He did so REPEATEDLY.

No they don't. The thing is, even without the constitution there's many reasons this case will fail. For one, it's not automatically obstructing law enforcement by destroying something.

To prove their case the government needs to prove the person was authorised to search and seize the particular property, and saying "We're the police" isn't sufficient. Also particular property means they need to have a reasonable suspicion on what was destroyed.

Secondly the *defendant* needs to destroy the evidence, he didn't even touch his phone.

Oh and the big one, the obstruction only applies if the person prevents "lawful authority" from siezing evidence. There's existing case law that shows this only applies when executing a warrant. In order to do that it ties into the first point, you need to know what you're trying to take into possession.

So the government needs to argue that they were taking into possession data they knew existed, not just a phone. Good luck to them. This is a hell of an uphill battle, and a complex case to prove, and it's worth noting that the people who need to do this are the same people who both misspelled the name of the country "Untied States" as well as listed the wrong agency "Customs and Border Patrol" (instead of Customs and Border Protection) being obstructed on their official court docket. I wouldn't trust these people to get a McDonalds order right let alone be able to argue a legal case.

No the argument is far more complicated than that. Like really really complicated. It goes beyond the constitution as well, and given he handed over a password that wiped the phone the 5th isn't relevant.

The question now is if the government had a right to see the evidence. Simply having a right to search doesn't make destruction of something evidence. Destroying something isn't obstruction. They can be, but only if there was something to point to there being evidence on that phone in the first place. For all they know he just wiped his own dick picks right now which isn't obstruction.

Even without the constitution this lawsuit will fail.

Since you're keen to solve this problem you will agree with funding free mental health clinics? Social services to the poor and homeless? Education? I mean all those three are directly and causally linked to reduced homicide rates (and violent crime in general).

Why do you default to surveillance?

I really need to attached a generator to Benjamin Franklin or something. The free energy from him spinning in his grave every time someone uses that quote could power Amazon's new datacentre.

The "essential liberty" Benjamin Franklin was talking about was the ability to levy taxes to build your own army, nothing to do with surveillance or freedom.

"Benjamin Franklin has got to be one of the most misquoted people on the internet." - Abraham Lincoln.

I haven't seen any recent story about what Linus Torvalds uses for this workstation, but he certainly has a history of using Intel graphics cards.

Errr, tell us you don't know how safety features work without telling us. There's more RAM required for the cars safety features than the infotainment system. Or do you think vision processing for lane keeping and radar processing to determine which lane the vehicle ahead is in happens by clacking a few relays?

Here's an example: The Volvo EX30 has 2 computer with 8GB of RAM. One for the infotainment system and one for the safety features. The Volvo EX90 has 2 computers, one with 8GB of RAM (infotainment) and one with 64GB of RAM (for the safety features, and lidar processing).
Teslas also have a similar configuration with HW3 having 32GB of RAM, and HW4 with 64GB of RAM.

Sure that's advanced, but you still need a computer with around 8GB of RAM at a minimum, oh and driver attentive monitoring systems are not just vision based, but mandatory as for a month ago in the EU, so every car has at least a computer with 8GB of RAM associated with a mandatory safety feature.

You're precisely the kind of person who would buy a car and then complain about the infotainment system. No a navigation system is a fundamental car feature that people universally use while driving these days, to the point where if they don't have one, they will get an additional one (typically their phone), and you just need to look here to Slashdot to see how many people would not consider buying a car that didn't support AA or Carplay.

The navigation and infotainment systems is a fundamental feature for any buyer who gives more of a shit than what colour the car comes in.

That I agree with. Except the single point of failure issue. Your car is literally full of single points of failure, it doesn't matter if it was built in the 70s or in the 2020s. Tow trucks have existed long before touchscreens.

Yes. No.

The ads thing and the distraction can fuck all the way off. But your other point is widely off base. At no point were you ever paying a vehicle for the hardware. You were paying for a functionality. Hell even in the 90s you ended up with different models of vehicle with different engine power largely differentiated by ... some software settings in the ECU. The whole heated seats debacle is nothing more than people turning off their brains. You get what you pay for. You don't pay for heated seats, you don't have heated seats. You do pay for heated seats, you do have heated seats. But for some reason BMW giving you the option of getting heated seats later without having to pay thousands of dollars to have seats replaced causes people to freak out.

Please tell me how is this bad for you:

Past situation:
a) You bought a car with heated seats and have heated seats.
b) You bought a car without heated seats and don't have heated seats.
c) You bought a car without heated seats, wanted heated seats, and had to pay thousands to swap out your seats to get heated seats, now you have heated seats.

Present:
a) You bought a car with heated seats and have heated seats.
b) You bought a car without heated seats and don't have heated seats.
c) You bought a car without heated seats, wanted heated seats, and paid either a one off fee to have it enabled without intrusive work, or pay a small monthly fee you can stop later, now you have heated seats (and more money in your pocket).
d) You bought a car without heated seats but since the heater is present anyway you hacked it and now you have free heated seats.

How is that BMW situation not better for you as the customer? It literally has all the old functionality with extra choices, one of which is cheaper and faster.

A great many idiots buy cars for the colour, or the vroom vroom sound and then complain about poorly implemented features like navigation. The trick is buy a car considering the entire package instead. E.g. there was no car at the top of my list which didn't have Google Maps as the primary navigation system. Not one. I have zero tolerance for poorly integrated features. But some people are more interested in "does it come in red?" and then complain about infotainment system on the way home. (By the way even before BMW went full retard with ads they were on my shit list. Their infotainment system is horrible)

Yes attrition is built into the law. It's why there's virtually no cars left on the road without ABS. Or do you suggest the government run a safety program that requires the population to collectively scrap millions of vehicles at once? No that would be silly. Also some integrated features make more sense for new vehicles. E.g. my car would fail roadworthy inspection if the cross movement detection didn't work. My previous car didn't have that feature, but critically, I could actually see out of my previous car because tiny windows seem to be a modern design "feature". So from a safety point of view that's a wash.

Honestly I have no time for people who are annoyed by things that actively make their lives better. It's the I got mine, fuck those other's mentality. Those grumpy old shits need to be reminded they live in a society and it's not all about them.

We could, but what about the knock on economic impact? That may be minimised in a car free city, but it would cripple America. When people turn desperate they start not following laws.

Congrats, you went from having bad drivers on the road, to having bad drivers on the road who aren't insured.

Correct, I completely dumbed it down to the point where my point was lost. My point was that these apps aren't just apps. The companies who write them act as payment processors that have to follow complex international regulations and interact with banking systems in regulated ways. Either way the "proprietary software" is no less trustworthy than that of your bank (and often your banking app is required on the device to register your virtual payment card in the first place), and an open source solution can't just exist standalone without a company behind it handling the complexity of payments.

I think I just used too dumbed down of a phrase. Google wallet is just a place to hold virtual cards. Google Pay is not, that's them acting as an bank, or rather not as a bank (that was me using a mistaken term) but as a payment processor.

Either way in any scenario you're entrusting the payment process to someone who is either covered by banking regulations or regional and global payment processing regulations. There's actual infrastructure involved. There's actual complex interactions with banking systems involved. It's not just some dumb app that can easily be replaced with open source.

I can't say I've ever had to toggle my work iPhone hotspot, ever. Nor my personal Android one.

That's my point: Your connectivity issue is moot, car or mobile. You're no worse off having vendors provide a feature you don't want or need to use. Some of us though expect those features to exist none the less.

Do you buy your car based on the colours or the feature set? I personally go for the feature set. My car running Google Maps was one of the reasons it was on the top of the list when I made a choice of which to get. If someone else is buying a car for you, sure I'd agree with you. But again, use your phone, more power to you, I've not once advocated your functionality gets cut-off, my singular point is that the OP is stupid in saying that *my* functionality should be cut off.

That's a completely different thing. The question isn't whether you won't get some functionality in the future (expecting that in a car is just ... weird) the question is whether existing functionality stops working. There's no expectation of future features backported in a car, and you having a new phone doesn't magically give your car the latest FSD either.

Better examples actually exist, but support my argument not yours. Ask me about my smart speakers. Ask me about how I got a new phone and suddenly the app didn't work anymore because the app didn't support the API version in a breaking change Android introduced and thus couldn't be installed on my phone. Then 2 years later ask the people who still had old phones how the exact reverse happened after Android depreciated the old API and they could no longer get the new app on the old phones (the vendor was kind enough to manually publish APKs for sideloading).

Linking two devices introduces a risk of something breaking, that's just the fact of it. I demand a feature complete experience without linking devices. That's all. You can link if you want to. I don't.

It's not banker greed. It's government greed. UPI is run by the government.

Tim Cook thought AR (augmented reality) was the future, that's why he started putting in the beefy hardware. Turned out the future was in chatbots.

Now Tim is not in charge anymore, the things he liked at Apple are like old leaves flowing away in soft autumn wind.

Correction, the dystopian interpretation of the constitution purveyed by our current lunatic fringe Supreme Court is that they have the authority to do so. The constitution says otherwise, but at some point, our government stopped actually reading it.