  The DOJ first sued EZ Lynk in 2021, accusing the Cayman Islands-based company of violating the Clean Air Act by marketing and selling “defeat devices.” These tools allegedly allow users to bypass factory emissions controls on diesel vehicles, primarily through the EZ Lynk Auto Agent app paired with an onboard diagnostic (OBD) hardware dongle.

Opponents say “Investigating this claim does not require identifying each person who has used the product,”

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?

▲ embedding-shape a day ago | parent | next [-]

> (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?

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dcrazy a day ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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ericmay a day ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

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AnthonyMouse a day ago | parent [-]

> 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.

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ericmay a day ago | parent [-]

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.

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AnthonyMouse a day ago | parent | next [-]

> 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.

	▲	ericmay 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> It seems a lot more reasonable to prosecute kidnappers rather than the makers of generic tools. As someone who is pro 2nd-Amendment (but not pro-gun) I of course appreciate this argument. There are certainly gray areas. The most immediate example that comes to mind are bongs or other items used for smoking pot (maybe other things? I'm not too sure). Ultimately it comes down to what the government and regulators think, what they can argue in court, and so forth. And if the people don't like it, they can take democratic political action.

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iamnothere 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> 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.

This is the same argument they use in the UK to ban things like long knives or realistic airsoft guns. We don’t really do that here in the US. Activists often try, but eventually the laws get struck down.

	▲	ericmay 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I'm not entirely familiar with the arguments used by the UK, but in the US neither long knives or realistic airsoft guns are used for wide scale law-breaking. That would probably be the key difference.

▲ legitster a day ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

	▲	a day ago \| parent [-]
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