Comment by pton_xd
12 hours ago
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.
12 hours ago
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.
Exactly. Same goes for expansion of presidential powers. It’s all fun and games as long as your “good” team controls the executive, but there will come a time when bad guy takes over. A good system of government limits the impact any single bad player might have.
> 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.
This new technology will improve existing procedures. How can you oppose it?
This new procedure will use existing technologies. How can you oppose it?
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.
Some states elect state judges. Some states appoint state judges. Federal judges are appointed. Appointed judges in the US and other countries show the same problems as elected judges.
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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.
And Garrett, the founder, has what even he calls a quite literal, not aspirational/visionary/metaphorical, aim that "We want to eliminate all crime."
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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
Facts are no match for my ability to use short sighted emotion and motivated reasoning to convince myself it'll be different this time. /s
Kinda funny if you think about it, the snitches are cut from the same cloth as the people clamoring for more cameras, more jackboot. If anything they should be pissed about being cut out.
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.
> so that criminals can't just flee to another jurisdiction and escape justice.
I think it's a fair deal so long as you can't escape to Utah/Idaho/Colorado when you realize the dystopia you've created isn't the kind of place you want to raise a family.
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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.
> The entire downtown area is just homeless camps.
This isn’t even remotely close to true.
> 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.
I live on Pike Street. There’s homeless, but it’s not “overrun” and for the year+half I’ve lived here I haven’t been “accosted by aggressive panhandlers”. These are areas with constant foot traffic.
Yes 3rd & Pike is bad, but it’s improved since then. Late at night it’s not the best—but it’s never been.
If this is truly your experience, I urge you to visit again. Seattle is a large and beautiful city with a lot to offer.
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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).
This is just victim blaming people for assuming they lived in a polite society with safeguards for their rights at a higher level.
People are allowed to leverage trust in society to make tradeoffs. Or should we ban all forms of delivery because it can be abused at the extremes of the system to mug the drivers? Should every single store have every product locked behind glass and armed guards to light up any shoplifters, lest it be their fault for being robbed?
You're acting like they should have known the President would take complete control of the government and all other branches should cede while a Gestapo was deployed against the populace. And even then, they would only be buying time. The fascists will install their own mass surveillance anyway whether you like it or not. They're fascists!
Maybe blame every Republican and Republican voter for installing a fascist government instead of a city that had the audacity to think they could leverage stability to make their lives a little better.
And, for what it's worth, I know folk here like to pretend "this is just to spy on you", but that's just your rhetoric. The city doesn't care about where you go. But this kind of data is used frequently rape and murder cases, as traffic cameras are often some of the best evidence available. And the analytics collecter can be useful for all sorts of civil engineering, policy, and architectural decisions.
Now do I agree with the mass surveillance? Do I think the motivations were entirely pure? No, not really. But do I think you're being a bit of a drama queen and blaming the wrong people? Absolutely.
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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.
For anyone else interested in reading more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salami_slicing_tactics
This new technology will improve existing procedures. How can you oppose it?
This new procedure will use existing technologies. How can you oppose it?
>they eventually start another campaign to allow use of the tools that they now have access to for less serious crimes.
Don't forget the part where the useful idiots cheer because "I hate street racers and package thieves" or "I hate cults and drugs" depending on the decade
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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.
Weird. There's an article right here showing them turning off the cameras when the line was crossed and now that data can't be used the way they don't want.
So clearly we're allowed more nuanced takes than you think.
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"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
i will never tire of the irony of a man who owned humans being lauded as a freedom fighter.
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And yet every society makes exactly this trade off.
There is no such thing as avoiding this trade off entirely.
"Those (the Penn family) who would give up essential Liberty (money & power), to purchase a little temporary Safety (a veto over a taxation dispute, trying to raise money from the Penn family), deserve neither Liberty (said money & power) nor Safety (the defense that said taxed money would've bought from the present French & Indian wars)"
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