Comment by kjkjadksj
2 days ago
Flock cameras would be so easy to disable by motivated people. Dress in nondescript clothing, mask, sunglasses, and just spraypaint over the lenses. This is completely asymmetric warfare because it is trivial how long it would take for you to do this. You could hit dozens of cameras across an area overnight. Meanwhile, flock or the city, whoever maintains this stuff, needs to identify the vandalized cameras, flag them for repair, pay a technician to go out and presumably repair the unit outright. You pay cents and they are paying potentially thousands in labor and hardware costs.
And this would absolutely work at scale too. Streetlights are already being vandalized for their copper and most cities cannot afford to hire more technicians to even keep up with streetlight repair. I believe I’ve seen the backlog for streetlight repair in LA is over 10x what the current street services crew is capable of repairing in a year of constant work and growing by the day.
Municipalities and these technology companies cannot keep up against a motivated crew and can’t afford to scale either. Totally asymmetric.
The initial disabling might be asymmetric but when/if you're caught you go to jail for years for something that cost the state maybe an hour tops to fix.
Therefore if only say one of a thousand gets caught, it still costs the people doing it more than the state on average (unless their life/time is worth basically nothing for years on end).
They are making literal zero progress catching copper theft so I doubt flock would be any better. Yeah it takes them hours to fix but they still need to send out a technician and pay for a technician. Maybe you can do this well out of the pov of the camera with a paintball gun.
Zero progress catching copper theft from private persons; because they do not care. They get basically nothing for solving that. If you robbed a cop or the mayor they'd have you found out within a week. Whether they care about vandalizing a camera depends very much on whether the whole thing is a graft or they have something else they want out of the camera.
If the goal is just to enrich their contractors, they might even be happy they're getting vandalized.