Comment by helterskelter
3 months ago
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.
Not only this does good to society in the obvious way, but also creates jobs as someone needs to clean those.
Kudos to the guy, who single-handedly doing what almost all politicians miserably fail at.
Is it good for society to disable traffic cameras? Here in Sweden, traffic camera is used exclusively to reduce traffic speed on roads where the maximum speed is too fast for installing traffic bumps, with an expected effect of reducing traffic speed by around 20-30%. They are generally only installed on 60-90km/h roads, around road maintenance/construction sites, and in tunnels. They active when the radar detects speeds of 5km above the maximum. (The reduction in speed happens regardless if the camera is functional or not, since it is primarily a psychological effect).
Sweden also have traffic monitors that monitor highways around cities, border exists and tunnels, and also license plate readers for toll roads and bridges (also often used for parking). Those two generally have a much higher privacy cost than traffic cameras.
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This is the best way to handle it because if the company presses charges they just look ridiculous.
Honestly, feels like the company is within their right to press charges here? Dude is disabling the equipment that they use to turn revenue, no?
Don't agree with the company, but I don't find a suit here ridiculous. If my job put up cameras, and my form of protest was to deface and disable them, I'd get fired. This isn't a job, it's government, but it's similar in my head. The people with the authority to do something did it.
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It makes sense to me that criminals, like this guy you met in a bar, are opposed to Flock cameras.
There's also this spray-on-a-pole diy option https://www.themarginalian.org/index.php/2013/07/31/ai-weiwe...
I live in the Bay Area and went to my Nextdoor because I was thinking of seeing if there's much anti-Flock sentiment, and (not surprisingly for Nextdoor), most people seem to think anti-camera people are paranoid, or have something to hide, and wish they were installed in more places to solve the (non-existent) raging crime issues, or speeding, or god knows what.
I shouldn't have expected much more, though, to be fair. There's a reason I don't use nextdoor.
The funny thing is the people calling anti-Flock people "paranoid". Well, I don't believe in dash cams or ringing my house with surveillance cameras and peering at the footage all day and all night. I think _those_ are the paranoid ones. What happened to just living your life and not worrying about everything?
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
Which is better than Flock's "Transparency" Report. I live in WA, ex-Flock employee, and in my County, half of the agencies with Flock agreements are not on their Transparency portal.
And at the very least - why can't you search the Transparency Portal? You have to try each and every agency name. Let's try https://transparency.flocksafety.com/ ...
<Error> <Code>NoSuchKey</Code> <Message>The specified key does not exist.</Message> <Key>index.html</Key> <RequestId>[redacted]</RequestId> <HostId>[redacted]</HostId> </Error>
Has been like that for a year plus, at least.
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They seem to be going up rapidly at the moment.
I live in a county where the county seat is <15k people (<40k in the entire county). There are two camera locations listed on deflock - four cameras total, since they face both directions. In the past month, I’ve discovered an additionally six locations (twelve cameras), all of which show signs of having been very recently installed.
I went to add them to Deflock, but their process requires an OSM account. I wasn’t able to do that on the side of the road, and haven’t gotten back to it yet.
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Holy crap, there are almost 1000 in my part of my city.
The security cameras deployed in Lowe's and Home Depot parking lots are Flock. All the better to track your movements, citizen.
I don't understand if flock deployment in Lowe/Home Depot is because margins are so low it is the only way to survive, or margins so high that they can afford such a program just to eek out a tiny bit more sales from the collected consumer info.
Either way it doesn't make sense to me why hardware stores are the biggest private use case.
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They have a very “citizen pick up that can” feel to them.
There are a lot of Flock supporters out there. In my neighborhood, homeowners can volunteer to put Flock cameras on their property, and a number of people are doing this.
It's like having a Ring doorbell and sharing the feed with the police, which is also pretty popular in some areas. If you trust your local police to ethically fight crime, why not help them out?
I feel these camera's is a symptom of how anxious the US overclass is.
I feel worrying about security cameras is primordial mammal fear of being tracked and eaten. Like fear of vaccine poisoning, a vestige of long ago threats.
The wealthy live different than you and me. A friends friends wife works at the facebook head quarters. Zuckerberg has a armed security escort when he walks between buildings. They're traveling around San Francisco, New York, London the same way you or I would travel around Mogadishu.
The reality is these guys are scared of us. And that's behind inane airport security, militarization of police, the ICE raids.
Years and years ago read a heretic economist that comment that highly unequal societies spend huge amount of money on security. Enough it has negative effects on their economy. This is really not a good thing for the rest of us.
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.
Except when it’s all tied into the ECU and you can’t remove it. Ugh…
You’re right. It’s a start. There’s also https://www.deflock.me
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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.
Might be logical. The government can throw me in jail, steal my stuff (aka civil forfeiture), or (as we found out recently) tear gas my kids all without any penalty. In some situations, the government decides they are allowed to kill you.
Companies at least risk significant consequences if they start tear gassing children. For the most part the worst they can do is screw you out of some money, which is not great, but obviously better than imprisonment and the like.
If millions of people are being tracked by GM and haven’t noticed, how is it a problem?
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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...
They have been collecting data since 2014, with some car manufacturers as early as 2010. Also, average age of vehicle isn’t a good metric when a lot of vehicles in the US are registered but never driven.
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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.
No need to imagine. There are several cases already of these buffoons in law enforcement doing scary things. The Institute for Justice (IJ) is one of the organizations taking these cases on and who also has suggestions for how to go about combating this stuff. I’m sure most here are also familiar with Louis Rossmann; he’s also been beating the drum on this stuff locally and in Colorado.
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.
I have multiple cars and none of them are new enough to have that.
They'll have to track me the old-fashioned way, by my phone.
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We aren't at the point where it's unavoidable though. Even if we assume that its impossible to dodge random onstar/sirius bloatware crap that probably tracks you, you can definitely still buy a car that doesn't have a 5g wireless modem, 360-degree webcam coverage, mandatory automatic software updates, and ass-warming seats locked behind DRM that forces you to have an online account linked to your credit card.
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Put me on that jury.
"And yet, you live in a society. I am very smart."
Not the right point to take away. The useful observation is that visibility is key to people understanding how their rights are being violated. Unfortunately this lesson is mostly useful to bad actors. If you're going to install surveillance cameras, don't make them look like surveillance cameras (unless they're part of a theft deterrent system).
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"
> "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety"
Ben Franklin's Famous 'Liberty, Safety' Quote Lost Its Context In 21st Century [0]
(it was about the legislature being able to legislate [taxes])
[0] https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famou...
The public safety issue has been ignored and denied (and "defunded") to the point where measures like this now appear necessary.
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What can’t be done with Flock?
The fallacy here is that giving police access to more tools makes policing better.
It doesn't. Simply giving the police more stuff doesn't garuantee they will be more effective. They might be LESS effective, if they, say, have a culture of abusing their tools.