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by tptacek 1061 days ago
You have an expectation of privacy for the contents of your trunk, but it's less firm than that of your house --- your trunk can be searched without a warrant to "inventory" it if it's merely impounded, without suspicion or an arrest.

If the police had a device that enabled them to see into car trunks, it would likely constitute a search requiring "reasonableness" to use it.
2 comments
fragmede 1061 days ago
Which it should be noted, they do. Semi-truck sized x-ray machines exist, especially at border control, but also elsewhere, and is used to see inside of semi-trucks. Using that same device against a car seems entirely feasible. But as you point out, if they impound the vehicle, they can just inventory the trunk directly, assuming they have the key. If you have a locked safe in the trunk, I don't think they're (legally) allowed to x-ray it to find out what's inside of that, although they can parallel-reconstrution their way to having a reason after the fact.
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tptacek 1061 days ago
Since the time of the founders, you've had essentially no rights to privacy at border crossings.

"Parallel construction" is a message board argument. At the point where you've decided the law doesn't matter, we can just stop talking about this stuff, because none of it matters.

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fragmede 1061 days ago
Parallel construction isn't the theoretical stuff of paranoid hackers on online message boards. In a 2013 statement, it was revealed that the DEA uses parallel reconstruction "almost daily" to build criminal cases using evidence gathered by the NSA.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE97409R2013...

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tptacek 1061 days ago
Yes, yes. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

It seems very unlikely that anybody parallel constructed anything here, since an officer was able to see the guns with the assistance of a visor made of his fingers.

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chrisco255 1061 days ago
Under what conditions is a car impounded? For a car to be impounded it already was somewhere it shouldn't have been or the driver themselves impaired in some way. Of course they need to be able to search trunks in such a case.
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FireBeyond 1061 days ago
> For a car to be impounded it already was somewhere it shouldn't have been or the driver themselves impaired in some way. Of course they need to be able to search trunks in such a case.

It could simply have been in a car accident and its driver taken to hospital. It may even have been off the road by the time it was towed to the impound. I see this happen several times a week.

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pests 1060 days ago
I parked an old beater that was full of my personal belongings (finishing up a move) a few years ago in front of a family members house. I accidently left the keys in the ignition but off. The police impounded it within hours claiming they thought it was abandoned; letting them skip their usual 48 hour wait time for nuisance vehicles.

I would have not been happy if that was searched and inventoried.

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