> The government says it needs this information to identify and interview witnesses who can testify about how the tools were actually used.
Why start this whole thing, if you don't already have this information and have people willing to help you as witnesses?
Sounds to me they're saying they don't have this already, but why is this investigation happening in the first place then? Rather than finding every user of the tool, find the users who use the tool in the way you don't approve of, then request the information for those?
Really bananas approach to go for "Every single user of the app" and "Everyone who bought a dongle" when it has very real and legal use cases.
Yeah, I'd HAPPILY report every single truck rolling coal around me if there was a place to report that information.
Hell, I've seen a truck roll coal around cop cars and, obviously, nothing happened.
This is just gross privacy intrusion masquerading as "protecting the environment". We don't need 100% compliance to the law and simple prosecution/ticketing of obvious violations would go a long way towards solving the problem outright. Much like we didn't need our cars emailing prosecutors every time someone drove without a seat belt on. Cops giving out tickets for not wearing a seatbelt was enough.
I watched a pickup roll coal in the middle of freaking East Bay, literally within site of downtown San Francisco, on a bicyclist. I reported their license to the California Air Resources Board, and not longer after that I saw it up on jacks in a neighborhood auto shop. That made my day. Asshole.
California is rather strict on emissions. Other states don't care. I used to work for my state's version of the DMV and the only public facing page where one could report things was to report people who would not register their cars locally (many people who purchase very expensive cars chose to register them in Montana). There used to be a web page to report license plates that were worn and needed replacing (like the reflective coating wore off, or all the paint got scratched off).
Vehicle regulation in the US is piss poor. Here's the full list of states that require all passenger vehicles to be inspected for safety and emissions every year:
* New York
* Massachussets
* Vermont
Utah used to require safety inspections every year, but they eliminated them; there were no noticeable side effects [1].
"Safety Inspections" were generally just a grift for third-party repairshops to collect free money and I couldn't be happier that they are no longer a thing.
Be aware that "safety" and "emissions" are different. Emissions testing is still required biannually for newish vehicles and yearly for older ones.
[1] https://www.deseret.com/2017/3/9/20607904/lawmakers-remove-r...
I used to live in Massachusetts. I'm not sure it's a benchmark to look up to. If buy buy a brand new car from a dealer, your next stop must be an inspection station - a pointless waste of time and money. But if your car is older than 15 years? You're no longer required to have an annual emissions test. Pretty backwards.
I'm in Idaho, so not such resource exists. It would have to be a federal agency that does the enforcement because our cops/prosecutors/lawmakers won't ever make something like that happen.
You can take temporary comfort knowing that it’s costing them $7 per gallon for that little asshole stunt. It seems you have to he is especially insecure to intentionally want to burn smoke on someone else. Especially when Tesla’s have a BioWeapon air filtration setting.
Not an obvious google (for me), so here's the link:
https://air.arb.ca.gov/Forms/VehicleComplaint/SmokingVehicle
I had a neighbor with a car they clearly wouldn't fix that desperately needed a smog check. reported them also. they moved away shortly after though, so i'm not sure if CARB ever followed through.
I got a nastygram from CARB once for something like that. I think they follow up.
Here in Colorado we have a new anti coal rolling law, with a hotline you can call it in on.
You know what happens when you call it in? The government sends a letter to the registered address of the truck saying, basically "Hey! Your emissions are very wasteful, you should get that checked out!". Glad California seems to have some teeth to the emissions laws.
Seems about as effective as could be though. By the time you see them doing it, it's already cleared up by the time you pull out your phone to video it to use as evidence. So this is pretty much acknowledging that it would be ripe for abuse if it had any actual consequence.
I'm in Texas, and I get coal rolled multiple times a year while I'm riding my bike. One asshat actually hit my shoulder with his extended mirror. After that, I started using my GoPro as a dashcam since I wasn't able to get the asshat's license plate number.
Man I got hit so many times as a cyclist in TX and GA. It took me awhile to realize that in GA, it was sometimes intentional. I hadn't realized how much bicyclists were disliked.
If you want to do something about this, given that we have universal surveillance of license plates anyway:
Demand that your local government installs PM 2.5 / 10 monitors on each of their spy cams. They'll easily pick up out-of-spec emissions systems. Join the emissions spikes with the license plates. Take the cars that are two standard deviations above the norm for PM 2.5 / 10 increases after they're spotted by the camera, and have them come in for an aggressive smog check.
Completely eliminate all other smog check requirements for late model cars because modern tests are just "check the pollution control light on the dash", and "check for tampering". Those checks will only catch honest drivers, since coal-rollers limit themselves to reversible modifications anyway.
If we're going to give up our privacy for some amorphous benefits (which I think is a terrible tradeoff), at least let those benefits include annual paperwork. As a bonus, if the PM 2.5 / 10 data is made public, then we'd have much better air pollution monitoring. There's no way this plan costs more than the current system, where every ICE car driver pays ~ $100 to an inspection station every few years. PM sensors are under $100, and you need orders of magnitude fewer sensors than cars.
For those, like me, who aren't familiar with the term "rolling coal": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_coal
I think the wikipedia page downplays how often it's used to try to hurt or annoy cyclists, pedestrians, or anyone who looks liberal/foreign. It's not just anti environmentalists who do it, it's a general MAGA thing.
"Try" to hurt?
Half-burned diesel particulate is absolutely cancerous, it can enter the bloodstream and cross the blood-brain barrier and they're generating clouds of it, probably thousands of times more than what a modern 18 wheeler puts out in half an hour of driving. And they're doing it to someone breathing hard.
If I sprayed some cancerous chemical in someone's face, I'd be arrested within the hour. I'd be on the regional news, even.
The double standards around motor vehicles never cease to amaze.
Wtf people are doing this on purpose? What's wrong with people?
The "people" doing this are exactly the type of people you'd expect...
Just the first thing that came up in a youtube search, there are thousands more:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYPMbLO4pAY
Wait, this isn't something that they configure the truck to do all the time? They can turn it on and off?
I thought this was some shitty way of being "special", like a loud exhaust, but being able to turn it on and off to gas people is downright evil.
A nasty combo of sadism and tribalism and stupidity.
Chest-thumping
I had a driver in a Ford F-150 do this in front of me last week as he pulled away from a light. The smoke totally blacked out the windshield for 5 seconds while I was in motion. I was totally blinded by this.
I had no idea this was a thing, much less that it was something people did on purpose.
https://old.reddit.com/r/IdiotsInCars/comments/1tdj76y/oc_id...
Many more:
https://www.reddit.com/r/IdiotsInCars/search/?q=coal&restric...
I wish they'd go back to just hanging plastic testicles from the trailer hitch, honestly.
Something like these? https://old.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/1h82ja1/new_generati...
Maybe they finally realized that they had been giving their trucks gender affirming care.
... and for those that assume, understandably, that this is strictly a US cultural phenomenon, I must (sadly) report that I saw a very new Ram 1500 dump black exhaust onto a cyclist on the 9 between Saint-Léonard and Crans-Montana. This happened in summer of 2022.
In terms of US cultural exports, for every jazz music and snowboarding I guess there has to be some coal rolling and fake service dogs.
I see rolling coal pretty regular in Alberta, Canada. Though not as an intentional act towards bicycles/EVs behind the truck, just people with a rich mixture that like burning money. That and it's legal to do a diesel delete...
What on earth? I can't understand USA at all..
> Hell, I've seen a truck roll coal around cop cars and, obviously, nothing happened.
> This is just gross privacy intrusion masquerading as "protecting the environment".
You're conflating two entirely different groups of people working for two different governments with entirely different motivations. It is entirely possible that the cops in the situation you observed didn't have any issue because they didn't think they were breaking any law they enforce. Your local police and EPA Special Agents have different jobs.
The Clean Air Act is a federal law. There are 10 states with laws directly targeting "rolling coal".
I was on a bike ride with my young kid. We were going up a hill and being passed by a lifted diesel truck. I could tell that the driver was desperately working the throttle to avoid accidentally blowing smoke in my kids' face.
Congratulations, buddy. You've designed your life around being such a massive unlikeable asshole to random strangers. But for a brief moment you understood shame.
I'm generally pretty libertarian, but I'm all for throwing the book at these guys.
> I'm generally pretty libertarian, but I'm all for throwing the book at these guys.
To me that seems perfectly in line with being libertarian. One of the legitimate roles of the government is protecting people from violence by other people. Libertarians are not anarchists.
Not to my understanding. Libertarian protections are from my understanding all about the quantifiable damages that were done by any given action. They don't usually go beyond that.
That's why most libertarians would be in favor of blowing asbestos insulation with the thought that "well, eventually the mesothelioma victims will sue which will stop the practice". You couldn't preemptively sue, however, as you don't have any damage you could demonstrate until after the cancer starts.
There might be flavors of libertarians that aren't that way but it's my understanding that environmental protections is one of the weaker aspects of the libertarian mindset. Especially since it simply doesn't account for "all the damage is done and the people that did the damage are now gone".
You're describing Corporatist Libertarians.
Traditional Libertarians: No organization (government or otherwise) should be large enough or powerful enough to infringe on anyone's liberties.
Corporatist Libertarians: No government should be powerful enough to infringe on the liberties of corporations.
Corporatism has taken over about 50% of the Democrat, Republican and Libertarian parties. They're what people usually mean when they say "moderate" in the US, and why no branches of the federal government have an approval rating above 33%. It's also why things are going downhill so fast: It doesn't matter which party is in power, even if they've got a filibuster proof majority and all three branches in their pocket. Their corporate faction will still be powerful enough to block progressive and populist legislation.
> environmental protections is one of the weaker aspects
That is probably why we are not on the same page here. I'm thinking in terms of the actual harm. Someone rolling coal near me is causing violence to me. The damage to the environment is more difficult to quantify, and that is not the angle I would approach it from.
You are perhaps confusing libertarians with anarcho-capitalists. Ancaps are a subset of libertarians. I think among other right-wing libertarian varieties there is a broader spectrum of beliefs, and left-wing libertarians generally would not support anything that pollutes the commons (although they would disagree about the best means of preventing such pollution).
(Most) libertarians still support addressing externalities.
One common libertarian solution for something unproven would be "it's your job to purchase insurance for this new way of doing things, and convince an actuary that it's safe; the insurance premiums will stop you from taking risks with unproven technologies without appropriate precautions/testing/etc".
> (Most) libertarians still support addressing externalities.
Not really. They support it in terms of individual responsibility and not as a government role.
> The standard libertarian solution for something unproven would be "it's your job to purchase insurance for this new way of doing things"
No libertarian I'm aware of would force someone to purchase insurance. But it also does not address the externalities problem. We have in this thread an example of an externality that doesn't have a solution. Rolling coal does small amounts of damage. An insurance agent would be happy to insure someone with a modded car that rolls coal because there isn't going to be a claim related to it.
The same is true for any CO2 emitting activity. The damage is an externality that builds up with very small individual acts. I know of no way this would be addressed with libertarian philosophy (grant for me that man-made climate change is real and a problem if you want to argue against this).
> Not really. They support it in terms of individual responsibility and not as a government role.
To a libertarian, a major part of the government's job is to enforce contracts and property rights. Externalities are mass infringements on other people's property rights, that need to either be avoided or appropriately compensated. Emitting CO2 does damage to a common good everyone has an interest in.
> No libertarian I'm aware of would force someone to purchase insurance.
I didn't say the government would force them to. (Though some smaller-scale voluntary association might well do so.)
The problem you'll have in a libertarian framework is who can bring a claim against who for CO2 emissions and for how much?
Like, let's say I have a slam dunk case that my $1000 tree died due to climate change. I have the receipts, documentation, everything (unrealistic as it is). How would I go around recovering the damages I'm owed? Who would figure out that "Ted there who drove to work for the last 20 years contributed $0.0001 of your damages. The concrete plant over there contributed $0.001. The coal plant $0.01".
I'll also point out you did not address the rolling coal problem.
It is not impossible, in a libertarian framework, to have appropriate court cases to establish standard collective rates and trading frameworks for CO2 emission limits. And that does solve the problem of individual vehicle emissions, as well.
Libertarians consider anyone doing things they don't like to be anarchists, and anything they do, to be "freedom."
You ever notice that areas with very high libertarian numbers tend to have lots of problems with illegal dumping, and lots of people who think registering and insuring their vehicle is optional?
I've lived in the most libertarian state in the country for the majority of my life. I've never noticed any illegal dumping, and I've never heard any libertarians call anyone an anarchist (maybe once?). If anything, it's the non-libertarians that call libertarians anarchists.
On what are you basing your opinions?
I would say that libertarians come in many flavors. And many of them are not big-L libertarians.
> You ever notice [...]
No. It may be true, but I would like to see evidence rather than conjecture. I have seen plenty of trashy areas that I would not associate with a high concentration of political libertarians.
I would agree that there is an entire flavor of libertarian who, for example, felt like they must not wear masks during the pandemic because they were being told by the government to wear them.
My position on that version of libertarianism is in line with Penn Jillete's. I.e. https://www.reddit.com/r/Libertarian/comments/je34ya/penn_ji...
You're right that's what it should be, as me and my kid's right not to get trampled to death beneath a 2m hood clearly trumps your "right" to drive a 4-ton machine at unsafe speeds wherever you please. But sadly that's not how most "libertarians" think.
Guy tries to drive courtously around you and this is how you take it? You're unhinged.
If I understand correctly, the trucker was set up to roll coal on other people, and only made an exception for this specific kid on a bike. It's not "unhinged" to stand up for others who have been targeted even while you were spared — it's just common decency.
Is there some way of knowing a truck is set up to "roll coal"? If not, then this could just be the OP thinking poorly of someone just trying to drive carefully around a family. It would be jumping to a very pessimistic conclusion without evidence.
But anyone who "rolls coal" doesn't have a truck set up to always do that. They'll have a switch on their console which makes it happen (or something digital). You don't need to try to not roll coal if you don't want to. Probably what happened is the person just drove a normal truck and knows that diesel fumes are stinky and tried to coast by the bikers so there would be the least amount of exhaust near them.
Not necessarily- many blow out black smoke when the throttle is pressed hard, but not when pressed gently. From what I understand there is a way of tuning the ECU to do this. But also there can just be a switch
Diesel fumes always stink, idling or driving. You mash down a throttle on a deleted diesel and it'll blow smoke. It can be a decent cloud depending on the last time you womped it.
The only masquerading is some basic OBD functions slapped onto an app that is entirely designed for the sole purpose of installing emissions evasion firmware. Most of the reviews brag about it, even.
And do you really think they're HQ'd in the caymans by coincidence? No. It's to avoid any repercussions.
You can get similar basic OBD functions from any of a dozen free apps on iOS or Android that do that all far better and for a few dollars.
FFS they even sell another app for editing (ie falsifying) electronic driver logs.
They are probably owned by off duty police
With this admin any comment on “protecting the environment” is an obvious lie when they state that climate change doesn’t exist and are opening up every national land then can to resource extraction.
Like it’s normally a dubious claim when trying to violate privacy but for them it’s fucking laughable if only it wasn’t so ominous.
Even the so-called experts on climate change, like Bill Gates, have given up on it.
> Sounds to me they're saying they don't have this already, but why is this investigation happening in the first place then?
They probably have tons of data and testimony from witnesses who use the product illegally. You can find hundreds of threads online of people telling you how to defeat emissions controls using their products.
The case prosecutors want to make is that EZ Lynk knowingly enables this behavior. If they can show that the majority of users are committing crimes with the app, that's a much stronger case than just rounding up a handful of witnesses.
> If they can show that the majority of users are committing crimes with the app, that's a much stronger case than just rounding up a handful of witnesses.
I still don't understand why this should even be relevant in cases like this. The thing is basically a generic OBD dongle, right? The same thing every DIY and shade tree mechanic uses to read codes and run service procedures.
Suppose 20,000 people buy it and use it for defeating emissions. Some other number of people buy it for the normal thing. Why does it matter at all whether the other number is 50 or 50 million? Those are the people who aren't relevant. Should the OEM be in trouble if some unrelated third party happens to write the emissions defeat code to require their dongle in particular so they have a high proportion of customers using it for that? Should they get away with promoting it for that if they're a huge company with lots of sales to people not using it for that? None of that should matter. The seller doesn't even control what the users are doing with it, nor should they.
If there is a law against advertising it for defeating emissions then prosecute them for the advertising. That's their crime, what the customers do is third party action.
> I still don't understand why this should even be relevant in cases like this. The thing is basically a generic OBD dongle, right? The same thing every DIY and shade tree mechanic uses to read codes and run service procedures.
The difference is this company provides a bunch of cloud services to roll out specific tunes at scale.
From the original filing:
> "EZ Lynk worked with/previewed the EZ Lynk System for at least two delete tune creators during development and before launching the EZ Lynk System. Those creators later disseminated delete tunes using the EZ Lynk System. There were numerous social media websites, including the “EZ Lynk Forum,” where third parties discussed using the EZ Lynk System to defeat emission controls. The Forum was run by EZ Lynk and one of the delete tune creators EZ Lynk worked with during development, and it provided contact information for EZ Lynk technical support. EZ Lynk representatives interacted with posts and videos about deleting emission controls and installing delete tunes, including tunes from one of the delete tune creators EZ Lynk worked with during development."
So it does seem like the DOJ is going after them for collaborating on developing and enabling the tunes. I suspect the subpoena is about establishing damages.
That doesn't address the issue at all. Why should the damages depend on what third parties do?
On top of that, wow, if you're familiar with how humans think and how prosecutors write indictments, that's some weak sauce. Look at this:
> EZ Lynk worked with/previewed the EZ Lynk System for at least two delete tune creators during development and before launching the EZ Lynk System. Those creators later disseminated delete tunes using the EZ Lynk System.
They worked with some developers. No claim that they knew what the developers were planning to produce at the time. Later the same developers published something alleged to be illegal.
> There were numerous social media websites, including the “EZ Lynk Forum,” where third parties discussed using the EZ Lynk System to defeat emission controls. The Forum was run by EZ Lynk and one of the delete tune creators EZ Lynk worked with during development, and it provided contact information for EZ Lynk technical support.
Users posted things on social media. There was a thing called "EZ Lynk Forum" that wasn't even entirely controlled by the company and from what I can tell was actually a Facebook group. The group listed the (presumably publicly known) contact info for their tech support.
> EZ Lynk representatives interacted with posts and videos about deleting emission controls and installing delete tunes, including tunes from one of the delete tune creators EZ Lynk worked with during development.
"Interacted with" as in the company's peons weren't lawyers, so their PR flacks liked posts praising the company and their tech support answered tech support questions, without paying attention to whether the user was doing something they weren't supposed to.
This is looking increasingly like a farce. That kind of stuff is vapid. If a user has a tech support question and mentioning that they want to defeat emissions means the company refuses to answer it then the user just comes back later or with a different account and asks the same question without mentioning their use case, right?
These kinds of prosecutions are the worst. It's punishing a company for saying the wrong things, i.e. having insufficiently aggressive lawyers, even if it has no real effect on what they do. It's a trap for the unwary and a bludgeon against companies insufficiently bureaucratic to have all their employees trained in corporate censorship practices.
Why are they subpoenaing Apple and Google for this information instead of EZ Lynk for their own records of distribution?
> The same thing every DIY and shade tree mechanic uses to read codes and run service procedures.
Now you have me wondering if this is their real target, to go after people who are defeating CRM on their vehicles so they can repair them themselves or in their small mom-and-pop garage of choice. But right to repair is popular, so they have to claim it's for something else.
> The case prosecutors want to make is that EZ Lynk knowingly enables this behavior.
We have decades of legal precedent saying that the makers of products with substantial legal uses should not be held responsible for the illegal actions of some of their customers.
Most recently, we have the Supreme Court ruling that ISPs are not liable for customers who use their internet connection for copyright infringement.
> EZ Lynk knowingly enables this behavior.
idk, knife makers are knowingly enabling knife attacks. If there's at least one EZLynk customer who isn't breaking a law then it seems to me the company is in the clear. I would use a gun analogy but, in the US, guns have constitutional protection.
I think the difference is that a knife is more or less used for what the manufacturer advertises it for.
Something similar has happened with gun manufacturers regularly. It's relatively easy to make a semi-automatic user-convertible into an automatic weapon. But selling your rifle with instructions like "we absolutely DO NOT RECOMMEND cutting this specific notch off of the trigger group with a hacksaw BECAUSE THAT WOULD BE ILLEGAL" has not been appreciated by the ATF or our court system.
Then they don’t need to unmask users to get testimony, right?
Why stop there? Why not request the PII of every person who could have plausibly downloaded the app at any point in time?
https://dictionary.justia.com/overbroad
It's the only way to be sure. Also, think of the children.
That’s fine. We’re also going to need a list of every user who bought a <name gun accessory here> as well.
My guess: they want to make the case that illegitimate use cases are indeed the primary use case. Their approach is to randomly sample all users and show that the vast majority use it to defeat emissions, undermining the app maker’s defence.
I don’t think that justifies the overreach. As you said, if they don’t have a case already, they shouldn’t be allowed to violate user privacy on speculation that some statistical evidence might hypothetically fall out of the data. But the legal system may disagree.
I suspect there is a bit of parallel construction going on
They might already know for a fact that illegitimate use cases are the primary use case, they just cannot use any of their evidence in court
So they are seeking a way to legally obtain the information they already have, basically
It's shady but my understanding is it happens kind of a lot in modern policing. They can get illegal information much easier than legal information. So the illegal information sort of forms the justification for the time and money spent pursuing and gathering the same information legally
I wonder if they will use this case (depending on how it turns out), for a case against 3d printers.
"You knowingly enabled $XYZ", etc.
Or AI companies, for that matter...
The supreme court struck that down for the Sony case. It was determined that since ISPs do not offer a service that is used specifically to break the law, they are not liable when their customers do. It would be the same argument here. the app is literally just an ODB tool, like many others on the market.
If you've ever seen any body cam footage on YouTube I'd wager that about half of them have a moment where the cop is asking someone for information they're not legally required to provide, and it's framed as "I have to investigate." The smart ones reply with some flavor of "ok, I'm not required to help you investigate."
This seems like a much more invasive, much more expensive version of that. "We have [potentially spurious] evidence that this application is used in way we deem a Bad Thing. We need to violate the privacy of this company and thousands of individuals to gather evidence that we should be required to get before bringing this suit in the first place, but we're the government so we don't have to do that."
Next up: expect the same treatment if you've ever downloaded a .gguf from HuggingFace.
Cynical hat: they think they can use this case to establish precedent to later compel unmasking a different set of users.
It's called "parallel construction".
I've learned never to believe the reasoning provided in DOJ filings. Realize it is written as a calculated manipulative tool to get a particular result. Whether they want it for the purpose stated is almost immaterial. The only thing you can really glean is they want the result is of whatever they're asking for, but no one knows if it is for the reason they state.
That's not a a valid argument. That's just an opinion.
The DOJ obtained a lawful subpoena through the legal system to request this information. The legal case is against EZ Lynk and by interviewing users (how will they know who to interview if they can't get the data? duh!) they can build their case against EZ Lynk and their product if the main usage is violating the Clean Air Act.
How else would the DOJ obtain evidence if they don't know who is buying the product?
> (how will they know who to interview if they can't get the data? duh!)
What I don't understand is how they know someone has to be interviewed, but they don't already know who, which makes me question how the investigation got started in the first place?
> How else would the DOJ obtain evidence if they don't know who is buying the product?
The question is, how did the investigation got started, unless they already can see that people are misusing the product? And since they obviously must be able to see that people are misusing it, why don't they instead obtain evidence about those specific users, that they must have observed already?
The case is against EZLynk, not the folks using the product.
> The question is, how did the investigation got started, unless they already can see that people are misusing the product? And since they obviously must be able to see that people are misusing it, why don't they instead obtain evidence about those specific users, that they must have observed already?
Well you'd have to get into the legal case for the specifics, but I don't think this is an accurate assumption to make. They can just see the product "on the shelf", test it for themselves, realize it can be used to violate the Clean Air Act, and then request the ability to talk to the consumers of the product to see how they use the product or if they've used it to violate the Clean Air Act. You don't have to engage with a specific person at all.
How else do you get what might be illegal products off the shelves? Perhaps the users primarily use it for other purposes and the interviews bear that out? That would inform the DOJ and the court on the merits of the case.
> How else do you get what might be illegal products off the shelves?
Your premise is that there is a difference in the product.
The product is a piece of hardware that connects your phone/laptop to the car's computer. Are you using it to program the computer to bleed the brakes, or are you using it to program the computer to defeat emissions tests? It's the same hardware dongle either way. A roll of duct tape isn't a different product when it's being used in the commission of a crime.
You can try to prosecute companies that actually ship the thing with software to defeat emissions, but that doesn't really do any good. People would just get the generic hardware from the store and the defeat software from anonymous third parties over the internet.
If you actually want to stop it, try one of these: The old style emissions tests, where they put the car on a dyno with an exhaust probe, have been mostly phased out because the equipment is a lot more expensive. Keep some of it around. Then when someone goes in for their emissions test, roll a D20 and if they get a 1 their vehicle is taking a trip to the full service facility and if the exhaust probe says something different than the car's computer their car gets a free forensic analysis to check for a defeat device. Finding one means jail time.
Your understanding about how this works is incorrect, I think that's the problem.
If a product being sold is primarily being used for a purpose which violates the law and does not otherwise have fair usage the government can and has pursued and won legal cases resulting in the product being banned. That is no different here. The reason for interviewing consumers is to help determine what the product is being used for to help inform the legal case. It may turn out that it's primarily used for fair usage or "practical" purposes which don't violate the law and the DOJ may drop their case. It may turn out everyone is using these to violate the Clean Air Act in which case it will likely and should be banned.
> A roll of duct tape isn't a different product when it's being used in the commission of a crime.
If the vast majority of the time the roll of duct tape was used in the commission of a crime, it absolutely could and likely would be banned.
> If the vast majority of the time the roll of duct tape was used in the commission of a crime, it absolutely could and likely would be banned.
Which continues to be an absurd premise. So if the original use case for duct tape was kidnappings then it should be forever banned because a sample taken at that time had that statistical distribution, and thereafter no other uses can be adopted because it's banned?
It seems a lot more reasonable to prosecute kidnappers rather than the makers of generic tools.
Lawful evidence gathering doesn’t require you to know the answer to every question you want to ask someone up front. Nothing would ever get solved if investigators couldn’t act on the perfectly logical conclusion that the suspect must have talked to SOMEONE to get this part of the crime done, and this SOMEONE ELSE knows who that was.
The balance is in tailoring the access that the investigators have to the SOMEONE ELSE. They have to convincingly demonstrate the connection between the questions they want to ask the third party and their ability to legally use that evidence to further their case.
It’s like saying the cops can’t subpoena the taxi dispatcher because the suspect only ever talked with the driver.
It's worth pointing out that EZ Lynk is a sleezy company that originally tried to hide behind a Section 230 protection (lol).
Their more recent legal defense of the product was throwing their own users under the bus: "we can't control if our customers are using the product to break laws". So they are the ones who framed all of the customers as potential criminals.