> “As much as Flock tries to be good stewards of the powerful tech we sell, this shows it really is up to users to serve their communities in good faith. Selling to law-enforcement is tricky because we assume they will use our tech to do good and then just have to hope we're right.”
> The Flock source added “Even if Flock took a stance on permitted use-cases, a motivated user could simply lie about why they're performing a search. We can never 100% know how or why our tools are being used.” A second Flock source said they believe Flock should develop a better idea of what its clients are using the company’s technology for.
In other words, why bother with safeguards when they'll just lie to us anyways?
> Even if Flock took a stance on permitted use-cases, a motivated user could simply lie about why they're performing a search. We can never 100% know how or why our tools are being used.
I think this is a legitimate problem.
But...isn't this what warrants are for? With a warrant, the police have to say why they want to perform a search to a judge, under threat of perjury. They have a powerful incentive not to lie.
So...should warrants be required for this kind of Flock data also? Couldn't Flock set a policy that these searches are performed only under warrant? Or a law be enacted saying the same? I imagine it would make Flock much less attractive to their potential customers, and searches would be performed much less often. [1] So it's not something Flock is going to do on their own. I think we'd need to create the pressure, by opposing purchases of Flock or by specifically asking our elected representatives to create such a law.
[1] If I'm being generous, because of the extra friction/work/delay. If I'm being less generous, because they have no legitimate reason a judge would approve.
> So...should warrants be required for this kind of Flock data also?
Based on another incident [0] I feel Flock's explanation for their actions boils down to:
1. "We are familiar with the customer the person claimed to be an agent for."
2. "We didn't know whether the person was doing something illegal with the data... And we don't want to know, and we don't try to find out."
3. "They didn't force us. They gave us money! We like money!"
As you might guess, I don't find these points especially compelling or exculpating. Certainly nothing that would/should stand up against state or local laws that prohibit the data being shared this way.
Any law would upset the third-party data broker constitutional runaround that the government has become addicted to. It is already a breach of privacy. We just need legislators willing to serve the public and ignore the lobbyists and executive.
Flock's entire business model is a flagrant violation of the 4th amendment. What Flock does for their core business is called "stalking", which is a crime.
The issue here is not that the law is inadequate to resolve this problem. The issue is that the current administration has chosen to collude with private corporations that flagrantly violate the law, thereby replacing our entire judiciary system with a protection racket.
Please don't be generous. Fascists depend on our patience to insulate them from consequences.
Eh, if a cop sat at a Dunkin Donuts and wrote down every license plate they saw that wouldn't require a warrant.
Why should contracting that out to a private company require a warrant?
Flock isn't say Google which collects location data because it needs it for Google Maps to function. Flock is only here because the local government paid it to setup equipment.
It's really an issue for the local community. Do you want your local tax dollars going to support parks or tracking individuals?
We knew this going in with Flock: that with full sharing to Flock's network of law enforcement agencies, we'd be trusting our data to every one of tens of thousands of tiny, often completely unaccountable police departments around the country, many of whom wouldn't give the slightest possible fuck about whether they were contravening our own department's general orders. That's why we disabled sharing, first to any out-of-state departments, and then altogether; PDs that wanted data from us could simply call us up on the phone like human beings.
It was implied, both by our department and, more vaguely, by Flock, that sharing was reciprocal: if we didn't enable it, other departments wouldn't share with us. That's false; not only is it false, but apparently, to my understanding, Flock has (or had?) an offering for PDs to get access to the data without even hosting cameras of their own.
That obviously leaves Flock's own attestations of client data separation, and I get the cynicism there too, but basically every municipality in the country relies on those same kinds of attestations from a myriad of vendors, and unlike Flock those vendors have basically nothing to lose (since nobody is paying attention to them).
I think you can reasonably go either way on all this stuff. But you can't run these stacks in their default configuration with their default sharing and without special-purpose ordinances and general ordinances governing them.
I write this mostly to encourage people who have strong opinions about this stuff to get engaged locally. I did, I'm not particularly good at it (I'm a loud message board nerd), and I got what I believe to be the only ALPR General Order in Chicagoland written and what I know to be the only ACLU CCOPS ordinance in Illinois passed.
> I write this mostly to encourage people who have strong opinions about this stuff to get engaged locally. I did, I'm not particularly good at it (I'm a loud message board nerd), and I got what I believe to be the only ALPR General Order in Chicagoland written and what I know to be the only ACLU CCOPS ordinance in Illinois passed.
What’s an ALPR General Order and a ALCU CCOPS ordinance? How did you get them passed?
For instance, just making it a rule that they are not allowed to lie to you about how things are being used -- we know that won't work because if they're willing to lie they are also willing to ignore contract violations.
Instead, put in a rule that says misuse of the system costs $X for each documented case. Now the vendor has a financial incentive to detect misuse, and the purchasers have a FINANCIAL incentive to curb misuse by their own employees.
It's not a magic fix, but it's the sort of thing that might help.
Better: require them to purchase misuse violation insurance.
Make a neutral third party liable for the cost and then that third party which is mostly disinterested gets to calculate risk and compliance procedures.
The only way we're really going to get data handling under control is to give the victims of data abuse financial beneficiaries of liability through the courts and insurance companies.
I would ask them “why bother with DUI laws if some people will drive drunk anyway?”
If the only way we can have rules is if they are 100% followed 100% of the time, then we wouldn’t have any rules to begin with. Very publicly revoke the licenses of people who break your rules. You can’t stop everybody, but you can do something. This is just a lame excuse for in action.
I want to know how much Flock paid the guy who came up with, "How could we know that building a nationwide panopticon for police would be used for police-state things?"
Imagine being the person who talks to the media on behalf of the police mass surveillance company. Like man you fucked up in this life if that’s where you ended up.
It's the same in the UK. I first became aware of it after the Jean Charles de Menezes shooting. He was the innocent electrician shot in 2005 as part of a terrorism panic. Every detail released by the police to justify the killing turned out to be a lie. Having paid attention since then I've come to realise it is standard practice.
Police behaviour in public inquiries (usually stonewalling and obfuscating) has been so bad that the government has just passed a law placing a "duty of candour" on the police and other civil servants, with criminal penalties for serious breaches.
That was less than a month ago so we'll see how it works.
Similar story with the infamous NYC case of Kitty Genovese in the mid 1960s, whom was sexually assaulted and murdered. The police claimed dozens of people heard and saw her screams, but nobody did anything. The truth was many people called the police, but nobody came. It was an essentially a coverup, but it did end up becoming a symbol of NYC’s moral decay. The narrative wasn’t officially challenged until many years later. (There is a recent is documentary out there where her brother digs into it all).
The alternative is sometimes life shattering cognitive dissonance and then a constant feeling of dread. So much of the human condition is willful ignorance it's kind of amazing anything works.
The majority of the global population still abides faith based story mode narratives.
American conviction in religion has fallen ~20% since 2000 but that still leaves ~60% bought into skywizards as media owned by older more religious intentionally helps peddle Newspeak that obfuscates attempts to bring science to the masses.
There's a difference between trusting cops, trusting the high-level branches of the US Government, and trusting the various departments of the US bureaucracy.
For example, I trust NOAA or NASA, used to trust the CDC, would never trust the CIA or FBI (because cops).
Distrust isn't a single thing. Distrusting cops is an entirely different kind of distrust than distrusting RFK Jr. RFK Jr kills people with pseudoscience. Cops go hands-on. I don't know enough about the statistics to compare the magnitude of killing. But I do know that the solutions would have to be completely different.
>It's amazing to me that people will still trust police narratives.
I wouldn't care if they were at least consistent.
What I take issue with is that the same individuals will toss the official narrative if it contradicts their viewpoint. That is a personal moral failing.
The Orwellian doublespeak is just a sign of the requisite cognitive dissonance surfacing whenever it conflicts with the necessity of maintaining in-group/out-group dynamics.
I’m not sure that I buy that argument but either way the data clearly shows crime has fallen consistently over the decades. Even over the last couple of years. This narrative that cities (of course only Democrat-dominated cities) are so crime ridden that they are basically under siege is completely manufactured.
The governor of my state went out of his way to ask Trump to come crack down on a few cities (all overwhelmingly or somewhat leaning blue) despite drastic drops in crime rates over the last five years. Ignoring the fact that he is the governor and has a super majority Republican legislature, meaning that ultimately he is saying “daddy Trump come save me I can’t do my job uwu,” he also very conspicuously left his home city off the list despite it sharing a similar population size and crime rate as another major city on the list.
It’s all a sham. The data does not bear their message out.
Crime is actually at its lowest point in 40 years, but you wouldn't know it looking at the constant fearmongering by legacy media and conservative politicians alike.
As a person old enough to remember the War on Drugs, I can agree that people who think things are worse now must have spent the late '80s/early '90s sheltering in libraries or something.
Sigh. I really do not want to get into the politicized language around abortion. Especially in this specific case, where we do not know many relevant facts. Let's just use the language in the police report:
> the abortion/miscarriage
Presumably that is neutral enough?
Back to my original point, which is that crime is not out of control. You say that
> Police believed they had identified a crime and investigated it
which is at odds with what the police say:
> No charges were ever filed against the woman and she was never under criminal investigation by Johnson County.
I am guessing the police have more information about this than you do.
The police creeped on a woman, invaded her extremely personal business, wrote reports about it with knowledge those reports could become public, without any of it being in service of crime reduction.
Edit: I'm not fully up-to-date on the law, but my understanding is that there is no justiciable crime in Texas around a woman herself terminating a pregnancy using medical means. Police could have witnessed her consuming the medication and there still would be nothing to charge as no crime would have occurred.
There actually doesn't have to be a disconnect between the narratives.
It could be possible that crime is out of control because police are doing these things instead of their actual job.
Compare the efforts police will go through to play with their toys vs the efforts they will go through to actually solve crime.
Despite living in a literal panopticon where the cops can buy infinite tracking information on anyone and even on just a query, violent crime clearance rates are abysmal.
Police just don't do their jobs.
edit: I do not actually believe crime is out of control, because it is not. I believe that cops are bad actors and liars.
When you put tools like databases or surveillance cameras into the hands of people, two things are guaranteed: a certain number of those people will use the tools for the wrong purpose, and a certain number of those bad users will lie about it.
Ironic that a site offering anti-surveillance resources is itself hosted behind the servers of Cloudflare, a US-based company (read: must turn over all data to NSA whenever they receive a national security letter, if they're not already eagerly, voluntarily turning over that data) that MiTM's a substantial portion of all global internet traffic.
I think bored cops are a much bigger threat to Democracy than most crime. It's ironic that the less crime and the more efficient policing the less free we become.
You don't deny that in the US, criminals do much more damage (death, injury, PTSD, destruction of property, unjust denial of use of property, the opportunity cost of avoiding certain places because of the danger of crime) than police do; do you?
In your answer, please stick to to concrete harms to actual people (living now or in the future)
excluding any harm that is a harm only to an abstraction like Democracy or Freedom.
"in the US" Cause the US is the whole world? Cops may be less of a threat to Democracy in a third-world country, such as the US, precisely because rampant crime means they have less time to spend curtailing the freedoms of mostly law-abiding people.
Over hiring of cops post-COVID is a major issue. Most municipalities spend more than 50% of their discretionary budgets on police salaries, benefits and pensions. Governments keep on hiring what will be expensive liabilities taxpayers will be on the hook for, for decades, since cops can retire at 45 and will draw from their pension until they die.
Indeed. I think people have been paying too much in taxes. Once tax revenue is diminished, all of this wasteful liberty-harming spending is supposed to correct itself. Regular workers don't have much of a choice in how much they pay, but businesses do.
> Indeed. I think people have been paying too much in taxes. Once tax revenue is diminished, all of this wasteful liberty-harming spending is supposed to correct itself.
My friend, the only thing that's going to diminish is public services that actually help people. The police state is the primary state organ dedicated to protecting people with political power from the hoi polloi, it's the one thing that's never going to go away.
If the past few thousand years of history is any indication, these people will wring every last cent out of you to pay a professional warrior class that will protect them from you.
Got to get rid of frivolous seizures/fines too. Back in the '09 crash police in my state were ticketing people like crazy, for even the tiniest infraction, due to reduced tax revenues. They'll never willingly give up their salaries so long as a single route is left for them to suck up the cash.
That's a given, because non-political crime (treason, insurrection, election fraud, coups, conspiracy to engage in any of the above) isn't a threat to democracy.
Flock really does have a huge amount of potential for abuse. It's a fair point that private companies (e.g. Google, etc) have way more surveillance on us than the government does, but the US and local governments having this level of surveillance should also worry folks. There's massive potential for abuse. And frankly, I don't trust most local police departments to not have someone that would use this to stalk their ex or use it in other abusive ways. I weirdly actually trust Google's interests in surveillance (i.e. marketing) more than I trust the government's legitimate need to monitor in some cases to track crimes. Things get scary quick when mass surveillance is combined with (often selective) prosecution.
> I weirdly actually trust Google's interests in surveillance (i.e. marketing) more than I trust the government's legitimate need to monitor in some cases to track crimes
You shouldn't.
When a company spies on everyone as much as possible and hordes that data on their servers, it is subject to warrant demands from any local, state, or Federal agency.
> Avondale Man Sues After Google Data Leads to Wrongful Arrest for Murder
Police had arrested the wrong man based on location data obtained from Google and the fact that a white Honda was spotted at the crime scene. The case against Molina quickly fell apart, and he was released from jail six days later. Prosecutors never pursued charges against Molina, yet the highly publicized arrest cost him his job, his car, and his reputation.
The thing is though, cops harass people, cops abuse their power, courts prosecute who they want, with or without Flock. This is a valid concern, but the root of the issue, I think what we should focus on first or primarily, is that the justice system isn't necessarily accountable for mistakes or corruption. As long as qualified immunity exists, as long as things like the "Kids for Cash" scandal (which didn't need Flock) go on, it doesn't really matter what tools they have, or not.
> As long as qualified immunity exists, as long as things like the "Kids for Cash" scandal (which didn't need Flock) go on, it doesn't really matter what tools they have, or not.
But, given that those abuses exist and are ongoing, we should not hand the police state yet another tool to abuse.
> I weirdly actually trust Google's interests in surveillance more than I trust the government's
I don't think this is weird at all. Corporations may be more "malicious" (or at least self centered), but governments have more power. So even if you believe they are good and have good intentions it still has the potential to do far more harm. Google can manipulate you but the government can manipulate you, throw you in jail, and rewrite the rules so you have no recourse. Even if the government can get the data from those companies there's at least a speed bump. Even if a speed bump isn't hard to get over are we going to pretend that some friction is no different from no friction?
Turnkey tyranny is a horrific thing. One that I hope more people are becoming aware of as it's happening in many countries right now.[0]
This doesn't make surveillance capitalism good and I absolutely hate those comparisons because they make the assumption that harm is binary. That there's no degree of harm. That two things can't be bad at the same time and that just because one is worse that means the other is okay. This is absolute bullshit thinking and I cannot stand how common it is, even on this site.
[0] my biggest fear is that we still won't learn. The problem has always been that the road to is paved with good intentions. Evil is not just created by evil men, but also my good men trying to do good. The world is complex and we have this incredible power of foresight. While far from perfect we seem to despise this capability that made us the creatures we are today. I'm sorry, the world is complex. Evil is hard to identify. But you got this powerful brain to deal with all that, if you want to
>I don't think this is weird at all. Corporations may be more "malicious" (or at least self centered), but governments have more power. So even if you believe they are good and have good intentions it still has the potential to do far more harm. Google can manipulate you but the government can manipulate you, throw you in jail, and rewrite the rules so you have no recourse. Even if the government can get the data from those companies there's at least a speed bump. Even if a speed bump isn't hard to get over are we going to pretend that some friction is no different from no friction?
That's all as may be, but you're ignoring the fact that governments are buying[0][1][2][3] the data being collected by those corporations. That's not "friction" in my book, rather it's a commercial transaction.
As such, giving corporations a pass seems kind of silly, as they're profiting from selling that data to those with a monopoly on violence.
So, by all means, give the corporations the "benefit of the doubt" on this, as they certainly have no idea that they're selling this information to governments (well, to pretty much anyone willing to pay -- including domestic abusers and stalkers too), they're only acting as agents maximizing corporate profits for their shareholders. Which is the only important thing, right? Anything else is antithetical to free-market orthodoxy.
People suffer and/or die? Just the cost of doing business right?
I suspect the real reason is to allow police to use their own discretion.
I deal with a lot of mentally-unstable people, and some of them are suicidal.
The thing to realize about suicidal people, is that they can be really dangerous to non-suicidal people.
"I'm not hurting anyone but myself." is a big fat lie.
I have friends that work for the railroad, and train engineers have to deal with folks that suicide by train. It's bad PTSD. In some cases, it may even cause the train to derail, which could injure or kill a lot of others.
Then, there's "suicide by cop." Those people tend to hurt a lot of folks, before they get their wish granted.
Not everyone just wanders off into the desert, or takes a bunch of sleeping pills (by the way, I invite anyone to ask the person that finds one of these "easy" suicides, how they feel about it).
And, then, of course, you have your suicide bombers, but they know what they are doing, and aren't telling themselves the "I'm not hurting anyone but myself." lie.
> Attempted suicide is criminalized in some jurisdictions for exactly that reason.
Ah yes, let's protect a suicidal person by charging them with a crime which they may eventually be able to expunge, but in the meantime will effect their livelihood. That will surely not create any problems which might complicate their lives and drive them further towards suicidal behavior.
That was never the case. Allegedly, they searched for her hoping to charge her with a crime, but when it was reported what they were doing, they said they were searching for her to make sure she was okay.
Committing crime is a crime against society and thus yourself, or something like that.
That's one view of justice anyway. I'm more inclined towards crimes being against specific persons or groups of distinct persons, in which case your thesis would be correct, but it's a minority opinion.
I would speak on this topic, but its political and Dang will have a moment, so I guess we'll just keep talking around the topic and never touching the cause.
> “As much as Flock tries to be good stewards of the powerful tech we sell, this shows it really is up to users to serve their communities in good faith. Selling to law-enforcement is tricky because we assume they will use our tech to do good and then just have to hope we're right.”
> The Flock source added “Even if Flock took a stance on permitted use-cases, a motivated user could simply lie about why they're performing a search. We can never 100% know how or why our tools are being used.” A second Flock source said they believe Flock should develop a better idea of what its clients are using the company’s technology for.
In other words, why bother with safeguards when they'll just lie to us anyways?
> Even if Flock took a stance on permitted use-cases, a motivated user could simply lie about why they're performing a search. We can never 100% know how or why our tools are being used.
I think this is a legitimate problem.
But...isn't this what warrants are for? With a warrant, the police have to say why they want to perform a search to a judge, under threat of perjury. They have a powerful incentive not to lie.
So...should warrants be required for this kind of Flock data also? Couldn't Flock set a policy that these searches are performed only under warrant? Or a law be enacted saying the same? I imagine it would make Flock much less attractive to their potential customers, and searches would be performed much less often. [1] So it's not something Flock is going to do on their own. I think we'd need to create the pressure, by opposing purchases of Flock or by specifically asking our elected representatives to create such a law.
[1] If I'm being generous, because of the extra friction/work/delay. If I'm being less generous, because they have no legitimate reason a judge would approve.
> So...should warrants be required for this kind of Flock data also?
Based on another incident [0] I feel Flock's explanation for their actions boils down to:
1. "We are familiar with the customer the person claimed to be an agent for."
2. "We didn't know whether the person was doing something illegal with the data... And we don't want to know, and we don't try to find out."
3. "They didn't force us. They gave us money! We like money!"
As you might guess, I don't find these points especially compelling or exculpating. Certainly nothing that would/should stand up against state or local laws that prohibit the data being shared this way.
_____________
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45382434
Any law would upset the third-party data broker constitutional runaround that the government has become addicted to. It is already a breach of privacy. We just need legislators willing to serve the public and ignore the lobbyists and executive.
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"So...should warrants be required for this kind of Flock data also? "
Yes.
Yes, this is what warrants are for.
Flock's entire business model is a flagrant violation of the 4th amendment. What Flock does for their core business is called "stalking", which is a crime.
The issue here is not that the law is inadequate to resolve this problem. The issue is that the current administration has chosen to collude with private corporations that flagrantly violate the law, thereby replacing our entire judiciary system with a protection racket.
Please don't be generous. Fascists depend on our patience to insulate them from consequences.
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Warrants for this is actually a great idea. Thats the exact correct solution to gov/leo overreach
Eh, if a cop sat at a Dunkin Donuts and wrote down every license plate they saw that wouldn't require a warrant.
Why should contracting that out to a private company require a warrant?
Flock isn't say Google which collects location data because it needs it for Google Maps to function. Flock is only here because the local government paid it to setup equipment.
It's really an issue for the local community. Do you want your local tax dollars going to support parks or tracking individuals?
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We knew this going in with Flock: that with full sharing to Flock's network of law enforcement agencies, we'd be trusting our data to every one of tens of thousands of tiny, often completely unaccountable police departments around the country, many of whom wouldn't give the slightest possible fuck about whether they were contravening our own department's general orders. That's why we disabled sharing, first to any out-of-state departments, and then altogether; PDs that wanted data from us could simply call us up on the phone like human beings.
It was implied, both by our department and, more vaguely, by Flock, that sharing was reciprocal: if we didn't enable it, other departments wouldn't share with us. That's false; not only is it false, but apparently, to my understanding, Flock has (or had?) an offering for PDs to get access to the data without even hosting cameras of their own.
That obviously leaves Flock's own attestations of client data separation, and I get the cynicism there too, but basically every municipality in the country relies on those same kinds of attestations from a myriad of vendors, and unlike Flock those vendors have basically nothing to lose (since nobody is paying attention to them).
I think you can reasonably go either way on all this stuff. But you can't run these stacks in their default configuration with their default sharing and without special-purpose ordinances and general ordinances governing them.
I write this mostly to encourage people who have strong opinions about this stuff to get engaged locally. I did, I'm not particularly good at it (I'm a loud message board nerd), and I got what I believe to be the only ALPR General Order in Chicagoland written and what I know to be the only ACLU CCOPS ordinance in Illinois passed.
> I write this mostly to encourage people who have strong opinions about this stuff to get engaged locally. I did, I'm not particularly good at it (I'm a loud message board nerd), and I got what I believe to be the only ALPR General Order in Chicagoland written and what I know to be the only ACLU CCOPS ordinance in Illinois passed.
What’s an ALPR General Order and a ALCU CCOPS ordinance? How did you get them passed?
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There are ways to work around that problem.
For instance, just making it a rule that they are not allowed to lie to you about how things are being used -- we know that won't work because if they're willing to lie they are also willing to ignore contract violations.
Instead, put in a rule that says misuse of the system costs $X for each documented case. Now the vendor has a financial incentive to detect misuse, and the purchasers have a FINANCIAL incentive to curb misuse by their own employees.
It's not a magic fix, but it's the sort of thing that might help.
Those are the same thing. Either way you need to go to court. Putting a number in doesn't magically make the contract more binding.
Better: require them to purchase misuse violation insurance.
Make a neutral third party liable for the cost and then that third party which is mostly disinterested gets to calculate risk and compliance procedures.
The only way we're really going to get data handling under control is to give the victims of data abuse financial beneficiaries of liability through the courts and insurance companies.
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I would ask them “why bother with DUI laws if some people will drive drunk anyway?”
If the only way we can have rules is if they are 100% followed 100% of the time, then we wouldn’t have any rules to begin with. Very publicly revoke the licenses of people who break your rules. You can’t stop everybody, but you can do something. This is just a lame excuse for in action.
I want to know how much Flock paid the guy who came up with, "How could we know that building a nationwide panopticon for police would be used for police-state things?"
Flock could shut off any PD they think is abusing their product. No excuses.
Then they will stop getting paid. They do not want to stop getting paid.
If only there was a process where a trusted individual could judge if an invasion of privacy was warranted.
In yet another set of words: we built a spy network, how could we ever know that people were going to use it to spy on people?
Imagine being the person who talks to the media on behalf of the police mass surveillance company. Like man you fucked up in this life if that’s where you ended up.
Maybe they should've tried not getting into the "dystopian surveillance network" business.
If only there was some person with good JUDGEment who could decide whether a situation WARRANTs police having data.
This is the “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” bad faith argument applied to surveillance technology.
I mean, this argument has worked for the firearms industry for centuries.
But oddly not for encryption ...
A lot of folk tried to justify the situation as being not as bad as it sounded, citing the official narrative as a source of truth.
It's amazing to me that people will still trust police narratives.
It's the same in the UK. I first became aware of it after the Jean Charles de Menezes shooting. He was the innocent electrician shot in 2005 as part of a terrorism panic. Every detail released by the police to justify the killing turned out to be a lie. Having paid attention since then I've come to realise it is standard practice.
Police behaviour in public inquiries (usually stonewalling and obfuscating) has been so bad that the government has just passed a law placing a "duty of candour" on the police and other civil servants, with criminal penalties for serious breaches.
That was less than a month ago so we'll see how it works.
Similar story with the infamous NYC case of Kitty Genovese in the mid 1960s, whom was sexually assaulted and murdered. The police claimed dozens of people heard and saw her screams, but nobody did anything. The truth was many people called the police, but nobody came. It was an essentially a coverup, but it did end up becoming a symbol of NYC’s moral decay. The narrative wasn’t officially challenged until many years later. (There is a recent is documentary out there where her brother digs into it all).
Lying in an official statement is already an illegal act punishable by jail (Perjury act of 1911).
Don't hold your breath.
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The alternative is sometimes life shattering cognitive dissonance and then a constant feeling of dread. So much of the human condition is willful ignorance it's kind of amazing anything works.
The majority of the global population still abides faith based story mode narratives.
American conviction in religion has fallen ~20% since 2000 but that still leaves ~60% bought into skywizards as media owned by older more religious intentionally helps peddle Newspeak that obfuscates attempts to bring science to the masses.
Conviction in religion has fallen 0%. It's just that the new religion doesn't call itself a religion.
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It's amazing to me that people who openly distrust obviously untrustworthy US police departments continue to trust the US federal government.
There's a difference between trusting cops, trusting the high-level branches of the US Government, and trusting the various departments of the US bureaucracy.
For example, I trust NOAA or NASA, used to trust the CDC, would never trust the CIA or FBI (because cops).
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Distrust isn't a single thing. Distrusting cops is an entirely different kind of distrust than distrusting RFK Jr. RFK Jr kills people with pseudoscience. Cops go hands-on. I don't know enough about the statistics to compare the magnitude of killing. But I do know that the solutions would have to be completely different.
>It's amazing to me that people will still trust police narratives.
I wouldn't care if they were at least consistent.
What I take issue with is that the same individuals will toss the official narrative if it contradicts their viewpoint. That is a personal moral failing.
The Orwellian doublespeak is just a sign of the requisite cognitive dissonance surfacing whenever it conflicts with the necessity of maintaining in-group/out-group dynamics.
Huge disconnect between these narratives:
- Crime is out of control, requiring deployment of active duty military to multiple cities.
- Police are so bored they are sifting through security cameras on fishing expeditions to maybe find someone accessing medical care.
Those are not mutually exclusive.
I’m not sure that I buy that argument but either way the data clearly shows crime has fallen consistently over the decades. Even over the last couple of years. This narrative that cities (of course only Democrat-dominated cities) are so crime ridden that they are basically under siege is completely manufactured.
The governor of my state went out of his way to ask Trump to come crack down on a few cities (all overwhelmingly or somewhat leaning blue) despite drastic drops in crime rates over the last five years. Ignoring the fact that he is the governor and has a super majority Republican legislature, meaning that ultimately he is saying “daddy Trump come save me I can’t do my job uwu,” he also very conspicuously left his home city off the list despite it sharing a similar population size and crime rate as another major city on the list.
It’s all a sham. The data does not bear their message out.
Crime is actually at its lowest point in 40 years, but you wouldn't know it looking at the constant fearmongering by legacy media and conservative politicians alike.
As a person old enough to remember the War on Drugs, I can agree that people who think things are worse now must have spent the late '80s/early '90s sheltering in libraries or something.
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Sigh. I really do not want to get into the politicized language around abortion. Especially in this specific case, where we do not know many relevant facts. Let's just use the language in the police report:
> the abortion/miscarriage
Presumably that is neutral enough?
Back to my original point, which is that crime is not out of control. You say that
> Police believed they had identified a crime and investigated it
which is at odds with what the police say:
> No charges were ever filed against the woman and she was never under criminal investigation by Johnson County.
I am guessing the police have more information about this than you do.
The police creeped on a woman, invaded her extremely personal business, wrote reports about it with knowledge those reports could become public, without any of it being in service of crime reduction.
Edit: I'm not fully up-to-date on the law, but my understanding is that there is no justiciable crime in Texas around a woman herself terminating a pregnancy using medical means. Police could have witnessed her consuming the medication and there still would be nothing to charge as no crime would have occurred.
> post-partum abortion
What the fuck are you talking about?
There actually doesn't have to be a disconnect between the narratives.
It could be possible that crime is out of control because police are doing these things instead of their actual job.
Compare the efforts police will go through to play with their toys vs the efforts they will go through to actually solve crime.
Despite living in a literal panopticon where the cops can buy infinite tracking information on anyone and even on just a query, violent crime clearance rates are abysmal.
Police just don't do their jobs.
edit: I do not actually believe crime is out of control, because it is not. I believe that cops are bad actors and liars.
Narrator: crime was not, in fact, out of control.
https://projects.csgjusticecenter.org/tools-for-states-to-ad...
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> Police just don't do their jobs.
So naturally, our police budgets increase every year.
When you put tools like databases or surveillance cameras into the hands of people, two things are guaranteed: a certain number of those people will use the tools for the wrong purpose, and a certain number of those bad users will lie about it.
https://deflock.me
Ironic that a site offering anti-surveillance resources is itself hosted behind the servers of Cloudflare, a US-based company (read: must turn over all data to NSA whenever they receive a national security letter, if they're not already eagerly, voluntarily turning over that data) that MiTM's a substantial portion of all global internet traffic.
You gotta take what you can get. This level of concern is right out the CIA guidebook of how to infiltrate a group and make sure nothing gets done
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We can entirely write off every US-based company as inherently evil simply because they're American.
Or, you know, we could operate with an ounce of nuance and not oversimplify the complexities of the world we live in.
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Get the Flock out.
https://archive.is/cN8fX
Title edited for length.
Posting this because of the recent discussion about Flock technology.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45473698
I think bored cops are a much bigger threat to Democracy than most crime. It's ironic that the less crime and the more efficient policing the less free we become.
You don't deny that in the US, criminals do much more damage (death, injury, PTSD, destruction of property, unjust denial of use of property, the opportunity cost of avoiding certain places because of the danger of crime) than police do; do you?
In your answer, please stick to to concrete harms to actual people (living now or in the future) excluding any harm that is a harm only to an abstraction like Democracy or Freedom.
"in the US" Cause the US is the whole world? Cops may be less of a threat to Democracy in a third-world country, such as the US, precisely because rampant crime means they have less time to spend curtailing the freedoms of mostly law-abiding people.
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Over hiring of cops post-COVID is a major issue. Most municipalities spend more than 50% of their discretionary budgets on police salaries, benefits and pensions. Governments keep on hiring what will be expensive liabilities taxpayers will be on the hook for, for decades, since cops can retire at 45 and will draw from their pension until they die.
Indeed. I think people have been paying too much in taxes. Once tax revenue is diminished, all of this wasteful liberty-harming spending is supposed to correct itself. Regular workers don't have much of a choice in how much they pay, but businesses do.
> Indeed. I think people have been paying too much in taxes. Once tax revenue is diminished, all of this wasteful liberty-harming spending is supposed to correct itself.
My friend, the only thing that's going to diminish is public services that actually help people. The police state is the primary state organ dedicated to protecting people with political power from the hoi polloi, it's the one thing that's never going to go away.
If the past few thousand years of history is any indication, these people will wring every last cent out of you to pay a professional warrior class that will protect them from you.
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Got to get rid of frivolous seizures/fines too. Back in the '09 crash police in my state were ticketing people like crazy, for even the tiniest infraction, due to reduced tax revenues. They'll never willingly give up their salaries so long as a single route is left for them to suck up the cash.
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That's a given, because non-political crime (treason, insurrection, election fraud, coups, conspiracy to engage in any of the above) isn't a threat to democracy.
I have thought about this thing Bruce Schneier said in 2009[0] a lot, ever since I first read it:
> It’s bad civic hygiene to build technologies that could someday be used to facilitate a police state.
0: https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2009/07/technology_...
I feel like this would be a good use of "provocative compliance".
1. Create an open network of off-the-shelf cameras watching public roadways
2. Load up the database with license plate numbers of local politicians and/or law enforcement
3. Create a "Where is my senator?" web site that uses that data
4. Watch all hell break loose
5. Get distributed stalking without a warrant outlawed
There are laws that protect legislators from this sort of thing (but not everyone else). See the recent spat between Senators Wyden and Cruz.
Flock really does have a huge amount of potential for abuse. It's a fair point that private companies (e.g. Google, etc) have way more surveillance on us than the government does, but the US and local governments having this level of surveillance should also worry folks. There's massive potential for abuse. And frankly, I don't trust most local police departments to not have someone that would use this to stalk their ex or use it in other abusive ways. I weirdly actually trust Google's interests in surveillance (i.e. marketing) more than I trust the government's legitimate need to monitor in some cases to track crimes. Things get scary quick when mass surveillance is combined with (often selective) prosecution.
> I weirdly actually trust Google's interests in surveillance (i.e. marketing) more than I trust the government's legitimate need to monitor in some cases to track crimes
You shouldn't.
When a company spies on everyone as much as possible and hordes that data on their servers, it is subject to warrant demands from any local, state, or Federal agency.
> Avondale Man Sues After Google Data Leads to Wrongful Arrest for Murder
Police had arrested the wrong man based on location data obtained from Google and the fact that a white Honda was spotted at the crime scene. The case against Molina quickly fell apart, and he was released from jail six days later. Prosecutors never pursued charges against Molina, yet the highly publicized arrest cost him his job, his car, and his reputation.
https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/google-geofence-locatio...
The more data you collect, the more dangerous you are.
I would rather trust companies making a legitimate effort not to collect and store unnecessary data in the first place
you, maybe politely, imply the police might abuse these tools, rather than actually they do routinely abuse the tools. For instance, one recent case which isn't speculation: https://local12.com/news/nation-world/police-chief-gets-caug...
Yeah; I don't exactly trust Google with tracking data, but at least Google doesn't have the power to imprison or kill me on a whim.
Problem is that if Google has it, the government can get it.
The thing is though, cops harass people, cops abuse their power, courts prosecute who they want, with or without Flock. This is a valid concern, but the root of the issue, I think what we should focus on first or primarily, is that the justice system isn't necessarily accountable for mistakes or corruption. As long as qualified immunity exists, as long as things like the "Kids for Cash" scandal (which didn't need Flock) go on, it doesn't really matter what tools they have, or not.
> As long as qualified immunity exists, as long as things like the "Kids for Cash" scandal (which didn't need Flock) go on, it doesn't really matter what tools they have, or not.
But, given that those abuses exist and are ongoing, we should not hand the police state yet another tool to abuse.
I don't think this is weird at all. Corporations may be more "malicious" (or at least self centered), but governments have more power. So even if you believe they are good and have good intentions it still has the potential to do far more harm. Google can manipulate you but the government can manipulate you, throw you in jail, and rewrite the rules so you have no recourse. Even if the government can get the data from those companies there's at least a speed bump. Even if a speed bump isn't hard to get over are we going to pretend that some friction is no different from no friction?
Turnkey tyranny is a horrific thing. One that I hope more people are becoming aware of as it's happening in many countries right now.[0]
This doesn't make surveillance capitalism good and I absolutely hate those comparisons because they make the assumption that harm is binary. That there's no degree of harm. That two things can't be bad at the same time and that just because one is worse that means the other is okay. This is absolute bullshit thinking and I cannot stand how common it is, even on this site.
[0] my biggest fear is that we still won't learn. The problem has always been that the road to is paved with good intentions. Evil is not just created by evil men, but also my good men trying to do good. The world is complex and we have this incredible power of foresight. While far from perfect we seem to despise this capability that made us the creatures we are today. I'm sorry, the world is complex. Evil is hard to identify. But you got this powerful brain to deal with all that, if you want to
>I don't think this is weird at all. Corporations may be more "malicious" (or at least self centered), but governments have more power. So even if you believe they are good and have good intentions it still has the potential to do far more harm. Google can manipulate you but the government can manipulate you, throw you in jail, and rewrite the rules so you have no recourse. Even if the government can get the data from those companies there's at least a speed bump. Even if a speed bump isn't hard to get over are we going to pretend that some friction is no different from no friction?
That's all as may be, but you're ignoring the fact that governments are buying[0][1][2][3] the data being collected by those corporations. That's not "friction" in my book, rather it's a commercial transaction.
As such, giving corporations a pass seems kind of silly, as they're profiting from selling that data to those with a monopoly on violence.
So, by all means, give the corporations the "benefit of the doubt" on this, as they certainly have no idea that they're selling this information to governments (well, to pretty much anyone willing to pay -- including domestic abusers and stalkers too), they're only acting as agents maximizing corporate profits for their shareholders. Which is the only important thing, right? Anything else is antithetical to free-market orthodoxy.
People suffer and/or die? Just the cost of doing business right?
[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/us-government-buys-dat...
[1] https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/when-the-government-buy...
[2] https://www.congress.gov/118/meeting/house/116192/documents/...
[3] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/02/28/government...
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Stalk one person and they get a restraining order. Stalk the entire town and it's a profitable business.
Does Flock offer any on-premise solution that would prevent the data from moving across state lines?
> Does Flock offer any on-premise solution that would prevent the data from moving across state lines?
Flock does not have an ALPR monopoly.
Any time some body says it is for your safety, it is not. Google, Apple, and police too.
> Any time some body says it is for your safety, it is not
You fasten your seatbelt in a car and plane for your own (and others’) safety. Not because everything is a conspiracy.
Probably time to reinvent the license plate as a concept; or start spinning up LLC's to put the cars under and just each the extra insurance costs.
https://archive.is/cN8fX
You cannot charge people for a crime... for their safety. These ideas are mutually excusive.
Attempted suicide is criminalized in some jurisdictions for exactly that reason.
I suspect the real reason is to allow police to use their own discretion.
I deal with a lot of mentally-unstable people, and some of them are suicidal.
The thing to realize about suicidal people, is that they can be really dangerous to non-suicidal people.
"I'm not hurting anyone but myself." is a big fat lie.
I have friends that work for the railroad, and train engineers have to deal with folks that suicide by train. It's bad PTSD. In some cases, it may even cause the train to derail, which could injure or kill a lot of others.
Then, there's "suicide by cop." Those people tend to hurt a lot of folks, before they get their wish granted.
Not everyone just wanders off into the desert, or takes a bunch of sleeping pills (by the way, I invite anyone to ask the person that finds one of these "easy" suicides, how they feel about it).
And, then, of course, you have your suicide bombers, but they know what they are doing, and aren't telling themselves the "I'm not hurting anyone but myself." lie.
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> Attempted suicide is criminalized in some jurisdictions for exactly that reason.
Ah yes, let's protect a suicidal person by charging them with a crime which they may eventually be able to expunge, but in the meantime will effect their livelihood. That will surely not create any problems which might complicate their lives and drive them further towards suicidal behavior.
That makes perfect sense.
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Which ones? I couldn't find anything supporting that claim but I'm not an expert.
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We should criminalize having a psychotic break, too, while we're at it
That was never the case. Allegedly, they searched for her hoping to charge her with a crime, but when it was reported what they were doing, they said they were searching for her to make sure she was okay.
Committing crime is a crime against society and thus yourself, or something like that.
That's one view of justice anyway. I'm more inclined towards crimes being against specific persons or groups of distinct persons, in which case your thesis would be correct, but it's a minority opinion.
s/excusive/exclusive
As soon as I saw the headline then I just knew this would be a TX based police force.
Gotta keep the supply of slaves coming. Why don't they just grow humans in vats?
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There are many exceptions for which killing doesn't make it a murder.
I hope, then, that you advocate for policies that actually reduce abortions, rather than attempting to ban them outright.
Not everyone agrees with you.
I would speak on this topic, but its political and Dang will have a moment, so I guess we'll just keep talking around the topic and never touching the cause.
Neat!