I'm in the PNW and they put Flock cameras up in my area recently. Nobody likes them (libs or cons), and we've seen some rather creative approaches to uh...disabling them. One person took a pipe cutter to the mount and spirited the whole unit away, another apparently fired a shotgun slug through it, somebody else looks like they used it to relieve their anger problems with a metal pipe.
Some guy I once met in a bar told me that he liked to mix a 1:1 solution of elmer's glue and water, put it into a spray bottle, set the nozzle to "stream", then squirt it all over the lens of a traffic camera near his house which he found offensive. His logic was that this made more sense than destroying the camera, because he could do it over and over and over: the company operating it would have to send someone out to clean the lens off each time, which would probably cost them more money than the camera was worth.
And yet they drive away in their GM/Ford/Nissan/Tesla/Any car/truck with its connected media unit and telemetry gathering infotainment systems and think “This is fine”.
Hey it's a start. Get people together who don't like Flock cameras and tell them about pulling the modem out of their vehicle and you'll get some bites.
People are probably unaware of the telemetry on their vehicle.
But this is a good point, people get upset when government is perceived to screw them over and not upset enough when the private sector does it. In practice, the private sector screws over the public quite a bit.
Same ones who probably will develop fast homomorphic encryption and distribute it to the entire world, completely oblivious to the eventual heat death of the universe.
"On Thursday, a Skagit County Superior Court judge ruled that pictures taken by Flock cameras in the cities of Sedro-Woolley and Stanwood qualify as public records, and therefore must be released as required by the state’s Public Records Act, court records show."
I do think that's an important distinction though; if I have a camera and record a public space, that's not an issue. If the government sets up a bunch of cameras, that's an issue, whether or not it's ICE, the FBI, or someone else using the cameras. I can't imagine the government will set up cameras and do non-scary things with it.
This seems like an unsupported assumption. Lots of people like them. Anyone who wants policing to be effective and cares about crime / public safety would like them to have the best tools.
"On Thursday, a Skagit County Superior Court judge ruled that pictures taken by Flock cameras in the cities of Sedro-Woolley and Stanwood qualify as public records, and therefore must be released as required by the state’s Public Records Act, court records show."
This video by Tom Lehto talks more about that court case that illustrates citizens can legally do FOIA requests for traffic cameras (e.g. Flock): https://youtu.be/1vQn4MWBln0
The example of Seattle Police dashcam and body camera footage may be interesting. When those things were relatively new, ten years ago or so, someone started filing daily public records requests for footage from all 911 dispatches (among other things). They wanted to build their own database of the theoretically public footage. The SPD complained that the overhead of redacting all that footage would be impossible. Eventually the legislature clarified the status and tightened the request rules, so now you have to request footage for a specific incident, and you may have to pay a redaction fee. [0]
ten years ago or so, someone started filing daily public records requests for footage from all 911 dispatches (among other things).
I know someone who until very recently worked for a major city's police department. He said there were people who would request every video they could think of, and it was his team's job to scrub through the video and blur/block out faces of children and things like that.
He said his team was absolutely overwhelmed with requests from randos all over the country requesting things in bulk. Even if his team (~10 people, full-time) didn't take the extra step to redact some images, they simply couldn't keep up with it. Essentially, a FOIA DDOS.
The stress was too much, and he left for a different career.
(Before anyone asks if the PD imposed a fee for video, I don't know. It's possible the fee wasn't high enough, or maybe there's a state law regulating the fee. But I'm not sure it matters since there are plenty of cranks in the world with very deep pockets.)
Redactions are necessary to protect innocent members of the public. Going through all the footage from every officer every single day to perform these redactions would require a huge amount of manpower. That may change with new technology, but until it can be automated reliably, the WA legislature got this right.
With shit like traffic cameras, I don't think redactions are necessary, although it would be nice if all license plates were automatically redacted and only accessible with a warrant. Turning the cameras off is an even better idea.
I think someone even tried automating the redactions then posting to YouTube.
It’s an interesting case that pits privacy against transparency.
I absolutely want the cops to wear bodycams and I’d prefer they can’t even turn them off. But they also need to protect the privacy of victims, suspects, and witnesses. So they can’t just live stream to the Internet either.
How much is the redaction fee? How much would it cost to just pay it for everything?
Someone should use AI to request such a large amount of data that it DDoSes the whole system. Unfortunately I feel like that would result in traffic camera data just being removed from FOIA rather than removed from use.
If I recall, the FOIA allows government agencies to charge you for the work of processing your request if you're requesting more than N pages or it takes more than a couple hours of work to fulfill the request. I'd be careful about a maliciously compliant response to such a thing. That said, we live in a boring world where they'd probably just respond by threatening you with a felony hacking prosecution for attempting to take down their system.
I don't think that would be legal... you'd have to get a judge to reverse the previous decision that established the cameras are public record. They would probably just turn them off instead.
So I definitely agree it's a positive development that these cameras are being taken down because they're absolutely orwellian, but I really don't understand why "the line" is being drawn at immigration enforcement? Were people really okay with this until the point where they found out that illegal immigrants can be tracked by the surveillance state too?
I'd like to say that the people who championed them realized that if fedcops can basically arrest their landscaper over what amounts to a civil infraction then it has implications for them. Unfortunately I don't think the people who championed the cameras in the first place have that kind of self awareness and what we're seeing is instead the typically silent majority saying "no, I akshually agree with the privacy people those are bad".
I'd have no problems enforcing laws about illegal immigrants if they actually bothered to check and not just deport random brown people even if they're citizens.
This isn't the "people" waking up and not being okay with this, it is one governmental power (the state) realizing that its own power to manage its citizens (the residents of WA) and its sovereignty is being threatened by another power (the fed) in a new way. The system the state previously used to enforce its own power over its constituents is now helping the competing power to have more power over those constituents outside of cooperation with the state power, so they are removing it. There is no sudden awakening of citizen consciousness here. Many of the actions emerging around ICE stuff are about states trying to combat overreaching federal power.
Wonder why people would take issue with the unqualified, armed, masked thugs abducting innocent people off the street and deporting them without recourse or due process. Must be all about Trump, surely.
The only thing defying logic here is the MAGA cult rationalizing away the brown shirts now patrolling the streets of America, they who are supposedly so attached to freedom.
What did they think would happen? Installing surveillance systems to monitor people is acceptable, as long as they're only used against the majority? I don't understand the logic here.
What kind of innane logic are you using here?! Yes, if the systems are installed for a reason approved by the public, and then they're used for a different reason, people don't like that.
That is rarely the case that they are “approved by the public” in anything even remotely close to a legitimate process. In cases like, was it Denver, where the city council voted against the approval of the $250,000 contract to surveil everyone’s movements, for the mayor to only immediately use his discretionary spending limit of up to $150,000 (or so) to approve a presumably smaller scope of surveillance.
In several other cities it has also led to all kinds of resistance by city councils and mayors in what can only be called an odd resistance against its own populace and constituents.
At least it seems that maybe something good will come of it when local people get more engaged and pay more attention and maybe even run for office against the corrupt narcissists of society that usually hold offices in local politics because people have not paid attention for a very long time.
Do you know your sheriff? Your city/county council members? The city manager? The mayor?
When you look at the deflock.me map and are astonished at how many cameras there are, you can thank people not paying attention in local politics and who their sheriff is, and you can thank the traitors at YC leadership who brought about this Orwellian system.
I think this is a case of, tools used to fight one type of crime are being used to fight another type of crime that disrupting the community. Kind of an unforeseen consequences situation.
This type of use and expansion of scope was totally foreseeable by anyone paying attention to history. It always starts as some targeted thing, then it becomes the path of least resistance for similar subsequent things as the barrier to entry is extremely low.
In my country you'd have to get a warrant. You'll get pretty much carte blanche for an Amber Alert but the judge isn't going to let you hunt down brown people.
But I guess if you elect judges pretty much all bets are off, no? Just find yourself a card carrying MAGA judge willing to sign off.
This is the most foreseeable consequence I can imagine. It’s up there with “When I throw this baseball where will it land?”. It shouldn’t even require conscious thought.
It's pretty simple: People will tolerate surveillance technology if it promises to promote order and justice. People imagine them being instrumental in convicting murders, rapists, etc. ICE raids have been shown to be (I'm being generous here) sloppy and chaotic and seemingly targeting towards working people to grind towards a government-mandated quota - not the "bad guys" that plague our streets. Few are interested in a massive surveillance network to clamp down on what are essentially civil infraction of otherwise law-abiding and productive members of the community.
Flock is a bad actor and untrustworthy (misleading departments and officials about how data is shared/accessed, literally reinstalling cameras that cities have demanded to be taken down). Regardless of whether the local municipality wants surveillance or not, Flock is not a trustworthy company to buy it from.
> misleading departments and officials about how data is shared/accessed
Many times this isn't misleading, per se, but nudge nudge wink wink. "We trust you to follow your own data privacy policy. It's not our job to police how access to your data is configured." In Washington, for example, there is data that LE cannot collect, and LE cannot pay someone to collect directly for them to bypass that...
... but if someone just so happens to ALREADY be collecting it, they can pay to access it.
Who? I don't understand your logic either. I don't think anyone said this "is fine as long as it's used against the majority". Virtually every large city uses Flock. This is the norm.
They had never picked up a history book so they didn't realize that the systems they envisioned being used to stop the jackboot upon people they don't like would eventually be used to stomp people they do.
Back in a day, you did not have cameras yet, so one had to hire snitches. Luckily this is not the case anymore, as demonstrated by Chinese leading by an example:
Specifically interesting is the section "State and local law enforcement agencies may not provide nonpublicly available personal information about an individual..." which puts police in a bind with Flock data: if the data is public, anyone can request it (including ICE) and they have to provide it to all comers. If they declare it not to be subject to public records request, then they also can't share it with ICE -- which is outside their control in practice, since Flock independently sells access to AI summaries of the data. In the face of this contradiction, turning the things off seems to be the only way to stay legal until the courts get done chewing on this.
I agree with this. As a resident of a neighboring suburb to Redmond, I would have welcomed more automated cameras to cut down on street racing, package thefts, and car prowls. In fact I want all of the suburbs around me to implement this so that criminals can't just flee to another jurisdiction and escape justice.
Seattle is in such a tough spot. I lived there from 2001 to 2010 and left and then went back in 2018 or so and it looked like the homeless population had doubled, or tripled in the time since. And then I went back again after COVID and it was just sad. The entire downtown area is just homeless camps. There used to be a big beautiful Macy's department store on 4th Ave that's just all boarded up now. You can't browse around outside Westlake Center without being bombarded and accosted by aggressive panhandlers. Even the iconic Pike Place Market was overrun with druggies.
The entire city is so poorly run they just have no answers, and nobody can do anything about it. Pick something. Build more housing, do a basic income. Something, anything. But they can't. And their politics just let it keep getting worse and worse.
You don't understand why they may want surveillance to curb or investigate violent crime, but not why they oppose surveillance used by the Gestapo to kidnap members of their community? Seriously?
It's like saying I'm hypocritical for loving to write with pencils but being offended when someone else stabs me with one.
> Bro, you said you liked pencils, make up your mind!
No. I'm calling them idiots for giving a bunch of 3rd graders piles of newspapers and matches and expecting the eventual end result to be anything other than a fire.
This shit was wholly foreseeable but they flew right into the sun, not too close to it, right the fuck into it, because they just couldn't stop lusting after the idea of sending the jackboot after someone for a crime that amounts to petty deviance (I'd like to say they were using it to go after petty thieves, but we all know they weren't doing that).
If stabbing people is so wrong, why don’t we lock up all the surgeons?
Of all the poor thinking and rhetorical skills out there, the one that drives me the craziest is this insistence that ignoring context is not just acceptable but essential.
The problem here is that the law and order politicians world wide pretty consistently follow a pattern that starts by demanding surveillance tools to fight very serious crimes and those crimes only. Once they get that, they eventually start another campaign to allow use of the tools that they now have access to for less serious crimes. After a few cycles of this, you get a massive erosion of citizen rights.
A little annoyed, this seems like is has nothing to do with the ICE arrests...
> The city suspended its Flock system because city officials could not guarantee they wouldn’t be forced to release data collected by those devices someday, she said.
Key part is "someday". Seems like the article is implying that flock may have shared this data with ICE which led to the arrests... but there is no proof supporting this...
> On Thursday, a Skagit County Superior Court judge ruled that pictures taken by Flock cameras in the cities of Sedro-Woolley and Stanwood qualify as public records, and therefore must be released as required by the state’s Public Records Act, court records show.
This is the more likely reason. What do folks here think about this ruling?
IMO it seems obvious that this should be public records/data, but would love to hear alternative positions to this.
I can't stand this type of "journalism"/sensationalism.
> Redmond’s Police Department was not among those listed in the report, and has never allowed external agencies to access their Flock data without requesting and receiving permission from the police chief first, according to an Oct. 24 statement by Lowe.
So because the arrests were near a Flock Camera the "journalist" is connecting the two? Even with the statements an information to the contrary?
This wouldn't be the first time Flock was used by ICE and would not be the first time Flock allowed ICE backdoor access against the wishes of the local government or police department in Washington. https://jsis.washington.edu/humanrights/2025/10/21/leaving-t...
So making the connection isn't a leap and seems like a pretty pragmatic action taken to reduce ICE's ability to surveil communities.
The journalists didn't make this connection, it was a topic of discussion at the city council meeting. And the result of that discussion was to suspend the cameras anyway, out of concern that ICE could end up with the the Flock data, even if they hadn't already. It would have been odd for the journalist to report on the outcome and leave out the event that prompted it.
I think we need to revise our understanding of expectation of privacy. The 'you have no expectation of privacy when you are outside' bit was formed before we had everything recording us and before face recognition could track us.
At the very least I think any kind of face recognition should require probable cause.
Its an interesting question indeed. You're saying there might be some expectation of privacy even in public?
The line here is a little different. I could point a camera out my window and record every license plate that drives by my house, and that would be allowed because its recording public activities, and the data I collect would be private—its mine from my camera.
The question here is if a public/government agency pays a private company to setup cameras in public, for the benefit of the public, then should that data collected by those cameras not also be public?
The courts seem to agree that it should be public, and I fail to see why it shouldn't be. Maybe I should read the opposition briefs on it.
I think it's less of a revision and more a return to a core meaning.
Privacy isn't a mechanic, it's a capability, and most reasonable people DO expect, implicitly, that that they can travel unremarked under most circumstances.
I think most people would agree that a government drone swarm specifically tasked to follow you everywhere in public (loitering outside buildings) would be an invasion of privacy. Especially when it is illegal not to be wearing some equivalent of license plates.
Maybe I need to write a news filter/browser extension that rewrites rage-bait articles to have titles and content based only on the meaningful content/facts, and less the speculation/insinuations.
From what I read, the pressure from activist groups on Redmond’s city leadership began before the Skagit County ruling. So it is probably unrelated. But I think it’s still a bad outcome for Redmond. Why wouldn’t you want law enforcement to be able to observe public spaces (which these cameras are monitoring) and identify or track suspects? We want our city services (like policing) to be efficient, right? We want criminals to be arrested and face consequences, right? We all want safe cities and neighborhoods, right?
I think the Skagit county ruling is likely to be appealed. There is a lot of information that governments can redact for a variety of reasons, despite FOIA or state/local transparency laws. It seems obvious that there’s a case for law enforcement to be able to access footage but to avoid handing over that kind of intelligence to the general public, where criminals could also abuse the same data. And I just don’t buy the argument that surveillance through cameras is automatically dystopian - we can pass laws that make it so that data is only accessible with a warrant or in a situation with immediate public risk. There are all sorts of powers the government has that we bring under control with the right laws - why would this be any different?
As for Redmond turning off its cameras - this is just fear-mongering about ICE. In reality, it’s just sanctuary city/state resistance to enforcing immigration laws. Redmond’s police department confirmed they’ve never shared this camera data with federal agencies, but that doesn’t stop activist types from making unhinged claims or exerting pressure. In reality, it’s activists of the same ideological bias as the soft on crime types that have caused crimes to go up dramatically in the Pacific Northwest in the last 20 years. They’re happy to see law enforcement hampered and the public put at risk - the ICE thing is just the new tactic to push it.
Your first paragraph doesn’t just beg the question, it outright harasses it.
…and identify or track suspects?
For starters, we’re all suspects when those cameras are running. Granted, AI-driven facial recognition is 100% accurate, so if you have nothing to hide…
> Why wouldn’t you want law enforcement to be able to observe public spaces (which these cameras are monitoring) and identify or track suspects?
Yeah, why wouldn't I want that? Or Flock "helpfully" proactively flagging AI-generated "suspicious vehicle movements" to LE for investigation? What could wrong there?
> We all want safe cities and neighborhoods, right?
Was it hard not to end that paragraph with a "Won't somebody think of our children?"?
I know there's a massive hate for flock online but it solved a murder that happened in a park behind my house in less than 24 hours which was pretty cool.
Couldn't they just not log the license plates and only look for license plates on the list like stolen cars, stolen plates, amber alert etc? Why do they a need a list of all cars that the camera saw?
They don't just log license, they log everything about the car, dents, location of dents, type of wheels, stickers, etc. If you swap a license plate they would be able to tell the car. One local case I read about, the culprits used their own car with a stolen plate. They were able to identify the car based on the car's "fingerprints" dents, style, color, antenna, scratches etc.
Immigration is similar to the housing crisis and Nimbyism. Voters don't want a streamlined and efficient immigration system that lawfully allows a lot of migrants in (NIMBY). it is also similar to the war on drugs and its failure, ICE won't solve anything just as the DEA only made things worse with drugs.
No matter what, the whole ICE acting like the SS thing will only result in more illegal migration in the long term, like a lot more. Same with europe's far right teasing.
If the "infrastructure" can't support more people, we can build more here in the US. Borders shouldn't be open, but more health and able-bodied or skilled people wanting to migrate, so long as their criminal history is clear, should be let in, infrastructure should be scaled. It's more economic activity and wealth for the rest of us. More jobs, more workers. We need to do that for the housing crisis anyways.
We need more cities, more development, less NIMBY-thinking and less "beat them until they comply" thinking. Too many people who don't know or are unwilling to solve real problems but are eager to see cruelty and violence cause these untenable and regrettable situations.
The lesson learned is that people going to their immigration hearings to stay legal are getting nabbed, and going the legal way is a convoluted recipe for failure.
As soon as enforcement lets up an iota the lesson will be it is wiser to stay off paper and off the visa pathway and go underground. People who aren't arrested and don't present to CBP for entry and don't get a visa, as far as the government knows, don't exist.
I don't think the drugs analog works. What this activity by ICE does though is put a chilling effect on "legal" immigration and tourism. Which will over time hurt supply chains, tourist destinations and jobs overall.
I agree with GP, but from the opposite perspective.
ICE doing a good job of removing illegal aliens ("acting like SS" in GP's parlance) will trigger the next democratic president to relax border enforcement. This is what happened with Biden. He let in 7.2 million migrants [1].
There's no way for Trump to deport 7.2 million people in 4 years. Pro-illegal immigration presidents are always at an advantage.
Trump's strict (and good) policies might trigger the next democratic president to just blanket pardon all illegal aliens, and the next republican president can't do anything about it.
> Voters don't want a streamlined and efficient immigration system that lawfully allows a lot of migrants
There was a really interesting open ended survey some years ago, in the leadup to the trump/clinton election but I can't find it now sorry.
When republicans voters were asked to describe their preferred immigration policies, they outline a stance significantly more permissive and flexible, and less burdensome, than the one we currently have. More liberal than the reality, in other words.
People don't know what the immigration policies are and so they can't know what they should be either. The anti-immigration sentiment is a stunning propaganda victory decades in the making, no more.
> No matter what, the whole ICE acting like the SS thing will only result in more illegal migration in the long term, like a lot more.
How so? What mechanism do you see that goes from "ICE acting like the SS" to "a lot more illegal migration in the long term"? What's the cause and effect here?
Not saying you're wrong, necessarily, just... I don't see the causality at all.
My guess is he sees ICE hauling people out of even the courts when they were attempting to abide by the legal processes and will say f-it, why bother, its safer to not adhere. just my assumption of OP's intent.
Why fill out the right paperwork and actually attend your court dates and immigration hearings if there is a good chance that will result in your extraordinary rendition to some torture prison God-only-knows-where? Much safer to simply stay off the books.
What was the reaction to SS? or to stick to my DEA example, what was the result of the war on drugs? millions and millions dead because of drug related causes right? how do you think the nation will react to ICE's brutal and cruel, even illegal operations? many would consider them heroes, but the other side will consider them no different than the SS or gestapo, the only correction is to wind down immigration enforcement dramatically, increasing immigration.
Imagine a democrat administration simply reverting ICE to its pre-2025 state. the implication alone and the perception it gives will drive up illegal immigration. "america is open again".
Statistics are showing that the total immigrant population is down by over a million since the start of the year. If you have the ability to leave, why put up with this nonsense?
A large number of people, myself included, are now radicalized against the concept of immigration enforcement. I think everyone has a duty to make sure that ICE is as ineffective as possible and ICE agents are as miserable as possible. There's a lot of talk, for example, about how the asylum system is easily abusable; that's true, but now we will not be able to fix it because no immigration reform compromise that doesn't destroy ICE is acceptable.
People want immigrants. It is just that they want them to be second class citizens that are not allowed to earn more than them because of their skin color.
I was resistant to this argument for a long time, but the ICE thing makes it clear that really the core of all of this is racism.
Yeah, it's a nation. A nation of immigrants. Where did your great-great-great grandfather come from? Did he spontaneously erupt from this common ancestry and heritage that you speak of?
Hi, Jew here: I was with you until you started slandering dissenters as "rootless cosmopolitans"—a slur has cost my family dearly—from jobs and enrollments to several dozen of our very lives.
Yes, NO land is an "economic zone" while it is also a home. I feel this especially acutely having grown up in the San Francisco Bay Area where My friends and I struggle to compete for housing with the best and the brightest from the entire world over who, themselves, treat my home region less like a community and more like an understaffed amusement park.
Nevertheless, your blood quanta framing is utterly horrifying to me, someone whose family were murdered, lands stolen, and who has no country to go back to.
We are not by choice "rootless cosmopolitans", but by the very bigotry you espouse.
> Blood and soil (German: Blut und Boden, pronounced [ˈbluːt ʊnt ˈboːdn̩] ⓘ) is a nationalist phrase and concept of a racially defined national body ("Blood") united with a settlement area ("Soil"). Originating in the German völkisch movement, it was used extensively by Nazi Germany
> will only result in more illegal migration in the long term
Why? Wouldn't it disincentivize illegal immigration by making it much more riskier?
Agreed that the legal immigration system needs an overhaul, these are a lot of people living in limbo, paying taxes and not causing crimes with very few rights.
The term no taxation without representation was the reason the USA got founded.
It's a temporary partisan solution, the other party will do the opposite, reducing enforcement and letting even more illegal migrants in, lest they be accused of being a xenophobe.
I can think of many uses for "surveillance state technology" that have nothing to do with immigration: It can be used against citizens and legal residents too.
But the sorts of ICE actions that are causing this controversy only have political support because the US immigration laws have been flouted for 30+ years. Regardless of what you or I think of it it’s the reality that lots of the electorate wants deportations and lots of them and that likely isn’t true in a world where the laws on the books were more strictly enforced in the past.
on the books immigration law has been broken for decades. do you expect people across the border wait a decade to get their turn for an immigration interview only to be turned down, when they can just cross the border?
When laws become impractical, they create 11 million law breakers.
Hundreds of thousands to millions of people have come to the US legally each year for the last thirty years.[0] How is that impractical? In fact the share of immigrants in the US has increased significantly (by 3 times) in the last 50 years, and is above the level of the EU, and is at the highest level in the last 100 years in the US.[1][2] Even if legal immigration was set to zero, that shouldn't give people the right to come here illegally.
To be clear I am not making an argument that mass surveillance is needed to solve any problem.
US vs EU vs OECD: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SM.POP.TOTL.ZS?most_rec... - I'm pretty sure the values here include illegal immigration as well, so if you factor that in the US may be lower than the EU, but again still at historically very high levels.
The entire point is that they legally in fact may not do so, and have only been doing so because of the lack of enforcement GP cites.
> When laws become impractical, they create 11 million law breakers.
We don't have nearly the same scale of problem in Canada. That probably has much more to do with only sharing an unsecured land border with a rich country.
> on the books immigration law has been broken for decades. do you expect people across the border wait a decade to get their turn for an immigration interview only to be turned down, when they can just cross the border?
No, I don't expect that at all. However the problem with your scenario isn't that they need to wait their turn, it's that they can "just cross the border". That fact that that has been allowed was an intentional policy decision.
How? As a migrant to the US I have generally found the rules quite reasonable, the UX of the websites is poorer than say the UK but the rules seem fine.
> do you expect people across the border wait a decade to get their turn for an immigration interview only to be turned down, when they can just cross the border?
Well yes, that's what following the law means. They can't complain about it, it's not their country, and they don't have a say on the rules.
In a similar vein by your logic, if you are in a hurry, why should you obey traffic laws when you can just run a red light or a stop sign right?
Ah, the paper tiger crisis. Clearly the misdemeanor of being in the country illegally requires new technology to be developed for state surveillance to enforce those laws, police cannot possibly be expected to do their job without it /s.
The expectation of privacy and personal freedoms of 350M people seems to be an inconvenience for the state wanting deporting a few more people per year.
as opposed to the big gate across the border being closed? you people are insane, do you realize that even democrats have been deporting people, separating families, locking up illegal immigrants,etc...?
They are not being enforced now. In fact the current administration is actively trying to circumvent the law. Which should not be surprising considering how much Trump has violated immigration law in his personal life
Not strictly enforcing the speed limit wouldn't justify the use of secret police to crack down on that either. But there's no xenophobia for speeders, so we don't see this action for them and we don't have to see specious takes like this defending it.
Excessive speeders in the absence of speed-limit enforcement just creates neighbors that don't mind their neighborhood being consumed by speed bumps/dips, I think there's an analogy here in residential areas. And if you have a lot of children in your neighborhood, there IS a 'xx-phobia' for speeders. But speed bumps and dips are an absolute nuisance and sometimes dangerous, so just having cameras identify and a system willing to punish speeders would absolutely be the preference.
Its a data gathering system. it takes pictures of everything that goes past it so that IF something happens, cops can search back through the system to see if/when a suspect went past that sensor. This sort of thing should be turned off regardless. I don't want my movements recorded and tracked all the time in the off chance someone might do something later. This ICE situation is the perfect example of why these actively passive systems are a threat.
In my home county they've arrested car thieves and recovered vehicles due to real-time Flock hits. It is not simply for forensic purposes.
If it was a bad idea it shouldn't have been installed in the first place. Turning it off now because a few loud people assumed things that weren't true (ICE using the system) is idiotic.
It and other ALPR systems real-time alert on things like stolen cars. In my home county they have arrested and convicted criminals due to this. That is fighting crime, by definition.
If it was such a bad idea, they shouldn't have installed them in Redmond. Turning them off now because some people assumed things that weren't true is idiocy and sets a bad precedent.
I'm in the PNW and they put Flock cameras up in my area recently. Nobody likes them (libs or cons), and we've seen some rather creative approaches to uh...disabling them. One person took a pipe cutter to the mount and spirited the whole unit away, another apparently fired a shotgun slug through it, somebody else looks like they used it to relieve their anger problems with a metal pipe.
Flock cameras, America's bipartisan issue?
Some guy I once met in a bar told me that he liked to mix a 1:1 solution of elmer's glue and water, put it into a spray bottle, set the nozzle to "stream", then squirt it all over the lens of a traffic camera near his house which he found offensive. His logic was that this made more sense than destroying the camera, because he could do it over and over and over: the company operating it would have to send someone out to clean the lens off each time, which would probably cost them more money than the camera was worth.
There's also this spray-on-a-pole diy option https://www.themarginalian.org/index.php/2013/07/31/ai-weiwe...
Is there a way to see where they are located? Or which cities are installing them? Hadn’t heard of them til this week
You can find them listed here. https://deflock.me/map#map=5/39.828300/-98.579500
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The security cameras deployed in Lowe's and Home Depot parking lots are Flock. All the better to track your movements, citizen.
And yet they drive away in their GM/Ford/Nissan/Tesla/Any car/truck with its connected media unit and telemetry gathering infotainment systems and think “This is fine”.
Hey it's a start. Get people together who don't like Flock cameras and tell them about pulling the modem out of their vehicle and you'll get some bites.
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Most cars or trucks used in the US are older than you seemed to assume.[1]
[1] https://www.bts.gov/content/average-age-automobiles-and-truc...
People are probably unaware of the telemetry on their vehicle.
But this is a good point, people get upset when government is perceived to screw them over and not upset enough when the private sector does it. In practice, the private sector screws over the public quite a bit.
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Same ones who probably will develop fast homomorphic encryption and distribute it to the entire world, completely oblivious to the eventual heat death of the universe.
For most people in the US a car is a daily necessity so it’s very difficult to avoid that telemetry gathering.
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Put me on that jury.
Well Tesla cameras don't qualify as public record
"On Thursday, a Skagit County Superior Court judge ruled that pictures taken by Flock cameras in the cities of Sedro-Woolley and Stanwood qualify as public records, and therefore must be released as required by the state’s Public Records Act, court records show."
I do think that's an important distinction though; if I have a camera and record a public space, that's not an issue. If the government sets up a bunch of cameras, that's an issue, whether or not it's ICE, the FBI, or someone else using the cameras. I can't imagine the government will set up cameras and do non-scary things with it.
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"And yet, you live in a society. I am very smart."
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Everyone was fine with Flock as well until arrests started.
Once there will be a few high-profile cases around telemetry data being used, there will be much more outcry there.
> Nobody likes them
This seems like an unsupported assumption. Lots of people like them. Anyone who wants policing to be effective and cares about crime / public safety would like them to have the best tools.
> Anyone who wants policing to be effective and cares about crime / public safety would like them to have the best tools.
This depends on what the “cost” is for this “safety,” no?
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety"
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"On Thursday, a Skagit County Superior Court judge ruled that pictures taken by Flock cameras in the cities of Sedro-Woolley and Stanwood qualify as public records, and therefore must be released as required by the state’s Public Records Act, court records show."
This video by Tom Lehto talks more about that court case that illustrates citizens can legally do FOIA requests for traffic cameras (e.g. Flock): https://youtu.be/1vQn4MWBln0
The example of Seattle Police dashcam and body camera footage may be interesting. When those things were relatively new, ten years ago or so, someone started filing daily public records requests for footage from all 911 dispatches (among other things). They wanted to build their own database of the theoretically public footage. The SPD complained that the overhead of redacting all that footage would be impossible. Eventually the legislature clarified the status and tightened the request rules, so now you have to request footage for a specific incident, and you may have to pay a redaction fee. [0]
[0] https://mrsc.org/explore-topics/public-records/law-enforceme...
ten years ago or so, someone started filing daily public records requests for footage from all 911 dispatches (among other things).
I know someone who until very recently worked for a major city's police department. He said there were people who would request every video they could think of, and it was his team's job to scrub through the video and blur/block out faces of children and things like that.
He said his team was absolutely overwhelmed with requests from randos all over the country requesting things in bulk. Even if his team (~10 people, full-time) didn't take the extra step to redact some images, they simply couldn't keep up with it. Essentially, a FOIA DDOS.
The stress was too much, and he left for a different career.
(Before anyone asks if the PD imposed a fee for video, I don't know. It's possible the fee wasn't high enough, or maybe there's a state law regulating the fee. But I'm not sure it matters since there are plenty of cranks in the world with very deep pockets.)
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Redactions are necessary to protect innocent members of the public. Going through all the footage from every officer every single day to perform these redactions would require a huge amount of manpower. That may change with new technology, but until it can be automated reliably, the WA legislature got this right.
With shit like traffic cameras, I don't think redactions are necessary, although it would be nice if all license plates were automatically redacted and only accessible with a warrant. Turning the cameras off is an even better idea.
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I think someone even tried automating the redactions then posting to YouTube.
It’s an interesting case that pits privacy against transparency.
I absolutely want the cops to wear bodycams and I’d prefer they can’t even turn them off. But they also need to protect the privacy of victims, suspects, and witnesses. So they can’t just live stream to the Internet either.
How much is the redaction fee? How much would it cost to just pay it for everything?
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Someone should use AI to request such a large amount of data that it DDoSes the whole system. Unfortunately I feel like that would result in traffic camera data just being removed from FOIA rather than removed from use.
If I recall, the FOIA allows government agencies to charge you for the work of processing your request if you're requesting more than N pages or it takes more than a couple hours of work to fulfill the request. I'd be careful about a maliciously compliant response to such a thing. That said, we live in a boring world where they'd probably just respond by threatening you with a felony hacking prosecution for attempting to take down their system.
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I don't think that would be legal... you'd have to get a judge to reverse the previous decision that established the cameras are public record. They would probably just turn them off instead.
So I definitely agree it's a positive development that these cameras are being taken down because they're absolutely orwellian, but I really don't understand why "the line" is being drawn at immigration enforcement? Were people really okay with this until the point where they found out that illegal immigrants can be tracked by the surveillance state too?
People were okay with it when they assumed, I think naively, that only guilty people had anything to hide.
Now that we've got someone willing to throw all rules and morals to the wayside in charge, they've understandably begun to reassess.
Sure wish Americans could understand the issues before they happen. Not after it's too late.
I'd like to say that the people who championed them realized that if fedcops can basically arrest their landscaper over what amounts to a civil infraction then it has implications for them. Unfortunately I don't think the people who championed the cameras in the first place have that kind of self awareness and what we're seeing is instead the typically silent majority saying "no, I akshually agree with the privacy people those are bad".
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I'd have no problems enforcing laws about illegal immigrants if they actually bothered to check and not just deport random brown people even if they're citizens.
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This isn't the "people" waking up and not being okay with this, it is one governmental power (the state) realizing that its own power to manage its citizens (the residents of WA) and its sovereignty is being threatened by another power (the fed) in a new way. The system the state previously used to enforce its own power over its constituents is now helping the competing power to have more power over those constituents outside of cooperation with the state power, so they are removing it. There is no sudden awakening of citizen consciousness here. Many of the actions emerging around ICE stuff are about states trying to combat overreaching federal power.
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Which is bad because a lot of them will be right back to insisting on more cameras, more data collection and more jackboot the second he's gone.
Wonder why people would take issue with the unqualified, armed, masked thugs abducting innocent people off the street and deporting them without recourse or due process. Must be all about Trump, surely.
The only thing defying logic here is the MAGA cult rationalizing away the brown shirts now patrolling the streets of America, they who are supposedly so attached to freedom.
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What did they think would happen? Installing surveillance systems to monitor people is acceptable, as long as they're only used against the majority? I don't understand the logic here.
What kind of innane logic are you using here?! Yes, if the systems are installed for a reason approved by the public, and then they're used for a different reason, people don't like that.
Did you get to vote on whether Flock could operate in your area?
The police chiefs are usually the ones pushing the initiative. Have you ever voted for a police chief in your life?
That is rarely the case that they are “approved by the public” in anything even remotely close to a legitimate process. In cases like, was it Denver, where the city council voted against the approval of the $250,000 contract to surveil everyone’s movements, for the mayor to only immediately use his discretionary spending limit of up to $150,000 (or so) to approve a presumably smaller scope of surveillance.
In several other cities it has also led to all kinds of resistance by city councils and mayors in what can only be called an odd resistance against its own populace and constituents.
At least it seems that maybe something good will come of it when local people get more engaged and pay more attention and maybe even run for office against the corrupt narcissists of society that usually hold offices in local politics because people have not paid attention for a very long time.
Do you know your sheriff? Your city/county council members? The city manager? The mayor?
When you look at the deflock.me map and are astonished at how many cameras there are, you can thank people not paying attention in local politics and who their sheriff is, and you can thank the traitors at YC leadership who brought about this Orwellian system.
I think this is a case of, tools used to fight one type of crime are being used to fight another type of crime that disrupting the community. Kind of an unforeseen consequences situation.
"Kind of an unforeseen consequences situation."
This type of use and expansion of scope was totally foreseeable by anyone paying attention to history. It always starts as some targeted thing, then it becomes the path of least resistance for similar subsequent things as the barrier to entry is extremely low.
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In my country you'd have to get a warrant. You'll get pretty much carte blanche for an Amber Alert but the judge isn't going to let you hunt down brown people.
But I guess if you elect judges pretty much all bets are off, no? Just find yourself a card carrying MAGA judge willing to sign off.
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Kind of an unforeseen consequences situation.
According to the article, it was foreseen. But the people who brought it up were ignored.
> Kind of an unforeseen consequences situation.
This is the most foreseeable consequence I can imagine. It’s up there with “When I throw this baseball where will it land?”. It shouldn’t even require conscious thought.
You have to be covering your eyes, plugging your ears, and shutting down your brain to not be able to foresee these consequences.
They are being used to perform another kind of crime. Much of ICE behaviour this past year has been highly criminal.
Redmond is under no obligation to assist them.
It's pretty simple: People will tolerate surveillance technology if it promises to promote order and justice. People imagine them being instrumental in convicting murders, rapists, etc. ICE raids have been shown to be (I'm being generous here) sloppy and chaotic and seemingly targeting towards working people to grind towards a government-mandated quota - not the "bad guys" that plague our streets. Few are interested in a massive surveillance network to clamp down on what are essentially civil infraction of otherwise law-abiding and productive members of the community.
Flock is a bad actor and untrustworthy (misleading departments and officials about how data is shared/accessed, literally reinstalling cameras that cities have demanded to be taken down). Regardless of whether the local municipality wants surveillance or not, Flock is not a trustworthy company to buy it from.
> Regardless of whether the local municipality wants surveillance or not, Flock is not a trustworthy company to buy it from.
That's because the local authorities aren't the final customer. The final customer is the federal government, they want allllll the data.
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> misleading departments and officials about how data is shared/accessed
Many times this isn't misleading, per se, but nudge nudge wink wink. "We trust you to follow your own data privacy policy. It's not our job to police how access to your data is configured." In Washington, for example, there is data that LE cannot collect, and LE cannot pay someone to collect directly for them to bypass that...
... but if someone just so happens to ALREADY be collecting it, they can pay to access it.
Who? I don't understand your logic either. I don't think anyone said this "is fine as long as it's used against the majority". Virtually every large city uses Flock. This is the norm.
They had never picked up a history book so they didn't realize that the systems they envisioned being used to stop the jackboot upon people they don't like would eventually be used to stomp people they do.
If you don't want to read a book, here is a Wikipedia article
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi
Back in a day, you did not have cameras yet, so one had to hire snitches. Luckily this is not the case anymore, as demonstrated by Chinese leading by an example:
https://t.co/Q1xOiQMmZT
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When history is racist, only racists will read history books.
It's apparently against Washington state law for local law enforcement to assist immigration enforcement: https://app.leg.wa.gov/RCW/default.aspx?cite=10.93.160
Specifically interesting is the section "State and local law enforcement agencies may not provide nonpublicly available personal information about an individual..." which puts police in a bind with Flock data: if the data is public, anyone can request it (including ICE) and they have to provide it to all comers. If they declare it not to be subject to public records request, then they also can't share it with ICE -- which is outside their control in practice, since Flock independently sells access to AI summaries of the data. In the face of this contradiction, turning the things off seems to be the only way to stay legal until the courts get done chewing on this.
That law isn’t really enforceable since it would violate a local government’s first amendment rights.
you don't understand it or you don't agree with it?
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I agree with this. As a resident of a neighboring suburb to Redmond, I would have welcomed more automated cameras to cut down on street racing, package thefts, and car prowls. In fact I want all of the suburbs around me to implement this so that criminals can't just flee to another jurisdiction and escape justice.
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Seattle is in such a tough spot. I lived there from 2001 to 2010 and left and then went back in 2018 or so and it looked like the homeless population had doubled, or tripled in the time since. And then I went back again after COVID and it was just sad. The entire downtown area is just homeless camps. There used to be a big beautiful Macy's department store on 4th Ave that's just all boarded up now. You can't browse around outside Westlake Center without being bombarded and accosted by aggressive panhandlers. Even the iconic Pike Place Market was overrun with druggies.
The entire city is so poorly run they just have no answers, and nobody can do anything about it. Pick something. Build more housing, do a basic income. Something, anything. But they can't. And their politics just let it keep getting worse and worse.
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You don't understand why they may want surveillance to curb or investigate violent crime, but not why they oppose surveillance used by the Gestapo to kidnap members of their community? Seriously?
It's like saying I'm hypocritical for loving to write with pencils but being offended when someone else stabs me with one.
> Bro, you said you liked pencils, make up your mind!
No. I'm calling them idiots for giving a bunch of 3rd graders piles of newspapers and matches and expecting the eventual end result to be anything other than a fire.
This shit was wholly foreseeable but they flew right into the sun, not too close to it, right the fuck into it, because they just couldn't stop lusting after the idea of sending the jackboot after someone for a crime that amounts to petty deviance (I'd like to say they were using it to go after petty thieves, but we all know they weren't doing that).
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If stabbing people is so wrong, why don’t we lock up all the surgeons?
Of all the poor thinking and rhetorical skills out there, the one that drives me the craziest is this insistence that ignoring context is not just acceptable but essential.
You don't understand the logic of "there are some crime problems we're willing to accept more intrusions to solve than other crime problems?"
Seems like something virtually everyone believes, and all that changes is where they draw the line of balance between intrusion and safety.
The problem here is that the law and order politicians world wide pretty consistently follow a pattern that starts by demanding surveillance tools to fight very serious crimes and those crimes only. Once they get that, they eventually start another campaign to allow use of the tools that they now have access to for less serious crimes. After a few cycles of this, you get a massive erosion of citizen rights.
This is called "Salamitaktik" in Germany.
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The point is that there is no actual line. There's the premise which then collects the data.
Then the data can be used for other purposes--no line prevents this.
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"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
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Clearly relevant regardless of opinion.
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety
The UK has their "blade runners" - maybe the US needs them, too.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/ulez-cameras-van...
A little annoyed, this seems like is has nothing to do with the ICE arrests...
> The city suspended its Flock system because city officials could not guarantee they wouldn’t be forced to release data collected by those devices someday, she said.
Key part is "someday". Seems like the article is implying that flock may have shared this data with ICE which led to the arrests... but there is no proof supporting this...
> On Thursday, a Skagit County Superior Court judge ruled that pictures taken by Flock cameras in the cities of Sedro-Woolley and Stanwood qualify as public records, and therefore must be released as required by the state’s Public Records Act, court records show.
This is the more likely reason. What do folks here think about this ruling?
IMO it seems obvious that this should be public records/data, but would love to hear alternative positions to this.
I can't stand this type of "journalism"/sensationalism.
> Redmond’s Police Department was not among those listed in the report, and has never allowed external agencies to access their Flock data without requesting and receiving permission from the police chief first, according to an Oct. 24 statement by Lowe.
So because the arrests were near a Flock Camera the "journalist" is connecting the two? Even with the statements an information to the contrary?
:(
This wouldn't be the first time Flock was used by ICE and would not be the first time Flock allowed ICE backdoor access against the wishes of the local government or police department in Washington. https://jsis.washington.edu/humanrights/2025/10/21/leaving-t...
So making the connection isn't a leap and seems like a pretty pragmatic action taken to reduce ICE's ability to surveil communities.
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The journalists didn't make this connection, it was a topic of discussion at the city council meeting. And the result of that discussion was to suspend the cameras anyway, out of concern that ICE could end up with the the Flock data, even if they hadn't already. It would have been odd for the journalist to report on the outcome and leave out the event that prompted it.
Yes. Because Flock literally cannot be trusted.
As an ex-Flock employee in my county alone, Flock's "Transparency Report" only lists -half- of the agencies using Flock.
I think we need to revise our understanding of expectation of privacy. The 'you have no expectation of privacy when you are outside' bit was formed before we had everything recording us and before face recognition could track us.
At the very least I think any kind of face recognition should require probable cause.
Its an interesting question indeed. You're saying there might be some expectation of privacy even in public?
The line here is a little different. I could point a camera out my window and record every license plate that drives by my house, and that would be allowed because its recording public activities, and the data I collect would be private—its mine from my camera.
The question here is if a public/government agency pays a private company to setup cameras in public, for the benefit of the public, then should that data collected by those cameras not also be public?
The courts seem to agree that it should be public, and I fail to see why it shouldn't be. Maybe I should read the opposition briefs on it.
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I think it's less of a revision and more a return to a core meaning.
Privacy isn't a mechanic, it's a capability, and most reasonable people DO expect, implicitly, that that they can travel unremarked under most circumstances.
I think most people would agree that a government drone swarm specifically tasked to follow you everywhere in public (loitering outside buildings) would be an invasion of privacy. Especially when it is illegal not to be wearing some equivalent of license plates.
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sigh I hope LLMs can save us from ourselves. :)
Maybe I need to write a news filter/browser extension that rewrites rage-bait articles to have titles and content based only on the meaningful content/facts, and less the speculation/insinuations.
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Paramilitaries kidnapping and assaulting my neighbors is not "rage bait." It's fascism.
From what I read, the pressure from activist groups on Redmond’s city leadership began before the Skagit County ruling. So it is probably unrelated. But I think it’s still a bad outcome for Redmond. Why wouldn’t you want law enforcement to be able to observe public spaces (which these cameras are monitoring) and identify or track suspects? We want our city services (like policing) to be efficient, right? We want criminals to be arrested and face consequences, right? We all want safe cities and neighborhoods, right?
I think the Skagit county ruling is likely to be appealed. There is a lot of information that governments can redact for a variety of reasons, despite FOIA or state/local transparency laws. It seems obvious that there’s a case for law enforcement to be able to access footage but to avoid handing over that kind of intelligence to the general public, where criminals could also abuse the same data. And I just don’t buy the argument that surveillance through cameras is automatically dystopian - we can pass laws that make it so that data is only accessible with a warrant or in a situation with immediate public risk. There are all sorts of powers the government has that we bring under control with the right laws - why would this be any different?
As for Redmond turning off its cameras - this is just fear-mongering about ICE. In reality, it’s just sanctuary city/state resistance to enforcing immigration laws. Redmond’s police department confirmed they’ve never shared this camera data with federal agencies, but that doesn’t stop activist types from making unhinged claims or exerting pressure. In reality, it’s activists of the same ideological bias as the soft on crime types that have caused crimes to go up dramatically in the Pacific Northwest in the last 20 years. They’re happy to see law enforcement hampered and the public put at risk - the ICE thing is just the new tactic to push it.
Your first paragraph doesn’t just beg the question, it outright harasses it.
…and identify or track suspects?
For starters, we’re all suspects when those cameras are running. Granted, AI-driven facial recognition is 100% accurate, so if you have nothing to hide…
> Why wouldn’t you want law enforcement to be able to observe public spaces (which these cameras are monitoring) and identify or track suspects?
Yeah, why wouldn't I want that? Or Flock "helpfully" proactively flagging AI-generated "suspicious vehicle movements" to LE for investigation? What could wrong there?
> We all want safe cities and neighborhoods, right?
Was it hard not to end that paragraph with a "Won't somebody think of our children?"?
You sound like great fun at a party.
I know there's a massive hate for flock online but it solved a murder that happened in a park behind my house in less than 24 hours which was pretty cool.
Redmond is such an excellent town.
No they turned them off because it turns out those cameras are public records and all their citizens can make requests for ALL THAT DATA.
Couldn't they just not log the license plates and only look for license plates on the list like stolen cars, stolen plates, amber alert etc? Why do they a need a list of all cars that the camera saw?
They don't just log license, they log everything about the car, dents, location of dents, type of wheels, stickers, etc. If you swap a license plate they would be able to tell the car. One local case I read about, the culprits used their own car with a stolen plate. They were able to identify the car based on the car's "fingerprints" dents, style, color, antenna, scratches etc.
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To run fishing expeditions.
We are all speed running our learning on how all of these systems can be used against us.
I have seen so many of these cameras by intersections recently! I wondered what they were.
Immigration is similar to the housing crisis and Nimbyism. Voters don't want a streamlined and efficient immigration system that lawfully allows a lot of migrants in (NIMBY). it is also similar to the war on drugs and its failure, ICE won't solve anything just as the DEA only made things worse with drugs.
No matter what, the whole ICE acting like the SS thing will only result in more illegal migration in the long term, like a lot more. Same with europe's far right teasing.
If the "infrastructure" can't support more people, we can build more here in the US. Borders shouldn't be open, but more health and able-bodied or skilled people wanting to migrate, so long as their criminal history is clear, should be let in, infrastructure should be scaled. It's more economic activity and wealth for the rest of us. More jobs, more workers. We need to do that for the housing crisis anyways.
We need more cities, more development, less NIMBY-thinking and less "beat them until they comply" thinking. Too many people who don't know or are unwilling to solve real problems but are eager to see cruelty and violence cause these untenable and regrettable situations.
> No matter what, the whole ICE acting like the SS thing will only result in more illegal migration in the long term, like a lot more.
I don't follow. Illegal immigration into the US is down right now. So, how did you arrive at that conclusion?
The lesson learned is that people going to their immigration hearings to stay legal are getting nabbed, and going the legal way is a convoluted recipe for failure.
As soon as enforcement lets up an iota the lesson will be it is wiser to stay off paper and off the visa pathway and go underground. People who aren't arrested and don't present to CBP for entry and don't get a visa, as far as the government knows, don't exist.
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I don't think the drugs analog works. What this activity by ICE does though is put a chilling effect on "legal" immigration and tourism. Which will over time hurt supply chains, tourist destinations and jobs overall.
It's a pendulum, the next administration will react in the other direction, possibly very dramatically.
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Because the blowback on ICE's current 'posture' is going to gut that agency.
I agree with GP, but from the opposite perspective.
ICE doing a good job of removing illegal aliens ("acting like SS" in GP's parlance) will trigger the next democratic president to relax border enforcement. This is what happened with Biden. He let in 7.2 million migrants [1].
There's no way for Trump to deport 7.2 million people in 4 years. Pro-illegal immigration presidents are always at an advantage.
Trump's strict (and good) policies might trigger the next democratic president to just blanket pardon all illegal aliens, and the next republican president can't do anything about it.
[1]: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/million-migrants-border-bi...
> Voters don't want a streamlined and efficient immigration system that lawfully allows a lot of migrants
There was a really interesting open ended survey some years ago, in the leadup to the trump/clinton election but I can't find it now sorry.
When republicans voters were asked to describe their preferred immigration policies, they outline a stance significantly more permissive and flexible, and less burdensome, than the one we currently have. More liberal than the reality, in other words.
People don't know what the immigration policies are and so they can't know what they should be either. The anti-immigration sentiment is a stunning propaganda victory decades in the making, no more.
Yes, that's my experience when having to explain what getting a greencard entails, most people have no idea how the whole thing works.
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> No matter what, the whole ICE acting like the SS thing will only result in more illegal migration in the long term, like a lot more.
How so? What mechanism do you see that goes from "ICE acting like the SS" to "a lot more illegal migration in the long term"? What's the cause and effect here?
Not saying you're wrong, necessarily, just... I don't see the causality at all.
My guess is he sees ICE hauling people out of even the courts when they were attempting to abide by the legal processes and will say f-it, why bother, its safer to not adhere. just my assumption of OP's intent.
Why fill out the right paperwork and actually attend your court dates and immigration hearings if there is a good chance that will result in your extraordinary rendition to some torture prison God-only-knows-where? Much safer to simply stay off the books.
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What was the reaction to SS? or to stick to my DEA example, what was the result of the war on drugs? millions and millions dead because of drug related causes right? how do you think the nation will react to ICE's brutal and cruel, even illegal operations? many would consider them heroes, but the other side will consider them no different than the SS or gestapo, the only correction is to wind down immigration enforcement dramatically, increasing immigration.
Imagine a democrat administration simply reverting ICE to its pre-2025 state. the implication alone and the perception it gives will drive up illegal immigration. "america is open again".
Statistics are showing that the total immigrant population is down by over a million since the start of the year. If you have the ability to leave, why put up with this nonsense?
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/08/21/key-findi...
A large number of people, myself included, are now radicalized against the concept of immigration enforcement. I think everyone has a duty to make sure that ICE is as ineffective as possible and ICE agents are as miserable as possible. There's a lot of talk, for example, about how the asylum system is easily abusable; that's true, but now we will not be able to fix it because no immigration reform compromise that doesn't destroy ICE is acceptable.
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People want immigrants. It is just that they want them to be second class citizens that are not allowed to earn more than them because of their skin color.
I was resistant to this argument for a long time, but the ICE thing makes it clear that really the core of all of this is racism.
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Yeah, it's a nation. A nation of immigrants. Where did your great-great-great grandfather come from? Did he spontaneously erupt from this common ancestry and heritage that you speak of?
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common ancestry and heritage? that's what you're going for as the defining american feature? really?
Hi, Jew here: I was with you until you started slandering dissenters as "rootless cosmopolitans"—a slur has cost my family dearly—from jobs and enrollments to several dozen of our very lives.
Yes, NO land is an "economic zone" while it is also a home. I feel this especially acutely having grown up in the San Francisco Bay Area where My friends and I struggle to compete for housing with the best and the brightest from the entire world over who, themselves, treat my home region less like a community and more like an understaffed amusement park.
Nevertheless, your blood quanta framing is utterly horrifying to me, someone whose family were murdered, lands stolen, and who has no country to go back to.
We are not by choice "rootless cosmopolitans", but by the very bigotry you espouse.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rootless_cosmopolitan
> The term is considered to be an antisemitic trope
> common ancestry or heritage
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_and_soil
> Blood and soil (German: Blut und Boden, pronounced [ˈbluːt ʊnt ˈboːdn̩] ⓘ) is a nationalist phrase and concept of a racially defined national body ("Blood") united with a settlement area ("Soil"). Originating in the German völkisch movement, it was used extensively by Nazi Germany
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> will only result in more illegal migration in the long term
Why? Wouldn't it disincentivize illegal immigration by making it much more riskier?
Agreed that the legal immigration system needs an overhaul, these are a lot of people living in limbo, paying taxes and not causing crimes with very few rights. The term no taxation without representation was the reason the USA got founded.
It's a temporary partisan solution, the other party will do the opposite, reducing enforcement and letting even more illegal migrants in, lest they be accused of being a xenophobe.
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NB: Title edited to add "WA" for clarity. I.e., this is the city of, not a toponym for another entity.
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I can think of many uses for "surveillance state technology" that have nothing to do with immigration: It can be used against citizens and legal residents too.
I don’t buy that for a second. Governments always want more control, and this is just another way for them to get it.
But the sorts of ICE actions that are causing this controversy only have political support because the US immigration laws have been flouted for 30+ years. Regardless of what you or I think of it it’s the reality that lots of the electorate wants deportations and lots of them and that likely isn’t true in a world where the laws on the books were more strictly enforced in the past.
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They'd find a need (or excuse) for it regardless of the state of our immigration system.
This is actually true, since there’s no need for it now and there would be no need for it in your silly hypothetical too.
> your silly hypothetical too.
The stats for Southwest Land Border Encounters are available at https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/southwest-land-border-enc... and the HN guidelines are available at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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on the books immigration law has been broken for decades. do you expect people across the border wait a decade to get their turn for an immigration interview only to be turned down, when they can just cross the border?
When laws become impractical, they create 11 million law breakers.
Hundreds of thousands to millions of people have come to the US legally each year for the last thirty years.[0] How is that impractical? In fact the share of immigrants in the US has increased significantly (by 3 times) in the last 50 years, and is above the level of the EU, and is at the highest level in the last 100 years in the US.[1][2] Even if legal immigration was set to zero, that shouldn't give people the right to come here illegally.
To be clear I am not making an argument that mass surveillance is needed to solve any problem.
[0] https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/green-card-holders-a...
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2024... via https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/09/27/u-s-immig...
[2] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SM.POP.TOTL.ZS?most_rec...
US vs EU vs OECD: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SM.POP.TOTL.ZS?most_rec... - I'm pretty sure the values here include illegal immigration as well, so if you factor that in the US may be lower than the EU, but again still at historically very high levels.
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> do you expect people across the border wait a decade to get their turn for an immigration interview only to be turned down
The backlog isn't a consequence of the law.
Is there a country that doesn't expect people to go through some kind of qualification process in order to immigrate legally? Here's what it looks like in Canada (where I live), for example: https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/se... It's actually quite complex, and depends on additional provincial legislation. And then there's citizenship on top of that: https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/se...
> when they can just cross the border?
The entire point is that they legally in fact may not do so, and have only been doing so because of the lack of enforcement GP cites.
> When laws become impractical, they create 11 million law breakers.
We don't have nearly the same scale of problem in Canada. That probably has much more to do with only sharing an unsecured land border with a rich country.
>when they can just cross the border
This is also a choice for the people in charge of the border. Enforcing a border is a solved problem for a rich, large-population nation.
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> on the books immigration law has been broken for decades. do you expect people across the border wait a decade to get their turn for an immigration interview only to be turned down, when they can just cross the border?
No, I don't expect that at all. However the problem with your scenario isn't that they need to wait their turn, it's that they can "just cross the border". That fact that that has been allowed was an intentional policy decision.
How? As a migrant to the US I have generally found the rules quite reasonable, the UX of the websites is poorer than say the UK but the rules seem fine.
> do you expect people across the border wait a decade to get their turn for an immigration interview only to be turned down, when they can just cross the border?
Well yes, that's what following the law means. They can't complain about it, it's not their country, and they don't have a say on the rules.
In a similar vein by your logic, if you are in a hurry, why should you obey traffic laws when you can just run a red light or a stop sign right?
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Ah, the paper tiger crisis. Clearly the misdemeanor of being in the country illegally requires new technology to be developed for state surveillance to enforce those laws, police cannot possibly be expected to do their job without it /s.
The expectation of privacy and personal freedoms of 350M people seems to be an inconvenience for the state wanting deporting a few more people per year.
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1. No it wasn't
2. It's not any less open now
as opposed to the big gate across the border being closed? you people are insane, do you realize that even democrats have been deporting people, separating families, locking up illegal immigrants,etc...?
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They are not being enforced now. In fact the current administration is actively trying to circumvent the law. Which should not be surprising considering how much Trump has violated immigration law in his personal life
Not strictly enforcing the speed limit wouldn't justify the use of secret police to crack down on that either. But there's no xenophobia for speeders, so we don't see this action for them and we don't have to see specious takes like this defending it.
Excessive speeders in the absence of speed-limit enforcement just creates neighbors that don't mind their neighborhood being consumed by speed bumps/dips, I think there's an analogy here in residential areas. And if you have a lot of children in your neighborhood, there IS a 'xx-phobia' for speeders. But speed bumps and dips are an absolute nuisance and sometimes dangerous, so just having cameras identify and a system willing to punish speeders would absolutely be the preference.
Because American citizens and documented immigrants never commit crimes? Nonsense.
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Its a data gathering system. it takes pictures of everything that goes past it so that IF something happens, cops can search back through the system to see if/when a suspect went past that sensor. This sort of thing should be turned off regardless. I don't want my movements recorded and tracked all the time in the off chance someone might do something later. This ICE situation is the perfect example of why these actively passive systems are a threat.
In my home county they've arrested car thieves and recovered vehicles due to real-time Flock hits. It is not simply for forensic purposes.
If it was a bad idea it shouldn't have been installed in the first place. Turning it off now because a few loud people assumed things that weren't true (ICE using the system) is idiotic.
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I’d start by being ticked off that my city was burning money deploying a cloud-connected mass surveillance apparatus.
Until someone you love gets abducted, and then you want them to be found right now.
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Flock doesn't fight crime, it documents the travel of people without a reason.
It and other ALPR systems real-time alert on things like stolen cars. In my home county they have arrested and convicted criminals due to this. That is fighting crime, by definition.
If it was such a bad idea, they shouldn't have installed them in Redmond. Turning them off now because some people assumed things that weren't true is idiocy and sets a bad precedent.
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And AI based "suspicious movements of vehicles".