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.
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 had no idea this was a thing, much less that it was something people did on purpose.
Many more:
https://www.reddit.com/r/IdiotsInCars/search/?q=coal&restric...
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.
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.
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.
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".
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".
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).
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.)
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
"You knowingly enabled $XYZ", etc.
Or AI companies, for that matter...
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."
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.
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Slippery slope is fully lubed
>Real-time protections for non-Play installs Google Play Protect offers protection for apps that are installed from sources outside of Google Play. When a user tries to install an app, Play Protect conducts a real-time check of the app against known harmful or malicious samples that Google Play Protect has cataloged.
https://developers.google.com/android/play-protect/client-pr...
They will also go further for apks with novel signatures - take a copy, upload it to google to decompile and scan, and then if you have their express permission, allow you to install it.
You can turn it off, so it's not "any". At best it's "most".
Clearly there is a single driving agenda, which Google and the government are largely in harmony on, to try to approach 100% real-identity-tying to every activity done online.
Where once, “online” meant generally greater anonymity than “IRL” activities, since most things could be signed up for with an arbitrary throwaway email address and no proof of identity. It is now or shortly will be the opposite.
I would not be surprised to see double sided phone cases so we can carry our big brother phone with our real phone.
There is some prior art in people being forced to carry a "work phone" and a "personal phone" at the same time.
There will be strange product marketing effects. If you only carry one phone, you can currently talk people into spending over $1K on a high tier big brother phone. But if you only use a big brother phone for bank apps and only at home, a $1K phone from Apple or Samsung is a hard sell, I'd be more likely to spend $1K on a really nice anti big brother phone on ali express or whatever.
gmail and a "work-ish" phone. official stuff like DMV or banks use this. my work requires MFA and auth apps and they live here too. no SIM card and mostly lives at my desk.
my main phone for doin stuff is a different phone with a custom ROM and nothin but f-droid.
For things requiring Play Integrity, I picked up a $20 burner carrier-locked Motorola phone at Walmart for $30. It's WiFi-only, given that I'm never going to pay for service on it, but I can also tether it to my main phone. It's also useful for writing one-star reviews on apps that require Play Integrity to function, which is something everyone should be doing.
So it's a $30 burner phone, not $20?
Ironically the phones with best third party rom support are google pixels. Good luck getting lineageos support or even unlocked bootloader on a random aliexpress phone. You might be able to sideload without restriction, but the ROM is probably gimped, won't receive updates, and has random privileged apps possibly spying on you.
If they really cared they could equip federal agents, and state/local police with testing equipment. It is easy to see/hear vehicles that are likely to be violating these rules. Heck, make a hotline, I would rat them out all day. Just incorporate it with rate-limiting how often each vehicle could get pulled over for it, so it doesn't get abused.
This really comes down to corporations and the government colluding to make us not actually own anything. The fact that they would refer to a tool for making modifications to your car a "defeat device" is so telling. Coupled with phones not allowing side loading is really fucked up.
Everything is awful, and it's been getting worse for as long as I can remember. I think I'm going to lose it and just cut ties with the internet, and computers in general very soon. The power, and freedom I used to feel has been replaced with oppression disguised as convenience. One Token Ring to rule them all.
Oh so AdBlue shortage is about to hit the US too?
Corporate mobile operating systems suck. Including "apps" to run on them, generally
There are some that do not require corporate approval and do not try to phone home but it's a relatively small fraction
This isn't really anything terribly new either. The government regardless of who the current president is will routinely go after individuals for (allaegedly) hurting coprorate profits. We saw it in the Napster/Limewire era, in the BitTorrent era and even with physical products far earlier than that. There's a ban on importing cars less than 25 years old because Mercedes-Benz dealerships lobbied for a law in the 1980s because too many people were importing them directly from Germany at a lower cost [2].
Heck, 60 years of Cuban embargoes and sanctions as well as the 1954 Guatemala coup were US efforts at the behest of the United Fruit Company. Same thing for oil and the 1953 Iranian coup.
[1]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/google-broke-its-promi...
[2]: https://www.jalopnik.com/the-25-year-import-rules-history-is...
More importantly, there's not spying on the user in the first place. The law doesn't force Google to spy, nor does it force Apple to lock consumers (for sure not "owners") out of their phones, so that they're left helpless when the CCP bans VPN and protest apps [1] (not to imply spying from Google alone isn't bad, before any other actors get involved).
[1] https://www.pcmag.com/news/apple-pulls-mapping-app-used-by-h...
Fortunately, we have more powerful policy tools to clean the air than attacking individual gearheads... convert America to an electric car system. You need to attack these problems at the point of production. Consumption side approaches are petty and not very effective.
It'll void any warranty.
The Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act disagrees with you.
Here's a legal view that explains it further [1].
Basically, they can deny warranty service if you make modifications, and they can tie it to a failure. You can add 100s of HP to your engine profile with these things, and why would it be reasonable to expect a manufacturer to warrant related component repairs if they're pushed beyond spec?
Here are relevant quotes, and []'s are mine.
> The Magnuson Moss Warranty Act requires manufacturers to honor their warranties and auto manufacturers only warrant their vehicles against manufacturing defects. Your claim here could be denied because the failure was not due to a defect in a factory component. It was caused by something added to the car[...] That system caused a non-defective part to fail. Your mod did not void the [entire] warranty. It’s just that the failure was not caused by a factory defect.
> Obviously, an aftermarket camshaft or a hopped up ECU won’t void the entire warranty on your car. The master cylinder failed? The blue tooth quit working? Unless there is a logical connection between the mod and the part or system that failed, you should be good to go.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnuson%E2%80%93Moss_Warranty...
[1] https://lehtoslaw.com/will-modifications-void-new-car-warran...
[1] https://www.motor1.com/news/729265/toyota-gr-corolla-warrant...
Adding insult, one guy had his comprehensive insurance coverage lapse right before!
The point isn't that you can't run the deep research. Everyone now has more capabilities, and if you want to waste time and tokens you can do it. The point is someone has done the work compiling these, and made it available once, for everyone to read. Think "caching". It has the exact amount of information needed to show the details of every attack. There is a lot. Sadly making it "concise" will remove information -- there is that much.
I do usually make edits to an article after I get it from an AI, as an editor would do when a writer submits something. I hate having AI shibboleths like "It's not X. It's Y". So I make it more humanized. But at the end of the day, the article does what it's supposed to do: make people aware of things in one place, rather than have to research it themselves every time.
Just like I don't want to look at AI art or listen to AI music, I don't want to read AI written blogslop.
The web is now full of shit. What a waste.
Why don't you write all your assembly code yourself? Why do you use a compiler? Why do you generate images, when you can draw them yourself? You're supposed to add value.
I don't think preparing a list of all the threats, editing it and publishing it for others is a "waste". I'm not publishing random stuff, this is important and in line with what I want people to know.
Some people on HN downvote any criticism of AI, other people complain that things are written by AI. If you're such big fans of AI being used more and more, then accept the consequences!
This is why you should write things yourself. There is no way an AI would write something so insane in response to that question. Since I can now read your true understanding of the world, I know not to waste my time on your ai slop. I have no reason to believe you fact checked the 'research' done using AI if you cant even understand how the research should have been done in the first place. You want to waste the time of others but arent even willing to sacrifice a bit yourself.
I'm seeing increasing numbers of people credulously citing ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini output as ground-truth fact. Many more are increasingly lulled into a false sense of security by the citations models append (to the point of neglecting even a bare-minimum skim of the cited sources, much less critically evaluating/contextualizing the nature of the sources themselves). My fear is that most people are blissfully ignorant at the new paradigms of propaganda that AI could enable; most of us here wouldn't be taken by the "slop" image-gen deepfakes (right now), but can you say the same about a couple of citations taken out of context?
We already know how trivial it is to win over a sizeable chunk of society by introducing red-herrings, misrepresenting statistical data, etc. -- oil companies perfected that art, and now as a result a huge number of voters in the US believe that climate change (doesn't exist|isn't man-made|is unavoidable). And that effort was "fully manual" and carried out without the aid of extensive psychological profiling at the individual level via an ad-surveillance complex. Today, society is almost completely defenseless against the extreme granularity/subtlety of manipulation that ownership of frontier AI models enables, especially when it's armed with even a fraction of the torrent of personal data that's being collected on each of us every day.
That's kinda fair, like it's still useful to prepare a list, but it's also like if you didn't go research your information yourself why would I start from a position of charitability when I read it? When I research something with LLMs, I know to double-check everything myself before I use it as a basis for my thought or repeat it to other people. Knowing an article is AI written forces me to doubt every sentence. Or maybe it's worse, I have to assume nobody cared about the sentence. The old format was a guarantee that someone gave enough shits to put the article together. Relevance comes implicitly bundled in each sentence. It's like someone talking to you in public in that there's often a reason to pay attention.
It's not as though that person is going to say something correct, or ethical, but I've had a lifetime of dealing with human kinds of wrongness. When stuff is wrong, I'll know it's wrong because the article is slanted or wrong because the author was lazy etc., which will let me discount it selectively and still get value from it when, e.g., a slanted author contradicts themselves. Reading an LLM article I have no clue whether the person who put it up even read the whole thing, so when I read sentences, I have no guarantee that the sentence communicates something worth paying attention to. I dislike that ambiguity and would prefer to guarantee that the text is slop by asking a bot myself. Then I know its worth upfront. I'd be fine with it if these sites included a direct statement in bold at the top: HEY THIS IS AI SLOP IF YOU DONT WANT THAT LEAVE. Then I know exactly how to parse it.
I spent way too much time on actually building this — with Claude and double checking everything — so an article I publish can be OK to push out. We aren’t building a bridge for thousands of cars here, it’s an article.
A lot of things are automated and 95% of the time they are correct. The key is knowing whether the last mile is worth fixing, if the consequences are minor.
What the startup does is make a verifiably trusted, zero-configuration, turnkey environment for businesses to move their data into and run AI workloads on, without worrying about their data being stolen, or some Agents doing unpredictable things. The environment is super-secured, with no ssh. It's an appliance, with over-the-air M of N updates. Think more "Tesla car" and less "OpenClaw". That's the foundation.
That environment then builds everything around a graph database, for people, organizations, and even code. We have Grokers that can ingest a codebase statically once, and then present the graph databases as a far better "RAG" than cosine similarity and pinecone vector databases.
At its most basic level: Agents can't be trusted. We want predictable Workflows, not agents. They can do 99% of everything Agents can, if done properly, and the remaining 1% are the dangerous parts https://safebots.ai/agents.html
Just because you use the internet to commit the crime doesn't make it not a crime.
The case being discussed is one where someone might be able to use the product to break the law.
So it’s more like demanding that Home Depot, Walmart, Amazon give the names of every American who’s ever bought a crowbar because the DOJ has heard that some people are breaking into buildings with crowbars.
It has been alleged that the government doesn’t want to prosecute these people who are the ones committing the crimes, they “just want to talk” in order to prosecute the company. Not sure I’d trust that without a signed immunity agreement. If I were forced to speak to these goons, I certainly wouldn’t say a word unless they gave me one of those - regardless of what I was using the gadget for.
This is an app for deliberately causing pollution. The users of that app should be criminally prosecuted and lose their license/spend a few months in prison. The price differential between this device/app and a generic ODB dongle you can buy on Amazon for ~$10 is entirely made up by the criminal features EZ Lynk offers.
The app being software versus hardware doesn't change the legal or moral situation involving it. Much like the DOJ would demand identities of people importing PlayStation 1 modchips back in the 90s, the users of this equally criminal application will be provided to the DOJ.
I think people should have the freedom to do what they want; if you want to have a truck that has horrible exhaust, fine, but we'll have it piped back into your cab for you to breathe instead of the people behind you, and if you want a car that sounds like a thousand go-carts racing down the street fine, but it'll be through headphones destroying your hearing every time you hit the gas.
Hey congrats, you discovered Society! This is what all those rules and shit are all about - your impact on other people, and their impact on you! It turns out that just saying “people should be able to do what they want” doesn’t actually solve anything, because other people also exist, and some of them are you!
I also absolutely loath the coal-rollers and everything about what they do, and if I could snap my fingers and have them lose both their trucks and their licenses to drive with no other consequences beyond their frustration, I'd do it.
Nevertheless, we cannot allow this good reason for which be both agree to be used as a wedge to let the state just wholesale collect data for whatever reason they want.
Very soon, the reason the state wants to wholesale collect data will be for a reason we entirely disagree. That is not an "IF", it is a "WHEN".
So, no, this isn't a justification.
Very soon, that ca
But if they get this thing taken off the market, that’s a huge loss for all of us because there are a ton of things this type of tool enables, many of them things people like us would be very interested in. Such as disabling privacy-invasive telematics, or disabling features like stop start, which I can personally attest has caused significant repair issues with the engine on my last car.
Having access to a tool like this is to a car what having an administrator account is on a PC. Without it, you are merely a guest, not an owner of the system.
For example, the reason we don’t have super efficient turbodiesel subcompacts that are perfectly legal in the EU is thanks to the so called “Clean” air act. Since the law is based on vehicle weight I can go buy a 8,000 pound truck and commute to work alone in it and pollute all I want. But if I want a super clean 80MPG diesel subcompact that’s 1/4 the gross weight supposedly bad for the environment.
But it gets worse in all sorts of ways, the law grandfathers coal plants from all these emissions standards. One coal plant can emit more pollution than millions of trucks. Guess which polluter the government is aggressively pursuing and violating the rights of? You guessed it, car enthusiasts who downloaded an app. Give me a break.
Why is this administration, which is all for coal, oil, and against environmental policies pursuing THIS?
This DOJ is all about pursuing cases for retribution. It could be, they already know someone they want to punish, and already found they're using the device. Or, use it as a source for finding people they want to punish.
This issue is just not directly politically important enough to get the "don't touch" treatment.
Donors and party power brokers aren't rolling coal.