Musician-turning-tech anarchist (?) Benn Jordan is making a very interesting series of videos about Flock cameras, their poor safety, and their gray-area interfacing with local governments:
I think his comment about "why dogs might provide actual neighborhood safety" is a good reminder that the thing that makes communities safe is "knowing your neighbors." You don't get safety by building a castle with a moat and a million cameras. You get safety by building a community with context that can respond without having to just "react" to the 6s version of "what happened".
I'm reminded of prepper forum discussions. Where some do little more than hoard supplies, weapons and gadgets yet don't network and build communities. In an actual societal breakdown scenario these isolated individuals will become loot drops for others who actually band together.
Many may find it unintuitive, but one of the best things you can do for the actual security of a neighborhood is to design it for pedestrian and "loitering" friendliness.
Benn's videos along with this one from a very chill middle-aged engineer/state rep made the difference in swaying our town to discontinue its Flock contract: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwbE5ks7dFg
During the KMT military dictatorship in Taiwan, the KMT used the radio to spread its anti-democratic propaganda and disparage pro-democracy activists. Activists meanwhile spread their messages via pirate radio.
>[1] Would crime go up, down or stay the same if all surveillance cameras were removed? The answer to that is the only one that matters.
At least 40,990 [2] innocent people died in the US in 2023, without significant outcry - that is, on the road, in car accidents. People in the US clearly value the freedom of driving over the deaths of innocent people. In 2023, there were an estimated 19,800 [3] homicides in the US. But even if you assume surveillance like Flock could prevent a meaningful fraction of those homicides - and there's little evidence it does [4] - that's still asking people to give up their most sensitive freedom, the right to move without being tracked, for speculative gains. People are not willing to sacrifice their freedom to save 40,990 people from cars, why should our constant locations be monitored?
The abuse isn't speculative. Police have been caught stalking exes, tracking abortions, and innocent people [5] have been held at gunpoint due to a flock misread. The "safety" these cameras provide comes with a surveillance that's already being turned against ordinary people.
>misreads by Flock's automated license plate readers... resulted in people who hadn't committed crimes being stopped at gunpoint, sent to jail, or mauled by a police dog, among other outcomes.
It seems like this article buried the best lede of the story on paragraph ten, which explains Flock's new business of surveillance drones launched in response to 911 calls (and also presumably triggered by other alerts configured by police and private businesses).
> Flock has recently expanded into other technologies... Most concerning are the latest Flock drones equipped with high-powered cameras. Flock's "Drone as First Responder" platform automates drone operations, including launching them in response to 911 calls or gunfire. Flock's drones, which reach speeds up to 60 mph, can follow vehicles or people and provide information to law enforcement.
This is much less concerning to me than mass surveillance. If someone calls 911 and you need to send a first responder, why not send a drone to get there faster while a person is on their way?
Because today it will be used as a first responder.
Tomorrow a police officer will suggest that these drones (that we are already using successfully) could be very useful for checking up on that "dangerous" neighborhood.
If the drones are "providing information" to the police, it's only a matter of time before their AI hallucinates something that gets someone killed. We've already seen AI gun detection services that report things like Doritos bags as guns.
Yeah this doesn't bother me in any way, shape, or form. We already have manned aircraft that respond to such things, unmanned aircraft are a strictly better solution. It makes sense for police and it makes even more sense for fire. An aircraft can arrive at the site of a reported fire while firemen are still buckling their pants.
That’s actually really cool and I don’t feel like it’s invasive. It’s surveillance in a specific location for a specific purpose and in response to certain emergencies. Active shooter is probably the first thing that comes to mind, but accidents, fires, unexpected disasters, etc. could all be situations where this technology helps assess the situation and inform response.
They do more than that - our local PD gave a presentation on what Flock’s pitching - ALPRs, fixed pan/tilt cameras, “citizen cameras,” drones, and a whole “sensor fusion” software suite that lets you stitch in everything along with data from surrounding precincts which also have Flock (think Palantir for local cops). We were pretty shocked at the scale.
Thank you for finding this nugget, I really only read HN comments and rarely the source material. You all have been my LLM summary for a decade at least.
These companies build this tech in SF and Seattle, cities with some of the gnarliest public safety problems in the country, then turn around and sell it to smaller towns where it does more harm than good.
Most places in America don't have problems that surveillance solves. They have problems they already know about and won't act on. Cameras don't fix homelessness or addiction or underfunded services. They just make life harder for regular people.
But that's the whole appeal for bureaucrats. Buying a product looks like doing something without having to do any of the actual work.
"Cameras don't fix homelessness or addiction or underfunded services. They just make life harder for regular people."
In what way do cameras make life harder for regular people? If anything rampant crime (and progressive legal systems' unwillingness to lock up repeat offenders for a long time or at all) makes life much harder for regular people than a camera just sitting there.
A few months ago a woman was harassed over a crime she did not commit, by a police officer using her vehicle driving in a large general area as proof she committed the crime. Officer demanded she admit to a crime she did not commit.
Additionally, the surveillance apparatus enables parallel reconstruction. When law enforcement gathers evidence via illegal means, they can then use the drag net to find cause to detain/search unrelated to the original crime, in order to have cover to gather evidence they illegally gathered prior, aka a loophole for civil rights.
1) Surveillance needs to be reviewed. Even if reviewed by AI, eventually that reviewed work needs to be reviewed by a human if we're going to maintain the fiction / friction of "human in the loop". The "hits" will include false positives, unless the system is overtuned so that it rarely kicks an event.
1a) Review will take time / resources which could be spent on human policing, harming the community.
1b) Some jurisdictions may prefer "broken windows as policy", the notion that they can construct a "reasonable suspicion", given enough garbage (some of it outright garbage, the point being there is so much of it nobody cares; don't need to do an accurate drug test until trial, right?).
2) False surveillance hits will make it through human review and result in injury to innocent humans.
3) Police forces already lack the money / manpower to investigate potential crimes.
4) Police forces already "prioritize" other matters than the mentally ill setting their houses on fire or releasing plagues of rabbits into their neighborhoods (actual things that have happened to me!).
I think this echoes very true in a lot of places, not just in the US. Here in the UK I'm pretty sure the police/the state more broadly know perfectly well who is doing a lot of the low level quality-of-life crime in most areas, but for structural reasons either can't or won't bother acting in many instances. Investigative work has never been easier: oftentimes there's multiple cctv angles of offences being committed, endless digital records, etc., but unless something can be done with this information in the real world, it's useless and actually takes resources away from other areas of public services.
Increasing the quality of the panopticon has all the downsides we talk about regularly on HN, and if you can't do anything useful for society with the data, it only ends up hurting people.
"Making life harder for people [in the other tribe]" has become a core platform for a great many politicians. There's growing movement advocating that one of the major purposes of government is to grief people you don't like. Looked at through that lens, blanketing small towns with these things, with a plan to use them against "Those People," makes complete sense.
Agreed. I live in a city that's top 5% of safest cities in CA and these cameras have sprouted up everywhere. I reached out to my cities representative about it and he ignored my outreach (nice thing about instagram - that "read" indicator!). The most blatant is one that just points into the Home Depot parking lot. I don't see them at target.
It's gross but I think the cohort of America that watches Fox News all day probably loves these things because they've been brainwashed with crime reports that are disproportionate from reality.
I don't think it's the bureaucrats. You should hear the Flock CEO talk. They have made it very public that their direct intent is to influence government policy in sweeping and total fashion to enable their service to be the mass surveillance tool of the near future. They sincerely believe that people will look back on them as the saviours of mankind.
I'm surprised Garrett Langley still has a job, he seems wildly out of touch. For instance he really believes that his Panopticon as a service is the reason crime is down in cities, conveniently ignoring crime rates prior to COVID.
Another POV is, they didn't invent cameras or drones, they aren't philosophers / employ any great or influential thinkers, nobody at Flock has won an election, all they really have done is sell some stuff that is easily defeated by a guy with a hammer or spray paint. I'm not sure he has another chance at a big Pay Day in his life, so in such desperate circumstances it will take something really criminal (or souring with VCs) to end this appearance in public life.
I'm very in favor of speed & redlight cameras and don't have a particular problem with license plate trackers. I think we partisan-ize far too many things nowadays, unfortunately.
Nah, he's just missing a good PR campaign, there's a 30% of the population that will eat whatever their supreme leaders say they should, I'm sure they can sanewash these cameras as well.
i think politicians have seriously underestimated how much people don't like crime, and most people would take constant surveillance if it could actually improve feelings of safety in urban environments.
As an ex-employee of Flock, if he doesn't really believe it he is an amazing actor. He talks of a very Minority Report-esque future, where there is literally zero crime, and it's because of Flock.
Flock's stats are very misleading too. If there was a Flock query in the course of investigating a crime, even if it leads nowhere or isn't relevant to the arrest or conviction, still, Flock was queried, so "Flock solved a crime".
It was sad. I had significant ethical questions when I joined, but all through recruitment and week one, everything was all about controls and restraints and auditing and ethics. After that, nope, a free for all. Selling our products in states that don't allow the use of certain functionality? Not our problem. We're not disabling it. That's up to you to decide whether you're using it or not.
I realize how unpopular flock is, and I will first say that I have literally never personally looked into the privacy concerns. But one city you don’t see named here is SF, which has cited Flock as a primary driver of its 10x reduction in car break-ins, and 30% reduction in burglaries. Those were a quality of life plague while I lived there
I could believe that perma-cameraing every inch of public space is more akin to chemo than to vitamin gummies, that SF had the city equivalent of bone cancer, and that this doesn’t mean healthy midwestern towns need Flock in any way.
Unfortunately, Flock really has been doing some shady stuff and the alliance of 1) people with legitimate concerns about Flock operations, and 2) the much larger population of people who are accustomed to getting away with petty crimes is, together, politically successful.
It would be easy to create a camera network that is locally owned and operated by public agencies, and if any place in America could so that it should be SF.
The crime did not happen because of a lack of technological capability or resources availability at a given price point. It happened because of politics and priorities. The 1984 camera dragnet vendor is no more responsible for the change in politics and priorities and subsequent crime reduction than whatever vendor sold the tires for the cop cars.
I'm glad Flock made it as far as they did before the ass-handing commences. Even some my normie friends and family are aware of the scourge because of their initial success, where they would otherwise think we're talking about a group of birds.
If you want to hear from the man himself, see link below. It was a fairly soft interview. I listened mainly because it was Noah and wasn't expecting him to be so pro-surveillance. So, even though I don't agree with them, it might be worth listening to their reasoning.
I don't know if axon does it, but the future is going to be mobile ALPRs. Uber drivers going around scanning every plate, selling to police, and helping predatory auto lenders repo cars. The latter is already being done, so it's just a matter of time.
Interesting point. Autonomous cars themselves could sell all the data they collect (like license plates, but also street maps, live traffic data, pot hole counts and locations etc)
Practically, axon cameras aren't nearly as ubiquitous as flock's, thus reducing the leo's dragnet capability. I'm sure the feds will successfully try to get access to this footage as well.
Kind of. Motorola (axon) effectively acts as an integration system for flock and about 20 other services. Motorola's stuff is IMO the bigger problem because it includes access to flock.
flock says customers own their data and control access. but their national lookup tool means 5,000+ agencies can search your city's cameras without your city's permission. 'customer-owned data' that anyone in the network can query isn't customer-owned in any meaningful sense.
Non-US citizens - what's the situation with cameras in public spaces where you live? In my town every 2nd hour or building entrance has a private camera pointed at the street. It's very depressing because the cops don't care - I've asked 2 in a patrol car when there was a mild case of vandalism I witnessed. Technically it's illegal, but nothing happens. The public cameras are on intersection and some bus stops. Too much, if you ask me, but the private cameras are everywhere.
In London cameras are everywhere, mostly private and they have been for years. Don't think I've seen anything like it in any European city I've visited.
Private cameras pointing to street can be lawful under GDPR, but in that case they are GDPR controller. That then requires them fulfill bunch of obligations which they probably aren't, e.g. giving proper Article 13 notice.
I don't know if it's criminal in any EU country, but it would be something that you could complain to DPA about. Or initiate civil lawsuit against the controller.
Worth noting is that in some cases the camera vendor might also be (joint) controller as they can determine means & purposes of the processing. If they are simply storing the video then it's unlikely, but if they for example use it for AI training that would likely bring them controller territory.
Japan is exporting it's AI-enhanced crime prediction platform across LatAm after successfully deploying it in Tokyo [0]. Japan is doing similar work to analyze financial transactions [1]. South Korea has also deployed a similar surveillance platform called Dejaview [2]. Even Finland has been deploying surveillance camera fusion centers [3]
The brutal reality is everyone is doing this and there's nothing you can do about it. National Security trumps all other concerns (even the GDPR exempts governments who argue their data collection is done for National Security reasons), especially in a world as unstable as today.
I drove into a very affluent subdivision this weekend, and like most others around here it had a flock camera recording every car on the way in. This camera, however, had the gall to advertise its presence as a neighborhood security measure. "Flock Safety watches this neighborhood" read the sign on the post, or some such. Of course the residents there had no choice but to accept its installation, as the local police support it. Nefarious framing and marketing in the name of "safety".
It's probably the neighborhood HOA that pays for it. My HOA got Flock cameras after a string of thefts, and has similar signs up. The HOA encourages homeowners to submit their car license plate info so that if a crime is reported, it's easier to identify cars that don't belong to homeowners.
Soon after the cameras were installed, some thieves stole a gift my brother had sent me. Thanks to license plate data and images of their faces, Vancouver PD had little trouble catching the perpetrators. It turned out that in addition to stealing Amazon/UPS/Fedex packages, they were stealing USPS mail and using it to commit identity theft. IIRC they ended up getting a decade in federal prison.
It seems like only a few people are responsible for the majority of thefts, so catching them and locking them up drastically improves quality of life for everyone else. Obviously this technology could be abused, but that's also true for things like fingerprinting, DNA evidence, and ID requirements. Similarly to those technologies, we could have laws restricting certain uses, allowing us to reduce crime while preventing abuses. But if a private community wants to install cameras and allow law enforcement to access the data they record, I don't see any constitutional issues.
You might be shocked to discover there are subdivisions so affluent they can afford physical armed security and access control structures with far more invasive identification and logging procedures.
I am not shocked to know that, but there are Flock cameras all over the town. None of the other ones have this advertisement on them. This neighborhood is not gated. However, Flock decided to do announce its presence only here.
I saw the same thing in a Home Depot parking lot yesterday. I guess I'm glad there's some sort of notice about it, even if its intent is more, I dunno, branding? It took me a while to figure out what all the solar panel + camera on a post installations were as they popped up around my town. I even pulled over to inspect the hardware for signs of ownership and didn't find anything.
It is very clearly advertising on their part. They have been paid to put that thing there and added the sign to announce the presence. It's like when you get your roof replaced by a business and they ask if they can put a sign in your yard. They're not doing it to make everybody know that you're getting your roof replaced, they're advertising.
this kind of headline might have some scholarly name, because, no... actually the number of cameras and feeds in the San Francisco Bay Area is multiplying rapidly, along with the entirety of California with few exceptions.. long ago, San Diego county, a military-led area, was the exception and to many pariah on the constant increase in tracking of vehicles, people and "events".. now, what used to be thought of as harsh and creepy, is not only matched in hardware, but exceeded in backend capacity, across almost every populated area
It's funny, if the company had just sold cameras to cities, they probably could have avoided this whole mess. But they just had to hit some keywords for Wall Street (like "AI" "cloud" and "SaaS"), which had the side-effect of making it appear (true or not) that they were part of a Palantir-style surveillance panopticon that tracks you everywhere.
Someone in my hometown was arrested for vandalizing them. The media chose to say "city owned security camera". It's amazing how they will rush to defend private enterprise.
There are ways of doing this that don't require you to abdicate all of your privacy to a third-party SaaS company who makes it easy to share information with the police everywhere.
My camera system is not connected to the cloud and it has a retention policy of 4 weeks. I took pains not to aim them anywhere where I'd be collecting data outside of my own property. There's full-disk encryption in use. The police could maintain their own surveillance network and place their own cameras in a legally compliant way and it would be fine.
Flock and Ring are awful because they enable easy surveillance and search after the fact, not a priori because they are surveillance systems. If they required proof of warrant before letting the police execute a search I think a lot of people would be more comfortable with them. A police officer stalking an ex is like the basic example you get if you ask an ALPR vendor why we need audit logging and proactive auditing of all searches. But that's not the only way these tools enable invasion of privacy.
If you want proof that that's the problem with them, you should know that people have been building wired camera systems and ALPR systems for decades before Flock and Ring came into existence. So it's solely the cloud Search-as-a-Service business model that's the problem there.
> The answer to that is the only one that matters.
This statement rests on the belief that absolute crime rate is the only thing that matters, and is a cousin to the "I have nothing to hide!" response from people who care little for intrusions to their privacy. Are you in favor of giving law enforcement authorities a way to unlock all private electronic devices?
I'm willing to tolerate the presence of some crime in the name of personal liberty. I do not think my whereabouts should be known on demand by government actors just because I drive a car.
You’re going to be so shocked to find out the tracking device the government tricked you to put in your pocket is even worse. Police can run geofenced dragnets whenever they want, and all you got was the ability to shitpost on the Internet.
You’ll be even more shocked when biometric login isn’t protected by the 5th amendment. Possibly, even more shocked when you find out about XKEYSCORE.
ALPR is bad, of course, but in terms of actual invasion of privacy there are far bigger kraken sized fish to fry that we have accepted as just… completely normal and even necessary to function in our society. It’s only natural that they continue to push the boundaries. Almost like giving up rights for security has consequences we were warned about 250 years ago.
By any means necessary, as long as crime goes down? So we can execute anyone that breaks any kind of law and as long as crime goes down, that's all that should matter? Rights have no value to you, only protecting people from crime? There's no balance to be had, the only relevant question is if crime goes up or down?
You need the carrot and the stick. There's a reason the QoL in urban areas in countries with significantly draconian enforcement like Singapore, Japan, and South Korea is significantly higher peer cities in North America and Western Europe.
Cleanliness and order as a cultural norm only arose because police in Singapore, Japan, and South Korea are very fine and enforcement happy.
> Would crime go up, down or stay the same if all surveillance cameras were removed?
I would think the same, crime rates would be unaffected in the short and medium term, since I don't think it prevents much crime given the short or non-custodial sentences given many criminals. Clearance rates and justice (conviction rates) would likely go down though IMO.
Musician-turning-tech anarchist (?) Benn Jordan is making a very interesting series of videos about Flock cameras, their poor safety, and their gray-area interfacing with local governments:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMIwNiwQewQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB0gr7Fh6lY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vU1-uiUlHTo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp9MwZkHiMQ
I recommend them.
I think his comment about "why dogs might provide actual neighborhood safety" is a good reminder that the thing that makes communities safe is "knowing your neighbors." You don't get safety by building a castle with a moat and a million cameras. You get safety by building a community with context that can respond without having to just "react" to the 6s version of "what happened".
I'm reminded of prepper forum discussions. Where some do little more than hoard supplies, weapons and gadgets yet don't network and build communities. In an actual societal breakdown scenario these isolated individuals will become loot drops for others who actually band together.
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Many may find it unintuitive, but one of the best things you can do for the actual security of a neighborhood is to design it for pedestrian and "loitering" friendliness.
Benn's videos along with this one from a very chill middle-aged engineer/state rep made the difference in swaying our town to discontinue its Flock contract: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwbE5ks7dFg
I'd also recommend Louis Rossman's videos on the topic, including how to get involved.
Those were great to watch, thanks!
Also, I can't help but feel like I'm watching a young Dr. Emmett Brown.. Great Scott!!
Benn is the best. His most recent video is about Ring cameras.
And Data center noise pollution before that. It's the only channel I subscribe to knowing full well every video is going to infuriate me.
Super worth a watch. Lots of technical tidbits also.
Love the Flashbulb!
Wow thank you for sharing this I had no idea this guy existed!
There’s more of us techno anarchists out there apparently!
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https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-som...
> Fact of the matter is they’d like to personally profit off the same nonsense they complain about.
Benn Jordan's YouTube channel is a registered Nonprofit https://www.patreon.com/posts/nonprofit-has-82858569
???
It is very clearly because YouTube has a higher reach than any other platform in that space.
During the KMT military dictatorship in Taiwan, the KMT used the radio to spread its anti-democratic propaganda and disparage pro-democracy activists. Activists meanwhile spread their messages via pirate radio.
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>[1] Would crime go up, down or stay the same if all surveillance cameras were removed? The answer to that is the only one that matters.
At least 40,990 [2] innocent people died in the US in 2023, without significant outcry - that is, on the road, in car accidents. People in the US clearly value the freedom of driving over the deaths of innocent people. In 2023, there were an estimated 19,800 [3] homicides in the US. But even if you assume surveillance like Flock could prevent a meaningful fraction of those homicides - and there's little evidence it does [4] - that's still asking people to give up their most sensitive freedom, the right to move without being tracked, for speculative gains. People are not willing to sacrifice their freedom to save 40,990 people from cars, why should our constant locations be monitored?
The abuse isn't speculative. Police have been caught stalking exes, tracking abortions, and innocent people [5] have been held at gunpoint due to a flock misread. The "safety" these cameras provide comes with a surveillance that's already being turned against ordinary people.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/flock-safety-alpr-cameras-mi...
>misreads by Flock's automated license plate readers... resulted in people who hadn't committed crimes being stopped at gunpoint, sent to jail, or mauled by a police dog, among other outcomes.
It seems like this article buried the best lede of the story on paragraph ten, which explains Flock's new business of surveillance drones launched in response to 911 calls (and also presumably triggered by other alerts configured by police and private businesses).
> Flock has recently expanded into other technologies... Most concerning are the latest Flock drones equipped with high-powered cameras. Flock's "Drone as First Responder" platform automates drone operations, including launching them in response to 911 calls or gunfire. Flock's drones, which reach speeds up to 60 mph, can follow vehicles or people and provide information to law enforcement.
This is much less concerning to me than mass surveillance. If someone calls 911 and you need to send a first responder, why not send a drone to get there faster while a person is on their way?
Because today it will be used as a first responder.
Tomorrow a police officer will suggest that these drones (that we are already using successfully) could be very useful for checking up on that "dangerous" neighborhood.
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As a concept, first responder drones are a good idea. But I wouldn't want public services having anything to do with that company.
If the drones are "providing information" to the police, it's only a matter of time before their AI hallucinates something that gets someone killed. We've already seen AI gun detection services that report things like Doritos bags as guns.
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At least their current cameras are fixed to a single point.
With their drones they now have cameras roaming freely everywhere.
What's the drone gonna do?
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I'm sorry but, in what way is a swarm of surveillance drones NOT a mass surveillance system?
And then what? Hover over me as I'm dying?
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Yeah this doesn't bother me in any way, shape, or form. We already have manned aircraft that respond to such things, unmanned aircraft are a strictly better solution. It makes sense for police and it makes even more sense for fire. An aircraft can arrive at the site of a reported fire while firemen are still buckling their pants.
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That’s actually really cool and I don’t feel like it’s invasive. It’s surveillance in a specific location for a specific purpose and in response to certain emergencies. Active shooter is probably the first thing that comes to mind, but accidents, fires, unexpected disasters, etc. could all be situations where this technology helps assess the situation and inform response.
In Southern California we have eye-wateringly expensive (and loud) police aircraft flying 24x7.
I’m not a fan of Flock but I would welcome anything that knocks out some of the ghetto birds’ budget.
They do more than that - our local PD gave a presentation on what Flock’s pitching - ALPRs, fixed pan/tilt cameras, “citizen cameras,” drones, and a whole “sensor fusion” software suite that lets you stitch in everything along with data from surrounding precincts which also have Flock (think Palantir for local cops). We were pretty shocked at the scale.
Hunter-Killers not far behind.
Nor is the Butlerian Jihad.
Thank you for finding this nugget, I really only read HN comments and rarely the source material. You all have been my LLM summary for a decade at least.
Code 8-style cop drone drops incoming
These companies build this tech in SF and Seattle, cities with some of the gnarliest public safety problems in the country, then turn around and sell it to smaller towns where it does more harm than good.
Most places in America don't have problems that surveillance solves. They have problems they already know about and won't act on. Cameras don't fix homelessness or addiction or underfunded services. They just make life harder for regular people.
But that's the whole appeal for bureaucrats. Buying a product looks like doing something without having to do any of the actual work.
"Cameras don't fix homelessness or addiction or underfunded services. They just make life harder for regular people."
In what way do cameras make life harder for regular people? If anything rampant crime (and progressive legal systems' unwillingness to lock up repeat offenders for a long time or at all) makes life much harder for regular people than a camera just sitting there.
Biased policing means these systems are used to target minorities, activists, and people with "controversial" beliefs: https://www.aclu.org/issues/national-security/discriminatory...
By mis-identifying them, leading to 5 months of jail time for a person who has done nothing other than be in public. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/30/us/north-dakota-facial-re...
A few months ago a woman was harassed over a crime she did not commit, by a police officer using her vehicle driving in a large general area as proof she committed the crime. Officer demanded she admit to a crime she did not commit.
Additionally, the surveillance apparatus enables parallel reconstruction. When law enforcement gathers evidence via illegal means, they can then use the drag net to find cause to detain/search unrelated to the original crime, in order to have cover to gather evidence they illegally gathered prior, aka a loophole for civil rights.
Surveillance tech can alter peoples behavior. I know I'm personally more stressed when I know I'm being filmed, even if I'm doing nothing wrong.
https://academic.oup.com/nc/article/2024/1/niae039/7920510?l...
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"Police used AI facial recognition to arrest a Tennessee woman for crimes committed in a state she says she’s never visited": https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/29/us/angela-lipps-ai-facial-rec...
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1) Surveillance needs to be reviewed. Even if reviewed by AI, eventually that reviewed work needs to be reviewed by a human if we're going to maintain the fiction / friction of "human in the loop". The "hits" will include false positives, unless the system is overtuned so that it rarely kicks an event.
1a) Review will take time / resources which could be spent on human policing, harming the community.
1b) Some jurisdictions may prefer "broken windows as policy", the notion that they can construct a "reasonable suspicion", given enough garbage (some of it outright garbage, the point being there is so much of it nobody cares; don't need to do an accurate drug test until trial, right?).
2) False surveillance hits will make it through human review and result in injury to innocent humans.
3) Police forces already lack the money / manpower to investigate potential crimes.
4) Police forces already "prioritize" other matters than the mentally ill setting their houses on fire or releasing plagues of rabbits into their neighborhoods (actual things that have happened to me!).
There's zero proof anywhere that these devices do anything about crimes. How could they? A camera can't lock someone up.
feels somewhat dystopian, no? the big brother is watching everywhere you go. no way this can go tits up
I think this echoes very true in a lot of places, not just in the US. Here in the UK I'm pretty sure the police/the state more broadly know perfectly well who is doing a lot of the low level quality-of-life crime in most areas, but for structural reasons either can't or won't bother acting in many instances. Investigative work has never been easier: oftentimes there's multiple cctv angles of offences being committed, endless digital records, etc., but unless something can be done with this information in the real world, it's useless and actually takes resources away from other areas of public services.
Increasing the quality of the panopticon has all the downsides we talk about regularly on HN, and if you can't do anything useful for society with the data, it only ends up hurting people.
> They just make life harder for regular people.
"Making life harder for people [in the other tribe]" has become a core platform for a great many politicians. There's growing movement advocating that one of the major purposes of government is to grief people you don't like. Looked at through that lens, blanketing small towns with these things, with a plan to use them against "Those People," makes complete sense.
Agreed. I live in a city that's top 5% of safest cities in CA and these cameras have sprouted up everywhere. I reached out to my cities representative about it and he ignored my outreach (nice thing about instagram - that "read" indicator!). The most blatant is one that just points into the Home Depot parking lot. I don't see them at target.
It's gross but I think the cohort of America that watches Fox News all day probably loves these things because they've been brainwashed with crime reports that are disproportionate from reality.
I believe home depot themselves put up these cameras.
> These companies build this tech in SF and Seattle, cities with some of the gnarliest public safety problems in the country
I live just outside Seattle. I worked for Flock.
Flock is a company based in Atlanta GA.
Axon, on the other hand, does have a decent sized Seattle presence.
> But that's the whole appeal for bureaucrats.
I don't think it's the bureaucrats. You should hear the Flock CEO talk. They have made it very public that their direct intent is to influence government policy in sweeping and total fashion to enable their service to be the mass surveillance tool of the near future. They sincerely believe that people will look back on them as the saviours of mankind.
> These companies build this tech in SF and Seattle
Flock's headquarters and largest offices are in Atlanta. They also have an office in Boston.
Ring's headquarters were in Santa Monica until post-acquisition they moved to Hawthorne, CA.
Arlo's offices are in Carlsbad and San Jose. Ok, finally an office in the Bay Area (one of two main offices), but still not San Francisco.
I'm surprised Garrett Langley still has a job, he seems wildly out of touch. For instance he really believes that his Panopticon as a service is the reason crime is down in cities, conveniently ignoring crime rates prior to COVID.
"Garrett Langley" sounds like what they renamed the villain in Le Mis for an American audience.
Another POV is, they didn't invent cameras or drones, they aren't philosophers / employ any great or influential thinkers, nobody at Flock has won an election, all they really have done is sell some stuff that is easily defeated by a guy with a hammer or spray paint. I'm not sure he has another chance at a big Pay Day in his life, so in such desperate circumstances it will take something really criminal (or souring with VCs) to end this appearance in public life.
He won’t for long. The backlash is just getting started. Left or right, no one wants their whereabouts subject to constant surveillance.
His only advantage is that the cops are on his side and won’t let go of these cameras without a fight.
> no one wants their whereabouts subject to constant surveillance
But sadly lots of people want everyone else subject to it, and some are willing to submit to it themselves to get it. It's not a foregone conclusion.
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I'm very in favor of speed & redlight cameras and don't have a particular problem with license plate trackers. I think we partisan-ize far too many things nowadays, unfortunately.
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Nah, he's just missing a good PR campaign, there's a 30% of the population that will eat whatever their supreme leaders say they should, I'm sure they can sanewash these cameras as well.
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i think politicians have seriously underestimated how much people don't like crime, and most people would take constant surveillance if it could actually improve feelings of safety in urban environments.
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No one wants their whereabouts subject to constant surveillance, except everyone who carries a “normal” cell phone, in other words not a burner.
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Does he really believe it or is it his job to say he really believes it?
Could he tell the difference?
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As an ex-employee of Flock, if he doesn't really believe it he is an amazing actor. He talks of a very Minority Report-esque future, where there is literally zero crime, and it's because of Flock.
Flock's stats are very misleading too. If there was a Flock query in the course of investigating a crime, even if it leads nowhere or isn't relevant to the arrest or conviction, still, Flock was queried, so "Flock solved a crime".
It was sad. I had significant ethical questions when I joined, but all through recruitment and week one, everything was all about controls and restraints and auditing and ethics. After that, nope, a free for all. Selling our products in states that don't allow the use of certain functionality? Not our problem. We're not disabling it. That's up to you to decide whether you're using it or not.
I realize how unpopular flock is, and I will first say that I have literally never personally looked into the privacy concerns. But one city you don’t see named here is SF, which has cited Flock as a primary driver of its 10x reduction in car break-ins, and 30% reduction in burglaries. Those were a quality of life plague while I lived there
I could believe that perma-cameraing every inch of public space is more akin to chemo than to vitamin gummies, that SF had the city equivalent of bone cancer, and that this doesn’t mean healthy midwestern towns need Flock in any way.
The byproduct of habitually coddling criminals with zero consequences.
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Crime's been descending from the COVID blip for a while, everywhere, Flock or otherwise. My city saw zero murders in Q1; 2021 saw ~15 by now.
In other words: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSVqLHghLpw
it's clearly not a covid effect https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/sf-car-breakins/
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Any evidence that the reduction is actually due to the cameras?
Don't people tend to behave if they know the are being watched?
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> which has cited Flock as a primary driver of its 10x reduction in car break-ins, and 30% reduction in burglaries
Are there reports or studies released which explains how the flock system influenced these reductions?
ALPR does help with some things but stationary burglaries are largely not among them.
Unfortunately, Flock really has been doing some shady stuff and the alliance of 1) people with legitimate concerns about Flock operations, and 2) the much larger population of people who are accustomed to getting away with petty crimes is, together, politically successful.
It would be easy to create a camera network that is locally owned and operated by public agencies, and if any place in America could so that it should be SF.
The crime did not happen because of a lack of technological capability or resources availability at a given price point. It happened because of politics and priorities. The 1984 camera dragnet vendor is no more responsible for the change in politics and priorities and subsequent crime reduction than whatever vendor sold the tires for the cop cars.
For those unfamiliar, you can read more about the flock safety cameras themselves here:
https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Flock_license_plate_readers
And more about the company behind the cameras:
https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Flock_Safety
I'm glad Flock made it as far as they did before the ass-handing commences. Even some my normie friends and family are aware of the scourge because of their initial success, where they would otherwise think we're talking about a group of birds.
If you want to hear from the man himself, see link below. It was a fairly soft interview. I listened mainly because it was Noah and wasn't expecting him to be so pro-surveillance. So, even though I don't agree with them, it might be worth listening to their reasoning.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/2V5m4J0tjYg1shWXWrOG8k?si=k...
And switches to Axon - https://denverite.com/2026/02/24/denver-ends-flock-contract-...
I have not done any research if that's out of the frying pan and into the fire or an improvement
I don't know if axon does it, but the future is going to be mobile ALPRs. Uber drivers going around scanning every plate, selling to police, and helping predatory auto lenders repo cars. The latter is already being done, so it's just a matter of time.
Interesting point. Autonomous cars themselves could sell all the data they collect (like license plates, but also street maps, live traffic data, pot hole counts and locations etc)
Practically, axon cameras aren't nearly as ubiquitous as flock's, thus reducing the leo's dragnet capability. I'm sure the feds will successfully try to get access to this footage as well.
Kind of. Motorola (axon) effectively acts as an integration system for flock and about 20 other services. Motorola's stuff is IMO the bigger problem because it includes access to flock.
flock says customers own their data and control access. but their national lookup tool means 5,000+ agencies can search your city's cameras without your city's permission. 'customer-owned data' that anyone in the network can query isn't customer-owned in any meaningful sense.
It's quite ironic to get an amazon ring video ad while viewing this article.
An obnoxious, autoplay-at-full-volume ad that took the page an extra 30 seconds to load and somehow bypassed firefox adblockers...
Firefox 149 + ublock origin did not display ads for me
Ring is just as bad. Arguably worse because it comes with a convenience / personal security factor.
Non-US citizens - what's the situation with cameras in public spaces where you live? In my town every 2nd hour or building entrance has a private camera pointed at the street. It's very depressing because the cops don't care - I've asked 2 in a patrol car when there was a mild case of vandalism I witnessed. Technically it's illegal, but nothing happens. The public cameras are on intersection and some bus stops. Too much, if you ask me, but the private cameras are everywhere.
In London cameras are everywhere, mostly private and they have been for years. Don't think I've seen anything like it in any European city I've visited.
Private cameras pointing to street can be lawful under GDPR, but in that case they are GDPR controller. That then requires them fulfill bunch of obligations which they probably aren't, e.g. giving proper Article 13 notice.
I don't know if it's criminal in any EU country, but it would be something that you could complain to DPA about. Or initiate civil lawsuit against the controller.
Worth noting is that in some cases the camera vendor might also be (joint) controller as they can determine means & purposes of the processing. If they are simply storing the video then it's unlikely, but if they for example use it for AI training that would likely bring them controller territory.
Japan is exporting it's AI-enhanced crime prediction platform across LatAm after successfully deploying it in Tokyo [0]. Japan is doing similar work to analyze financial transactions [1]. South Korea has also deployed a similar surveillance platform called Dejaview [2]. Even Finland has been deploying surveillance camera fusion centers [3]
The brutal reality is everyone is doing this and there's nothing you can do about it. National Security trumps all other concerns (even the GDPR exempts governments who argue their data collection is done for National Security reasons), especially in a world as unstable as today.
[0] - https://www.japan.go.jp/kizuna/2024/06/japans_ai-based_crime...
[1] - https://www.tc.u-tokyo.ac.jp/en/ai1ec_event/10769/
[2] - https://m.blog.naver.com/mtnews_net/223775186368
[3] - https://poliisi.fi/en/camera-surveillance-system
Y Combinator CEO Gary Tan evangelises this company every chance he gets and YC was an early stage seed funder (Summer 2017)
Y Combinator CEO Gary Tan evangelises this company and YC was an early stage seed funder (Summer 2017)
And moving to the next vendor that hopefully does a better job of staying out of the public eye...
Funny they are just trying to get this started in Toronto
I drove into a very affluent subdivision this weekend, and like most others around here it had a flock camera recording every car on the way in. This camera, however, had the gall to advertise its presence as a neighborhood security measure. "Flock Safety watches this neighborhood" read the sign on the post, or some such. Of course the residents there had no choice but to accept its installation, as the local police support it. Nefarious framing and marketing in the name of "safety".
It's probably the neighborhood HOA that pays for it. My HOA got Flock cameras after a string of thefts, and has similar signs up. The HOA encourages homeowners to submit their car license plate info so that if a crime is reported, it's easier to identify cars that don't belong to homeowners.
Soon after the cameras were installed, some thieves stole a gift my brother had sent me. Thanks to license plate data and images of their faces, Vancouver PD had little trouble catching the perpetrators. It turned out that in addition to stealing Amazon/UPS/Fedex packages, they were stealing USPS mail and using it to commit identity theft. IIRC they ended up getting a decade in federal prison.
It seems like only a few people are responsible for the majority of thefts, so catching them and locking them up drastically improves quality of life for everyone else. Obviously this technology could be abused, but that's also true for things like fingerprinting, DNA evidence, and ID requirements. Similarly to those technologies, we could have laws restricting certain uses, allowing us to reduce crime while preventing abuses. But if a private community wants to install cameras and allow law enforcement to access the data they record, I don't see any constitutional issues.
> no choice but to accept its installation
You might be shocked to discover there are subdivisions so affluent they can afford physical armed security and access control structures with far more invasive identification and logging procedures.
I am not shocked to know that, but there are Flock cameras all over the town. None of the other ones have this advertisement on them. This neighborhood is not gated. However, Flock decided to do announce its presence only here.
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I saw the same thing in a Home Depot parking lot yesterday. I guess I'm glad there's some sort of notice about it, even if its intent is more, I dunno, branding? It took me a while to figure out what all the solar panel + camera on a post installations were as they popped up around my town. I even pulled over to inspect the hardware for signs of ownership and didn't find anything.
Most of the houses probably have little yard signs advertising some security service, and stickers on the doors advertising an alarm company too.
Ok? They paid for those.
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we enforce laws presumably in the name of safety, is this really nefarious framing or marketing? seems pretty straightforward to me.
It is very clearly advertising on their part. They have been paid to put that thing there and added the sign to announce the presence. It's like when you get your roof replaced by a business and they ask if they can put a sign in your yard. They're not doing it to make everybody know that you're getting your roof replaced, they're advertising.
Monte Sereno or Saratoga?
Congratulations EFF I know for a fact you’ve been working hard to get these removed.
this kind of headline might have some scholarly name, because, no... actually the number of cameras and feeds in the San Francisco Bay Area is multiplying rapidly, along with the entirety of California with few exceptions.. long ago, San Diego county, a military-led area, was the exception and to many pariah on the constant increase in tracking of vehicles, people and "events".. now, what used to be thought of as harsh and creepy, is not only matched in hardware, but exceeded in backend capacity, across almost every populated area
Our city voted them out for awhile. So the feds just put them on every bit of federal property near roads, which ended up doing the exact same thing.
Where is this?
It's funny, if the company had just sold cameras to cities, they probably could have avoided this whole mess. But they just had to hit some keywords for Wall Street (like "AI" "cloud" and "SaaS"), which had the side-effect of making it appear (true or not) that they were part of a Palantir-style surveillance panopticon that tracks you everywhere.
A big part of the value is the network: track a stolen a car or a suspect in the next town over or across the country.
A car, a suspect, an ex lover, a union organizer, a journalist going to meet a source, an activist headed to a rally. All kinds of things, really!
Or a woman who got an abortion
And they will either quietly rebrand and build it or someone else will.
Government loves the product. What it doesn't like about Flock is that the peasants are aware about it and complaining.
Funny that. Not everyone wants to live in an open air prison.
Someone in my hometown was arrested for vandalizing them. The media chose to say "city owned security camera". It's amazing how they will rush to defend private enterprise.
Legacy local news is highly dependent on the police for content and access. No surprise.
More likely: the local news reporter doesn't know the difference, or didn't think there was a difference.
the alternative is to not punish vandalism? what are you even saying?
Apparently he’s saying property rights bad, Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone-for-all good.
It really is amazing how they managed to fit so much copper into those devices.
Would be a shame if it became common knowledge.
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There are ways of doing this that don't require you to abdicate all of your privacy to a third-party SaaS company who makes it easy to share information with the police everywhere.
My camera system is not connected to the cloud and it has a retention policy of 4 weeks. I took pains not to aim them anywhere where I'd be collecting data outside of my own property. There's full-disk encryption in use. The police could maintain their own surveillance network and place their own cameras in a legally compliant way and it would be fine.
Flock and Ring are awful because they enable easy surveillance and search after the fact, not a priori because they are surveillance systems. If they required proof of warrant before letting the police execute a search I think a lot of people would be more comfortable with them. A police officer stalking an ex is like the basic example you get if you ask an ALPR vendor why we need audit logging and proactive auditing of all searches. But that's not the only way these tools enable invasion of privacy.
If you want proof that that's the problem with them, you should know that people have been building wired camera systems and ALPR systems for decades before Flock and Ring came into existence. So it's solely the cloud Search-as-a-Service business model that's the problem there.
> The answer to that is the only one that matters.
This statement rests on the belief that absolute crime rate is the only thing that matters, and is a cousin to the "I have nothing to hide!" response from people who care little for intrusions to their privacy. Are you in favor of giving law enforcement authorities a way to unlock all private electronic devices?
I'm willing to tolerate the presence of some crime in the name of personal liberty. I do not think my whereabouts should be known on demand by government actors just because I drive a car.
You’re going to be so shocked to find out the tracking device the government tricked you to put in your pocket is even worse. Police can run geofenced dragnets whenever they want, and all you got was the ability to shitpost on the Internet.
You’ll be even more shocked when biometric login isn’t protected by the 5th amendment. Possibly, even more shocked when you find out about XKEYSCORE.
ALPR is bad, of course, but in terms of actual invasion of privacy there are far bigger kraken sized fish to fry that we have accepted as just… completely normal and even necessary to function in our society. It’s only natural that they continue to push the boundaries. Almost like giving up rights for security has consequences we were warned about 250 years ago.
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> The answer to that is the only one that matters.
Is it, though? Crime would be super low if we were all confined to prison cells by default, too.
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No it's not. Would crime go up, down, or stay the same if we had to get strip searched before entering airplanes?
The types of crime that would happen in an airplane would already be identifiable due to its constrained cabin, so I don’t understand the comparison.
Let’s use your example for say a concert. Is checking bags worth it? Would crime go up if there was no bag check? Why or why not?
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I mean, that depends on whether you consider the warrantless, disproportionate search a crime.
It should be!
By any means necessary, as long as crime goes down? So we can execute anyone that breaks any kind of law and as long as crime goes down, that's all that should matter? Rights have no value to you, only protecting people from crime? There's no balance to be had, the only relevant question is if crime goes up or down?
Wow.
You need the carrot and the stick. There's a reason the QoL in urban areas in countries with significantly draconian enforcement like Singapore, Japan, and South Korea is significantly higher peer cities in North America and Western Europe.
Cleanliness and order as a cultural norm only arose because police in Singapore, Japan, and South Korea are very fine and enforcement happy.
Crime would go down if everyone was executed. Your question is not the only one that matters.
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> Would crime go up, down or stay the same if all surveillance cameras were removed?
I would think the same, crime rates would be unaffected in the short and medium term, since I don't think it prevents much crime given the short or non-custodial sentences given many criminals. Clearance rates and justice (conviction rates) would likely go down though IMO.
probably up
Perhaps this venture would have been more successful as a Public Benefit Corporation.
In the USA in 2026, "capitalism", "politics", and "evil" have all become synonymous.
Maybe I am naive, and the corruption is too deep and pervasive.