Comment by helterskelter
10 hours 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.
This is the best way to handle it because if the company presses charges they just look ridiculous.
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
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.
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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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.
They have a very “citizen pick up that can” feel to them.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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"
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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