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Comment by mullingitover

2 days ago

Recent WIRED[1] article goes in depth on this exact problem:

> Another prompt instructs the system to list everyone arrested more than twice in two years for “any offense,” exempting only narcotics arrests, and then says to map where those people live, retrieve the calls for service at their homes, and “do a workup on the top three individuals.” The prompt begins with everyone in the area who has an arrest record and ends with dossiers on three of them, chosen by the software.

> A “workup,” in Flock’s terminology, is a one-command background check. It starts with a name and a date of birth and returns what the department’s records and commercial data hold: vehicles, prior listings as a suspect, and, on a second screen, relatives, phone numbers, and online accounts.

This stuff is beyond the wildest fantasies of East Germany's Stasi, and it's going to be a whack-a-mole game dealing with all the baby Flocks that spring up if Flock itself can be shut down.

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/flock-safety-os-investigate/

6 comments

mullingitover

Reply
Gigachad  2 days ago

For a more modern example, China already has this and a lot more. The public seems largely supportive of it though because most street crimes stopped.

The potential for abuse is obviously massive, but the benefit to society is too.

legitster  2 days ago

> This stuff is beyond the wildest fantasies of East Germany's Stasi

I feel like that's a bit of a false equivalency. The soviet secret police had surprisingly little hard evidence on anyone - part of the terror of these regimes is that they could act decisively with little more than a rumor or gossip and be free from scrutiny for any mistakes.

  • mullingitover  2 days ago

    You're right: the current US regime has been gleefully weaponizing the legal system against political enemies, and the difference is that they don't care about scrutiny for mistakes because there have been zero consequences for anyone involved. The Soviets were at least somewhat worried about bad PR.

    My thinking is if we can stop pervasive AI-driven surveillance we might be saved from a totalitarian regime who views The Handmaid's Tale as an instruction manual, and instead be able to settle for a run-of-the-mill corrupt authoritarian one.

  • dghlsakjg  2 days ago

    Look up some of the Flock horror stories.

    There's the one where a guy was surrounded by cops with their guns pointing at him because of a flock fuckup. He had a partial plate match (as in, some of the digits matched, but not an exact match) with a plate that was lost or stolen (as in the plate itself was stolen, not the car it was attached to.) That one went viral because the guy was an editor at a magazine driving a loaner car

    There's this one where a lady was pulled out of her car at gunpoint after flock flagged her as a murder suspect. This happened twice in a weekend. She was never suspected of murder, it was a mistaken flag. https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2026/aug/28/milwaukee-p...

    Flock doesn't require evidence for an alert to be put in their system. If you have access you can apparently just put out an alert saying someone is a murder suspect, and some police department will repeatedly drag a woman out of her car until the media embarrasses them publicly

  • zaptheimpaler  2 days ago

    Right the US government definitely isn’t detaining people, sending them to foreign gulags or sending mobs of masked morons shooting innocent people like Pretti in broad daylight. We don’t even know the names of the ICE officers who did that to this day so they seem pretty free of scrutiny as well.