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Submission + - AI Cameras in Thousands of School Buses, Now They Want to Give Cops Access (404media.co)

Submitted by joshuark
joshuark writes: Hail to the Bus Driver!

BusPatrol plans to scan the license plates of all vehicles the buses drive past, and then let law enforcement search that data. The plan would essentially turn school buses into roaming surveillance vehicles.

BusPatrol, a company that has installed AI-powered cameras in tens of thousands of school buses around the U.S., now plans to turn those cameras into automatic license plate readers (ALPRs), capturing the location of every vehicle the buses drive past, and give that data to law enforcement, 404 Media has learned.

BusPatrol has already taken steps to share the collected data with law enforcement contracting giant Axon, according to leaked BusPatrol documents and a source with knowledge of the plans.

BusPatrol has acknowledged how controversial its plan to collect and share this data is, pointing specifically to concerns about ICE using license plate data, but emphasizes the likely success of selling the angle of protecting children.

“Who would have thought that school buses would be turned into the mass surveillance state?,” Michael Soyfer, an attorney from the Institute for Justice, which has various ongoing ALPR-related lawsuits The Institute for Justice argues that warrantless use of ALPR systems is unconstitutional, describing similar systems as a “dragnet.”

Kate Spree, senior manager of brand communications at BusPatrol, said in an email “This inquiry is based on a false premise and inaccurate information. BusPatrol does not pool or sell data across communities; student safety program data is used only to support the BusPatrol program in the community where that data was created.”

When 404 Media asked clarifying questions and said that the reporting is based on leaked BusPatrol material, Spree stopped replying to text messages and emails.

This plan gives new meaning to the animated cartoon series "The Magic School Bus"...

Comment It's for LLMs. (Score 1) 27

by segin (#65433239) Attached to: Apple Notes Expected To Gain Markdown Support

Adding Markdown support to Notes is about exactly one thing: Enabling LLMs, via tool calls, to create formatted notes on the user's device.

And how do LLMs universally create formatted text? Markdown. This is completely about Apple Intelligence and having it create Notes.

Comment The legal ignorance of everyone in this thread... (Score 1) 68

...is utterly unsurprising. Legal perspectives on "who" is taking out actions through software say it's not the user driving the software, but the developer of said software. Between your pressing of "Enter" at the URL bar and GET / HTTP/1.1, legally sits Mozilla. Welcome to the enshittification of legal systems through lawyers fighting shitty intellectual property infringement lawsuits (thank you, copyright, patent, and IP trolls for the minefield of court precedent we've all carefully got to wade through.) Such wording becomes legally necessary. Arguably, Tim Berners-Lee should have included it with WorldWideWeb from the very first public release 25 December 1990.

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