're talking about anyway. Smoking has gone through a ton of regulation over the years. And is already rarer and rarer.
Perhaps scientists should stop finding a vaccine for Zika since it isn't as bad as cancer and other deadly diseases.
I think the actual issue is trusting the American government with our privacy. They've shown repeatedly that they don't care about it through various initiatives.
The only time it makes sense to me is when the minor issue gets an unreasonable amount of attention based on emotions rather than science to the point that other issues that may actually be far more important are ignored. Such as shifting limited resources from the major issue to the minor issue for little gain.
Then there's the problem of the minor issue involving a law that can be used for revenue generation.
When evaluating a proposed regulation, which will decrease individual liberty to promote safety, it's absolutely necessary to ask if the exchange is an effective sacrifice.
Life and Liberty are core human rights. Sometimes a little of one must be exchanged to preserve the other. And let me be clear that I am not suggesting that we surrender all liberty to maximize safety, nor the other way around. Instead, reasonable compromises must be made.
Unfortunately, while there are units of lives to measure the one, there are no units on liberty.
But exchanging what is subjectively lots of liberty through warrantless phone searches to save a few lives is not a good choice when you also have the option to exchange a little liberty to save more lives through legislation on smoking. Yes, we could do both, but the former is a poor value and the latter is much more effective, making it not a false Appeal to Worse but an honest value comparison. And while there isn't a strictly limited budget on liberty before we reach "1984" - we can always inch fractionally closer - the same decision-making must be made.
Similar value comparisons must be made on other fronts as well: we have spent a lot of money and are very certain find that an overal cure for cancer is going to be hard to find, but it could definitely cure many people - say a 20% chance (sorry, my pessimism is showing through) that a cure can be found for $100B that will save 600,000 US deaths a year (and going back to the earlier topic, 150,000 of those are due to lung cancer...), or 5% that an additional $100B will find a cure. Contrast that to spending less than $100M for the first studies of Zika. Treatment is probably a vaccine, well understood as a tool to combat viruses, likely a just a few years out. Stopping Zika will save millions of lives. Or, alternatively, hundreds of millions of people suffer from malaria and millions die, and known treatments exist, and it's been eradicated in the US and Europe.
What would you spend the most money and liberty on? For some reason, our current answers are cancer and digital surveillance.
Smoking is more provable, controllable, and doesn't involve a highly invasive seizure and search, the results of which are questionable anyway.
We get all up in arms about relatively small numbers of needless deaths and ignore any of many elephants in the room, one of which is the fact that tobacco is a huge, profitable industry that has a vast lobby and kills nearly a half-million people per year.
All I'd like to see is a sense of scale to our outrage. Both distracted driving and smoking involve personal, silly choices, both of which can kill others. One is 141x more likely to kill; let's fight that first instead of yet further eroding privacy.
I'm sorry I presented them as mutually exclusive, you're correct that they are not.
The difference is that one is already illegal - stopped, as it were. I postulate that this law will not significantly reduce distracted driving, but that it will primarily serve to perpetuate our government's apparent war on privacy. To be clear: I'm perfectly fine with a warrant-based search, particularly of carrier records. All this law does is grant individual law enforcement officers yet more authority to judge and immediately punish.
I believe the underlying argument is that if you're going to trample civil liberties anyway, you might as well do it in a way that saves more lives, as greater compensation for those lives enjoying less freedom.
If we presume a totalitarian state to begin with, then logically, it should abolish tobacco consumption before abolishing texting-while-driving, and the resources devoted to enforcing the former should be 100 times greater than those devoted to enforcing the latter.
The premise is that countermeasures should be proportional to the relative risk or impact. You could make a similar comparison between the War on Terrorism versus texting while driving, or even compare the former to putting non-slip adhesive strips in your bathtub. You could literally save more lives by buying non-slip strips for every bathtub in America, hiring professionals to install them properly, and replacing every last one of them every five years, and do it all with a fraction of the budget. But dying from a slip-and-fall accident isn't as scary as dying from a suicide bomber.
Anyway, the ultimate premise is that government should do things that make sense, which is why the argument is doomed to fail. After it has outgrown its initial idealism, a government first does the things that maintain its own dominance, and then does the things that tangibly reward its greatest supporters. Cold, hard logic does not enter into the equation.
Part of what bothers me is this notion that "texting while driving impairs a driver to the level of .08 blood alcohol level." (This quote comes from the NYS Senate bill mentioned in the article.) If that's the case, can we expect that the punishment for texting while driving will be similar to the punishment for DUI? If not, why not?
If you ask me, this is just a lot of hysteria being put in the service of revenue generation and more money for our government's corporate partners.
Seems like this would be hard to prove, often my girlfriend will be using my phone while I am driving, how would this tell who was using it? I don't think there is a way. This means if the driver was the sole person in the car you could do this, otherwise it would be ambiguous.
or voice composition, i use software on my phone that came preinstalled to tell it to send a text message to my wife without even looking at it (I've actually used it on my motorcycle through my bluetooth helmet!)
I do the same with Siri. Read & compose texts with both hands on the bars and eyes on the road. I actually prefer it to trying to read something 10:1.
I have the iPhone 6+ in a ram mount just in front of the instrument cluster so I could attempt to read it if the screen would consistently respond to my gloved finger.
My phone is typically either in the dedicated compartment in the "Infotainment Center" or in the saddlebags. I almost always have my music playing (via Bluetooth) but I can control that (skip songs, adjust volume, etc., via controls on my hand grips). Because my phone is always paired via Bluetooth, I do get the audible alert played through the stereo system when I receive an SMS message -- and the ringtone and notification on my display when I receive a phone call -- but I can't hear or read my messages through it.
After thinking about it for a moment, I don't think Siri would be able to "hear" me, though, regardless of where my phone was (I don't have a Bluetooth earpiece or anything like that and I don't wear a helmet). I'm gonna look into it, though.
Yes, but many will not pass that mic back to the phone until you are on a "phone call".
Why, i'm not sure, but it's infuriating whenever i get in my Mazda that voice recognition won't work any more (the phone ignores it's mic because it's connected to bluetooth that identifies as being able to handle that, and the car won't send that info back to the phone).
Yep. But guess what? The police can and probably still will write you a ticket for it even though the evidence is shaky at best. Why? Because you'll still have to appear in court to fight it if you wish to fight it and they are banking that you will just pay the fine to make it go away. How many people can take a few days off of work to go to court to fight a ticket without employment repercussions? The State is indirectly using Business (employers) to enslave and indebt the population.
You have no constitutional right to drive. That's what this law is based on. You do have a constitutional right to free travel, so some people believe that gives you a constitutional right to drive, but that hasn't held up.
I think he was alluding to the constitutional right to privacy, which is something we do have.
The number of people in the car (i.e. whether another passenger could have been using the phone) shouldn't affect whether you have the right to the privacy of your communications and personal data on your phone.
Hmm. Given how walking (or even biking) on the side of highways is discouraged (or ticketed), and public and private land is fenced off around these major roads, how does the right to free travel hold up? Or do they consider paid transportation like buses to be sufficient?
If I want to go east, I have to take the highway. There are no other roads through the mountains for a good 50 miles north of my current location.
Where are you talking about? In the US, you would only get bothered for walking on a limited access freeway (in some areas even those are open to pedestrians).
There's even an effort to sign post a national route system:
Its like DWB, in that its technically not illegal to walk along the side of the road, just like its technically not illegal to shake down anyone walking along the side of the road. After all, the police are just investigating a crime report from somewhere within 50 miles and one week where the description of the violator is no more specific than "a man" or whatever.
To say the problem varies a lot geographically is an understatement.
This is a corruption of terminology. "Driving" in these discussions means traveling via the public road, which you do have a right to do. Using the public roads for private commerce (the original definition to "driving") is different, but nobody here is talking about that.
Sets a bad precedent. Next they'll be analyzing receipts and purchases an hour or two before to determine if you were at a bar, working too late (tired), or whatever. Submit your health data as well, maybe your decision making was impaired by poor diet and lack of exercise.
Uh... you know they can already lock you in a cage for days or draw your blood or forcibly probe your anus, right? I think that it's a little too late for precedent.
Bar Receipts are used to Indict Suspect in Fatal 2013 Hit-And-Run.
>>Investigators interviewed witnesses and obtained bar receipts to determine when, where and how much McIvor had been drinking, said Sgt. Tony Landato, a Mesa police spokesman.
Curious to know if it's even possible to know whether a driver has manually sent a text message / composed it via voice / given it to the passenger to compose text.
At least with breathalyzing, it's binary. You're either drunk or you're not, there's no middle ground or room for interpretation.
Breathalyzing is binary but "being too drunk to drive safely" isn't, they just made testing binary for the law's sake. It's possible to be under the limit for a test yet still have enough alcohol in you to slightly impair your driving if you're not used to drinking, it's also possible to be able to drink quite a bit over the limit and still be sober enough to drive safely, but the law just looks at averages and picks a spot to make it binary.
From the article: "Further analysis, which might require a warrant, could be necessary to determine whether such usage was via hands-free dashboard technology and to confirm the original finding."
As the other commenter noted, "to drunk to drive" has way more room for interpretation than "sent a text before an accident", yet the law seems to have arrived at a reasonable compromise.
Note that sending a text message via voice and is still distracted driving, and some studies show that it's just about as dangerous. It's currently legal, but some jurisdictions are contemplating banning that too.
With all the proactive wiretapping and data accumulation, why don't they just ask the ISP/cell-provider for the data instead?
There's zero chance of me disputing that they messed with the phone and created fake entries to bust me for causing an accident.
The cynic in me thinks these are benefits they would lose if excellent public transport was available more readily than personal vehicle transportation. Therefore, why would they be in favor of more people using public transport.
Its a good PR campaign that they're not monitoring all our communications, therefore they need our cooperation to physically hand over the device, so we'll think thats they only way to be monitored. Of course they are monitoring the network, every byte.
The cooperation bit is funny, because if you have no choice by law, unless you like to spend your time with judges and maybe in a cell, how is it cooperation?
What happens if you simply don't have a phone with you?
I often leave my phone at home when going on short (say, 30 minutes, tops) trips: to the grocery store, post office, bank, etc.
Statistically, I'm way more likely to be involved in a crash on one of these short trips close to my home, I've heard. Let's say that I was. How would the police know if I legitimately didn't have my phone with me or was refusing to hand it over? Short of searching both my person and my vehicle (which now gets us into other legal territory), they wouldn't know. Could I then face possible repercussions for _NOT_ having my phone with me? (i.e. "He admitted to owning a mobile phone but, when asked, refused to present it for inspection.")
I can only assume that for this software to work, you will have to unlock your phone. Even if this software does only what it "promises" to do, what is preventing a hypothetically corrupt officer to use one of their other tools (such as the CelleBrite UFED) to dump the entire contents of the phone while it's in their custody, or compromise it with a state sponsored virus?
Seems like too big a loophole, with no real benefits.
Could I store my smartphone in the trunk to avoid such a compelled search? Probably not, as I think about it, since they could allege I put it there after the accident took place.
> Could I store my smartphone in the trunk to avoid such a compelled search? Probably not, as I think about it, since they could allege I put it there after the accident took place.
I think their argument would be that even if the phone were in the trunk, you could still have been using it via Bluetooth.
In Riley v. California, the Supreme Court decided unanimously to limit the ability of law enforcement to search cell phones while making arrests, requiring police to obtain a search warrant before examining the data contained in an arrestee’s device.
IANAL, but I presume this sidesteps that by:
1. Pinky-swearing that they won't look at the individual's other data.
2. Coercing consent to a search by threatening to take away their license.
3. Performing the search before arresting so as not to get into "search incident to arrest" (SITA) territory.
So what would the evidentiary standard be in cases like this? As far as I know, no mobile device out there differentiates between a text sent via hands free vs one entered on the keyboard, so all this device could do is tell whether a text was sent, not how, which makes it nigh useless since "I was using handsfree" is unfalsifiable.
Why not a mandatory gastroscopy to see if the driver has recently eaten? In many countries eating while driving is just as illegal as talking over the phone. Surely we want to have the full image of what was happening before the accident here?
"the person's license or permit to drive and any non-resident operating privilege shall be immediately suspended and subsequently revoked should the driver refuse to acquiesce to such field test."
Wow. Driving without owning and carrying a smartphone means you lose your license because you're refusing to give up a smartphone for search.
On the other hand I can get a burner bottom tier pay as you go Android for my mom and MiL, toss it in her glove compartment, and tell her to give it to the cop to keep her license if she gets in an accident. Both aren't interested in smartphones and my MiL refuses to carry any sort of phone.
I've illegally driven without a smartphone a couple times when I've forgotten it at home.
Interestingly the punishment for driving without carrying your license (wallet left at home, etc) is lower, or used to be lower, than the proposed punishment for driving without a smartphone.
They're treating it precisely like the breathalyzer. You can refuse either and they will get a warrant for the search. In the meantime, your license and freedom will be revoked, because US law says driving is a granted freedom, not a right.
What's happened to critical thinking and moderate stances? Why can't people be reasonable any more? To echo a sentiment I first read here (the provenance of which I am unsure), "Our increased reliance on laws to regulate behavior is a measure of how uncivilized we’ve become".
*- Distractions also include: pets, sandwiches, passengers, and beautiful people.