This breakdown in rule of law is unfortunate. Ideally, this would be handled by, in order of desirability:
- Flock decision-makers and customers holding ethics as a priority, and not taking the actions they are due to sense of duty, community, morals etc
- Peer pressure resulting in ostracization of Flock execs and decision makers until they stop the unethical behavior
- Governments using legislation and law enforcement to prevent the cameras being used in the way they are
Below this, is citizens breaking the law to address the situation, e.g. through this destruction. It is not ideal, but it is necessary when the higher-desirability options are not working.
> It is not ideal, but it is necessary when the higher-desirability options are not working.
What has worried me for years is that Americans would not resort to this level. That things are just too comfortable at home to take that brave step into the firing lines of being on the right side of justice but the wrong side of the law.
I'm relieved to see more and more Americans causing necessary trouble. I still think that overall, Americans are deeply underreacting to the times. But that only goes as far as to be my opinion. I can't speak for them and I'm not their current king.
You won't get to the kind of change you thought you would see until food runs low and the economy stalls. The American Revolution was rare in that it didn't need to happen. The Founders were just being giant assholes (j/k). While the French Revolution just a few decades later was more status quo. A lot of starvation and poverty just pushed the population over the edge.
On the contrary I think Americans are reacting about the same as any other set of people would react. There are always going to be people who, as long as their personal lives are stable, they are not going to do anything to put that stability at risk. America is also huge enough that even if one part of the country is having a crisis, millions of fellow citizens will not hear of it or have any 2nd, 3rd or 4th hand connection to the matter.
But also if a small portion of Americans disparately plan to do stuff like sabotage surveillance camera, it's still newsworthy.
I agree. The amount of cameras and tracking has gotten out of control. If America actually becomes an "authoritarian" country (seems almost likely) I imagine all these Flock pics with other data mining techniques will be used to send Communist Progressives to reeducation camp.
General strike! Close the ports, close the airports, steal dozers and park them on railroad tracks, teachers on the streets in front of their schools to protect their students, blockade the grocery distribution centers, so that the shelves go bare, just stop everything, everywhere.
When it hurts the billionaires, they will tell their politicians to invoke the 25th.
It's the only way, we've lost our democracy, but we still have economic power.
While points 1 and 2 are indeed desirable, point 3 should be moot given we have a constitutional right to privacy and freedom from unreasonable search and seizures.
The combination of ubiquitous scanners, poor data controls on commercially owned date, and law enforcement access without proper warrants compounds to a situation that for many rational people would fail the test of being fair play under the Fourth Amendment. For similar reasons, for example, it has been held by the Supreme Court that installing a GPS tracker on a vehicle and monitoring it long-term without a warrant is a 4A violation (US v Jones). Similar cases have held that warrants are needed for cellphone location tracking.
So far, however, courts have not held Flock to the same standard -- or have at least held that Flock's data does not rise to the same standard.
I personally think this is a mistake and is a first-order reason we have this problem, and would prefer the matter to stop there rather than rely on ethics. (Relying on ethics brought us pollution in rivers, PFAS and Perc in the ground, and so on.)
Given the state of politics and the recent behavior of the Supreme Court, however, I would not hold my breath for this to change soon.
In a country like the US with a fairly democratic process at various levels of government, this just means that people with some strong opinions can subject the rest of the citizens to their desires. This is the universal veto on societal order. We can see that the desire for governments to "live in fear of the governed" usually rapidly disappears when people start destroying water lines and power lines. After all, 'the governed' and 'the government' are the same people just with different factions distributed in power.
A government that can't do anything to police unions is also the government living in fear of the governed. A government that can't rein in (say) PG&E is also a government living in fear of the governed. When political representatives are shot by a right-wing anti-abortion terrorist that is also (and perhaps even more viscerally so) a government living in fear of the governed. And I'm certainly not 100% okay with this.
Having lived or spent time in a lot of 3rd world shitholes, including a civil war, I've only really felt freedom in places with lawless lack of government, never places with 'rule of law' -- that always gets twisted for the elite.
Of course the same happens in lawless regions, but power is fractured enough, there is a limit on power they can wield against the populace, as the opposing factions ultimately are a check on any one side oppressing the population to leave. They can't man machine guns at all the 'borders' and ultimately corruption becomes cheap enough that it is accessible to the common person which arguably provides more power to the common man than representative democracy does.
I think this element of factions in competition was part of the original genius of the '50' states with the very minimal federal government. But the consolidation of federal power and loss of the teeth of the 10th amendment and expansion of various clauses in the constitution means there is now no escape and very few remaining checks.
The thing about that is the governments who most fear the governed are often extremely draconian. I actually do not think that it is constructive and it is precisely that fear that is driving things like voter suppression in the US.
All of this presumes that residents in municipalities with ALPRs don't want them used the way they are. That's not true! These things are broadly pretty popular among a broad set of residents.
I am in favor of them. There is no expectation of privacy in the public setting. I can record anyone on a public street w/o their permission.
If these license plate cameras are making the streets safer and helping to reduce crime, why not? Sure there may be some mis-uses here and there, but for the most part they seem to be working and in places where they are deployed, crime is being reduced.
They're only popular because people are routinely lied to. We see this same issue time and time again in "free markets".
If you tell people this will help stop crime and that's it, everyone and their mama is gonna say yes.
If you tell people the truth, that police don't really care to look at the data and this surveillance is going to be used to target innocent people for unrelated "crimes" on the taxpayers dollar, then everyone would say no.
This is also why 99% of surveys are broken. You can get people to agree to literally anything if you just lie a little. After all, Adolf Hitler got elected by promising to fix the German economy and, in a way, he did.
You are unfortunately, for whatever your reasons you have, barking up the wrong tree. The people already made a law, the supreme law in fact, called the Constitution.
In fact the capital criminals in this matter are the people violating and betraying that supreme law; the politicians, sheriffs, city councils, and even the YC funders behind Flock, etc.
It is in fact not even just violating the supreme law, but though that betrayal, it is in fact also treason.
My guess is the vast majority of the 80,000 or whatever cameras are uncontested politically. Local board meetings for most towns are boring and quiet affairs, and those are also the most effective venue for these concerns.
If you are a taxpayer in a local jurisdiction with Flock cameras and you want them removed, show up to every single meeting and maximize use of public comment time.
Local government is a place individuals can actually be extremely effective but also almost nobody ever actually does.
Dan Carlin, on his Common Sense podcast several years ago, said something that really stuck with me (and he probably was paraphrasing it from someone else).
Society is like a pressure cooker, with built-in safety release valves to prevent the pressure from getting too high. If your solution to the safety release is to block off the valves, with authoritarian surveillance, draconian laws, and lack of justice for the elites committing crimes, it just moves it somewhere else. Block off too many, and it explodes.
I mean, that's excellent wishcasting, but the reality is that current economic incentives combined with a lack of social ("cancel culture" got cancelled because "uwu too mean"), regulatory ("uwu can't hurt Capital or the rich people won't make jobs no more"), and criminal ("uwu can't hold Capital accountable for their actions when they do crimes or people will lose jobs") accountability means that this was always going to be the outcome.
More people need to understand that the system is working as designed, and the elimination of peaceful, incremental reform based on popular demand, along with mass manipulation of human emotions through media and advertising, means that this sort of resistance is the sole outcome left before devolving into naked sectarian violence.
Say what you will, but the anti-Flock camera smashers are at least doing something beyond wishcasting from a philosophical armchair in comment sections or social media threads.
> It is not ideal, but it is necessary when the higher-desirability options are not working.
You are simply imposing your own views on others. Just because you disagree with Flock doesn't give you the right to destroy license plate readers that my tax dollars paid for. Who appointed you king?
Peer pressure is apparently not even effective in getting billionaires who could easily hire whatever variety of escort they want from having sex with trafficked children, so I'm not sure in what world it's supposed to stop the billionaires from installing cameras.
I view this breakdown in law similar to the marijuana situation. It’s kind of a villainous administration, green lighting villainous things. The law doesn’t hold water in this case. The people have to do something drastic to get that across.
We either have out of control govt or civil unrest and only people who don’t know what the latter looks like cheer it on. We’re screwed unless someone unlocks the economy. Right now it’s not happening.
Doesn't breakdown in rule of law happened when a corporation (surely) bribed local officials to install insecure surveillance devices with zero concern for the community living near them?
How many homeowners install mystery-meat Chinese cameras on their houses that feed the data God knows where? Should their homes be vandalized too for their lack of concern for the community?
The real breakdown in the rule of law occurred when the US Supreme Court made the specious decision that amoral business entities (corporations) had the same rights in a democracy as citizens.
All this shit flows downhill from Citizens United.
What other social issues should be solved with vigilante justice?
I don't like all this surveillance stuff, but Flock is just the tip of the iceberg and "direct action" against Flock is just as likely to backfire as it is to lead to changes. More importantly, once you give folks moral license to do this stuff it's hard to contain the scope of their activity.
>What other social issues should be solved with vigilante justice?
Everything you said is true, but I suspect, also irrelevant, because options short of vigilante justice aren't going to be seen by the public as viable for much longer (if they're even seen so now). America's social contract is breaking, and existing institutions make it clear, daily, that they will strengthen that trend rather than reverse it. And as JFK said, 'Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.' That doesn't make the violence laudable, or even desirable. It is simply inevitable without seemingly impossible positive change from an establishment that is hostile to such.
This is a nice description (i.e "where is the limit on this type of action?") of a reason why this approach is low on the list, and why ideally we would solve it with one of the other options.
You don't want to give people "moral license" to do this broadly, but we've hit a point where there are no options available that don't have downsides. Stated another way: Taking no action can also be unethical.
the threat of vigilante mob justice is required for the law to work. its the tension that makes sure the rich and powerful want to stay involved, and be held accountable by it, rather than skipping over it and making it irrelevant.
the threat has to be credible, which is where things like this, and luigi are quite valuable
For me, Flock installing these cameras and other people taking them down are two sides of the same coin. One group puts cameras up in public without people's knowledge or permission, the other group takes cameras down without people's knowledge or permission. I find it kind of beautiful, like the ebb and flow of the tide.
I believe in surveillance, but Flock is just the tip of the iceberg and rolling out mass public surveillance is just as likely to backfire as it is to lead to changes. More importantly, once you give folks moral license to do this stuff it’s hard to contain the scope of their activity.
I've done this recently. It's only been six weeks so not sure if I'll keep it up, but I have felt very little pain. I put my sim back in my iPhone the other day when I needed an Uber to go to the vet after reading that recently taxis in my city have been denying people with pets even if you tell them you have one when ordering. Sim went right back in my flip phone when I got home and I actually experienced some relief as I did it.
It seems to me that throwing bad data into the Flock system is far more effective than breaking a few commodity electronic devices.
Figure out how to put an LCD in front of many of the ALPR cameras and play a slideshow of car images of license plates that exist almost exclusively in different geolocations. Make the Flock data so noisy that it becomes useless.
Ring doorbells and ALPRs are a meme compared to what we've already deployed domestically. I've seen the Houston police department fly wide area surveillance aircraft all day over certain parts of town. The capabilities of some of these systems are almost unbelievable.
I strongly recommend not breaking the law until you've fully considered the omniscient demigod threat model. You never know who is watching and what their capabilities might be.
Recent: Across the US, people are dismantling and destroying Flock surveillance cameras (bloodinthemachine.com) | 456 points by latexr 2 days ago | 293 comments | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47095134
Kind of weird all of those people weren't all up in arms about it before the whole ice thing, why would you be mad that they're tracking somebody else but not mad that they have been slurping up data about your movements and habits this whole time, then monetizing said data by selling it to industries like insurance companies etc.
all of these people didnt even know these cameras existed until recently. even this weekend, was talking to a few friends and they had never heard of them. I think they wanted to just sort of sneak them in under the radar and all the current ICE stuff has created more scrutiny and public knowledge about surveillance in general.
It's weird due to the complete lack of second order thinking the majority of people seem to have.
You can scream up and down about how building such things is a horrible idea because it can one day be used for evil, and folks will either yawn or call you paranoid or worse.
Then the thing actually gets (very lightly) abused/used for something folks don't like and omg it's an emergency no one could have ever predicted! And oh look - it's often times far too late to do a damn thing about it other than surface level 'fixes' that are nothing of the sort.
It gets very frustrating living in such a society, but it might simply be the way humans are wired. If it's not in your face and actively a major problem to you in the moment, it's simply not a concern.
Huh? even if you knew and understood the scope of it before (I’d say a vast majority did not and thought they were just red light cameras), it is not very hard to understand that when you see the people in masks without badges snatching your neighbors haphazardly and with specious reasons that you might make a chunk of that majority look at the cameras more skeptically and maybe, just maybe wonder if that technology could be turned against you too.
Until recently very few people could articulate the real risk this tech posed, now you can literally see it play out (depending where you live)
I am an American and I am doing something about it. Co-founded a company that manufactures privacy-centric, on-prem video monitoring devices. No cloud.
I support what you're doing, but I'd like to point out that everybody cares about ethics at the start...
> We are committed to protecting human privacy and mitigating bias in policing with the development of best-in-class technology rooted in ethical design, which unites civilians and public servants in pursuit of a safer, more equitable society.
I see your point, and I've seen people reevaluate their priorities when presented with a life altering sum of money (or with a court subpoena).
And that's one of the reasons we made it architecturally impossible for someone to access the data externally. The user decides how and where to send the data.
Someone in the thread linked a teardown showing these use a ~$4 OV5647 Arducam sensor on what's essentially a Raspberry Pi. The real vandalism isn't the people with hammers — it's charging municipalities six figures for a trail camera with a cellular modem and a pitch deck.
I wonder how resistant the cameras are to strong handheld lasers. I suppose they could harden them against some common wavelengths with filters, but that'd affect the image clarity in normal use.
I have worked with watt class lasers before and I implore you not to do this. Even if it's tempting. Most places where there are surveillance cameras are places where there are also people, and unless you want to hand out OD5 goggles to everyone in eyeshot... a pellet gun would be safer.
My friend in college did an internship on high frequency, short pulse beams (I wanna say violet and picosecond? Which I still think was exotic at the time).
Most of his work was dealing with and accounting for reflections that left the machine. If you have a prism that’s sending 95% of the light where you want it to go, when it’s a multi watt laser you can’t just let that 5% go wherever it wants. You will blind someone. So his job was getting black bodies in all the right spots to absorb the lost light.
His safety goggles looked like even more expensive Oakleys of that era and they were (much more expensive).
Unrelated, but I really want to take the opportunity:
How can one know what is dangerous for the eyes or not? Years ago I got an "IR illuminator" (from aliexpress, probably) that I wanted to use with my raspberrypi NoIR camera, for fun. Say filming myself during the night to see how much I move while sleeping, or making my own wildlife camera trap.
But I was scared that it could be dangerous and never used it (I tested it in an empty room, but that was it).
Is there a safe way for a hobbyist to get an IR illuminator and be sure that I won't make somebody blind with it?
> Most places where there are surveillance cameras are places where there are also people
I assume you're concerned about reflections from the camera lens or housing? In my mind, the archetypal camera is mounted on a nice tall pole, silhouetted against open sky, and painted matte black.
> watt class lasers
Surely those would be excessive for someone attacking the sensor, unless they want to remotely sear some graffiti by burning away paint.
Please do not encourage people to go shining bright lasers at small targets from long distances right next to busy roads.
This is a nerd fantasy thing, but it's a really bad idea. It's hard to hit a tiny lens from a distance and it only takes one slip of the hand to shine it straight into traffic or someone walking down the sidewalk.
Lol that's almost literally the cheapest possible option. You can get these for $3-4 (on a board and with a mipi cable and everything) from China - I have a dozen in a box that I bought to test out a camera array idea before shelling out for nicer sensors.
https://deflock.org/map provides a crowd sourced map showing the known locations of flock cameras for anyone interested in knowing where Big Brother is watching.
If I was someone on the run, then I would just get a fake license plate. They record plates on the interstates as well. Also, they have cameras and presumably can alert of a certain make and model + color car trailer on AI near a last seen area. Only way to bypass that is by swapping cars or getting a really generic popular car.
Car culture in general is an abomination to civil rights. You are tracked by the government, forced to shell out money to predatory insurance companies, and can basically be illegally searched and seized at any point on the roadway. I hope that chinese e-bikes/e-motos will get good enough to where I can use them as my primary form of transport.
America is really now two Americas. The divide between traditional freedoms and neo-authoritarianism is getting wider. But America is so large that even the minority (just) that believes in freedom is still 167 million people. Even if only a small percentage of that number, from either side of the divide, believes in violent activism, things are going to get worse before they get better.
It just depends on if you're on the up portion of the K or the down stick. The larger picture might show an increase but if you split the data apart one leg is actually declining while the other is growing.
while an important consideration, I'm sure there are many on the up side of the k-economy that don't believe that persistent surveillance is warranted or ethical.
This is the most important comment here. There is a future reckoning to be had between the radical authoritarian fringe and normal Americans who do not want to live in an open air prison. The conflict is completley preventable, and makes a less safe place to live for us all.
America is converting into a radical authoritarian state, yes, but they're not a "fringe". They are, by a small margin, the dominant faction in the US. Popular vote counts prove it.
There isn't a radical authoritarian fringe in the US. There are multiple, competing radical authoritarian perspectives in the US, and I wouldn't be surprised if the sum of them constituted a majority.
They disagree on the authority, not the methods, and help the two institutional parties cooperate to destroy civil liberties by accusing their counterparts of abusing ("weaponizing") civil rights to commit crimes, spy for foreign governments, and/or abuse children.
The back and forth between "the Left" and "the Right" seems to actually be about who gets to run the prison instead of whether we should run a nation like one.
As your net worth increases, the concern about what you have to lose from a personal safety perspective skyrockets. You start becoming far more paranoid and seeing crime everywhere. Tech CEOs and billionaires will build the dystopian panopticon society 100 times out of 100 because they don't care about other people, they just want to feel safe. If that means mass surveillance for the rest of the world, so be it.
If you don't believe me, just look at the CCP. It already happened there.
You're implying here, I assume, that anyone who voted R is pro neo-authoritarianism. It is interesting too that you've also implicitly stated that the D's are pro-freedom. Both statements are false on their face and highly influenced by terminally online behavior.
I would suggest you go look at polls. Dems have been polling in the dirt among their own party since they decided to usurp Bernie in 2016 and embrace the rich, Repubs have been polling in the dirt since Trump took office last year.
Absolutely no one is happy about the state of America. You can argue semantics, but it's pointless navel gazing at the larger national issue. No one, of any political affiliation, believes the government can govern. It's probably the single uniting factor across all political stripes. No one is happy. No one believes America has gotten measurably better in the last 10-15 years, and everyone is suffering in one way or another. The flock/authoritarian bent is simply the last gasps of a neoliberal government that has realized there's no easy way out of the last 40 years of anti-citizen policies.
The easier fix seems like doxxing politicians and embarrassing them until they protect all of their constituents against things like this. We got a small modicum of privacy with the Video Privacy Protection Act [0] after Bork's video rental history was going to be released.
I imagine there is a process in place to allow cities / states / communities to place the cameras on polls. If Vegas somehow got around public comment process to put these on poles, then what would stop any random company from requesting to put their own camera there? Like lets say a motivated individual went through some process to put a camera on a pole someplace near somebody that would definitely make the govt official / flock exec etc nervous, what is stopping them? It sounds an awful lot like Flock is basically going to town's and saying "we will put up a bunch of cameras in a bunch of places" probably based upon algorithm's etc. How do they decide where these get put, who gets to decide that? Why can't any random company request to put up a camera on a random power pole? After they give the map to the govt officials, do they get a chance to say "oh this one by my house, can you move that?"
Many in this administration are the lowest, least educated parts of their respective societies. They don’t have shame. You cannot shame them because this is literally their only way to make money.
If shame were a motivator for this administration or the current grifter class, neither of these things would exist to the current Armageddon-level they currently do. That is to say, completely agree with your take here. There are plenty of government-entity examples of this, but my favorite I've seen recently was a video montage of Elon saying annually, like clockwork, that sully autonomous driving would be here in 2-3 years for the last 12 years or so. If these people had shame, he wouldn't be doing that, as an example.
I certainly agree about the lack of shame - but even if you destroyed all of the Flock cameras (and any other public traffic cams) you're still left with no actual protection for your private data.
There's more of us then there are of them - so their wealth can't protect them from everything. They can and do buy privacy so there must be something worth protecting that the masses can expose using their same methods.
it's wild to me that Americand accept a private company plastering their town with surveillance cameras, given you know, everything
Additionally, that you draw the line at sharing that juicy data with law enforcement. I mean sure, yeah, but even before that, sharing essentially all your movement data with some company because...?
We don't accept that? Our civil liberties have been infringed upon by neoliberals and oligarchs for the last 100+ years, starting with Lincoln with income tax and FDR with social security into the mess we have today.
I'm sure they'd charge the municipalities and private entities for those replacements one way or another, which ultimately decreases the reliability and value proposition of their product.
the damage is showing that Flock, from an objective technology point of view, is really quite much more limited in terms of its efficacy than its sellers are leading the buyers to believe.
what good is their platform if it is easily defeated by a guy with a ladder and a hammer?
"Ah, see, criminals hate Flock cameras. We'll send you a replacement for free, but you should buy two more and point it at that one so you can catch the bastard next time." is how I imagine that goes.
> Merchant reports instances of broken and smashed Flock cameras in La Mesa, California, just weeks after the city council approved the continuation of Flock cameras deployed in the city, despite a clear majority of attendees favoring their shutdown.
Speaking only for areas near where I live, it was in response to a persistent uptick in home invasions. Police can't be everywhere at once, and LPR cameras flag stolen cars and mismatched plates that thieves like to use.
Harvest data and let the techno fascist state that is slowly emerging figure out a use case later. For potential scenarios: if you like sci fi you can watch minority report, if you like history you can look at central Europe around 1930
I think it's nuts how nobody seemed to care about this mass surveillance tool until it fell into the hands of the red party. "Just keep electing the blue party" is not a convincing security posture.
Because we in america tend to value individual liberties in a way that others don't. And yes of course LPR is mass surveillance. Cars should not even have to be registered.
Maybe I'm just getting old but I dislike these implicit call to destructive action articles, even if I don't like the surveillance. It is not incumbent upon the public to destroy surveillance cameras, and it's probably a bad sign for society if they are. If you destroy one of these cameras you will probably be arrested, and it will ruin your life. We can elect officials who oppose these cameras, and encouraging people to destroy city property is not the move.
A lot of the people doing it would probably agree that it's a bad sign that it's necessary. And further that most elections have become a false choice, and aren't effective, as they're so far removed from the changes necessary.
I'm with you on the AI slop but your complaint on this post just sounds like bootlicking.
I would say that anarchist-style direct action against mass surveillance pretty much embodies the classic hacker ethos going back many decades at this point.
This is really bad for all the reasons that people have mentioned (vigilante "justice" never is a good thing) but people have a misplaced understanding of right and wrong here. Flock cameras have helped solve some major crimes, and people will be glad to have this technology around if they are ever a victim.
Police states are great at solving major crimes. And when those are sufficiently solved, to justify their continued existence, they have to solve lesser crimes, repeating until you need enough surveillance to ensure no one's flushing their toilet improperly.
Police states are like autoimmune diseases under the hygiene hypothesis. They'll keep ramping up their sensitivity until they're attacking everything, even when it's benign.
Flock cameras can be helpful in all sorts of crimes. They've been used to solve everything from kidnappings to minor property damage.
There obviously isn't a future without crime. This is just a tool to make it easier for police to do their job and deter criminals somewhat, but that is probably marginal.
There will always be kidnappings, there will always be property damage. Having technology available to make it easier to solve those crimes seems obvious to me.
"That it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape, than that one innocent Person should suffer, is a Maxim that has been long & generally approv’d"
The amount of damage these cameras have caused is totally disproportional to whatever meager benefit they may have wrought. These are antisocial machines.
This comment is so naive and full of banalities I don't even know what to say, open a few history and philosophy books, these topics have been at the center of many deep and interesting debates over at least two thousands years and your take isn't even high-school level comprehension of the subject. If the end goal of societies was to stop crime we'd have achieved that a long time ago
Dude my car was literally jacked up and had the catalytic convertor chopped off in a parking with flock cameras at a hotel before, def never got caught, and according to the hotel security footage they parked right next to my car, got out and did everything real fast. Plus most people using cars to commit heinous crimes are usually stolen and ditched right after anyways, people who use their own car to commit crimes usually end up being lower level crimes like organized retail theft, drugs, etc, you know stuff id rather not trade privacy for security over.
yeah surveillance doesn't mean secure. A few weeks ago there was a solid 10-15 second run of automatic weapons fire on my street in an intersection. I do a lot of shooting and i could tell from the concussion it couldn't have been more than a couple hundred feet from my bedroom window. My neighbors turned in all their camera footage with recordings of two cars and the gunfire to a detective. When i asked them what happens next the detective just said in an annoyed voice "well i'll ask someone to check around..". Like it was plainly obvious he had zero interest at all.
edit: I live in Dallas so, although we sometimes hear gunshots when the Cowboys score a touchdown, i'm not in an active war zone.
My confusion stems from the fact that mass surveillance is already pretty normal in major cities. Your face is on a dozen cameras anytime you walk through the grocery store. Your precise location is pinged off cell towers multiple times a day. I understand specific qualms with Flock as a company and how they manage the data, but this libertarian demand for total privacy in public spaces has been long lost and the beef with Flock in particular doesn’t even scratch the surface.
Edit: And I don’t even know how to have good faith conversations about this topic in these spaces, because the hive mind has decided that anything but absolute outrage is untenable. I’m getting downvoted for sharing my opinion.
If you think USA has mass surveillance you haven't been to Asia (South Korea, Taiwan, China, Singapore, Etc).
I can drive down highways in most cities in the USA without my license plate being read (Flock isn't on highways). Also Flock as integrated mostly just records license plates. It's not recording video 24/7.
Commonplace does not mean acceptable. Flock is new, and so it is an easier target for concentrated action. Also, Flock seems to be a centralized clearinghouse for surveillance data on a different scale than your local grocer's CCTV system.
We already have mass surveillance, and yet we still have major crimes. It's not working, and I see no reason to believe that removing more freedom will lead to having safer streets. Why are we giving up liberty and getting nothing in return? That's an excellent reason to protest against adding more surveillance.
This breakdown in rule of law is unfortunate. Ideally, this would be handled by, in order of desirability:
Below this, is citizens breaking the law to address the situation, e.g. through this destruction. It is not ideal, but it is necessary when the higher-desirability options are not working.
> It is not ideal, but it is necessary when the higher-desirability options are not working.
What has worried me for years is that Americans would not resort to this level. That things are just too comfortable at home to take that brave step into the firing lines of being on the right side of justice but the wrong side of the law.
I'm relieved to see more and more Americans causing necessary trouble. I still think that overall, Americans are deeply underreacting to the times. But that only goes as far as to be my opinion. I can't speak for them and I'm not their current king.
You won't get to the kind of change you thought you would see until food runs low and the economy stalls. The American Revolution was rare in that it didn't need to happen. The Founders were just being giant assholes (j/k). While the French Revolution just a few decades later was more status quo. A lot of starvation and poverty just pushed the population over the edge.
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What confuses me is that no revolution is required. All we had to do to avoid this was to vote. Voting would still (probably) work.
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The other day in Kansas City some lady set fire to a warehouse that was being sought for purchase by ICE. They are on video and quite nonchalant.
> I still think that overall, Americans are deeply underreacting to the times.
To put things in perspective, the whole humankind, as in 99.99% of population, is utterly underreacting.
Who is the arbiter of "necessarily trouble"? You? Only people that politically agree with you?
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On the contrary I think Americans are reacting about the same as any other set of people would react. There are always going to be people who, as long as their personal lives are stable, they are not going to do anything to put that stability at risk. America is also huge enough that even if one part of the country is having a crisis, millions of fellow citizens will not hear of it or have any 2nd, 3rd or 4th hand connection to the matter.
But also if a small portion of Americans disparately plan to do stuff like sabotage surveillance camera, it's still newsworthy.
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> What has worried me for years is that Americans would not resort to this level.
They'll stop once the police (or ICE, more likely) start dishing out horrific punishments for it.
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I agree. The amount of cameras and tracking has gotten out of control. If America actually becomes an "authoritarian" country (seems almost likely) I imagine all these Flock pics with other data mining techniques will be used to send Communist Progressives to reeducation camp.
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General strike! Close the ports, close the airports, steal dozers and park them on railroad tracks, teachers on the streets in front of their schools to protect their students, blockade the grocery distribution centers, so that the shelves go bare, just stop everything, everywhere.
When it hurts the billionaires, they will tell their politicians to invoke the 25th.
It's the only way, we've lost our democracy, but we still have economic power.
Get out there and be the change you want to see, king
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While points 1 and 2 are indeed desirable, point 3 should be moot given we have a constitutional right to privacy and freedom from unreasonable search and seizures.
The combination of ubiquitous scanners, poor data controls on commercially owned date, and law enforcement access without proper warrants compounds to a situation that for many rational people would fail the test of being fair play under the Fourth Amendment. For similar reasons, for example, it has been held by the Supreme Court that installing a GPS tracker on a vehicle and monitoring it long-term without a warrant is a 4A violation (US v Jones). Similar cases have held that warrants are needed for cellphone location tracking.
So far, however, courts have not held Flock to the same standard -- or have at least held that Flock's data does not rise to the same standard.
I personally think this is a mistake and is a first-order reason we have this problem, and would prefer the matter to stop there rather than rely on ethics. (Relying on ethics brought us pollution in rivers, PFAS and Perc in the ground, and so on.)
Given the state of politics and the recent behavior of the Supreme Court, however, I would not hold my breath for this to change soon.
> This breakdown in rule of law is unfortunate.
Yearly reminder to read:
https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/kurz-the-discourse-of-vol...
This is excellent, I second your suggestion for everyone to read this.
i'm not a fan of lawlessness but on the other hand, i'm 100% ok with the government living in fear of the governed.
In a country like the US with a fairly democratic process at various levels of government, this just means that people with some strong opinions can subject the rest of the citizens to their desires. This is the universal veto on societal order. We can see that the desire for governments to "live in fear of the governed" usually rapidly disappears when people start destroying water lines and power lines. After all, 'the governed' and 'the government' are the same people just with different factions distributed in power.
A government that can't do anything to police unions is also the government living in fear of the governed. A government that can't rein in (say) PG&E is also a government living in fear of the governed. When political representatives are shot by a right-wing anti-abortion terrorist that is also (and perhaps even more viscerally so) a government living in fear of the governed. And I'm certainly not 100% okay with this.
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Lawlessness is superior to the law of the tyrant.
Having lived or spent time in a lot of 3rd world shitholes, including a civil war, I've only really felt freedom in places with lawless lack of government, never places with 'rule of law' -- that always gets twisted for the elite.
Of course the same happens in lawless regions, but power is fractured enough, there is a limit on power they can wield against the populace, as the opposing factions ultimately are a check on any one side oppressing the population to leave. They can't man machine guns at all the 'borders' and ultimately corruption becomes cheap enough that it is accessible to the common person which arguably provides more power to the common man than representative democracy does.
I think this element of factions in competition was part of the original genius of the '50' states with the very minimal federal government. But the consolidation of federal power and loss of the teeth of the 10th amendment and expansion of various clauses in the constitution means there is now no escape and very few remaining checks.
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The thing about that is the governments who most fear the governed are often extremely draconian. I actually do not think that it is constructive and it is precisely that fear that is driving things like voter suppression in the US.
All of this presumes that residents in municipalities with ALPRs don't want them used the way they are. That's not true! These things are broadly pretty popular among a broad set of residents.
I am in favor of them. There is no expectation of privacy in the public setting. I can record anyone on a public street w/o their permission. If these license plate cameras are making the streets safer and helping to reduce crime, why not? Sure there may be some mis-uses here and there, but for the most part they seem to be working and in places where they are deployed, crime is being reduced.
They're only popular because people are routinely lied to. We see this same issue time and time again in "free markets".
If you tell people this will help stop crime and that's it, everyone and their mama is gonna say yes.
If you tell people the truth, that police don't really care to look at the data and this surveillance is going to be used to target innocent people for unrelated "crimes" on the taxpayers dollar, then everyone would say no.
This is also why 99% of surveys are broken. You can get people to agree to literally anything if you just lie a little. After all, Adolf Hitler got elected by promising to fix the German economy and, in a way, he did.
You are unfortunately, for whatever your reasons you have, barking up the wrong tree. The people already made a law, the supreme law in fact, called the Constitution.
In fact the capital criminals in this matter are the people violating and betraying that supreme law; the politicians, sheriffs, city councils, and even the YC funders behind Flock, etc.
It is in fact not even just violating the supreme law, but though that betrayal, it is in fact also treason.
Where in the Constitution does it require us to give up our privacy to private companies with little oversight? Seems like there's contention here.
https://journals.law.unc.edu/ncjolt/blogs/under-surveillance...
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Guess Flock cameras don't solve quite as many crimes as they claim. Surveillance heal they self.
One has not only a legal, but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.
People who rape, murder, and eat children run the country and face no hint of repurcussion. There never was rule of law. Only the appearance of it.
Rape is clearly in the Epstein files.
Murder is implied in the Epstein files with an email about burying girls on the property.
Eating sounds like an unhelpful exaggeration, unless I missed a major news story.
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Flock would not exist if they held ethics as a priority. It's The Panopticon from the well known book The Panopticon is Unethical
The higher-desirability options are practically only theoretical in many contexts. See also the United Healthcare CEO killing.
My guess is the vast majority of the 80,000 or whatever cameras are uncontested politically. Local board meetings for most towns are boring and quiet affairs, and those are also the most effective venue for these concerns.
If you are a taxpayer in a local jurisdiction with Flock cameras and you want them removed, show up to every single meeting and maximize use of public comment time.
Local government is a place individuals can actually be extremely effective but also almost nobody ever actually does.
Would someone please think of the rule of law?! :'((((
Dan Carlin, on his Common Sense podcast several years ago, said something that really stuck with me (and he probably was paraphrasing it from someone else).
Society is like a pressure cooker, with built-in safety release valves to prevent the pressure from getting too high. If your solution to the safety release is to block off the valves, with authoritarian surveillance, draconian laws, and lack of justice for the elites committing crimes, it just moves it somewhere else. Block off too many, and it explodes.
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable.”
- JFK
I mean, that's excellent wishcasting, but the reality is that current economic incentives combined with a lack of social ("cancel culture" got cancelled because "uwu too mean"), regulatory ("uwu can't hurt Capital or the rich people won't make jobs no more"), and criminal ("uwu can't hold Capital accountable for their actions when they do crimes or people will lose jobs") accountability means that this was always going to be the outcome.
More people need to understand that the system is working as designed, and the elimination of peaceful, incremental reform based on popular demand, along with mass manipulation of human emotions through media and advertising, means that this sort of resistance is the sole outcome left before devolving into naked sectarian violence.
Say what you will, but the anti-Flock camera smashers are at least doing something beyond wishcasting from a philosophical armchair in comment sections or social media threads.
> It is not ideal, but it is necessary when the higher-desirability options are not working.
You are simply imposing your own views on others. Just because you disagree with Flock doesn't give you the right to destroy license plate readers that my tax dollars paid for. Who appointed you king?
Nobody said he had the right, he explicitly does not have the right, that's what makes it civil disobedience.
And civil disobedience is basically necessary to have a functioning society long term.
Who appointed anyone king? Neither Trump nor Flock are kings, both should be challenged, violently if necessary.
I think you already jumped to far. You can't break the law when the law is broken by every other tier of society.
Sorry, try again!
Peer pressure is apparently not even effective in getting billionaires who could easily hire whatever variety of escort they want from having sex with trafficked children, so I'm not sure in what world it's supposed to stop the billionaires from installing cameras.
I view this breakdown in law similar to the marijuana situation. It’s kind of a villainous administration, green lighting villainous things. The law doesn’t hold water in this case. The people have to do something drastic to get that across.
All those behaviours are consequences of direct civil disobedience, unrest and rebellion - not alternatives.
We either have out of control govt or civil unrest and only people who don’t know what the latter looks like cheer it on. We’re screwed unless someone unlocks the economy. Right now it’s not happening.
> This breakdown in rule of law is unfortunate.
Doesn't breakdown in rule of law happened when a corporation (surely) bribed local officials to install insecure surveillance devices with zero concern for the community living near them?
How many homeowners install mystery-meat Chinese cameras on their houses that feed the data God knows where? Should their homes be vandalized too for their lack of concern for the community?
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The real breakdown in the rule of law occurred when the US Supreme Court made the specious decision that amoral business entities (corporations) had the same rights in a democracy as citizens.
All this shit flows downhill from Citizens United.
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What other social issues should be solved with vigilante justice?
I don't like all this surveillance stuff, but Flock is just the tip of the iceberg and "direct action" against Flock is just as likely to backfire as it is to lead to changes. More importantly, once you give folks moral license to do this stuff it's hard to contain the scope of their activity.
>What other social issues should be solved with vigilante justice?
Everything you said is true, but I suspect, also irrelevant, because options short of vigilante justice aren't going to be seen by the public as viable for much longer (if they're even seen so now). America's social contract is breaking, and existing institutions make it clear, daily, that they will strengthen that trend rather than reverse it. And as JFK said, 'Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.' That doesn't make the violence laudable, or even desirable. It is simply inevitable without seemingly impossible positive change from an establishment that is hostile to such.
This is a nice description (i.e "where is the limit on this type of action?") of a reason why this approach is low on the list, and why ideally we would solve it with one of the other options.
You don't want to give people "moral license" to do this broadly, but we've hit a point where there are no options available that don't have downsides. Stated another way: Taking no action can also be unethical.
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the threat of vigilante mob justice is required for the law to work. its the tension that makes sure the rich and powerful want to stay involved, and be held accountable by it, rather than skipping over it and making it irrelevant.
the threat has to be credible, which is where things like this, and luigi are quite valuable
For me, Flock installing these cameras and other people taking them down are two sides of the same coin. One group puts cameras up in public without people's knowledge or permission, the other group takes cameras down without people's knowledge or permission. I find it kind of beautiful, like the ebb and flow of the tide.
Consider the converse of your statement
I believe in surveillance, but Flock is just the tip of the iceberg and rolling out mass public surveillance is just as likely to backfire as it is to lead to changes. More importantly, once you give folks moral license to do this stuff it’s hard to contain the scope of their activity.
Rule of law is long gone, neither party has any interest in it, it's more of a guideline of law now.
Don’t both sides this. Explicitly point out that the GOP is many orders of magnitude worse.
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Doomer vibes are common, but meanwhile, state and local justice systems continue to prosecute many crimes and crime is on a downward trend [1].
[1] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/record-low-crime-rates-are-...
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Are you really both-sides-ing this?
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> While some communities are calling on their cities to end their contracts with Flock, others are taking matters into their own hands.
This is absolutely the right thing to do.
Remove and smash the cellular modem in your car while you are at it.
The cellular modem is usually on a dedicated fuse. No need for violence unless smashing it would be satisfying.
I took a look at the schematics for the two fuse boxes in my 2023 Chevrolet and _could not tell which/if any_ fuse was dedicated to a cellular modem.
This was in regards to: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2025/01/...
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and for good measure get rid of the tracking device in your pocket that you willingly use all day to send your location to facebook, X, tiktok, etc.
> and for good measure get rid of the tracking device in your pocket that you willingly use all day to send your location to facebook, X, tiktok, etc.
I don't have facebook, X, or tiktok installed on my phone.
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I've done this recently. It's only been six weeks so not sure if I'll keep it up, but I have felt very little pain. I put my sim back in my iPhone the other day when I needed an Uber to go to the vet after reading that recently taxis in my city have been denying people with pets even if you tell them you have one when ordering. Sim went right back in my flip phone when I got home and I actually experienced some relief as I did it.
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I just want a hot NSA rep. Is that too much to ask?
It seems to me that throwing bad data into the Flock system is far more effective than breaking a few commodity electronic devices.
Figure out how to put an LCD in front of many of the ALPR cameras and play a slideshow of car images of license plates that exist almost exclusively in different geolocations. Make the Flock data so noisy that it becomes useless.
Ring doorbells and ALPRs are a meme compared to what we've already deployed domestically. I've seen the Houston police department fly wide area surveillance aircraft all day over certain parts of town. The capabilities of some of these systems are almost unbelievable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide-area_motion_imagery
I strongly recommend not breaking the law until you've fully considered the omniscient demigod threat model. You never know who is watching and what their capabilities might be.
These kinds of headlines always read like wishful thinking on the author's part more than a real trend
Some of the "news" items these days read more like suggestions.
Until they get so expensive and there is so much pushback that cities end their contracts with them which seems to be the goal here.
Recent: Across the US, people are dismantling and destroying Flock surveillance cameras (bloodinthemachine.com) | 456 points by latexr 2 days ago | 293 comments | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47095134
Kind of weird all of those people weren't all up in arms about it before the whole ice thing, why would you be mad that they're tracking somebody else but not mad that they have been slurping up data about your movements and habits this whole time, then monetizing said data by selling it to industries like insurance companies etc.
all of these people didnt even know these cameras existed until recently. even this weekend, was talking to a few friends and they had never heard of them. I think they wanted to just sort of sneak them in under the radar and all the current ICE stuff has created more scrutiny and public knowledge about surveillance in general.
how is it weird for you exactly? we didn't have masked gestapo thugs before.
It's weird due to the complete lack of second order thinking the majority of people seem to have.
You can scream up and down about how building such things is a horrible idea because it can one day be used for evil, and folks will either yawn or call you paranoid or worse.
Then the thing actually gets (very lightly) abused/used for something folks don't like and omg it's an emergency no one could have ever predicted! And oh look - it's often times far too late to do a damn thing about it other than surface level 'fixes' that are nothing of the sort.
It gets very frustrating living in such a society, but it might simply be the way humans are wired. If it's not in your face and actively a major problem to you in the moment, it's simply not a concern.
ICE is performing necessary law enforcement.
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> Kind of weird all of those people weren't all up in arms about it before the whole ice thing
They weren't being used to build concentration camps before.
Huh? even if you knew and understood the scope of it before (I’d say a vast majority did not and thought they were just red light cameras), it is not very hard to understand that when you see the people in masks without badges snatching your neighbors haphazardly and with specious reasons that you might make a chunk of that majority look at the cameras more skeptically and maybe, just maybe wonder if that technology could be turned against you too.
Until recently very few people could articulate the real risk this tech posed, now you can literally see it play out (depending where you live)
You should be glad they came around instead of lamenting why it didn’t happen earlier
I don't think OP is glad people came around on it
When it comes to privacy violations, Ring and Nest aren't much better - but at least people have a choice whether or not to install them.
Nest: video was recovered from 'residual data located in backend systems' even though there was no active subscription.
Ring: employees accessing people's videos.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/05/...
I am an American and I am doing something about it. Co-founded a company that manufactures privacy-centric, on-prem video monitoring devices. No cloud.
I support what you're doing, but I'd like to point out that everybody cares about ethics at the start...
> We are committed to protecting human privacy and mitigating bias in policing with the development of best-in-class technology rooted in ethical design, which unites civilians and public servants in pursuit of a safer, more equitable society.
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety
I see your point, and I've seen people reevaluate their priorities when presented with a life altering sum of money (or with a court subpoena).
And that's one of the reasons we made it architecturally impossible for someone to access the data externally. The user decides how and where to send the data.
Someone in the thread linked a teardown showing these use a ~$4 OV5647 Arducam sensor on what's essentially a Raspberry Pi. The real vandalism isn't the people with hammers — it's charging municipalities six figures for a trail camera with a cellular modem and a pitch deck.
“You can’t put a price on safety”
> broken and smashed Flock cameras
I wonder how resistant the cameras are to strong handheld lasers. I suppose they could harden them against some common wavelengths with filters, but that'd affect the image clarity in normal use.
I have worked with watt class lasers before and I implore you not to do this. Even if it's tempting. Most places where there are surveillance cameras are places where there are also people, and unless you want to hand out OD5 goggles to everyone in eyeshot... a pellet gun would be safer.
My friend in college did an internship on high frequency, short pulse beams (I wanna say violet and picosecond? Which I still think was exotic at the time).
Most of his work was dealing with and accounting for reflections that left the machine. If you have a prism that’s sending 95% of the light where you want it to go, when it’s a multi watt laser you can’t just let that 5% go wherever it wants. You will blind someone. So his job was getting black bodies in all the right spots to absorb the lost light.
His safety goggles looked like even more expensive Oakleys of that era and they were (much more expensive).
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Unrelated, but I really want to take the opportunity:
How can one know what is dangerous for the eyes or not? Years ago I got an "IR illuminator" (from aliexpress, probably) that I wanted to use with my raspberrypi NoIR camera, for fun. Say filming myself during the night to see how much I move while sleeping, or making my own wildlife camera trap.
But I was scared that it could be dangerous and never used it (I tested it in an empty room, but that was it).
Is there a safe way for a hobbyist to get an IR illuminator and be sure that I won't make somebody blind with it?
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> Most places where there are surveillance cameras are places where there are also people
I assume you're concerned about reflections from the camera lens or housing? In my mind, the archetypal camera is mounted on a nice tall pole, silhouetted against open sky, and painted matte black.
> watt class lasers
Surely those would be excessive for someone attacking the sensor, unless they want to remotely sear some graffiti by burning away paint.
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Please do not encourage people to go shining bright lasers at small targets from long distances right next to busy roads.
This is a nerd fantasy thing, but it's a really bad idea. It's hard to hit a tiny lens from a distance and it only takes one slip of the hand to shine it straight into traffic or someone walking down the sidewalk.
Maybe pick up one [1] and experiment with it. If I had some spare change I would love to grab one just to hack it.
[1] https://www.ebay.com/itm/297938376075
Do not do this.
Comments in the sub-$200 LiDAR thread suggested those would play merry havoc with a camera too.
Last I recall they’re just a crappy 5 megapixel Arducam camera module based on teardowns.
https://www.cehrp.org/dissection-of-flock-safety-camera/
https://www.arducam.com/product/arducam-ov5647-noir-camera-b...
Lol that's almost literally the cheapest possible option. You can get these for $3-4 (on a board and with a mipi cable and everything) from China - I have a dozen in a box that I bought to test out a camera array idea before shelling out for nicer sensors.
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https://deflock.org/map provides a crowd sourced map showing the known locations of flock cameras for anyone interested in knowing where Big Brother is watching.
If I was someone on the run, then I would just get a fake license plate. They record plates on the interstates as well. Also, they have cameras and presumably can alert of a certain make and model + color car trailer on AI near a last seen area. Only way to bypass that is by swapping cars or getting a really generic popular car.
Car culture in general is an abomination to civil rights. You are tracked by the government, forced to shell out money to predatory insurance companies, and can basically be illegally searched and seized at any point on the roadway. I hope that chinese e-bikes/e-motos will get good enough to where I can use them as my primary form of transport.
America is really now two Americas. The divide between traditional freedoms and neo-authoritarianism is getting wider. But America is so large that even the minority (just) that believes in freedom is still 167 million people. Even if only a small percentage of that number, from either side of the divide, believes in violent activism, things are going to get worse before they get better.
They talk about a K shaped recovery in economics.
It just depends on if you're on the up portion of the K or the down stick. The larger picture might show an increase but if you split the data apart one leg is actually declining while the other is growing.
while an important consideration, I'm sure there are many on the up side of the k-economy that don't believe that persistent surveillance is warranted or ethical.
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Trump won the election with less than 50% of the popular vote. He has never enjoyed an approval rating equal to or higher than 50%.
This is the most important comment here. There is a future reckoning to be had between the radical authoritarian fringe and normal Americans who do not want to live in an open air prison. The conflict is completley preventable, and makes a less safe place to live for us all.
America is converting into a radical authoritarian state, yes, but they're not a "fringe". They are, by a small margin, the dominant faction in the US. Popular vote counts prove it.
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There isn't a radical authoritarian fringe in the US. There are multiple, competing radical authoritarian perspectives in the US, and I wouldn't be surprised if the sum of them constituted a majority.
They disagree on the authority, not the methods, and help the two institutional parties cooperate to destroy civil liberties by accusing their counterparts of abusing ("weaponizing") civil rights to commit crimes, spy for foreign governments, and/or abuse children.
The back and forth between "the Left" and "the Right" seems to actually be about who gets to run the prison instead of whether we should run a nation like one.
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As your net worth increases, the concern about what you have to lose from a personal safety perspective skyrockets. You start becoming far more paranoid and seeing crime everywhere. Tech CEOs and billionaires will build the dystopian panopticon society 100 times out of 100 because they don't care about other people, they just want to feel safe. If that means mass surveillance for the rest of the world, so be it.
If you don't believe me, just look at the CCP. It already happened there.
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You're implying here, I assume, that anyone who voted R is pro neo-authoritarianism. It is interesting too that you've also implicitly stated that the D's are pro-freedom. Both statements are false on their face and highly influenced by terminally online behavior.
I would suggest you go look at polls. Dems have been polling in the dirt among their own party since they decided to usurp Bernie in 2016 and embrace the rich, Repubs have been polling in the dirt since Trump took office last year.
Absolutely no one is happy about the state of America. You can argue semantics, but it's pointless navel gazing at the larger national issue. No one, of any political affiliation, believes the government can govern. It's probably the single uniting factor across all political stripes. No one is happy. No one believes America has gotten measurably better in the last 10-15 years, and everyone is suffering in one way or another. The flock/authoritarian bent is simply the last gasps of a neoliberal government that has realized there's no easy way out of the last 40 years of anti-citizen policies.
Yeah, it doesn't seem productive to paint this as a partisan issue
Your assumptions are probably reflective of my downvotes, but I choose my words carefully.
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No one said the Democrats are pro-freedom. Both parties are authoritarian. One is just less effective.
Good. Flock deserves it. So, do all big tech companies that have been "move fast break things"
Could someone explain how they are doing this, safely and without detection or damage to municipal property?
The easier fix seems like doxxing politicians and embarrassing them until they protect all of their constituents against things like this. We got a small modicum of privacy with the Video Privacy Protection Act [0] after Bork's video rental history was going to be released.
[0] https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=video+r...
I imagine there is a process in place to allow cities / states / communities to place the cameras on polls. If Vegas somehow got around public comment process to put these on poles, then what would stop any random company from requesting to put their own camera there? Like lets say a motivated individual went through some process to put a camera on a pole someplace near somebody that would definitely make the govt official / flock exec etc nervous, what is stopping them? It sounds an awful lot like Flock is basically going to town's and saying "we will put up a bunch of cameras in a bunch of places" probably based upon algorithm's etc. How do they decide where these get put, who gets to decide that? Why can't any random company request to put up a camera on a random power pole? After they give the map to the govt officials, do they get a chance to say "oh this one by my house, can you move that?"
Many in this administration are the lowest, least educated parts of their respective societies. They don’t have shame. You cannot shame them because this is literally their only way to make money.
If shame were a motivator for this administration or the current grifter class, neither of these things would exist to the current Armageddon-level they currently do. That is to say, completely agree with your take here. There are plenty of government-entity examples of this, but my favorite I've seen recently was a video montage of Elon saying annually, like clockwork, that sully autonomous driving would be here in 2-3 years for the last 12 years or so. If these people had shame, he wouldn't be doing that, as an example.
That's not easier, and they don't have shame. They're proud of becoming wealthy.
I certainly agree about the lack of shame - but even if you destroyed all of the Flock cameras (and any other public traffic cams) you're still left with no actual protection for your private data.
There's more of us then there are of them - so their wealth can't protect them from everything. They can and do buy privacy so there must be something worth protecting that the masses can expose using their same methods.
Yet everybody is happy giving plaid and therefore palintir there entire financial history and future data
It's funny how some banks even disallow you from copy-pasting your routing and account numbers to make it harder to manually set up payments that way
Which banks do that?
Whataboutism isn't helpful, or relevant.
it's wild to me that Americand accept a private company plastering their town with surveillance cameras, given you know, everything
Additionally, that you draw the line at sharing that juicy data with law enforcement. I mean sure, yeah, but even before that, sharing essentially all your movement data with some company because...?
We don't accept that? Our civil liberties have been infringed upon by neoliberals and oligarchs for the last 100+ years, starting with Lincoln with income tax and FDR with social security into the mess we have today.
All they had to do was not air a very expensive superbowl commercial
Are you thinking of the Ring camera commercial or did I miss a flock one during the same Superbowl?
Doesn’t that just mean Flock makes more money from making replacements?
I'm sure they'd charge the municipalities and private entities for those replacements one way or another, which ultimately decreases the reliability and value proposition of their product.
the damage is showing that Flock, from an objective technology point of view, is really quite much more limited in terms of its efficacy than its sellers are leading the buyers to believe.
what good is their platform if it is easily defeated by a guy with a ladder and a hammer?
"Ah, see, criminals hate Flock cameras. We'll send you a replacement for free, but you should buy two more and point it at that one so you can catch the bastard next time." is how I imagine that goes.
All paid for by taxpayers because a few extremists have appointed themselves kings
They're supposed to serve you, not the other way, and you're supposed to start chopping heads off when they abuse the power you gave them.
> Merchant reports instances of broken and smashed Flock cameras in La Mesa, California, just weeks after the city council approved the continuation of Flock cameras deployed in the city, despite a clear majority of attendees favoring their shutdown.
Well who could've seen that coming.
Why were those installed in the first place?
Speaking only for areas near where I live, it was in response to a persistent uptick in home invasions. Police can't be everywhere at once, and LPR cameras flag stolen cars and mismatched plates that thieves like to use.
Harvest data and let the techno fascist state that is slowly emerging figure out a use case later. For potential scenarios: if you like sci fi you can watch minority report, if you like history you can look at central Europe around 1930
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47095134
I think it's nuts how nobody seemed to care about this mass surveillance tool until it fell into the hands of the red party. "Just keep electing the blue party" is not a convincing security posture.
License plate readers are hardly mass surveillance.
Why is no one in democratic countries complaining about mass surveillance?
And I mean real cameras (not license plate readers) recording 24/7?
I'm talking about UK, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, etc.
Because we in america tend to value individual liberties in a way that others don't. And yes of course LPR is mass surveillance. Cars should not even have to be registered.
Maybe I'm just getting old but I dislike these implicit call to destructive action articles, even if I don't like the surveillance. It is not incumbent upon the public to destroy surveillance cameras, and it's probably a bad sign for society if they are. If you destroy one of these cameras you will probably be arrested, and it will ruin your life. We can elect officials who oppose these cameras, and encouraging people to destroy city property is not the move.
A lot of the people doing it would probably agree that it's a bad sign that it's necessary. And further that most elections have become a false choice, and aren't effective, as they're so far removed from the changes necessary.
This is my America. Bravo.
A little direct action a day, keeps the fascists away
good.
God Bless America
Oh no.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPQFF0oqsto
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GOOD
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I'm with you on the AI slop but your complaint on this post just sounds like bootlicking.
I would say that anarchist-style direct action against mass surveillance pretty much embodies the classic hacker ethos going back many decades at this point.
"lick the boot and accept every degenerate technology without any question or you're AnTiFa"
Ok buddy
Agree with all your points. HN has become such slop.
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Waow (based based based)
This is really bad for all the reasons that people have mentioned (vigilante "justice" never is a good thing) but people have a misplaced understanding of right and wrong here. Flock cameras have helped solve some major crimes, and people will be glad to have this technology around if they are ever a victim.
Police states are great at solving major crimes. And when those are sufficiently solved, to justify their continued existence, they have to solve lesser crimes, repeating until you need enough surveillance to ensure no one's flushing their toilet improperly.
Police states are like autoimmune diseases under the hygiene hypothesis. They'll keep ramping up their sensitivity until they're attacking everything, even when it's benign.
Flock cameras can be helpful in all sorts of crimes. They've been used to solve everything from kidnappings to minor property damage.
There obviously isn't a future without crime. This is just a tool to make it easier for police to do their job and deter criminals somewhat, but that is probably marginal.
There will always be kidnappings, there will always be property damage. Having technology available to make it easier to solve those crimes seems obvious to me.
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I think most opposing Flock have considered and rejected the bargain of trading their freedom for security in this case.
There are other ways to sacrifice your privacy for a sense of safety that doesn't impose your 'understanding of right and wrong' on the entire public.
>have a misplaced understanding of right and wrong here.
"Could I be making wrong assumptions? No I'm a hacker, it must be everyone else who is wrong."
"That it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape, than that one innocent Person should suffer, is a Maxim that has been long & generally approv’d"
The amount of damage these cameras have caused is totally disproportional to whatever meager benefit they may have wrought. These are antisocial machines.
Always nice to hear from someone completely immune to miscarriages of justice.
This comment is so naive and full of banalities I don't even know what to say, open a few history and philosophy books, these topics have been at the center of many deep and interesting debates over at least two thousands years and your take isn't even high-school level comprehension of the subject. If the end goal of societies was to stop crime we'd have achieved that a long time ago
Dude my car was literally jacked up and had the catalytic convertor chopped off in a parking with flock cameras at a hotel before, def never got caught, and according to the hotel security footage they parked right next to my car, got out and did everything real fast. Plus most people using cars to commit heinous crimes are usually stolen and ditched right after anyways, people who use their own car to commit crimes usually end up being lower level crimes like organized retail theft, drugs, etc, you know stuff id rather not trade privacy for security over.
yeah surveillance doesn't mean secure. A few weeks ago there was a solid 10-15 second run of automatic weapons fire on my street in an intersection. I do a lot of shooting and i could tell from the concussion it couldn't have been more than a couple hundred feet from my bedroom window. My neighbors turned in all their camera footage with recordings of two cars and the gunfire to a detective. When i asked them what happens next the detective just said in an annoyed voice "well i'll ask someone to check around..". Like it was plainly obvious he had zero interest at all.
edit: I live in Dallas so, although we sometimes hear gunshots when the Cowboys score a touchdown, i'm not in an active war zone.
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All fun and good until whatever you are comes under the scrutiny of the police state.
My confusion stems from the fact that mass surveillance is already pretty normal in major cities. Your face is on a dozen cameras anytime you walk through the grocery store. Your precise location is pinged off cell towers multiple times a day. I understand specific qualms with Flock as a company and how they manage the data, but this libertarian demand for total privacy in public spaces has been long lost and the beef with Flock in particular doesn’t even scratch the surface.
Edit: And I don’t even know how to have good faith conversations about this topic in these spaces, because the hive mind has decided that anything but absolute outrage is untenable. I’m getting downvoted for sharing my opinion.
If you think USA has mass surveillance you haven't been to Asia (South Korea, Taiwan, China, Singapore, Etc).
I can drive down highways in most cities in the USA without my license plate being read (Flock isn't on highways). Also Flock as integrated mostly just records license plates. It's not recording video 24/7.
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Commonplace does not mean acceptable. Flock is new, and so it is an easier target for concentrated action. Also, Flock seems to be a centralized clearinghouse for surveillance data on a different scale than your local grocer's CCTV system.
We already have mass surveillance, and yet we still have major crimes. It's not working, and I see no reason to believe that removing more freedom will lead to having safer streets. Why are we giving up liberty and getting nothing in return? That's an excellent reason to protest against adding more surveillance.
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