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Cider9986 10 hours ago [-]
I don't see anything so wrong with cutting them down. I see it similar to maintaining a local trail. Removing obstacles like fallen trees or brambles. These are pests that are unconstitutional.
It seems like a statement to the prosperity of the American ideals of freedom that they are being removed both by local activism and illegal means. Along with the general sentiment on social media. It's genuinely insane the power social media has on earth. It's attributed to the revolution in Nepal, major protests in India, and there were a bunch more in other countries[1].
We as humans have been brainwashed with the nothing to hide fallacy. It's good to see it dismantled once we see mass surveillance in practice.
[1] Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Kenya, Morocco, Madagascar, Peru, and Bulgaria from a Brave overview (can't say I researched any of these).
Prompt: other countries that had uprisings like the Nepal 2025 one
linkjuice4all 10 hours ago [-]
Cutting them down isn’t the worst idea but it would be nice if we could just elect people that wouldn’t allow this in the first place. Knowing that won’t happen, the only chance reasonable people have to stop this is to turn these systems against the decision makers until they yield.
Some kind of Flock@home volunteer surveillance network that tracks politicians, records LEO interactions (including those involving masked unaccountable agents), and provides the only accountability that the public has left.
willis936 10 hours ago [-]
What do you mean "allow"? Police chiefs are not elected positions and they often find funding outside of the town's budget for these automated bill of rights violation machines.
Brian_K_White 9 hours ago [-]
Does the police deptartment own the land where the cameras are installed?
conception 9 hours ago [-]
Sparrowmap.com is an attempt
andai 9 hours ago [-]
Remember when someone set up a website tracking Elon Musk's private jet? iirc he politely asked him to take it offline.
jMyles 9 hours ago [-]
> Cutting them down isn’t the worst idea but it would be nice if we could just elect people that wouldn’t allow this in the first place.
Is this really better though? First-party community maintenance is more direct, cheaper, and doesn't rely on fragile central authorities (granted, it _does_ rely on a difficult pattern of community discussion and collaboration to satisfy tribal consensus, etc).
I'm broadly OK with cameras being in public, but I have much more trust in direct action than I do in elected "officials".
On medium time-scales, it seems to me that a great solution will be to have community-maintained cameras kinda all over the commons, but such that the camera eye can be accessed publicly (ie, removing the information asymmetry which gives the undesirable actors (police, etc) greater view than the actual community participants).
ericmay 10 hours ago [-]
I don't really care too much one way or the other about these cameras, and generally think it's probably bad to have more surveillance but could you help me understand what exactly is "unconstitutional" or even nefarious with these cameras provided they are bought and installed on property that is owned by the installer or an entity such as the government which presumably has legal justification for installing them?
I'm genuinely asking since I'm a bit out of touch with this latest controversy, but how are they any different than a dash cam, doorbell camera, or my alley camera, for example such that they deserve special consideration?
ThrustVectoring 10 hours ago [-]
It's the database query, not the physical cameras. In the pre-digital age where privacy was considered in constitutional law, tracking people's and vehicle's movements was horrendously expensive - you'd need multiple detectives doing things by hand per person of interest. This meant that it was reserved for when the government already had pretty strong reason to believe in some sort of wrongdoing. Even with a personal, non-internet-connected doorbell camera, the police would need to identify what cameras exist for a location and contact the owners in order for the footage to do anything.
With automated license plate readers, they can simply collect everything with a reasonably affordable network of cameras, then query the database when they want to find a particular pattern of activity. The police have already detained people for frequent border-crossing between marijuana-legal and illegal states. This gets exacerbated by granularity and extensiveness - imagine an anti-choice state pointing cameras at every maternity care parking lot in the state and tracking who visits them for cross-referencing with visits to pro-choice states.
And with the existence of parallel construction, there's no reasonable way short of dismantling the ALPR system to avoid abuse against the citizenry.
ericmay 9 hours ago [-]
Please correct my understanding if this is not the case... so the issue isn't the cameras themselves it's that you believe (and I am sympathetic toward) that they are easily searchable without a warrant and so it's something akin to a 4th Amendment violation? Less so to do with surveillance state which we might consider a separate issue? I mention that just because the surveillance state with just cameras could include consumer cameras, drones, highway traffic cams, the damn automated plate reader and tracking camera that gave me a $100+ ticket in London for driving through a congestion zone and... those bast.... and... (jk - well sort of it, I mean it is part of the group here)
I'm not sure I'm on board with the efficiency argument but those are always interesting ones.
ThrustVectoring 9 hours ago [-]
The privacy violation is that the database exists, full stop. I don't think a warrant requirement would be a meaningful barrier, since the data is already part of the camera network operators' database and all sorts of informal or backdoor agreements would easily happen.
Like, all a warrant requirement does is make it so that the police have to talk to a judge before making the searched data part of the evidence against you. It would do nothing to stop the police from fabricating some other pretext to lawfully stop and investigate you - say, parking a police cruiser at the border into the state and whenever the ALPR in that car hits a list of vehicles, stop them for going 0.1 MPH over the limit and the officer says they smell weed.
ericmay 9 hours ago [-]
> The privacy violation is that the database exists, full stop.
Is that because the government has access to the database? Aside from that I'm not really sure what the difference is between Flock in this case and something like a doorbell camera.
ThrustVectoring 9 hours ago [-]
It's nefarious and privacy-violating when the database exists, government involvement just exacerbates things because private companies aren't allowed to send armed goons to your house and break down your door.
ericmay 8 hours ago [-]
So my understanding was incorrect, you're against any recording including personal use, traffic cameras, security cameras on private property (for example at a jewelry store)?
ThrustVectoring 8 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure why you're ignoring the central point I'm making about scale. One guy having a camera pointing out of his doorbell is different from Amazon being able to do whatever they want with the footage from something like one in five US homes. Systems are more than the sum of their isolated parts.
ericmay 8 hours ago [-]
I was trying to understand where your opposition was - the operator of the device, the number of devices, or perhaps who and how information was accessed.
Maybe I should've been more direct. In your view, what is the appropriate usage for camera devices in public spaces?
ThrustVectoring 8 hours ago [-]
All public cameras are a cost to privacy for the benefit of the operator, its just that the identity of the operators and the extensiveness and data centralization change the magnitude of the cost and the proper response.
If my friend has a doorbell camera and I don't like being recorded by him every time I visit his house, I can just not visit his house. Similarly, if Target has in-store surveillance cameras, I can just not shop there. If driving anywhere has me logged multiple times in Flock's network, I can't just stop driving, and even if I did they track pedestrians and bluetooth signals too.
In short my opposition is to all of it, but some scenarios are clearly far worse for privacy than others. Doing something unusual that has your neighbors privately chuckling at their surveillance footage is less bad than doing something unusual that has Target's loss protection following you and making you feel uncomfortable, which is less bad than doing something unusual that has a police officer decide to "randomly" stop your car and attempt to search it, which is less bad than doing something unusual that has a SWAT team kicking down your door and arresting you.
starkrights 8 hours ago [-]
I mean, yeah? I dont understand your lack of perceived separation. It’s seems pretty plain that there is no interconnected network of doorbell cameras that anyone can use to track someone across every possibly doorbell camera that filmed them[1]. A doorbell camera is for an individual to see what’s happening immediately on their property.
A flock camera is connected to every other flock camera, ever, period. It’d be bad enough if a whole town were tracking the movements of all of their citizens constantly and storing that data forever to be searchable without a warrant (because of the extremely obvious flashing abuse vector that has been shown to be taken advantage of multiple times- give the old google a search for police officers stalking exes and their partners via flock, or flock employee spying on children’s gymnastics gym)
BUT, it’s not even just that! You can track people everywhere that there are flock cameras if you are a part of the flock network! So you can stalk people everywhere in the country with 0 oversight. It is an insanely massive privacy issue.
It’s universal persisted tracking of literally everyone’s movements 24/7 everywhere there is a flock camera, persisted presumably forever, and currently accessible to an extremely large amount of people without any authorization or judicial check required. (Many would go to comment on the police demographic being unstable and/or uniquely situated to abuse this, but arguments about that may or may not be moot to you depending on your opinion of the police)
I feel like it’s plainly clear that any doorbell camera does not do that. Even if most doorbell cams are cloud enabled, I’d imagine it’s significantly harder to subpoena a doorbell company for “every camera you have on exactly this street that could’ve done this thing”, and infinitely more so to force them to give you all of their data history and continue to do so forever. Flock just does that as their business.
Doorbell cameras are also not particularly capable of tracking you on every major travel route you take, as they’re primarily on, well, residential doors. Maybe some businesses have them? But they certainly aren’t able to resolve every license plate that travels through a segment of highway. Not to mention that they just don’t do that at present at all anyways, even in the places they’re installed- they just record motion, and sometimes use AI to point out “a car drove by” or “a person walked up to the door.” Not “license plate XYZ1234 drove through highway 12 at 8:34 pm”.
I feel like your statement just kinda ignores all of this and is saying “well yeah, but besides all the mass movement tracking and data storage and correlation, it’s basically like a doorbell camera because they both record people/cars and store them somehow, right?”
Which, I mean yeah I guess? But the “besides” part is kind of entirely the massive problem.
[1] well, not yet.
ericmay 8 hours ago [-]
> It’s seems pretty plain that there is no interconnected network of doorbell cameras that anyone can use to track someone across every possibly doorbell camera that filmed them
That doesn't seem clear to me at all. It may not be one interconnected network but if a crime occurs say, at 100 Main Street the police can see doorbell cameras, identify the model, and ask the home owner for the tape and if necessary get a warrant. It's certainly not as easy to obtain the data but it's certainly possible to achieve the same goal.
Look, I'm not trying to defend Flock here or anything, just trying to understand what the specific concern is whether that is hyper-efficient tracking, a privacy violation, a constitutional violation, or maybe even something different altogether.
trevithick 9 hours ago [-]
There's also the matter of police accessing this massive data trove "for personal purposes, including tracking romantic partners, relatives or acquaintances."
It’s an interpretation of the Fourth Amendment, which is loosely supported by Supreme Court precent in Carpenter and Jones. See my previous comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46359826
Edit: To be more clear, the issue courts have considered is warrantless searches of ALPR databases (and whether that evidence should be excluded), not whether it’s constitutional to put up cameras.
atmavatar 9 hours ago [-]
More recently, there's also United States v. Chatrie, which was a 6-3 decision that searching Google's location history data is covered by the Fourth Amendment
The constitution forbids unreasonable search and seizure. Tracking people's movements without specific reason the believe that they are a criminal has generally been regarded, at least by the public, as a classic example of government overreach.
tiahura 9 hours ago [-]
They are not unconstitutional. There is no right to privacy in public. There's endless confusion online, but legally, public means "not private."
Cider9986 8 hours ago [-]
The Supreme Court has ruled that police must get a warrant to place a tracker on your car even if your car is always in public.
"What is so wrong with having your house burn down? It's just a chemical process that happens all the time."
ericmay 9 hours ago [-]
That's a bad assumption and incorrect in this case. Instead of assuming you should just ask. I also did my best to communicate that I was genuinely interested in learning more about what was the crux of the issue.
MelonArmiger 9 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
K0balt 9 hours ago [-]
I don’t know, but it seems like a magnetron gun might be a decent way to turn these off.
altairprime 10 hours ago [-]
One of the oddities in reporting about Flock is that no one’s considered who the silent customers are. Even Techdirt is focusing on municipal abuses and greed, calling out Flock for reactivating cameras for its own sake. But the real question should be: is Flock reactivating municipal cameras on behalf of non-municipal customers? So, when we find out here that the most likely non-municipal customer is also monitoring social media about Flock, it intensifies my suspicion that Flock exists as a liability shield for warrantless surveillance for the government — and that municipalities are just a front.
blakeashleyjr 10 hours ago [-]
A plague on our land. Hopefully the recent Chatrie v. United States decision gives courts the ammo they need to shut these down.
There is a big difference in a cop seeing you go by, checking a list, and coming after you than scanning every license plate, bumper sticker, etc. and putting in a database for every cop in the country.
GauntletWizard 10 hours ago [-]
I don't even have a problem with every cop being equipped with an automatic ALPR... So long as the data is not retained. I do believe that we need better auditing and oversight in response to the availability, but it's not a great evil that an APB can be virtually guaranteed to catch a car... So long as we're using them carefully and judiciously, in response to immediate and recent threats or a clearly understood long tail. There's supposed to be a balance of power; it's not evil to give the police new powers, but it is evil to give politicians unanswered and unlimited tracking of the movements of anyone they so desire.
driverdan 7 hours ago [-]
What's going on with HN hiding this post? 84 votes in 4 hours and it's on page 3 while there are posts on page 1 that are older and have fewer votes.
fastcall 4 hours ago [-]
You mean Flock Safety (YC ‘17)? :)
spl757 9 hours ago [-]
Dollars to donuts it isn't just tiktok and instragram. If it's on the internet and not end-to-end encrypted with the proper ciphers it's being monitored. Shit, the police and feds keep things they can't decipher hoping they can in the future.
My rule of thumb is that if it's technically possible, someone, somewhere is doing it.
thataccount 9 hours ago [-]
Should be obvious to the government places that notice all this info coming out that people do not LIKE these as a solution, and they should maybe, I dunno, start listening to the people?
andrewflnr 9 hours ago [-]
This is good to know, and we might even mostly be on the side of the lawbreakers here but, like, monitoring public coordinated attempts to break the law is squarely in the job description of law enforcement. Maybe if someone had done a better job of social media monitoring, we could have had a real response to Jan 6, 2021. (I know, I know, maybe not under the cheeto's authority specifically, but the point is that LEOs reading public messages is still something that happens in a government actually working for the people.)
4d4m 9 hours ago [-]
Flock OS underpins many more cameras than are visible and added by Flock directly.
andai 8 hours ago [-]
Warm regards to GPT-6-NSA.
tamimio 9 hours ago [-]
Glowies are panicking, summarize the situation.
danielrmay 10 hours ago [-]
"I hope our names are touching on the watchlist"
bladeacidic 9 hours ago [-]
Everyone posting here is now on a list somewhere. Hopefully you're deanonymized sufficiently. Better hope we don't get caught up in something!
Cider9986 7 hours ago [-]
>Hopefully you're deanonymized sufficiently
What?
bladeacidic 5 hours ago [-]
*you are sufficiently anonymous here
nullbio 10 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
nkrisc 10 hours ago [-]
> I'm certainly not pro-surveillance state
Right after expressing complete acceptance of living in a surveillance state.
nullbio 10 hours ago [-]
Nice hyperbole. I'm concerned about govt listening to our private conversations and mining our inner dialogue. I could not care less if they know when my car passes a camera in public. People are instantly very emotional about this without reflecting on why. If you want to live in a safe country, you must give up some level of freedom. That's life. Otherwise, why not just ban all forms of surveillance? Make it a rule that unless police witness a crime first-hand, no one can be prosecuted? See how that plays out.
Cider9986 8 hours ago [-]
So tracking your location without a warrant isn't a surveillance state problem? No right to privacy in public doesn't mean there should be the complete elimination of it, especially by the people supposed to represent us.
It is. That's why I said "If they have better accountability in terms of law enforcement using it (warrant requirements, transparency, etc) I see no problem with it."
To be clear, I am not in favor of Flock in its current incarnation. I am in favor of it if these safeguards are introduced.
harimau777 10 hours ago [-]
I think that a reasonable argument that tracking someone's movements can give significant insight into private communication. If you know who someone is talking to, when, where, and how often, then you can deduce a lot of what they are communicating.
I'm not sure about your argument about giving up freedom for security. One of the quotes that has become embedded in American social consciousness is Ben Franklin's "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety".
nullbio 9 hours ago [-]
Great quote, but I don't consider this "essential liberty".
harimau777 9 hours ago [-]
I get that you don't agree with it, but that quote is part of most American's understanding of our country. If the government derives its authority from the people, then that has to matter.
10 hours ago [-]
Barrin92 9 hours ago [-]
>If you want to live in a safe country, you must give up some level of freedom
Is that why prisons so safe and free of crime? How is that life? Electronic mass surveillance is how old, the late 90s?
Yes, let's ban all mass surveillance. I know where that gets you, the 70s or 80s when the height of technology was localized tape CCTV in a handful of places. Did everyone die and everything burn down? How can anyone with a straight face be this hysterical when most people currently alive grew up without any surveillance
nullbio 8 hours ago [-]
The US in the 70's and 80's is not comparable to current US given different socioeconomic factors. China is far safer than the US is, if you want an accurate example.
> Is that why prisons so safe and free of crime?
Surveilled prisons are safer than non-surveilled ones. Compare a technology forward prison with a prison in a third world country if you want an example.
Barrin92 5 hours ago [-]
>The US in the 70's and 80's is not comparable to current US given different socioeconomic factors
The socioeconomic factors have become more favorable. Excluding surveillance there's been a secular crime drop due to aging demographics, family planning / abortions, potentially even decline in lead etc. The US is not as safe as China, but it's safer than the US 40 years ago all other things held equal. Of course an authoritarian state is safer but that's meaningless to compare yourself to if you value freedom.
What's actually changed is an absolute spread of paranoia and fear of imagined threats even in neighborhoods that look like as idyllic as a Scandinavian village.
mikem170 9 hours ago [-]
Crimes can be investigated without always-on survellience. Like has been done for decades.
Are all these deployed cameras actually solving crimes? What are the numbers? Aren't there already a bunch of other ways to track cars, like onstar sim chips?
Always-on survellience is always abused. It's already abused by US police officers. tracking their x-wives for example, the new boyfriends, etc. And there's room for much worse. Many of us grew up hearing about things that totalitarian communist governments were doing. The East German's would have loved to have such technologies.
New capabilities are being rolled out by flock- facial recognition and bluetooth tracking, for example.
This seems to be another example of the government contracting with private companies to do things that would be illegal for the government to do themselves.
Historically stuff like this ends up being abused by the establishment. facial recognition in Hong Kong. Protesters dissappeared. Stingray phone tracking in Portland. Protesters picked up by black SUVs. Freezing bank accounts in Ottawa. ICE deporting people without due process. Just keeps getting worse.
Think of all the modern niceties we enjoy that protesters earned. Will protesters of the future stand a chance when everyone is tracked all the time?
gonzalohm 10 hours ago [-]
You don't see anything wrong with being tracked 24/7 ? The fact that it's already possible to be tracked with your phone signals that there is already a problem that needs fixing
nullbio 10 hours ago [-]
Flock is not tracking you 24/7, your phone is. What is so dangerous about the government knowing that your car passed a camera at a particular point in time?
ipdashc 10 hours ago [-]
> What is so dangerous
We can make up plenty of scenarios where it's dangerous, but even without those, can we not just... not like something? To use the common analogy, my neighbor staring at me through the window all the time wouldn't be dangerous. But it's weird, it's uncomfortable. Can we just not do it? I want to be able to drive places without my movements being logged. Clearly many millions of people agree, given the backlash against Flock. This isn't some essential technology, we got along just fine without it.
I would also like it if people would wake up to their phones tracking them, etc, and demand that laws be passed to deal with that. But this is a good start!
nullbio 9 hours ago [-]
And what percentage of that backlash is by people with a criminal record? And what percentage of these criminals are the ones pushing the narrative of this being some grave invasion of privacy that must be stopped for "mah freedom"?
It's easy to work people up about anything involving monitoring, their brains immediately shut down and think emotionally about the subject. But not all forms of monitoring are equivalent, and some of it is useful and has net-benefit.
ipdashc 6 hours ago [-]
Lol pretty much everyone I've seen talking about Flock is a terminally online nerdy type (myself included). The people I see protesting it in the news and such are either similar young privacy-minded people or boomers. I don't think either of these groups tend to have criminal records, nor that there's a grand conspiracy of petty criminals working together to get rid of Flock, the one superhero that would defeat them once and for all.
Maybe it's easy to work people up about it because people don't like being monitored.
I agree it's not all equivalent and some of it is useful, but people have clearly made their voices heard that they think blanket license plate recording is excessive and makes them uncomfortable. Perhaps society will listen.
nullbio 2 hours ago [-]
Until now the only uproar I've seen about it has been people posting Tiktok videos of them cutting down cameras or burning them with lasers, ergo commiting crimes.
BLKNSLVR 10 hours ago [-]
If I'm the ex-partner of a government employee?
mikem170 9 hours ago [-]
Ideally we'd democratically decide whether we want this or not. We can make spurrious tracking (which is usually for profit) illegal, if we want.
People in former communist countries and other oppressive places often have a different attitude about such things. They learned the hard way.
skullone 10 hours ago [-]
Tread on us harder!
nullbio 10 hours ago [-]
What are you so concerned about exactly?
jasonlotito 10 hours ago [-]
Imagine having a life you value. Now, imagine you have opinions you express.
Now, imagine expressing those opinions destroys the first.
Before you jump in with a rebuttal, any comment you reply with here must include your full name and address, otherwise, you admit to being a bot and therefore worthless.
That's the concern.
nullbio 10 hours ago [-]
Now imagine that none of that is relevant because we're not talking about listening devices or communication tapping.
This is just false equivalence, and this false equivalence is why people are immediately so defensive of anyone who suggest Flock is a good idea in principle.
As for the 'full name and address', also not relevant, Flock is not obtaining either of these details.
harimau777 10 hours ago [-]
If I can track your car, I can determine if you went to a protest. If I can determine if you went to a protest, then I can punish your speech.
nullbio 9 hours ago [-]
99% of the people who attend protests take their phone with them. Furthermore, Flock does not prove you participated in a protest. What if you were going to a shop near a protest? What if you were going to the park? This would never be considered sufficient evidence for anything actionable.
Also what's to say you aren't counter-protesting?
harimau777 9 hours ago [-]
It would be pretty easy to determine most people's basic political alignment (e.g. party registration is public record) and therefore which side of a protest someone was on. I don't think it is likely that an authoritarian government would care if they could prove that you were actually at the protest. Even just prosecuting someone, even if it has no chance of success, is a significant punishment.
vatsachak 10 hours ago [-]
It's just that flock is insecure and is also used in a negative manner by those who wield it.
I mean functionally, given cell phones and ring doorbells we're already in a surveillance state.
nullbio 10 hours ago [-]
Right, and I think that part of Flock should be fixed. But I don't think in general it is a bad idea. Do these same people also think it is bad that the police can get a warrant to read your text messages?
harimau777 10 hours ago [-]
If the warrant is a real warrant, not some rubber stamp or FISA court, then I'd have less of a problem with the Flock cameras. However, that's not how America works.
Calazon 10 hours ago [-]
They certainly think it would be bad for police to read your text messages without a warrant.
nullbio 10 hours ago [-]
I agree with that too. So if the argument is: "Flock is good in principle but right now it doesn't have the necessary safeguards", well, that's exactly what I said in my original post.
harimau777 9 hours ago [-]
The problem is that the safeguards will inevitably be bent, ignored, parallel constructioned, or repealed. As long as the cameras are there, they are a threat.
It seems like a statement to the prosperity of the American ideals of freedom that they are being removed both by local activism and illegal means. Along with the general sentiment on social media. It's genuinely insane the power social media has on earth. It's attributed to the revolution in Nepal, major protests in India, and there were a bunch more in other countries[1].
We as humans have been brainwashed with the nothing to hide fallacy. It's good to see it dismantled once we see mass surveillance in practice.
[1] Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Kenya, Morocco, Madagascar, Peru, and Bulgaria from a Brave overview (can't say I researched any of these).
Prompt: other countries that had uprisings like the Nepal 2025 one
Some kind of Flock@home volunteer surveillance network that tracks politicians, records LEO interactions (including those involving masked unaccountable agents), and provides the only accountability that the public has left.
Is this really better though? First-party community maintenance is more direct, cheaper, and doesn't rely on fragile central authorities (granted, it _does_ rely on a difficult pattern of community discussion and collaboration to satisfy tribal consensus, etc).
I'm broadly OK with cameras being in public, but I have much more trust in direct action than I do in elected "officials".
On medium time-scales, it seems to me that a great solution will be to have community-maintained cameras kinda all over the commons, but such that the camera eye can be accessed publicly (ie, removing the information asymmetry which gives the undesirable actors (police, etc) greater view than the actual community participants).
I'm genuinely asking since I'm a bit out of touch with this latest controversy, but how are they any different than a dash cam, doorbell camera, or my alley camera, for example such that they deserve special consideration?
With automated license plate readers, they can simply collect everything with a reasonably affordable network of cameras, then query the database when they want to find a particular pattern of activity. The police have already detained people for frequent border-crossing between marijuana-legal and illegal states. This gets exacerbated by granularity and extensiveness - imagine an anti-choice state pointing cameras at every maternity care parking lot in the state and tracking who visits them for cross-referencing with visits to pro-choice states.
And with the existence of parallel construction, there's no reasonable way short of dismantling the ALPR system to avoid abuse against the citizenry.
I'm not sure I'm on board with the efficiency argument but those are always interesting ones.
Like, all a warrant requirement does is make it so that the police have to talk to a judge before making the searched data part of the evidence against you. It would do nothing to stop the police from fabricating some other pretext to lawfully stop and investigate you - say, parking a police cruiser at the border into the state and whenever the ALPR in that car hits a list of vehicles, stop them for going 0.1 MPH over the limit and the officer says they smell weed.
Is that because the government has access to the database? Aside from that I'm not really sure what the difference is between Flock in this case and something like a doorbell camera.
Maybe I should've been more direct. In your view, what is the appropriate usage for camera devices in public spaces?
If my friend has a doorbell camera and I don't like being recorded by him every time I visit his house, I can just not visit his house. Similarly, if Target has in-store surveillance cameras, I can just not shop there. If driving anywhere has me logged multiple times in Flock's network, I can't just stop driving, and even if I did they track pedestrians and bluetooth signals too.
In short my opposition is to all of it, but some scenarios are clearly far worse for privacy than others. Doing something unusual that has your neighbors privately chuckling at their surveillance footage is less bad than doing something unusual that has Target's loss protection following you and making you feel uncomfortable, which is less bad than doing something unusual that has a police officer decide to "randomly" stop your car and attempt to search it, which is less bad than doing something unusual that has a SWAT team kicking down your door and arresting you.
A flock camera is connected to every other flock camera, ever, period. It’d be bad enough if a whole town were tracking the movements of all of their citizens constantly and storing that data forever to be searchable without a warrant (because of the extremely obvious flashing abuse vector that has been shown to be taken advantage of multiple times- give the old google a search for police officers stalking exes and their partners via flock, or flock employee spying on children’s gymnastics gym)
BUT, it’s not even just that! You can track people everywhere that there are flock cameras if you are a part of the flock network! So you can stalk people everywhere in the country with 0 oversight. It is an insanely massive privacy issue.
It’s universal persisted tracking of literally everyone’s movements 24/7 everywhere there is a flock camera, persisted presumably forever, and currently accessible to an extremely large amount of people without any authorization or judicial check required. (Many would go to comment on the police demographic being unstable and/or uniquely situated to abuse this, but arguments about that may or may not be moot to you depending on your opinion of the police)
I feel like it’s plainly clear that any doorbell camera does not do that. Even if most doorbell cams are cloud enabled, I’d imagine it’s significantly harder to subpoena a doorbell company for “every camera you have on exactly this street that could’ve done this thing”, and infinitely more so to force them to give you all of their data history and continue to do so forever. Flock just does that as their business.
Doorbell cameras are also not particularly capable of tracking you on every major travel route you take, as they’re primarily on, well, residential doors. Maybe some businesses have them? But they certainly aren’t able to resolve every license plate that travels through a segment of highway. Not to mention that they just don’t do that at present at all anyways, even in the places they’re installed- they just record motion, and sometimes use AI to point out “a car drove by” or “a person walked up to the door.” Not “license plate XYZ1234 drove through highway 12 at 8:34 pm”.
I feel like your statement just kinda ignores all of this and is saying “well yeah, but besides all the mass movement tracking and data storage and correlation, it’s basically like a doorbell camera because they both record people/cars and store them somehow, right?”
Which, I mean yeah I guess? But the “besides” part is kind of entirely the massive problem.
[1] well, not yet.
That doesn't seem clear to me at all. It may not be one interconnected network but if a crime occurs say, at 100 Main Street the police can see doorbell cameras, identify the model, and ask the home owner for the tape and if necessary get a warrant. It's certainly not as easy to obtain the data but it's certainly possible to achieve the same goal.
Look, I'm not trying to defend Flock here or anything, just trying to understand what the specific concern is whether that is hyper-efficient tracking, a privacy violation, a constitutional violation, or maybe even something different altogether.
https://www.newsweek.com/flock-camera-police-arrests-1226378...
Edit: To be more clear, the issue courts have considered is warrantless searches of ALPR databases (and whether that evidence should be excluded), not whether it’s constitutional to put up cameras.
See: https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-applauds-important-...
See: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25-112_0am4.pdf
https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/victory-federal-...
"What is so wrong with having your house burn down? It's just a chemical process that happens all the time."
There is a big difference in a cop seeing you go by, checking a list, and coming after you than scanning every license plate, bumper sticker, etc. and putting in a database for every cop in the country.
My rule of thumb is that if it's technically possible, someone, somewhere is doing it.
What?
Right after expressing complete acceptance of living in a surveillance state.
https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/victory-federal-...
To be clear, I am not in favor of Flock in its current incarnation. I am in favor of it if these safeguards are introduced.
I'm not sure about your argument about giving up freedom for security. One of the quotes that has become embedded in American social consciousness is Ben Franklin's "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety".
Is that why prisons so safe and free of crime? How is that life? Electronic mass surveillance is how old, the late 90s?
Yes, let's ban all mass surveillance. I know where that gets you, the 70s or 80s when the height of technology was localized tape CCTV in a handful of places. Did everyone die and everything burn down? How can anyone with a straight face be this hysterical when most people currently alive grew up without any surveillance
> Is that why prisons so safe and free of crime?
Surveilled prisons are safer than non-surveilled ones. Compare a technology forward prison with a prison in a third world country if you want an example.
The socioeconomic factors have become more favorable. Excluding surveillance there's been a secular crime drop due to aging demographics, family planning / abortions, potentially even decline in lead etc. The US is not as safe as China, but it's safer than the US 40 years ago all other things held equal. Of course an authoritarian state is safer but that's meaningless to compare yourself to if you value freedom.
What's actually changed is an absolute spread of paranoia and fear of imagined threats even in neighborhoods that look like as idyllic as a Scandinavian village.
Are all these deployed cameras actually solving crimes? What are the numbers? Aren't there already a bunch of other ways to track cars, like onstar sim chips?
Always-on survellience is always abused. It's already abused by US police officers. tracking their x-wives for example, the new boyfriends, etc. And there's room for much worse. Many of us grew up hearing about things that totalitarian communist governments were doing. The East German's would have loved to have such technologies.
New capabilities are being rolled out by flock- facial recognition and bluetooth tracking, for example.
This seems to be another example of the government contracting with private companies to do things that would be illegal for the government to do themselves.
Historically stuff like this ends up being abused by the establishment. facial recognition in Hong Kong. Protesters dissappeared. Stingray phone tracking in Portland. Protesters picked up by black SUVs. Freezing bank accounts in Ottawa. ICE deporting people without due process. Just keeps getting worse.
Think of all the modern niceties we enjoy that protesters earned. Will protesters of the future stand a chance when everyone is tracked all the time?
We can make up plenty of scenarios where it's dangerous, but even without those, can we not just... not like something? To use the common analogy, my neighbor staring at me through the window all the time wouldn't be dangerous. But it's weird, it's uncomfortable. Can we just not do it? I want to be able to drive places without my movements being logged. Clearly many millions of people agree, given the backlash against Flock. This isn't some essential technology, we got along just fine without it.
I would also like it if people would wake up to their phones tracking them, etc, and demand that laws be passed to deal with that. But this is a good start!
It's easy to work people up about anything involving monitoring, their brains immediately shut down and think emotionally about the subject. But not all forms of monitoring are equivalent, and some of it is useful and has net-benefit.
Maybe it's easy to work people up about it because people don't like being monitored.
I agree it's not all equivalent and some of it is useful, but people have clearly made their voices heard that they think blanket license plate recording is excessive and makes them uncomfortable. Perhaps society will listen.
People in former communist countries and other oppressive places often have a different attitude about such things. They learned the hard way.
Now, imagine expressing those opinions destroys the first.
Before you jump in with a rebuttal, any comment you reply with here must include your full name and address, otherwise, you admit to being a bot and therefore worthless.
That's the concern.
This is just false equivalence, and this false equivalence is why people are immediately so defensive of anyone who suggest Flock is a good idea in principle.
As for the 'full name and address', also not relevant, Flock is not obtaining either of these details.
Also what's to say you aren't counter-protesting?
I mean functionally, given cell phones and ring doorbells we're already in a surveillance state.