It’s pretty depressing to see every ostensibly American value be replaced by profit-driven utilitarianism. “It improves X problem marginally and it makes money, so why not?” seems to be the reasoning for just about everything anymore. No discussion of values, of the society we want to build, or anything else. That’s the world the tech industry is building.
That's generous. To me it's just felonious corruption possibly bordering on treason.
> and it makes money
It doesn't make money. Which is why these rent seeking entities attach themselves to the federal and state budgets with onerous contracts that they will defend to the death. If they had to actually compete for private business they would be out of money by end of year.
> of the society we want to build
This isn't directionless either. The people doing this have a vision for your society and they're willing to do almost anything to secure that.
> That’s the world the tech industry is building.
Which is why I find monopoly law enforcement so important. "Too big to fail" has become the norm and it seems to me is a required ingredient in order to achieve these outcomes.
Too big to fail shouldn’t even be in the vernacular of our society. Every private business should be able to fail. Let it happen and the let new entrants take over and compete.
Is something does become so large and critical to the functioning of the nation that means we have either failed to trust bust or it needs to be nationalized and made a public service. If Microsoft for example were to fail tomorrow, no way in hell should we bail them out. Let them fail, let others enter the market and pick up the pieces.
You know you're in trouble when someone brings up "treason", the only crime defined specifically in the Constitution, exactly so people wouldn't randomly call everything they don't like "treason".
>It doesn't make money. Which is why these rent seeking entities attach themselves to the federal and state budgets with onerous contracts that they will defend to the death
Flock and friends are just the most flagrant tip of the iceberg. This behavior goes all the way down to your goddamn licensed plumber and his stupid trade group that lobbies to make it illegal for anyone unlicensed to install a gas stove, and it's all crap.
It makes someone money. And the "great thing" about government money is that when you lose it it doesn't come out of your pocket!
Honestly, we should treat these people like we would with any other employee wasting money. They need to justify their expenses. I don't mean with just words, I mean data. Words aren't enough. I can claim all day that painting this red dot on a ceiling with my special paint that costs 10 cents to make and $10k to install just right is an effective solution to stopping terrorists, pedophiles, and even cancer but words aren't proof. And except for the utmost security concerns, this data and justifications should be public. Otherwise there is no accountability.
People often say they don't trust politicians. I'd like to see those words be reflected in actions. It seems we only don't trust certain politicians. And it seems we hand over all trust as soon as they claim they are protecting children and fighting terrorists. I'm sorry, but what class of people are we finding in the Epstein list? Last I checked he wasn't hanging around low class people with no political or monetary influence. So why do we let them use that phrase like some cheat code?
Stopped reading at the silly word "treason". Come on. The word treason has a meaning. This forum is an incredibly rare thing: a place of measured, reasonable, fact-based debate. Let's keep it that way.
Reminds me of the school 'vape detectors' that can also be programmed to listen for "loud noises" and "keywords" but basically handwave away the fact it violates wiretapping laws because they're claiming they're basically doing pattern matching on RAM buffered audio then dumping it.
It really feels like there is no debate anymore when it comes to things actually being implemented, they are just thrust upon us and maybe discussed later after there have already been consequences
> It’s pretty depressing to see every ostensibly American value be replaced by profit-driven utilitarianism
That's the difference between mythos and ethos - they were never the actual values to begin with (profit-driven utilitarianism is exactly American ethos)
Have you read The Technological Republic recently? What you said is an echo of the Palantir CEO's thesis there. In the book he calls for discussion of what "the good life" is. I found it a bit ironic that you seem to come to different conclusions about surveillance.
This country literally had a civil war to prevent rich capitalists from owning other human beings. America’s “values” have always been rooted in profit-driven utilitarianism.
I spent several years doing a bunch of work in my local muni that drastically restricted, and eventually booted (I'm not happy about this; long story) Flock. I feel like my Flock bona fides are pretty strong. I understand people not being comfortable with Flock. I do not understand this idea that it's an obvious red line.
People disagree about this technology. I live in what I believe to be one of the 5 most progressive municipalities in the United States† and I can tell you from recent experience that our community is sharply divided on it.
† (we're a small inner-ring suburb of Chicago; I'm "cheating" in that Chicago as a whole is not one of the most progressive cities in the country, but our 50k person muni is up there with Berkeley and represented by the oldest DSA member in Congress)
i guess you're not part of a group that the current administration has decided is anti-American just because we exist?
this administration is already making proclamations that are not laws (Executive Orders and National Security Directives), which clearly violate 1st Amendment rights to free speech, and yet are being interpreted by states to go after specific groups (may i introduce you to Texas and Florida).
police already exist as an uncontrollable force within most cities who apply the law as they see fit.
do you think a combination of those two things isn't going to result in a tool like this being abused?
if you do think it will be abused and that isn't a red line, that says something about you.
if you don't think it will be abused despite the evidence that police abuse surveillance and the current administration has no respect for due process and that isn't a red line, that also says something about you.
circling back, i hope you never find yourself on the receiving end of the technology you want others to be on the receiving end of.
> I do not understand this idea that it's an obvious red line.
It's an invasive surveillance technology that contributes to building the pervasive surveillance day to day reality.
You're muddying the waters asking "why are you against this" without even hinting at an argument why anyone should not be against this.
You can already see the progression. What was sold as "only listens to gunshots" now no longer listens only to gunshots. The deal constantly gets altered.
I'm surprised you say that. To flip this on its head, what would be your principled argument to accept ambient surveillance?
I don't doubt that license plate readers are used primarily to solve crimes. But the fact that it is collected and can be made available to anyone essentially strips you of privacy in everyday life. Cops are people too; once the tech is available, it is sometimes abused to spy on spouses, neighbors, journalists critical of the local PD, and so on.
There is also a more general argument: an ever-growing range of human activities is surveilled to root out crime, and we can probably agree that the end state of that would be dystopian: it'd be a place where your every word or even every thought is proactively monitored and flagged for wrongthink. We're ways off, but with every decade, we're getting closer. I'm not saying that Flock-listening-to-conversations is the line we can't cross, but if not this, then what?
> Common threads animating this violent conduct include anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.
My birth, as someone who is bi, is now declared to be tantamount to terrorism in the USA. My belief that race shouldn't matter, is now extremism.
The red line, is systems like this, enable those who would happily hunt me down and gut me like a fish. There are preachers in the government, who frequently say that I am not a person. The government is attempting to move to an extrajudicial procedure where it concerns people the government oppose.
We shouldn't gladly be making it easier for a better Dehomag to be put together - that is the red line.
"Flock safety currently solves ... %10 of the crime Nation Wide"
Pretty bold statement without citing data to back that up. I have already received a speeding warning letter from one of these things. Does that count as a crime Flock solved?
I tire of all this binary thinking. It is true that surveillance helps victims. It is also true that the same surveillance can endanger civil liberties. We should have some say in how much we will allow our liberties to be endangered.
Sounds like someone watched too much Person of Interest
If I recall correctly, "If LE looked at Flock in the process of investigating a crime that resulted in an arrest, it counts" (regardless of whether that look had any meaningful impact or any findings at all in the crime, just "in trying to solve this crime, did you run a search on Flock at all").
I don't know and DNGAF about Garry, but that argument is specious and reflects the conflict his business fundamentally creates for him. The smart move would be to be silent, not sure what you "admire".
Isn't it getting harder to say this, hearing this kind of rhetoric? "My bombs only kill the bad guys" is either hopelessly ignorant, or willfully malicious.
This knocked Garry down a solid 4 levels of respect in my own book. What an embarrassing level of thought to publish under one's name on such an important question.
The logic here works both ways. The number of wars prevented by mutually assured destruction, and the number of lives saved is beyond nontrivial, and likely outnumbers the lives lost.
I don't want to get into an argument about the dangers involved, I agree with Taleb about the fat tails of violence, and how standard statistics breaks down when there is infinite variance. My point is just that Tan's point is reasonable, even if there is risk. You need only look at the CCTV usage in the UK to see how you can have a reasonable society with strong surveillance.
Part of why CCTV in the UK is ubiquitous and yet hasn’t so far resulted in what many people describe as a surveillance state is that the cameras are all operated by different people. To hoover up data an agency needs to go ask the owner of every shop along a road for the video, while hoping they’ve not recorded over the tape yet.
That falls apart (and is falling apart) when the cameras are all operated by the same company. Now an agency can just go to that company and request video for an entire town in one go. There’s probably a self-service portal for this because the operator isn’t even based in that town, so has no skin in the game, no need to work out whether they agree this is something the video is needed for.
>You need only look at the CCTV usage in the UK to see how you can have a reasonable society with strong surveillance.
It's not really 'surveillance' as the vast majority of those cameras are privately owned and on private property. The numbers that get thrown around are basically just guesses, given that there are no central records of privately owned CCTV cameras.
The UK has departed from being a reasonable society with strong surveillance. This happened about the same time the police started showing up at 2am for Facebook posts from old ladies.
Irrespective of how you feel about this, its very strange to throw China under the bus here. If Chinese surveillance is so dystopian, don't you think China uses the same exact rhetoric for protecting their police state? After all China went from a bunch of farms to the second largest economy in 30 years.
Either you think mass surveillance is wrong or not.
The slide into hell is steep and slippery. I’m afraid we’re in a dark period of history that’s only going to get darker.
I want proponents of this tech to explain something to me. Why has the rate of stochastic terrorism only increased since the NSA and Palantir started spying on all of us? Isn’t the whole point of this to preempt those kinds of things?
For the record: they prevented essentially nothing in our muni. We're 4.5 square miles sandwiched between the Austin neighborhood of Chicago (our neighbor to the east; many know it by its reputation) one side and Maywood/Broadview/Melrose Park on the other, directly off I-290; the broader geographic area we're in is high crime.
We ran a pilot with the cameras in hot spots (the entrances to the village from I-290, etc).
Just on stolen cars alone, roughly half the flags our PD reacted to turned out to be bogus. In Illinois, Flock runs off the Illinois LEADS database (the "hotlist"). As it turns out: LEADS is stale as fuck: cars are listed stolen in LEADS long after they're returned. And, of course, the demography of owners of stolen cars is sharply biased towards Black and Latino owners (statistically, they live in poorer, higher-crime areas), which meant that Flock was consistently requesting the our PD pull over innocent Black drivers.
We recently kicked Flock out (again: I'm not thrilled about this; long story) over the objections of our PD (who wanted to keep the cameras as essentially a better form of closed-circuit investigatory cameras; they'd essentially stopped responding to Flock alerts over a year ago). In making a case for the cameras, our PD was unable to present a single compelling case of the cameras making a difference for us. What they did manage to do was enforce a bunch of failure-to-appear warrants for neighboring munis; mostly, what Flock did to our PD was turn them into debt collectors.
Whatever else you think about the importance of people showing up to court for their speeding tickets, this wasn't a good use our sworn officers' time.
I don't care. The world is a dangerous place, we make it safer by promoting freedom and education and goodwill and faith in people, not by growing the police state. We do know for a fact however that in the near future anything "think of the children" or "just looking for criminals" ultimately gets turned against all of us as the government grows and grows without limit, our rights will become fewer and fewer with the encroachment. It's not "panic" or "exaggeration" it has happened all through history of nation-states.
> Why has the rate of stochastic terrorism only increased since the NSA and Palantir started spying on all of us?
…is this true? What timespan are we looking at? My understanding was that crime has been on the decline pretty much from the 90s up until 2020. And in 2020 the world changed in a way that kind of made everyone go nuts.
Violent crimes stats look the same pretty much everywhere in the west, there are way more variables than "surveillance on/off", probably a lot of socio economic variables if I had to guess, as it turns out most people who are well fed, have a good life and look forward to a brighter future don't just walk around and commit violent crimes.
I disagree and think it is very reasonable and very possible. Don't put up cameras everywhere, don't put up listening devices everywhere, don't allow the government to buy this information from corporations. There should be a clear line drawn between me or you or a bar putting up a camera and the government gaining access to that data. It's not hard, it really isn't. Saying what you're saying it just trite and not looking at what is possible.
I actually agree with you but I think two things can be true at once.
- There is no reasonable expectation of privacy in public. Any individual with a camera can record you at any time. (Otherwise the entire genre of street photography basically wouldn't exist, and journalists could get arrested for documenting stories in the public interest.)
- We shouldn't have automated cameras recording all the time and feeding that information into a massive database where people's movements can be correlated and tracked across the country.
There's no reasonable expectation of pervasive video/audio capture, permanent recording, and complete AI analysis of all actions in public by all citizens forever, either. But that's the direction in which we're rapidly heading.
>The point of terrorism is that it’s a random act of violence.
That's absolutely incorrect. Terrorism is violence used to achieve political goals.
>"Terrorism is the calculated use of violence or threat of violence against civilians and property to intimidate or coerce a population or government to achieve political, religious, or ideological goals" - a simple google search
It's not random at all. Random acts of violence are not meant to achieve any goal - they spur-of-the-moment, unplanned, etc. Terrorists have a goal, they typically have a target in mind to achieve a goal, it isn't very random at all. Sure random people might get hurt in the incident, but the incident itself isn't typically random. Terrorists usually prepare for it, for months or years. Was flying two planes into the twin towers random? No, it was not. Was blowing up the federal building in Oklahoma City random? No, it was not. These were very carefully selected targets.
Terrorism isn't even an actual action. Its a threat of a random action to the public.
For example, saying "there is a planned school shooting at a school in $metro_city", even though there is absolutely nobody doing that - that causes terror. Doesn't have to be backed by any actions at all.
Like, with the shooting of UHC CEO, there was no grandiose statements or otherwise causing terror ahead of time. It was 3 bullets and leave.
The Stochastic part is that the proponents of terrorism don't know where it will manifest, they just incite and hope someone's listening. In contrast a terrorist act like 9-11 was carefully planned and had approval up Al Qaeda's 'chain of command'.
“Human distress” today, and “human everything” tomorrow. They probably just don't currently have the processing capability or upload bandwidth for all the passersby talking, the only issue is technical and not moral. Flock is in this for money, all morals are turned off --corporations are not really people-- and will sell cops and the government anything they are willing to pay for, including listening for wrongthink. Every time I read a story like this I send EFF or the ACLU another $20
"Listening on normal conversations can uncover serious crimes being executed or planned" - just an imaginary excuse from the future, along the small gradual steps taken, like this one.
1984 was a pretty mild vision of the surveillance state. If tech continues to improve we will not too far into the future have full surveillance around the clock of everybody. No way around it and it will not even cost a lot. The big question is who will have access to the data.
And then they'll start proactively reporting to law enforcement when their AI model thinks what you're saying is "suspicious", just like they do now when it thinks the movement patterns of behavior of your car is suspicious.
Flock's CEO openly says the he intends that "Flock will help eliminate ALL crime", and has shown he has no concerns about how dystopian or Minority Report-esque Flock would need to be to accomplish that mission.
I think you're going to find that working class people living in low and middle income neighborhoods do not agree with you about this. They're unhappy with how police response tends to traumatize the innocent in their neighborhoods, but they're even more unhappy with how police response appears only to halfheartedly address crime, which falls heavier (both in frequency and impact) on lower-income people than it does on the wealthy.
You can read meeting minutes from neighborhood and beat meetings to confirm this (there's probably lots of things you can read to confirm it, but the nerdiest way to do it is to get the raw data.)
A shorter way to say all of this: you're expressing a luxury belief.
Yeah the real issue that most Americans (and probably other countries) is that 0.1% of the populace is wagging the rest of the 99.9% around based on how much they're willing to pay to politicians.
I'm going to go around these things all day screaming, "help, rape!"
It's like that old prank where you order pizzas to someone's house that didn't order them. That's how we used to fight against the man. Now we scream, "rape" randomly in public.
They film us on the street. They film us at traffic signals, from law enforcement vehicles, and drones, parks and even through our doorbell cameras. I don't mean this glibly, or in its entirety, but the big screen watching your every move in 1984 seems not too far off..
And now with the advent of highly capable LLMs, we don't even need humans watching and listening. The data streams can be captured, analyzed, summarized, for any behavior, mention, suspicion, or hallucination of undesirable activity. In a population inured to masked agents snatching people off the street domestically and
semi*-autonomous drone strikes abroad*, our future doesn't look rosy.
This is the key realization which is missing from talks about AI dangers.
Total surveillance used to be impossible because the government needed people to spy on other people. They needed to find somebody willing and pay them.
Now it can be automated.
The war won't be humans vs an AI controlling robots. It'll be humans vs the government and rich people controlling AI controlling robots.
Larry Ellison, major asshole and big ally of the current authoritarian regime:
"Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on," Ellison said, describing what he sees as the benefits from automated oversight from AI and automated alerts for when crime takes place.
Ellison, Vance, Musk, Thiel, Luckey, Zuckerberg and many of the tech oligarch assholes want us to live in their surveillance state.
They're currently making good progress. What will you do to help stop them?
And so plebians vs patricians turns into citizens vs entrepreneurs.
It's not just about who owns the means of production anymore, it's about who owns the means of surveillance (the so called AI).
Two thousand years and humans have learned nothing. Power and money still lead to more power and money which lead to abuse, which after decades gets so bad it leads to revolution. Except this time they want to make revolutions impossible. So they _have_ learned but common people have not.
Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on
These people live in fantasyland bubbles, powered by their unshakeable belief in their own intelligence and "hyper rational" nonsense.
People already film themselves committing crimes. There are a great many people who, over and over again, make decisions in the present that will have strongly negative consequences in their own futures.
"If we watch people they won't do bad things." Sure, in some other universe maybe.
It's funny because they were constantly recorded at epstein's island and yet not on their best behavior...
Recording isn't enough you also need follow-up and if there's anything we've learned over the years is that the police are going to follow up on somebody throwing their soda can into Ellison's yard but not breaking your front door.
Looking beyond the obvious surveillance issues, how long until all the location are made public and people start in with the pranks/activism/etc diverting responders away from real emergencies?
"officers we're just rehearsing a play in a public space ... " or something like that
That's probably exactly the rationalization for this. No expectation of privacy in a public space, and therefore no requirement for warrant to eavesdrop. I may not like it, but the government will find absolutely any way to do things we don't like in spite of the infinite attempts to restrain it from doing so decades or centuries ahead of time.
Get little throwable "annoy-o-tron" devices with a button-cell and a magnet that randomly play little gunshot sounds or fake screams and throw them near the Raven sensors.
That’s a good point. I can tell you from firsthand experience that the abundance of cameras in our society absolutely have a profound effect on the ability of law enforcement to solve individual crimes. To the point you are making how do we transfer those successes into reducing the level of crime?
My thoughts on that are probably not very popular on here and those are to just build larger jails and equip those with drug rehabilitation options. The larger jails allow us to not just kick the people back on the streets immediately but compel steps that help eliminate recidivism. Another source of criminal behavior is mental illness. I have no clues on how to fix that except perhaps concentrate on the causes.
All these cameras and recording devices exist for that same reason Advil exists in that it helps a toothache. Doesn’t really solve the problem but fights the symptoms.
If that was true, there would be no crime in London.
The current system is all downsides - no privacy while the police ignore crimes like bike thefts despite ample CCTV coverage. Worse, CCTV and other surveillance tools are used with glee to target protestors who the government dislike.
Completely agree. Generally speaking, America’s homicide closure rate isn’t great compared to other western countries and is unfortunately trending downward in recent years.
I can certainly understand concerns about privacy but the other sides of this discussion should not be ignored.
How would that work? Assume that I'm willing to bribe the underclass with welfare to prevent crime (hell, assume I'm only worried about the worst types of crime)... how much bribery for how much reduction?
Holy false dichotomy Batman. The amount of crime you can reduce by funding decent law enforcement training and a working law system and just by having a general halfway welfare system dwarfs the effects these privacy invading solutions could ever produces. Absolute lunacy to believe that.
"Never give power to authorities that wouldnt want them to have if someone you didnt like was in charge"
While I fully agree with your statement, until we as a society learn to self regulate and prevent things like orange man happening, its best that we live in a world where people in charge have as little power as possible.
Having adequate law enforcement training and funding, is not mutually exclusive with leveraging technology for more effective enforcement. In fact that's where some of the funding goes. I would be interested in seeing some data reflecting a reduction in crime as a result of increasing the welfare system, as you claim.
It's a problem entirely made up from America's insistence on guns. IMHO that's like when you have a website that serves a few requests per second, and then someone has the bright idea of using Kafka and Kubernetes because reasons, and now you have a horrible mess that requires multiple developers to support and, instead of questioning the original technical decision, everybody instead piles up technical "solutions."
At least nobody actually says "The founding engineers knew everything, our job is protect their original technical decisions, because otherwise our great company will fall."
Regulate guns and all these problems go away. As a bonus, you'll find out they were neither necessary nor useful for defending your rights.
Firearms are regulated in the United States. Quite heavily, in fact. This goes back to the National Firearm Act of 1934, carries through the Gun Control Act of 1968, then loops in the Firearm Owners' Protection Act (FOPA) of 1986 (which included the famous Volkmer-McClure amendment that all but outlawed fully automatic weapons for civilians) and runs through at least the Brady Act of 1993. And that's without getting into the smorgasbord of state, county, and municipal laws that also apply.
The idea that the US is still living in the Wild West era with regards to firearms is a complete myth.
> As a bonus, you'll find out they were neither necessary nor useful for defending your rights.
That's not an experiment I'm willing to indulge in personally. As the old saying goes "I'd rather have my guns and not need them, than need them and not have them."
>The idea that the US is still living in the Wild West era with regards to firearms is a complete myth.
Compared to every other country in the world, including those with private firearm ownership, the US very much is still in the Wild West.
>That's not an experiment I'm willing to indulge in personally.
You're indulging in it now. Your rights are being eroded and nullified daily by an increasingly militarized police force, an ever more pervasive surveillance state and an authoritarian government going off the rails. How are your guns helping?
It really isn't though. Sure I can't go and buy a full auto AR15/AK47 without a special license. However it's pretty easy for me to go buy semi-auto version of that which can also do a lot of damage. There are a few red flag laws like in Texas but they are easily gotten around by private trade, and that's true for most "Red" states. Often no waiting period either if you go to an actual store. It really varies a lot state to state.
Guns aren't the cause of America's crime problems. Guns existing don't make people walk out of homedepot with a cart full of tools or out of a walmart with a TV. Guns don't make people drive recklessly or commit DUIs. Guns don't burglarize peoples houses or make people sell or use drugs.
But the argument doesn’t make any sense. History isn’t full of examples where handguns prevented tyranny. It’s America that is running the experiment, not the rest of the world. And the conclusion is lots of people die as a result, and right now it looks very much like you’re headed toward tyranny anyway.
It’s pretty depressing to see every ostensibly American value be replaced by profit-driven utilitarianism. “It improves X problem marginally and it makes money, so why not?” seems to be the reasoning for just about everything anymore. No discussion of values, of the society we want to build, or anything else. That’s the world the tech industry is building.
> by profit-driven utilitarianism.
That's generous. To me it's just felonious corruption possibly bordering on treason.
> and it makes money
It doesn't make money. Which is why these rent seeking entities attach themselves to the federal and state budgets with onerous contracts that they will defend to the death. If they had to actually compete for private business they would be out of money by end of year.
> of the society we want to build
This isn't directionless either. The people doing this have a vision for your society and they're willing to do almost anything to secure that.
> That’s the world the tech industry is building.
Which is why I find monopoly law enforcement so important. "Too big to fail" has become the norm and it seems to me is a required ingredient in order to achieve these outcomes.
Too big to fail shouldn’t even be in the vernacular of our society. Every private business should be able to fail. Let it happen and the let new entrants take over and compete.
Is something does become so large and critical to the functioning of the nation that means we have either failed to trust bust or it needs to be nationalized and made a public service. If Microsoft for example were to fail tomorrow, no way in hell should we bail them out. Let them fail, let others enter the market and pick up the pieces.
You know you're in trouble when someone brings up "treason", the only crime defined specifically in the Constitution, exactly so people wouldn't randomly call everything they don't like "treason".
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>It doesn't make money. Which is why these rent seeking entities attach themselves to the federal and state budgets with onerous contracts that they will defend to the death
Flock and friends are just the most flagrant tip of the iceberg. This behavior goes all the way down to your goddamn licensed plumber and his stupid trade group that lobbies to make it illegal for anyone unlicensed to install a gas stove, and it's all crap.
It makes someone money. And the "great thing" about government money is that when you lose it it doesn't come out of your pocket!
Honestly, we should treat these people like we would with any other employee wasting money. They need to justify their expenses. I don't mean with just words, I mean data. Words aren't enough. I can claim all day that painting this red dot on a ceiling with my special paint that costs 10 cents to make and $10k to install just right is an effective solution to stopping terrorists, pedophiles, and even cancer but words aren't proof. And except for the utmost security concerns, this data and justifications should be public. Otherwise there is no accountability.
People often say they don't trust politicians. I'd like to see those words be reflected in actions. It seems we only don't trust certain politicians. And it seems we hand over all trust as soon as they claim they are protecting children and fighting terrorists. I'm sorry, but what class of people are we finding in the Epstein list? Last I checked he wasn't hanging around low class people with no political or monetary influence. So why do we let them use that phrase like some cheat code?
Stopped reading at the silly word "treason". Come on. The word treason has a meaning. This forum is an incredibly rare thing: a place of measured, reasonable, fact-based debate. Let's keep it that way.
Reminds me of the school 'vape detectors' that can also be programmed to listen for "loud noises" and "keywords" but basically handwave away the fact it violates wiretapping laws because they're claiming they're basically doing pattern matching on RAM buffered audio then dumping it.
Do you have a link to an analysis of one of these?
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It really feels like there is no debate anymore when it comes to things actually being implemented, they are just thrust upon us and maybe discussed later after there have already been consequences
And by discussion you mean discussion about removing safety/privacy/any other laws in the way the the 'new thing' being implemented.
> It’s pretty depressing to see every ostensibly American value be replaced by profit-driven utilitarianism
That's the difference between mythos and ethos - they were never the actual values to begin with (profit-driven utilitarianism is exactly American ethos)
Have you read The Technological Republic recently? What you said is an echo of the Palantir CEO's thesis there. In the book he calls for discussion of what "the good life" is. I found it a bit ironic that you seem to come to different conclusions about surveillance.
This country literally had a civil war to prevent rich capitalists from owning other human beings. America’s “values” have always been rooted in profit-driven utilitarianism.
> You're thinking Chinese surveillance
> US-based surveillance helps victims and prevents more victims
— Garry Tan, Sept 03, 2025, YC CEO while defending Flock on X.
https://xcancel.com/garrytan/status/1963310592615485955
I admire Garry but not sure why there can’t be a line that we all agree not to cross. No weapon has ever been made that was not used to harm humanity.
I spent several years doing a bunch of work in my local muni that drastically restricted, and eventually booted (I'm not happy about this; long story) Flock. I feel like my Flock bona fides are pretty strong. I understand people not being comfortable with Flock. I do not understand this idea that it's an obvious red line.
People disagree about this technology. I live in what I believe to be one of the 5 most progressive municipalities in the United States† and I can tell you from recent experience that our community is sharply divided on it.
† (we're a small inner-ring suburb of Chicago; I'm "cheating" in that Chicago as a whole is not one of the most progressive cities in the country, but our 50k person muni is up there with Berkeley and represented by the oldest DSA member in Congress)
i guess you're not part of a group that the current administration has decided is anti-American just because we exist?
this administration is already making proclamations that are not laws (Executive Orders and National Security Directives), which clearly violate 1st Amendment rights to free speech, and yet are being interpreted by states to go after specific groups (may i introduce you to Texas and Florida).
police already exist as an uncontrollable force within most cities who apply the law as they see fit.
do you think a combination of those two things isn't going to result in a tool like this being abused?
if you do think it will be abused and that isn't a red line, that says something about you.
if you don't think it will be abused despite the evidence that police abuse surveillance and the current administration has no respect for due process and that isn't a red line, that also says something about you.
circling back, i hope you never find yourself on the receiving end of the technology you want others to be on the receiving end of.
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> I do not understand this idea that it's an obvious red line.
It's an invasive surveillance technology that contributes to building the pervasive surveillance day to day reality.
You're muddying the waters asking "why are you against this" without even hinting at an argument why anyone should not be against this.
You can already see the progression. What was sold as "only listens to gunshots" now no longer listens only to gunshots. The deal constantly gets altered.
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> do not understand this idea that it's an obvious red line
ALPRs are not an obvious red line. Federal police ignoring court orders with microphones on street corners is.
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Constantly surveilling your citizens without cause doesn't strike you as an obvious red line?
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I'm surprised you say that. To flip this on its head, what would be your principled argument to accept ambient surveillance?
I don't doubt that license plate readers are used primarily to solve crimes. But the fact that it is collected and can be made available to anyone essentially strips you of privacy in everyday life. Cops are people too; once the tech is available, it is sometimes abused to spy on spouses, neighbors, journalists critical of the local PD, and so on.
There is also a more general argument: an ever-growing range of human activities is surveilled to root out crime, and we can probably agree that the end state of that would be dystopian: it'd be a place where your every word or even every thought is proactively monitored and flagged for wrongthink. We're ways off, but with every decade, we're getting closer. I'm not saying that Flock-listening-to-conversations is the line we can't cross, but if not this, then what?
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> Common threads animating this violent conduct include anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.
> https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/coun...
My birth, as someone who is bi, is now declared to be tantamount to terrorism in the USA. My belief that race shouldn't matter, is now extremism.
The red line, is systems like this, enable those who would happily hunt me down and gut me like a fish. There are preachers in the government, who frequently say that I am not a person. The government is attempting to move to an extrajudicial procedure where it concerns people the government oppose.
We shouldn't gladly be making it easier for a better Dehomag to be put together - that is the red line.
"Flock safety currently solves ... %10 of the crime Nation Wide"
Pretty bold statement without citing data to back that up. I have already received a speeding warning letter from one of these things. Does that count as a crime Flock solved?
I tire of all this binary thinking. It is true that surveillance helps victims. It is also true that the same surveillance can endanger civil liberties. We should have some say in how much we will allow our liberties to be endangered.
Sounds like someone watched too much Person of Interest
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1839578/
If I recall correctly, "If LE looked at Flock in the process of investigating a crime that resulted in an arrest, it counts" (regardless of whether that look had any meaningful impact or any findings at all in the crime, just "in trying to solve this crime, did you run a search on Flock at all").
Flock cameras don't issue citations at all and don't appear to include speed radar.
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I don't know and DNGAF about Garry, but that argument is specious and reflects the conflict his business fundamentally creates for him. The smart move would be to be silent, not sure what you "admire".
A CEO of YC - the site you're currently on...
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> I admire Garry
Isn't it getting harder to say this, hearing this kind of rhetoric? "My bombs only kill the bad guys" is either hopelessly ignorant, or willfully malicious.
Way too many people in this industry value professional achievement over ethical considerations. And in doing so provide cover for obvious bad actors.
This knocked Garry down a solid 4 levels of respect in my own book. What an embarrassing level of thought to publish under one's name on such an important question.
The logic here works both ways. The number of wars prevented by mutually assured destruction, and the number of lives saved is beyond nontrivial, and likely outnumbers the lives lost.
I don't want to get into an argument about the dangers involved, I agree with Taleb about the fat tails of violence, and how standard statistics breaks down when there is infinite variance. My point is just that Tan's point is reasonable, even if there is risk. You need only look at the CCTV usage in the UK to see how you can have a reasonable society with strong surveillance.
Part of why CCTV in the UK is ubiquitous and yet hasn’t so far resulted in what many people describe as a surveillance state is that the cameras are all operated by different people. To hoover up data an agency needs to go ask the owner of every shop along a road for the video, while hoping they’ve not recorded over the tape yet.
That falls apart (and is falling apart) when the cameras are all operated by the same company. Now an agency can just go to that company and request video for an entire town in one go. There’s probably a self-service portal for this because the operator isn’t even based in that town, so has no skin in the game, no need to work out whether they agree this is something the video is needed for.
>You need only look at the CCTV usage in the UK to see how you can have a reasonable society with strong surveillance.
It's not really 'surveillance' as the vast majority of those cameras are privately owned and on private property. The numbers that get thrown around are basically just guesses, given that there are no central records of privately owned CCTV cameras.
The UK has departed from being a reasonable society with strong surveillance. This happened about the same time the police started showing up at 2am for Facebook posts from old ladies.
It’s dirty, extreme class divide , people don’t give a shit, you see young people homeless begging everywhere.
The UK is a dystopian society, an example on what not to do.
I am not from the UK, I just get forced to work there. I’ve been here for 2 out of the last 7 years.
Good music though
Why do you admire him? Him and his ilk are responsible for the dystopia we're barreling towards.
What's to prevent US-based surveillance from becoming Chinese surveillance?
Also, what reason do you think China gives for its surveillance? It's the same: "protecting victims", "protecting citizens", "public safety".
> I admire Garry
Why?
Irrespective of how you feel about this, its very strange to throw China under the bus here. If Chinese surveillance is so dystopian, don't you think China uses the same exact rhetoric for protecting their police state? After all China went from a bunch of farms to the second largest economy in 30 years.
Either you think mass surveillance is wrong or not.
He's not an oligarch in China, though, so of course theirs is bad.
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The slide into hell is steep and slippery. I’m afraid we’re in a dark period of history that’s only going to get darker.
I want proponents of this tech to explain something to me. Why has the rate of stochastic terrorism only increased since the NSA and Palantir started spying on all of us? Isn’t the whole point of this to preempt those kinds of things?
What is the counterfactual? Without knowing the number of attacks prevented by these tools, we don't know what the baseline would be.
For the record: they prevented essentially nothing in our muni. We're 4.5 square miles sandwiched between the Austin neighborhood of Chicago (our neighbor to the east; many know it by its reputation) one side and Maywood/Broadview/Melrose Park on the other, directly off I-290; the broader geographic area we're in is high crime.
We ran a pilot with the cameras in hot spots (the entrances to the village from I-290, etc).
Just on stolen cars alone, roughly half the flags our PD reacted to turned out to be bogus. In Illinois, Flock runs off the Illinois LEADS database (the "hotlist"). As it turns out: LEADS is stale as fuck: cars are listed stolen in LEADS long after they're returned. And, of course, the demography of owners of stolen cars is sharply biased towards Black and Latino owners (statistically, they live in poorer, higher-crime areas), which meant that Flock was consistently requesting the our PD pull over innocent Black drivers.
We recently kicked Flock out (again: I'm not thrilled about this; long story) over the objections of our PD (who wanted to keep the cameras as essentially a better form of closed-circuit investigatory cameras; they'd essentially stopped responding to Flock alerts over a year ago). In making a case for the cameras, our PD was unable to present a single compelling case of the cameras making a difference for us. What they did manage to do was enforce a bunch of failure-to-appear warrants for neighboring munis; mostly, what Flock did to our PD was turn them into debt collectors.
Whatever else you think about the importance of people showing up to court for their speeding tickets, this wasn't a good use our sworn officers' time.
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We also don't know the number of attacks indirectly caused by these tools, by instilling a more fraught social environment.
I don't care. The world is a dangerous place, we make it safer by promoting freedom and education and goodwill and faith in people, not by growing the police state. We do know for a fact however that in the near future anything "think of the children" or "just looking for criminals" ultimately gets turned against all of us as the government grows and grows without limit, our rights will become fewer and fewer with the encroachment. It's not "panic" or "exaggeration" it has happened all through history of nation-states.
> Why has the rate of stochastic terrorism only increased since the NSA and Palantir started spying on all of us?
…is this true? What timespan are we looking at? My understanding was that crime has been on the decline pretty much from the 90s up until 2020. And in 2020 the world changed in a way that kind of made everyone go nuts.
Violent crimes stats look the same pretty much everywhere in the west, there are way more variables than "surveillance on/off", probably a lot of socio economic variables if I had to guess, as it turns out most people who are well fed, have a good life and look forward to a brighter future don't just walk around and commit violent crimes.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mirta-Gordon/publicatio...
Let’s start with school shootings which only started AFTER the surveillance apparatus went online.
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There is no reasonable expectation of privacy in public. That includes being recorded on video, or audio.
I disagree and think it is very reasonable and very possible. Don't put up cameras everywhere, don't put up listening devices everywhere, don't allow the government to buy this information from corporations. There should be a clear line drawn between me or you or a bar putting up a camera and the government gaining access to that data. It's not hard, it really isn't. Saying what you're saying it just trite and not looking at what is possible.
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I actually agree with you but I think two things can be true at once.
- There is no reasonable expectation of privacy in public. Any individual with a camera can record you at any time. (Otherwise the entire genre of street photography basically wouldn't exist, and journalists could get arrested for documenting stories in the public interest.)
- We shouldn't have automated cameras recording all the time and feeding that information into a massive database where people's movements can be correlated and tracked across the country.
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There's no reasonable expectation of pervasive video/audio capture, permanent recording, and complete AI analysis of all actions in public by all citizens forever, either. But that's the direction in which we're rapidly heading.
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> stochastic terrorism
This is a bugbear for me. The point of terrorism is that it’s a random act of violence.
>The point of terrorism is that it’s a random act of violence.
That's absolutely incorrect. Terrorism is violence used to achieve political goals.
>"Terrorism is the calculated use of violence or threat of violence against civilians and property to intimidate or coerce a population or government to achieve political, religious, or ideological goals" - a simple google search
It's not random at all. Random acts of violence are not meant to achieve any goal - they spur-of-the-moment, unplanned, etc. Terrorists have a goal, they typically have a target in mind to achieve a goal, it isn't very random at all. Sure random people might get hurt in the incident, but the incident itself isn't typically random. Terrorists usually prepare for it, for months or years. Was flying two planes into the twin towers random? No, it was not. Was blowing up the federal building in Oklahoma City random? No, it was not. These were very carefully selected targets.
The stochastic part is who is doing it (random people being incited) vs an organized cell who has members engaging in random acts of violence
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Stochastic terrorism usually refers to incitement, afaict.
Edit: it's got a Wikipedia article, which says it's a particular kind of incitement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_terrorism
Terrorism isn't even an actual action. Its a threat of a random action to the public.
For example, saying "there is a planned school shooting at a school in $metro_city", even though there is absolutely nobody doing that - that causes terror. Doesn't have to be backed by any actions at all.
Like, with the shooting of UHC CEO, there was no grandiose statements or otherwise causing terror ahead of time. It was 3 bullets and leave.
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The Stochastic part is that the proponents of terrorism don't know where it will manifest, they just incite and hope someone's listening. In contrast a terrorist act like 9-11 was carefully planned and had approval up Al Qaeda's 'chain of command'.
That should be Flock (YC 2017)
There are a lot of ideas that are bad for society but great for business. YC is business first, always.
Yeah, and yet YC has backed literal scams on some exuberance of hope (uBiome)
We stopped putting that in submission titles years ago. An exception is for Launch HNs.
Yes. My intention was how it should be in mind space rather than literally.
“Human distress” today, and “human everything” tomorrow. They probably just don't currently have the processing capability or upload bandwidth for all the passersby talking, the only issue is technical and not moral. Flock is in this for money, all morals are turned off --corporations are not really people-- and will sell cops and the government anything they are willing to pay for, including listening for wrongthink. Every time I read a story like this I send EFF or the ACLU another $20
> will sell cops and the government anything they are willing to pay for
Anything they are willing to force us to pay for.
"Listening on normal conversations can uncover serious crimes being executed or planned" - just an imaginary excuse from the future, along the small gradual steps taken, like this one.
1984 was a pretty mild vision of the surveillance state. If tech continues to improve we will not too far into the future have full surveillance around the clock of everybody. No way around it and it will not even cost a lot. The big question is who will have access to the data.
The logical next step is replace the microphones with the ones we carry around in our pockets every day: https://youtube.com/watch?v=IRELLH86Edo
1960: "I have a great idea! lets have every person in the country carry a radio tracking beacon!" "That'll never fly!" 2012: "I can has TWO iphones??"
Surely this will never be used for evil
They promised. Possibly even pinky promised!
(hackers too, to never steal data from them)
"We will all be on our best behaviour because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on"
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/VA5hHllB4Xw
And then they'll start proactively reporting to law enforcement when their AI model thinks what you're saying is "suspicious", just like they do now when it thinks the movement patterns of behavior of your car is suspicious.
Flock's CEO openly says the he intends that "Flock will help eliminate ALL crime", and has shown he has no concerns about how dystopian or Minority Report-esque Flock would need to be to accomplish that mission.
I’m not worried that much about random acts of violence from desperate or misguided strangers.
The crime I want eliminated is that of the elite.
I think you're going to find that working class people living in low and middle income neighborhoods do not agree with you about this. They're unhappy with how police response tends to traumatize the innocent in their neighborhoods, but they're even more unhappy with how police response appears only to halfheartedly address crime, which falls heavier (both in frequency and impact) on lower-income people than it does on the wealthy.
You can read meeting minutes from neighborhood and beat meetings to confirm this (there's probably lots of things you can read to confirm it, but the nerdiest way to do it is to get the raw data.)
A shorter way to say all of this: you're expressing a luxury belief.
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Yeah the real issue that most Americans (and probably other countries) is that 0.1% of the populace is wagging the rest of the 99.9% around based on how much they're willing to pay to politicians.
When one cares not about false positives, eliminating all true positives is trivial.
I'm going to go around these things all day screaming, "help, rape!"
It's like that old prank where you order pizzas to someone's house that didn't order them. That's how we used to fight against the man. Now we scream, "rape" randomly in public.
What a time to be alive.
They film us on the street. They film us at traffic signals, from law enforcement vehicles, and drones, parks and even through our doorbell cameras. I don't mean this glibly, or in its entirety, but the big screen watching your every move in 1984 seems not too far off..
And now with the advent of highly capable LLMs, we don't even need humans watching and listening. The data streams can be captured, analyzed, summarized, for any behavior, mention, suspicion, or hallucination of undesirable activity. In a population inured to masked agents snatching people off the street domestically and semi*-autonomous drone strikes abroad*, our future doesn't look rosy.
* for now
This is the key realization which is missing from talks about AI dangers.
Total surveillance used to be impossible because the government needed people to spy on other people. They needed to find somebody willing and pay them.
Now it can be automated.
The war won't be humans vs an AI controlling robots. It'll be humans vs the government and rich people controlling AI controlling robots.
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Exactly. Roll it out first to see who is being "productive" at work.
At least we don't have listening devices in our homes!
Yeah, that would be so sad... Hey Alexa, play Despacito 2.
Hey, Alexa?
Seems like we need more peaceful citizen defense tools.
ICE will go after you for organizing such tools (unrelated to immigration cases): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45475525
Larry Ellison, major asshole and big ally of the current authoritarian regime:
"Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on," Ellison said, describing what he sees as the benefits from automated oversight from AI and automated alerts for when crime takes place.
Ellison, Vance, Musk, Thiel, Luckey, Zuckerberg and many of the tech oligarch assholes want us to live in their surveillance state.
They're currently making good progress. What will you do to help stop them?
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/09/omnip...
> What will you do to help stop them?
- Support https://eff.org, https://fsf.org
- Use GNU/Linux phones (Librem 5 and Pinephone)
- Use https://qubes-os.org on desktop.
And so plebians vs patricians turns into citizens vs entrepreneurs.
It's not just about who owns the means of production anymore, it's about who owns the means of surveillance (the so called AI).
Two thousand years and humans have learned nothing. Power and money still lead to more power and money which lead to abuse, which after decades gets so bad it leads to revolution. Except this time they want to make revolutions impossible. So they _have_ learned but common people have not.
And this guy is going to own TikTok through a deal with Trump, he's literally going to be the thought police
Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on
These people live in fantasyland bubbles, powered by their unshakeable belief in their own intelligence and "hyper rational" nonsense.
People already film themselves committing crimes. There are a great many people who, over and over again, make decisions in the present that will have strongly negative consequences in their own futures.
"If we watch people they won't do bad things." Sure, in some other universe maybe.
It's funny because they were constantly recorded at epstein's island and yet not on their best behavior...
Recording isn't enough you also need follow-up and if there's anything we've learned over the years is that the police are going to follow up on somebody throwing their soda can into Ellison's yard but not breaking your front door.
With WiFi even being able to detect our heartbeats [0], we'll get to enjoy dynamic pricing on our insurance on a second-by-second basis!
Remember kids, if the invasive tracking is done by the government and a couple of companies, then it's the good kind of dystopia! /s
[0]: https://news.ucsc.edu/2025/09/pulse-fi-wifi-heart-rate/
Looking beyond the obvious surveillance issues, how long until all the location are made public and people start in with the pranks/activism/etc diverting responders away from real emergencies?
"officers we're just rehearsing a play in a public space ... " or something like that
Is there an audio stream that tends to ruin speech recognition?
Play multiple lyrical songs at the same time? Bonus for multi-language.
1. This is illegal eavesdropping
2. I will start screaming at the Flock cameras
Next week: App that emits frequencies that block Flock microphones
2 weeks from now: Google and Apple remove AntiFlock apps; developers arrested
(Only slightly sarcastic. We should be talking about ways of making these things useless, as well as illegal)
EMP devices.
1. This is illegal eavesdropping
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/plain_view_doctrine_0
might apply, though IANAL
That's probably exactly the rationalization for this. No expectation of privacy in a public space, and therefore no requirement for warrant to eavesdrop. I may not like it, but the government will find absolutely any way to do things we don't like in spite of the infinite attempts to restrain it from doing so decades or centuries ahead of time.
There are eavesdropping laws specifically about audio recording. Not sure if it's federal or state by state.
Get little throwable "annoy-o-tron" devices with a button-cell and a magnet that randomly play little gunshot sounds or fake screams and throw them near the Raven sensors.
Seems we are not far away from full-on 1984.
How's this different than shotspotter?
It’s webscale
Don't worry. If LEOs are dispatched reacting to a Flock event, they will be using Carbyne, a company founded by Epstein and Ehud Barak.
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Disgusting.
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I'm yet to be convinced that the removal of privacy has any effect on the level of crime, nor do I believe that to be the primary motivation for it
Nor a viable solution to the problem.
That’s a good point. I can tell you from firsthand experience that the abundance of cameras in our society absolutely have a profound effect on the ability of law enforcement to solve individual crimes. To the point you are making how do we transfer those successes into reducing the level of crime?
My thoughts on that are probably not very popular on here and those are to just build larger jails and equip those with drug rehabilitation options. The larger jails allow us to not just kick the people back on the streets immediately but compel steps that help eliminate recidivism. Another source of criminal behavior is mental illness. I have no clues on how to fix that except perhaps concentrate on the causes.
All these cameras and recording devices exist for that same reason Advil exists in that it helps a toothache. Doesn’t really solve the problem but fights the symptoms.
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If that was true, there would be no crime in London.
The current system is all downsides - no privacy while the police ignore crimes like bike thefts despite ample CCTV coverage. Worse, CCTV and other surveillance tools are used with glee to target protestors who the government dislike.
Completely agree. Generally speaking, America’s homicide closure rate isn’t great compared to other western countries and is unfortunately trending downward in recent years.
I can certainly understand concerns about privacy but the other sides of this discussion should not be ignored.
https://www.npr.org/2023/04/29/1172775448/people-murder-unso...
Before discussing trade-offs between those two, what about prevention of crime?
How would that work? Assume that I'm willing to bribe the underclass with welfare to prevent crime (hell, assume I'm only worried about the worst types of crime)... how much bribery for how much reduction?
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Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
When do we start removing white-collar crime?
What crime? The system is working as designed. /i
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Holy false dichotomy Batman. The amount of crime you can reduce by funding decent law enforcement training and a working law system and just by having a general halfway welfare system dwarfs the effects these privacy invading solutions could ever produces. Absolute lunacy to believe that.
"Never give power to authorities that wouldnt want them to have if someone you didnt like was in charge"
While I fully agree with your statement, until we as a society learn to self regulate and prevent things like orange man happening, its best that we live in a world where people in charge have as little power as possible.
But we want to build fancy tech and not listen to those annoying humanists, so no
Having adequate law enforcement training and funding, is not mutually exclusive with leveraging technology for more effective enforcement. In fact that's where some of the funding goes. I would be interested in seeing some data reflecting a reduction in crime as a result of increasing the welfare system, as you claim.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flock_Safety#Efficacy
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It is now fair game to destroy their illegal surveillance devices. Please do.
It's a problem entirely made up from America's insistence on guns. IMHO that's like when you have a website that serves a few requests per second, and then someone has the bright idea of using Kafka and Kubernetes because reasons, and now you have a horrible mess that requires multiple developers to support and, instead of questioning the original technical decision, everybody instead piles up technical "solutions."
At least nobody actually says "The founding engineers knew everything, our job is protect their original technical decisions, because otherwise our great company will fall."
Regulate guns and all these problems go away. As a bonus, you'll find out they were neither necessary nor useful for defending your rights.
> Regulate guns and all these problems go away.
Firearms are regulated in the United States. Quite heavily, in fact. This goes back to the National Firearm Act of 1934, carries through the Gun Control Act of 1968, then loops in the Firearm Owners' Protection Act (FOPA) of 1986 (which included the famous Volkmer-McClure amendment that all but outlawed fully automatic weapons for civilians) and runs through at least the Brady Act of 1993. And that's without getting into the smorgasbord of state, county, and municipal laws that also apply.
The idea that the US is still living in the Wild West era with regards to firearms is a complete myth.
> As a bonus, you'll find out they were neither necessary nor useful for defending your rights.
That's not an experiment I'm willing to indulge in personally. As the old saying goes "I'd rather have my guns and not need them, than need them and not have them."
>The idea that the US is still living in the Wild West era with regards to firearms is a complete myth.
Compared to every other country in the world, including those with private firearm ownership, the US very much is still in the Wild West.
>That's not an experiment I'm willing to indulge in personally.
You're indulging in it now. Your rights are being eroded and nullified daily by an increasingly militarized police force, an ever more pervasive surveillance state and an authoritarian government going off the rails. How are your guns helping?
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It really isn't though. Sure I can't go and buy a full auto AR15/AK47 without a special license. However it's pretty easy for me to go buy semi-auto version of that which can also do a lot of damage. There are a few red flag laws like in Texas but they are easily gotten around by private trade, and that's true for most "Red" states. Often no waiting period either if you go to an actual store. It really varies a lot state to state.
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There are more civilian guns than civilians in the US.
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Guns aren't the cause of America's crime problems. Guns existing don't make people walk out of homedepot with a cart full of tools or out of a walmart with a TV. Guns don't make people drive recklessly or commit DUIs. Guns don't burglarize peoples houses or make people sell or use drugs.
We're not going to regulate guns this way, so this point, valid or not, isn't meaningful to US policy.
Dangerous freedom > peaceful slavery
The non-American mind simply can't comprehend, and that's okay.
But the argument doesn’t make any sense. History isn’t full of examples where handguns prevented tyranny. It’s America that is running the experiment, not the rest of the world. And the conclusion is lots of people die as a result, and right now it looks very much like you’re headed toward tyranny anyway.