Even though it's become commonplace in the last 20 years, I'm still shocked to see how companies can pretty much ignore the law, do whatever they want, and have everyone involved shielded from any kind of significant consequences.
In situations like this, I think the person at the top of the chain that told employees to perform the illegal installations should be arrested and charged. On top of that, the company should be fined into bankruptcy. If the directors knew about it any companies they're involved with shouldn't be allowed to conduct future business in the municipality (or state).
They were co-operating/conspiring with CBP as an extension of the federal government.
Most likely the feds said they will tie up whoever challenges them in federal court. They can play jurisdiction fuck fuck games and then flip between it being a search, it being necessary for safety, that the city/county was obstruction a federal investigation, and all other nonsense.
Don't think your company could just put up cameras and post the location of LEO and they'd let you get away with something like that.
> Most likely the feds said they will tie up whoever challenges them in federal court. They can play jurisdiction fuck fuck games and then flip between it being a search, it being necessary for safety, that the city/county was obstruction a federal investigation, and all other nonsense.
This sounds like some sort of legal procedures adopted from the USSR.
Well, you're probably right for some types of procedures.
But this type of thing (surveillance cameras) would actually fall under state security and be ordered by the Central Committee and done top down without any comments anywhere along the line (because everyone understood what was good for them).
You're probably thinking of the "we're making the wrong type of tractor ball bearings"/"we're making broken consumer radios" type of issue where yeah, they'd give you the runaround.
It turns out capitalism devolves into authoritarianism too when money gets concentrated enough. Basically any extreme concentration of power (wealth concentration or Stalinism) is going to tend toward this kind of outcome.
It isn't just USSR, it is the core Russian principle of "oprichnina" - you can violate any laws, human or God's, as long as you're serving the tzar, Secretary General or President Putin. We start to see a hint of it here with ICE, and i'm sure we'll see a bit more of it with the newly formed Domestic Terrorism Task Force.
And if I'd have to wager anyone that dare speaking out would be labelled antifa, therefore a terrorist, therefore free for all from a law enforcement perspective...
Things are going downhill at an impressive pace... Not going to lie watching the Trainwreck in slow motion is entertaining in a sort of morbid way. Though I wished that it wouldn't go that way...
Trainwreck spotting is best conducted from outside of the train.
I think that most cases of seemingly unwarranted depression and apathy in people today in fact stem from their subconscious acknowledgement of this trainwreck in progress, and failure of consciousness to accept that and/or do anything about it.
>I think that most cases of seemingly unwarranted depression and apathy in people today in fact stem from their subconscious acknowledgement of this trainwreck in progress, and failure of consciousness to accept that and/or do anything about it
I think many sense this, want to get off the train, and away from the tracks but can't figure out how to do it. To pull off it seems overwhelming.
First articulated in 2005 by scholar Alexei Yurchak to describe the civilian experience in Soviet Russia, hypernormalization describes life in a society where two main things are happening.
The first is people seeing that governing systems and institutions are broken. And the second is that, for reasons including a lack of effective leadership and an inability to imagine how to disrupt the status quo, people carry on with their lives as normal despite systemic dysfunction – give or take a heavy load of fear, dread, denial and dissociation.
I only wish the train-wreck were in "slow motion" so there'd be a bit more time to take some meaningful actions as opposed to piling manufactured crises atop one another (and another, and another) in rapid succession as is currently happening.
> It isn't just USSR, it is the core Russian principle of "oprichnina" - you can violate any laws, human or God's, as long as you're serving the tzar, Secretary General or President Putin.
This mode of operation is completely the reverse of my country the Netherlands.
In Dutch society it doesn't really matter who the current ruling party is the big machine keeps rolling on. The names change frequently- governments keep tumbling down- but every day like clockwork people get up in the morning, go to work and follow their programming.
Prime minister A is replaced by prime minister B.
In some ways having a personality cult is less scary. You can kill a man but how do you destroy a collective?
> "In some ways having a personality cult is less scary. You can kill a man but how do you destroy a collective?"
In some ways it's far more terrifying, because of the operative word "cult" there. Sometimes the object of such a "personality cult" can attract the mindset of an actual cult to form around them and create a highly destructive and dangerous "collective". It's happened many times already throughout recorded history, and it never really seems to go all that well for anyone involved.
A bunch of companies seem to be relying on similar federal cover. To me it seems dumb because whatever legal exposure they create will outlast the current administration. It’s impossible to predict who will be running the federal government 3 years from now, and liability does not evaporate much in that time frame.
The next administration could decide to side with localities, and assist prosecutions of the companies and executives involved. Or even pursue their own federal prosecutions.
If you click through to the follow up article, you’ll find that the city covered the cameras with black plastic.
Sometimes low tech solutions work pretty well. And since the cameras are under contract to the city, on city poles, I doubt there’s anything the feds can do.
Confiscate the shares. No compensation. Effectively nationalisation as punishment.
Solves the “too big to fail” problem as the company continues to exist, the ceo ends up in jail and the owners end up broke, but the work still gets done.
> CEO won’t go to jail, but they’ll spend the rest of their lives fighting shareholder lawsuits.
One important lesson to be learned from the past 20 years: if you're sued, don't go to court. If you're dragged to court, say "fuck you, I'm not going and I'm not paying." If you have enough money, they literally will not do anything. They'll just have endless sham court cases that you're free to ignore and there will never be any consequences.
Alex Jones is up to a few billion dollars in settlements against him. He's had court cases against him for, what, over 10 years now? He's still running his show, still getting money, and he's openly mocking the courts. Judges don't care. Whatever people work in the frameworks that allegedly exist to enforce judgments don't care. They're getting their salary either way.
I think you're reading the wrong lesson from this. If someone cares enough to take you down, your strategy isn't just useless, it's actively harming you. It's a "for my friends everything, for my enemies the law" situation.
A better lesson is that you can be "on the radar" but far enough from the central hotspot that you are not a priority. Alternatively you need someone to have your back and be your heatshield while you keep trudging along.
The issue mentioned above around how justice works has always been a problem in the US. Justice isn't blind, or fair. Best justice money can buy. The current administration just went all out for this.
I personally don't understand what makes executives so special that they are exempted from the same sort of criminal proceeding the average Joe is faced with. By all accounts they hold these lofty positions precisely because they can (and should) be held responsible for their company's dirty deeds.
A fine is low stakes because the company more likely than not will have a way to recoup that loss. There is an obvious calculus to that which is practically a cliché to mention. A lawsuit just puts it on the people to succeed in civil proceedings at their own expense, over a potentially lengthy period of time.
Western countries like the UK and US tend to be quite soft on businesses engaging in practices that would land an unremarkable working class person in prison if they were caught doing the same.
If government fails to prosecute crime then laws are pointless, and in the west we have had a significant swing, especially in high population centres, towards electing governments and officials that refuse to prosecute crimes.
That is because we are moving away from Democracy and rule of law and towards Feudalism and aristocracy. In such a system, the law is not blind but it is applied depending on the accused social status.
Feudalism is not a good goverment system to produce wealth nor well-being. It is very good at concentrating the diminishing wealth in a few hands, thou.
The problem is would-be aristocrats who prefer neofeudalism fighting it out with other would-be aristocrats who prefer to rule through directed mobocracy and information control. The former pretends they are fighting for decency, morals, and individual freedoms, while the latter pretends they are fighting for the common good, democracy, and “freedom from” various bad things. God help us if either group succeeds.
It was a mistake to treat corporations as the legal person responsible for these things. The officers of the corporations should be held legally responsible for breaking the law.
It is pretty clear to me that many of the things companies do get away with would land regular Joe in jail with high reliability. I think we have to start making CEOs more liable for such things, especially when done on their explicit command.
First of all, I think that this instinct to fine-'em, screw-'em, etc. is profoundly authoritarian. It is extremely important for a civil society not only that predictable laws are put into place, but also that predictable enforcement of those laws exist. I jaywalk almost every day. I understand that if a cop sees me jaywalk, he will fine me. I also understand that if the cop wants to put me in jail for jaywalking, he cannot do that, and the law would be on my side. On my side, me, the offender.
The reason is that the law not only specifies what people should do what is allowed and isn't allowed, but also what the penalties are for breaking the law. A law stating "People are required to do X" or "People are forbidden from doing Y", without any penalties specified is not worth the paper it is written on and cannot be enforced in any way (at least that's how it works in my jurisdiction, Romania).
And that is all very well, and how it should be, in a law-based state.
Secondly, in this case, this is an act of the executive branch. Specifically it is an executive branch attempting to terminate a contract with the company. It is not a company attempting to spy on private citizens by installing cameras against the law. It is a company attempting not to be ousted out of a contract with the government.
"The law", in spite of what cop movies might have you believe, is not the executive branch, but the legislature. And private citizens and private corporations are simply not required to follow the orders of the executive, unless the executive has a piece of paper signed off by the legislature which states that the executive has a right to issue the order. In much simpler terms, citizens and corporations are only required to follow legal orders and are not required to follow illegal orders, given by the executive. Who decides what is legal? The judiciary.
This is what it means to live in a society with a separation of powers.
> The city intends to terminate the contract on Sept. 26 under its notice to Flock, but the company is challenging that termination, and the dispute could escalate to litigation.
A cease-and-desist by the executive is not a law. The corporation's opinion is that the contract termination is illegal. And therefore that the cease-and-desist is illegal. Perhaps they're right. Perhaps they're wrong. But they have the right to bring the thing to trail.
"Well maybe they have the right to bring the thing to trail, but until the trail is ruled in their case, they should follow the orders of the executive.", I hear the objection.
Not at all. If they are wrong, they will be punished for not following the orders, including every extra day that the cameras stay up. But if they are right, they cannot be made to follow an illegal order, at any point.
"So the executive cannot do anything to get those cameras down until the trail is solved?"
Not at all. They can get, either as part of the trail, or outside of it, a court order, to get those cameras down. Not following a court order is actually something that can get you arrested, etc. and I doubt any business would risk that. But that means the judge must decide that it is in the community's best interest for those cameras to be down, instead of up, during the trail proceedings. And he may not decide that. He may decide the opposite, or that it doesn't matter.
Again, the system being fair and working as intended. Not the executive doing whatever it wants.
> “Flock unlawfully made data collected within Evanston and the State of Illinois available to federal agencies,” Ruggie wrote, referencing the findings of Giannoulias’ audit. “This is not a procedural error; it is an intentional and unauthorized disclosure of protected data… Let it be absolutely clear: this breach is material, intentional, and cannot be cured. The City will not entertain remediation efforts or renegotiation.” [0]
I can't seem to access the audit in question [1] and there are connected articles that seem to also be talking about forest park police using camera readers.
Whatever the case, there seems to be reasonable doubt in the trust in Flock Safety. I don't understand how an illegal termination of contract would result in anything other than Evanston having to pay out the remaining fees and maybe a cancellation fee.
This is so abundantly hilarious to read. Cooperating with the Federal government cannot plausibly be a crime in the United States. It'd be like if I was sentenced to a Federal pentitiary, reported in to serve my sentence and was then found guilty of collaboration with the Federal government in some state court.
Realistically if Flock didn't cooperate, the Federal government would just show up with a warrant, subpoena, or other document. Given that Flock themselves is not being investigated, there isn't really any incentive for them to go that route.
Now the state may be abundantly pissed that the Feds are in their backyard, but they have the right to regulate interstate commerce. They are entirely within their rights to also terminate the contract of course.
> It is extremely important for a civil society not only that predictable laws are put into place, but also that predictable enforcement of those laws exist.
At the moment, this doesn't exist either. Particularly on the low end of offenses, selective enforcement and racial profiling run rampant, and not just in the US.
Any decent developed society takes laws that have gone outdated off the books entirely - the exceptions are the US and the UK, about the only nations in the world that didn't have at least one revolution, war, putsch or peaceful regime change that was used to reboot the entire legal system from scratch and incorporate decades if not centuries of progress.
There's never really been any enforcement on the low end that I am aware of. Even as a little kid I asked my dad about things like speeding, jaywalking, driving without insurance, etc. and he pointed that basically no one is actually even investigated for those things.
What that may all be very true, would it not be better if law enforcement was predictable and in accord with the written law passed by the legislature and settled, in cases of dispute, by the judiciary?
> Particularly on the low end of offenses, selective enforcement and racial profiling run rampant
I think most people will agree to this. When they do, some will be thinking of disparate enforcement of traffic regulations and others lax enforcement of shoplifting/retail theft.
That's only the tip of the iceberg. Literally every enforcement agency targets the bottom of whatever section of the social and economic ladder they deal in.
If anything dealing with the police is actually way better than any of the civil enforcement agencies because accused criminals have "real rights" whereas all the other agencies have the same sort of kangaroo administrative sort of processes that ICE drew ire for.
Me: "I do not think the population should live under fear of excessive, arbitrary and unaccountable law enforcement. The company may be entirely in the wrong in which case they should be punished to the full extent of the law, including for present non-compliance, but that should be up to the judge and to the extent determined in the written law."
Well, if we consider it fine for people to commit crimes like shoplift, rob, or assault people it seems fairly normal to permit groups of people to violate the law too.
Lots of fans of Luigi Mangione and this hasn't directly killed anyone yet.
I'd say it's just a general tolerance to the idea that the rules we have are baroque and anything goes when trying to reach your aims. This seems fairly cross politically unifying.
Those who want the law obeyed are kind of rare. Most are happy to have the law violated to hurt their political opponents. Then they feel surprisingly aggrieved to have same strategy played against them.
The difference is that people are fans of Luigi Mangione because he enforced a punishment for what people feel should be illegal. You're trying to paint vigilante justice with the same brush as lawlessness, when in fact it's the opposite.
One is breaking the law to punish someone that the law failed to, the other is breaking the law to avoid punishment.
The CEO caused vast death and suffering with the policies he enacted in the name of profit, yet the law didn't touch him. Enforcing what the people think should be enforced isn't the same as enforcing what the people think shouldn't be enforced (mass surveillance). It is, in fact, the opposite.
There is a larger issue that other commenters are missing:
> The city has paid the first two years of that extension but would still owe $145,500 for the final three years if the contract is upheld. The city intends to terminate the contract on Sept. 26 under its notice to Flock, but the company is challenging that termination, and the dispute could escalate to litigation.
The city is trying to terminate a contract with Flock. Under that contract, the city agreed to pay Flock for three more years of service. Flock maintains that the city doesn't have the right to nullify the contract. The linked article says almost nothing about the contract dispute, but another article [1] has some details.
I don't know whether the city is correct about its power to terminate the contract, or whether instead Flock is correct. Either way, I wonder whether Flock is re-installing the cameras out of fear that, if it doesn't, it will be voiding its right to future payment under the contract.
"Flock had allowed U.S. Customs and Border Protection to access Illinois cameras in a 'pilot program' against state law" they are already violating state law, aren't they?
The core of the debate is that Flock has "fixed the issue", and hence doesn't think the contract should be escapable, the services provided today are ostensibly legal. Definitely a question for lawyers on how the exact terms shake out, if the city has an out or if Flock met their obligations by fixing the access issue.
> This decision came after Illinois Secretary of State [...] discovered that Flock had allowed U.S. Customs and Border Protection to access Illinois cameras in a “pilot program” against state law, and after the RoundTable reported in June that out-of-state law enforcement agencies were able to search Flock’s data for assistance in immigration cases.
This illustrates the textbook argument for why mass surveillance is bad: these tools can quickly end up in the wrong hands.
I feel as if ALPRs are already a fact of life. Not thrilled about it, but that’s sort of what license plates are for (ALPRs are really just automated cop eyeballs).
The most disturbing thing, is the behavior of the company. It’s pretty clear that they have a separate contract with the feds, and that contract is the one they care about more.
It’s also an illustration of the faustian bargain that customers make, when establishing these types of contracts. That goes for regular customers, like consumers of social media, SaaS, or data storage apps; not just municipalities, running ALPRs and redlight cameras. It’s like a roach motel; your data checks in, but doesn’t check out. Camel’s nose, and all that.
Basically, all of SV’s business, is about gathering data. That’s why my solitaire apps keep trying to get me to sign onto public challenges and leaderboards.
As lots of folks here have indicated, this behavior will only be changed, by truly holding corporations and corporate directors (and maybe also shareholders) accountable. That’s pretty difficult, in practice. I guess it shouldn’t be easy, as we’d have endless frivolous litigation, but it shouldn’t be impossible, either.
You're right, of course, but the real issue is the lack of corporate accountability, and data stewardship. Since HN has a lot of folks that really don't want people talking about corporate accountability, the discussions are pretty much guaranteed to devolve into macguffins.
Case in point: notice how fast this discussion will dive off the front page. Happens quite frequently, when the topic is one that makes certain folks uncomfortable.
I think there is probably a core difference between recording the position of any plate which is wanted pertaining to a crime and recording the position of every plate. I have zero issue with Flock finding suspect plates, but the fact some journalists were able to get logs of where their cars were indicates it is far more overbroad of collection than an automated cop's eyeballs.
I'm basically in the same boat. There is no practical way for me to avoid having my picture taken 6 or more times every single day. I flip the camera off each and every time I drive/walk by it. It's infuriating.
No that’s vandalism, what you do is get a nice printout of the exact view the camera has and just plop it in front of the thing, like a for sale sign or something. Tape if you have to.
Engaging official channels instantly gets you on a list. These institutions aren't stupid, they're evil. Easier to just back a trailer into it or something. And if some scrappers haul the downed pole off a week after that you didn't see them.
Furthermore, it's beyond naive to care about whether it's technically vandalism. You can't beat the establishment within the law because the establishment makes the law.
In theory, constitutional rights would be the ideal tool of choice on your second point. Of course that requires a civil suit against the state and really expensive attorneys.
To add to your point, it’s naive to believe that those protections are effective for anyone who isn’t incredibly wealthy at this point. The issue is most people can’t afford to take a case all the way, let alone start one.
They'd be worth something to a handful of reasonably competent hackers. There's no way these things are actually secure, they're IOT devices after all.
Neat. There's only one city in my state that has these cameras. Its the wealthy blue city of Jackson Hole [1] that can't manage to fix potholes. I only pass through that place when taking someone to the airport. Curious if they were able to read my previous military plate which changes number every 5 years. Now I want to get one of these things to play with to see how it interprets my plate. I think I can see a flock on a pole in the live stream.
Community note: it is my understanding, based on teardowns that I've found online, that Flock cameras should be assumed to contain a cellular modem and at least one GPS receiver. At least some have been found to contain an addition, obfuscated GPS receiver.
Not an american, here in germany you'd barely get a fine if they even bother to prosecute you for using a jammer for a few minutes here and there. But I don't yet have to deal with ai powered surveillance cams by private companies in my city.
Yes. Absolutely. We incrementally pushed society to this point by incrementally approving more and more surveillance and government intervention across a myriad of issue until it ultimately built up the institutions and precedents and honed the workflows that we're now seeing used for stuff that even the stupid are at least kinda uneasy about.
The best you can get is https://deflock.me/map, which is crowd-sourced, and therefore both incomplete and inaccurate.
Cities tend to resist public records requests for camera locations.
But Flock is currently in ~5,000 communities around the country. They have managed to spread very quickly, and very quietly, and the public has only become aware of it relatively recently.
There is also a good site at https://eyesonflock.com/ that parses data from the transparency pages that some places publish.
>Would be particularly interesting to see where they are in blue states
The answer is going to be "the snooty inner ring suburbs and wealthy rural-ish commuter communities that already had overstaffed PDs harassing teenagers"
I was thinking Fairfax county VA when I wrote that but Berkley fits the bill really well too.
Big enough to have enough "real city" problems to get people who have no real existential problems worried, but not enough to keep the police/security busy with "real crime", small enough these people can think that there's serious accountability preventing mundane abuse/misuse (whereas almost nobody in NYC would think that there's accountability for any misuse that isn't regional news worthy) and rich enough to not have to seriously care about resource allocation toward unnecessary security apparatus.
They installed some here at a Home Depot parking lot right when the ice raids started. It was weird that only the home deport owned portion of the parking lot got them which lead to some investigation into who put them up and sure enough flock has a contract with HD.
Home Depot has had an incredibly aggressive retail theft problem for about half a decade now across virtually every market.
Their response of putting 10 ALPRs in each store's parking lot and locking up everything seems rational based upon what I've seen. There's something about stealing Milwaukee tools that gets certain groups of people very excited. They even have some tool manufacturers designing activation at checkout mechanisms to discourage theft.
I have a hard time believing this stuff is making them any money or is a secret government arrangement. It seems purely about loss prevention in the case of HD. They have been an easy target up until recently.
Home Depot seems like the one compelling win I've seen so far regarding these cameras. You'd have to be pretty crazy to try and steal tools these days. The speed with which law enforcement can react to these signals is incredible. I don't necessarily like the implications for other things but it does make shopping in certain retail environments feel much safer.
So, cameras in the HD and Apple Store parking lots seem acceptable to me based upon the risk these businesses endure. Cameras in public I don't like, but without them the ones in private wouldn't be able to accomplish as much (I.e., interception of felony retail theft suspects while they still have all of the evidence on them).
So, if I understand you correctly, Home Depot was actively collaborating with ICE to get their best customer lures arrested? How the fuck does that make sense?!
This will escalate - every new car on the road comes with a bevy of cheap cameras integrated - I get 360 degree views when backing up from my 2018 Chevy Bolt. It's really only a matter of time before license plate scanning computers get integrated - there's already a cellular modem integrated into the vehicle - I don't use or pay for that feature, but it's an opportunity.
This will escalate - every new car on the road comes with a bevy of cheap cameras integrated
Back when DOGE was making headlines and a certain car salesman was using the Oval Office as daycare for his kid, there were a people on HN and elsewhere noting that every Tesla could easily be turned into a roving real-time government surveillance unit.
There's already a full cottage market of ALPR-on-cellphone applications. They can just mount a cellphone on the windshield and it's gonna run ALPR all day every day.
Same thing with fingerprint capture - they've now just got mobile apps to take a picture of your hands and submit for print processing.
Would destroying the cameras be a legitimate act of social disobedience, considering that the company shows a total defiance and lack of respect for the law and society? I would argue it is.
Unfortunately, in addition to being dangerous to others, this approach pretty much always comes with increased exposure to prosecution and increased penalties.
The optimal approach seems to be vandalism - spray painting over the front of the cameras, placing other objects to block their view, or permanently blinding them with lasers. All of these things are still illegal and would likely subject you to the legal system, but they at least require on-site intervention to remedy and keep the actor out of prison (but maybe not jail).
The least risky approach I've found is also the least effective - they're often on public property, so place _yourself_ in front of them. It takes them out of commission for a while and should be legal. Coordinated action would likely get the attention of Flock, law enforcement, and the media. Unfortunately, even that could be construed as "interfering with law enforcement operations" or similar, and/or conspiracy if you're organizing or participating in mass resistance.
If the federal government decides they want to step in on Flock's behalf, they could put you under the jail. :\
So Fun facts about digital cameras like these: Strong infrared leds at night blind them completely. They sometimes even switch into daymode and become useless at night. Also, lasers are usually not enough to destroy the ccd sensor but only cause small dots to appear[0]. But a Spraycan on a stick can be very effective and of course a silenced airgun for those hard to reach places can be very effective.
Nobody is saying "do nothing". The point is that shooting guns into the air is dangerous and you shouldn't do it. If you want to disable the cameras, do so in a way that doesn't recklessly endanger people (i.e spray chalk on a stick).
But airguns are usually much less regulated, much quieter and easier to supress and the legal liability for firing an airgun somewhere vs a firearm is usually much different. And they usually have enough power for that purpose without risking too much colleteral damage.
I don’t even think an airgun could really have an effect, but for anyone contemplating this kind of thing, please at least deconstruct the device and put it into something different looking. There is no point in getting offed with impunity by some Idiocracy goon because he saw a finger gun.
Better use of one’s efforts could be to support legal challenges of this clearly unconstitutional mass surveillance by the government through its corporate, or in this case, YC cutouts.
"Move fast, break things" seems to me that is also the Trump admin's MO at the sacrifice of democracy. The SV mantra has moved up into politics and is causing permanent damage. If rules aren't enforced why would anyone follow them?
Aside the topic, but I wonder how HN, as a community, and as a moderation team, weighs this on the intellectual curiosity vs primarily politics scale.
This seems politics to me. Very important politics that a lot of people in tech have a special interest for, but politics nonetheless, and much more pressing topics seem to be absent through the on-topic rule.
I tend to dislike it when purely political posts show up here, but I appreciate the ones that intersect with technology, particularly ones that relate to privacy issues.
This does not seem to be a prevalent opinion on here, and I was trying to be diplomatic, but I guess it still comes out as "why is it OK to post / comment politics here if it's a less contentious topic many people on HN care about, but I regularly get downvoted for even relating information to my association with a demographic group forcefully enlisted to the front of the culture war".
Calling anything "local" to HN is pretty funny US-centrism, for someone posting before 8 AM EST. And I'd never call what's happening in Gaza a "culture war", that would seem trivializing - although my issue seems to be escalating more and more as well.
Even though it's become commonplace in the last 20 years, I'm still shocked to see how companies can pretty much ignore the law, do whatever they want, and have everyone involved shielded from any kind of significant consequences.
In situations like this, I think the person at the top of the chain that told employees to perform the illegal installations should be arrested and charged. On top of that, the company should be fined into bankruptcy. If the directors knew about it any companies they're involved with shouldn't be allowed to conduct future business in the municipality (or state).
They were co-operating/conspiring with CBP as an extension of the federal government.
Most likely the feds said they will tie up whoever challenges them in federal court. They can play jurisdiction fuck fuck games and then flip between it being a search, it being necessary for safety, that the city/county was obstruction a federal investigation, and all other nonsense.
Don't think your company could just put up cameras and post the location of LEO and they'd let you get away with something like that.
> Most likely the feds said they will tie up whoever challenges them in federal court. They can play jurisdiction fuck fuck games and then flip between it being a search, it being necessary for safety, that the city/county was obstruction a federal investigation, and all other nonsense.
This sounds like some sort of legal procedures adopted from the USSR.
Well, you're probably right for some types of procedures.
But this type of thing (surveillance cameras) would actually fall under state security and be ordered by the Central Committee and done top down without any comments anywhere along the line (because everyone understood what was good for them).
You're probably thinking of the "we're making the wrong type of tractor ball bearings"/"we're making broken consumer radios" type of issue where yeah, they'd give you the runaround.
It turns out capitalism devolves into authoritarianism too when money gets concentrated enough. Basically any extreme concentration of power (wealth concentration or Stalinism) is going to tend toward this kind of outcome.
It isn't just USSR, it is the core Russian principle of "oprichnina" - you can violate any laws, human or God's, as long as you're serving the tzar, Secretary General or President Putin. We start to see a hint of it here with ICE, and i'm sure we'll see a bit more of it with the newly formed Domestic Terrorism Task Force.
And if I'd have to wager anyone that dare speaking out would be labelled antifa, therefore a terrorist, therefore free for all from a law enforcement perspective...
Things are going downhill at an impressive pace... Not going to lie watching the Trainwreck in slow motion is entertaining in a sort of morbid way. Though I wished that it wouldn't go that way...
Trainwreck spotting is best conducted from outside of the train.
I think that most cases of seemingly unwarranted depression and apathy in people today in fact stem from their subconscious acknowledgement of this trainwreck in progress, and failure of consciousness to accept that and/or do anything about it.
In other words, mass cognitive dissonance.
>I think that most cases of seemingly unwarranted depression and apathy in people today in fact stem from their subconscious acknowledgement of this trainwreck in progress, and failure of consciousness to accept that and/or do anything about it
I think many sense this, want to get off the train, and away from the tracks but can't figure out how to do it. To pull off it seems overwhelming.
First articulated in 2005 by scholar Alexei Yurchak to describe the civilian experience in Soviet Russia, hypernormalization describes life in a society where two main things are happening.
The first is people seeing that governing systems and institutions are broken. And the second is that, for reasons including a lack of effective leadership and an inability to imagine how to disrupt the status quo, people carry on with their lives as normal despite systemic dysfunction – give or take a heavy load of fear, dread, denial and dissociation.
> "watching the Trainwreck in slow motion"
I only wish the train-wreck were in "slow motion" so there'd be a bit more time to take some meaningful actions as opposed to piling manufactured crises atop one another (and another, and another) in rapid succession as is currently happening.
Send help.
> It isn't just USSR, it is the core Russian principle of "oprichnina" - you can violate any laws, human or God's, as long as you're serving the tzar, Secretary General or President Putin.
“For my friends everything, for my enemies the law.” — Oscar R. Benavides, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Óscar_R._Benavides
> Domestic Terrorism Task Force
That is ... a surprisingly honest name for a force that'll terrorize any domestic opposition, gotta give them that at least.
This mode of operation is completely the reverse of my country the Netherlands.
In Dutch society it doesn't really matter who the current ruling party is the big machine keeps rolling on. The names change frequently- governments keep tumbling down- but every day like clockwork people get up in the morning, go to work and follow their programming. Prime minister A is replaced by prime minister B.
In some ways having a personality cult is less scary. You can kill a man but how do you destroy a collective?
> "In some ways having a personality cult is less scary. You can kill a man but how do you destroy a collective?"
In some ways it's far more terrifying, because of the operative word "cult" there. Sometimes the object of such a "personality cult" can attract the mindset of an actual cult to form around them and create a highly destructive and dangerous "collective". It's happened many times already throughout recorded history, and it never really seems to go all that well for anyone involved.
A bunch of companies seem to be relying on similar federal cover. To me it seems dumb because whatever legal exposure they create will outlast the current administration. It’s impossible to predict who will be running the federal government 3 years from now, and liability does not evaporate much in that time frame.
The next administration could decide to side with localities, and assist prosecutions of the companies and executives involved. Or even pursue their own federal prosecutions.
> Most likely the feds said they will tie up whoever challenges them in federal court
The keep saying this and losing in court. I don’t have much respect left for these bootlickers who won’t fight.
If you click through to the follow up article, you’ll find that the city covered the cameras with black plastic.
Sometimes low tech solutions work pretty well. And since the cameras are under contract to the city, on city poles, I doubt there’s anything the feds can do.
Confiscate the shares. No compensation. Effectively nationalisation as punishment.
Solves the “too big to fail” problem as the company continues to exist, the ceo ends up in jail and the owners end up broke, but the work still gets done.
> Confiscate the shares. No compensation
This is better than corporate death penalties but still more complicated than fines. Massive fines are the answer.
> Solves the “too big to fail” problem as the company continues to exist, the ceo ends up in jail and the owners end up broke
So do fines and bankruptcy. CEO won’t go to jail, but they’ll spend the rest of their lives fighting shareholder lawsuits. Feed them to the wolves.
> CEO won’t go to jail, but they’ll spend the rest of their lives fighting shareholder lawsuits.
One important lesson to be learned from the past 20 years: if you're sued, don't go to court. If you're dragged to court, say "fuck you, I'm not going and I'm not paying." If you have enough money, they literally will not do anything. They'll just have endless sham court cases that you're free to ignore and there will never be any consequences.
Alex Jones is up to a few billion dollars in settlements against him. He's had court cases against him for, what, over 10 years now? He's still running his show, still getting money, and he's openly mocking the courts. Judges don't care. Whatever people work in the frameworks that allegedly exist to enforce judgments don't care. They're getting their salary either way.
I think you're reading the wrong lesson from this. If someone cares enough to take you down, your strategy isn't just useless, it's actively harming you. It's a "for my friends everything, for my enemies the law" situation.
A better lesson is that you can be "on the radar" but far enough from the central hotspot that you are not a priority. Alternatively you need someone to have your back and be your heatshield while you keep trudging along.
The actual takeaway here is the newly formed Soviet United States of America.
The issue mentioned above around how justice works has always been a problem in the US. Justice isn't blind, or fair. Best justice money can buy. The current administration just went all out for this.
I personally don't understand what makes executives so special that they are exempted from the same sort of criminal proceeding the average Joe is faced with. By all accounts they hold these lofty positions precisely because they can (and should) be held responsible for their company's dirty deeds.
A fine is low stakes because the company more likely than not will have a way to recoup that loss. There is an obvious calculus to that which is practically a cliché to mention. A lawsuit just puts it on the people to succeed in civil proceedings at their own expense, over a potentially lengthy period of time.
Western countries like the UK and US tend to be quite soft on businesses engaging in practices that would land an unremarkable working class person in prison if they were caught doing the same.
If government fails to prosecute crime then laws are pointless, and in the west we have had a significant swing, especially in high population centres, towards electing governments and officials that refuse to prosecute crimes.
That is because we are moving away from Democracy and rule of law and towards Feudalism and aristocracy. In such a system, the law is not blind but it is applied depending on the accused social status.
Feudalism is not a good goverment system to produce wealth nor well-being. It is very good at concentrating the diminishing wealth in a few hands, thou.
The problem is would-be aristocrats who prefer neofeudalism fighting it out with other would-be aristocrats who prefer to rule through directed mobocracy and information control. The former pretends they are fighting for decency, morals, and individual freedoms, while the latter pretends they are fighting for the common good, democracy, and “freedom from” various bad things. God help us if either group succeeds.
If people elect officials that promise to not enforce crimes, how is that not Democracy? I don't get it.
It was a mistake to treat corporations as the legal person responsible for these things. The officers of the corporations should be held legally responsible for breaking the law.
It is pretty clear to me that many of the things companies do get away with would land regular Joe in jail with high reliability. I think we have to start making CEOs more liable for such things, especially when done on their explicit command.
First of all, I think that this instinct to fine-'em, screw-'em, etc. is profoundly authoritarian. It is extremely important for a civil society not only that predictable laws are put into place, but also that predictable enforcement of those laws exist. I jaywalk almost every day. I understand that if a cop sees me jaywalk, he will fine me. I also understand that if the cop wants to put me in jail for jaywalking, he cannot do that, and the law would be on my side. On my side, me, the offender.
The reason is that the law not only specifies what people should do what is allowed and isn't allowed, but also what the penalties are for breaking the law. A law stating "People are required to do X" or "People are forbidden from doing Y", without any penalties specified is not worth the paper it is written on and cannot be enforced in any way (at least that's how it works in my jurisdiction, Romania).
And that is all very well, and how it should be, in a law-based state.
Secondly, in this case, this is an act of the executive branch. Specifically it is an executive branch attempting to terminate a contract with the company. It is not a company attempting to spy on private citizens by installing cameras against the law. It is a company attempting not to be ousted out of a contract with the government.
"The law", in spite of what cop movies might have you believe, is not the executive branch, but the legislature. And private citizens and private corporations are simply not required to follow the orders of the executive, unless the executive has a piece of paper signed off by the legislature which states that the executive has a right to issue the order. In much simpler terms, citizens and corporations are only required to follow legal orders and are not required to follow illegal orders, given by the executive. Who decides what is legal? The judiciary.
This is what it means to live in a society with a separation of powers.
> The city intends to terminate the contract on Sept. 26 under its notice to Flock, but the company is challenging that termination, and the dispute could escalate to litigation.
A cease-and-desist by the executive is not a law. The corporation's opinion is that the contract termination is illegal. And therefore that the cease-and-desist is illegal. Perhaps they're right. Perhaps they're wrong. But they have the right to bring the thing to trail.
"Well maybe they have the right to bring the thing to trail, but until the trail is ruled in their case, they should follow the orders of the executive.", I hear the objection.
Not at all. If they are wrong, they will be punished for not following the orders, including every extra day that the cameras stay up. But if they are right, they cannot be made to follow an illegal order, at any point.
"So the executive cannot do anything to get those cameras down until the trail is solved?"
Not at all. They can get, either as part of the trail, or outside of it, a court order, to get those cameras down. Not following a court order is actually something that can get you arrested, etc. and I doubt any business would risk that. But that means the judge must decide that it is in the community's best interest for those cameras to be down, instead of up, during the trail proceedings. And he may not decide that. He may decide the opposite, or that it doesn't matter.
Again, the system being fair and working as intended. Not the executive doing whatever it wants.
> “Flock unlawfully made data collected within Evanston and the State of Illinois available to federal agencies,” Ruggie wrote, referencing the findings of Giannoulias’ audit. “This is not a procedural error; it is an intentional and unauthorized disclosure of protected data… Let it be absolutely clear: this breach is material, intentional, and cannot be cured. The City will not entertain remediation efforts or renegotiation.” [0]
I can't seem to access the audit in question [1] and there are connected articles that seem to also be talking about forest park police using camera readers. Whatever the case, there seems to be reasonable doubt in the trust in Flock Safety. I don't understand how an illegal termination of contract would result in anything other than Evanston having to pay out the remaining fees and maybe a cancellation fee.
[0] https://evanstonroundtable.com/2025/08/28/flock-challenges-c...
[1] https://www.ilsos.gov/news/2025/august-25-2025-giannoulias-a...
This is so abundantly hilarious to read. Cooperating with the Federal government cannot plausibly be a crime in the United States. It'd be like if I was sentenced to a Federal pentitiary, reported in to serve my sentence and was then found guilty of collaboration with the Federal government in some state court.
Realistically if Flock didn't cooperate, the Federal government would just show up with a warrant, subpoena, or other document. Given that Flock themselves is not being investigated, there isn't really any incentive for them to go that route.
Now the state may be abundantly pissed that the Feds are in their backyard, but they have the right to regulate interstate commerce. They are entirely within their rights to also terminate the contract of course.
While all that may be very true, and you may be right, that is all for the judge to decide, is it not?
I am not taking the side of the company, I am taking the side of rule of law and due process.
> It is extremely important for a civil society not only that predictable laws are put into place, but also that predictable enforcement of those laws exist.
At the moment, this doesn't exist either. Particularly on the low end of offenses, selective enforcement and racial profiling run rampant, and not just in the US.
Any decent developed society takes laws that have gone outdated off the books entirely - the exceptions are the US and the UK, about the only nations in the world that didn't have at least one revolution, war, putsch or peaceful regime change that was used to reboot the entire legal system from scratch and incorporate decades if not centuries of progress.
There's never really been any enforcement on the low end that I am aware of. Even as a little kid I asked my dad about things like speeding, jaywalking, driving without insurance, etc. and he pointed that basically no one is actually even investigated for those things.
What that may all be very true, would it not be better if law enforcement was predictable and in accord with the written law passed by the legislature and settled, in cases of dispute, by the judiciary?
> Particularly on the low end of offenses, selective enforcement and racial profiling run rampant
I think most people will agree to this. When they do, some will be thinking of disparate enforcement of traffic regulations and others lax enforcement of shoplifting/retail theft.
That's only the tip of the iceberg. Literally every enforcement agency targets the bottom of whatever section of the social and economic ladder they deal in.
If anything dealing with the police is actually way better than any of the civil enforcement agencies because accused criminals have "real rights" whereas all the other agencies have the same sort of kangaroo administrative sort of processes that ICE drew ire for.
Are you using ChatGPT to lick boots?
Me: "I do not think the population should live under fear of excessive, arbitrary and unaccountable law enforcement. The company may be entirely in the wrong in which case they should be punished to the full extent of the law, including for present non-compliance, but that should be up to the judge and to the extent determined in the written law."
"Bootlicker"
Well, if we consider it fine for people to commit crimes like shoplift, rob, or assault people it seems fairly normal to permit groups of people to violate the law too.
Lots of fans of Luigi Mangione and this hasn't directly killed anyone yet.
I'd say it's just a general tolerance to the idea that the rules we have are baroque and anything goes when trying to reach your aims. This seems fairly cross politically unifying.
Those who want the law obeyed are kind of rare. Most are happy to have the law violated to hurt their political opponents. Then they feel surprisingly aggrieved to have same strategy played against them.
The difference is that people are fans of Luigi Mangione because he enforced a punishment for what people feel should be illegal. You're trying to paint vigilante justice with the same brush as lawlessness, when in fact it's the opposite.
One is breaking the law to punish someone that the law failed to, the other is breaking the law to avoid punishment.
The CEO caused vast death and suffering with the policies he enacted in the name of profit, yet the law didn't touch him. Enforcing what the people think should be enforced isn't the same as enforcing what the people think shouldn't be enforced (mass surveillance). It is, in fact, the opposite.
> Most are happy to have the law violated to hurt their political opponents.
Way to make me feel like an outcast.
There is a larger issue that other commenters are missing:
> The city has paid the first two years of that extension but would still owe $145,500 for the final three years if the contract is upheld. The city intends to terminate the contract on Sept. 26 under its notice to Flock, but the company is challenging that termination, and the dispute could escalate to litigation.
The city is trying to terminate a contract with Flock. Under that contract, the city agreed to pay Flock for three more years of service. Flock maintains that the city doesn't have the right to nullify the contract. The linked article says almost nothing about the contract dispute, but another article [1] has some details.
I don't know whether the city is correct about its power to terminate the contract, or whether instead Flock is correct. Either way, I wonder whether Flock is re-installing the cameras out of fear that, if it doesn't, it will be voiding its right to future payment under the contract.
[1] https://evanstonroundtable.com/2025/08/28/flock-challenges-c...
> I wonder whether Flock is re-installing the cameras out of fear that
They are already being accused of breach and the city ordered them to remove them. Reinstalling devices out of "fear" is not a reasonable response.
"Flock had allowed U.S. Customs and Border Protection to access Illinois cameras in a 'pilot program' against state law" they are already violating state law, aren't they?
Company fears not being paid, has no fear of committing a crime.
I would think the commission of state crimes would have an impact on the contract. If the city does nothing they would be an accessory to those crimes
The core of the debate is that Flock has "fixed the issue", and hence doesn't think the contract should be escapable, the services provided today are ostensibly legal. Definitely a question for lawyers on how the exact terms shake out, if the city has an out or if Flock met their obligations by fixing the access issue.
> Flock has "fixed the issue"
Strong office space vibes in this one [1].
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUE0PPQI3is
It’ll just work itself out naturally.
> This decision came after Illinois Secretary of State [...] discovered that Flock had allowed U.S. Customs and Border Protection to access Illinois cameras in a “pilot program” against state law, and after the RoundTable reported in June that out-of-state law enforcement agencies were able to search Flock’s data for assistance in immigration cases.
This illustrates the textbook argument for why mass surveillance is bad: these tools can quickly end up in the wrong hands.
Play silly games, win silly prizes.
Additional info on the “pilot program” they took issue with: https://apnews.com/article/immigration-abortion-license-plat...
I feel as if ALPRs are already a fact of life. Not thrilled about it, but that’s sort of what license plates are for (ALPRs are really just automated cop eyeballs).
The most disturbing thing, is the behavior of the company. It’s pretty clear that they have a separate contract with the feds, and that contract is the one they care about more.
It’s also an illustration of the faustian bargain that customers make, when establishing these types of contracts. That goes for regular customers, like consumers of social media, SaaS, or data storage apps; not just municipalities, running ALPRs and redlight cameras. It’s like a roach motel; your data checks in, but doesn’t check out. Camel’s nose, and all that.
Basically, all of SV’s business, is about gathering data. That’s why my solitaire apps keep trying to get me to sign onto public challenges and leaderboards.
As lots of folks here have indicated, this behavior will only be changed, by truly holding corporations and corporate directors (and maybe also shareholders) accountable. That’s pretty difficult, in practice. I guess it shouldn’t be easy, as we’d have endless frivolous litigation, but it shouldn’t be impossible, either.
Licesne plates were never intended to be recorded all the time to create a data set of who went where when.
They were so that in the non-standard case where something other than "business as usual" has happened an owner could be identified.
You're right, of course, but the real issue is the lack of corporate accountability, and data stewardship. Since HN has a lot of folks that really don't want people talking about corporate accountability, the discussions are pretty much guaranteed to devolve into macguffins.
Case in point: notice how fast this discussion will dive off the front page. Happens quite frequently, when the topic is one that makes certain folks uncomfortable.
Because having the .gov build and maintain the lists would be so much better?
The problem isn't that "evil capitalists are doing the thing" it's that anyone is doing the thing.
I can’t help but notice that we’re still not talking about corporate accountability.
I think there is probably a core difference between recording the position of any plate which is wanted pertaining to a crime and recording the position of every plate. I have zero issue with Flock finding suspect plates, but the fact some journalists were able to get logs of where their cars were indicates it is far more overbroad of collection than an automated cop's eyeballs.
Yes, but most of my comment was about corporate accountability, which no one wants to talk about.
There's a Flock camera at the end of my driveway. I'm next to a city line, so it's a reasonable location.
I wonder if I can file a CCPA request and get a list of my comings and goings.
Yes you can, see this article
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/virginia-police-used-f...
I'm basically in the same boat. There is no practical way for me to avoid having my picture taken 6 or more times every single day. I flip the camera off each and every time I drive/walk by it. It's infuriating.
…or someone could knock the damn thing offline.
No that’s vandalism, what you do is get a nice printout of the exact view the camera has and just plop it in front of the thing, like a for sale sign or something. Tape if you have to.
Engaging official channels instantly gets you on a list. These institutions aren't stupid, they're evil. Easier to just back a trailer into it or something. And if some scrappers haul the downed pole off a week after that you didn't see them.
Furthermore, it's beyond naive to care about whether it's technically vandalism. You can't beat the establishment within the law because the establishment makes the law.
In theory, constitutional rights would be the ideal tool of choice on your second point. Of course that requires a civil suit against the state and really expensive attorneys.
To add to your point, it’s naive to believe that those protections are effective for anyone who isn’t incredibly wealthy at this point. The issue is most people can’t afford to take a case all the way, let alone start one.
Or dress up in a gorilla suit, then paint it in festive Halloween colors.
Why sue? Why not impound and fine like they would illegally parked vehicles?
The cameras are not meaningfully worth a whole lot of money.
They'd be worth something to a handful of reasonably competent hackers. There's no way these things are actually secure, they're IOT devices after all.
Indeed, but the data they get from them is.
And neither is a beater but they still get impounded.
https://deflock.me/
Thankfully, in my city, it seems to be all retail parking lots. But it’s disturbing to see other very, very adjacent cities go all-in on flock.
Neat. There's only one city in my state that has these cameras. Its the wealthy blue city of Jackson Hole [1] that can't manage to fix potholes. I only pass through that place when taking someone to the airport. Curious if they were able to read my previous military plate which changes number every 5 years. Now I want to get one of these things to play with to see how it interprets my plate. I think I can see a flock on a pole in the live stream.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoUOrTJbIu4 [live camera, town square]
One of the closest points in my area is Made/Operated by: "Unknown".
Very helpful. In my general area there are almost 100.
Community note: it is my understanding, based on teardowns that I've found online, that Flock cameras should be assumed to contain a cellular modem and at least one GPS receiver. At least some have been found to contain an addition, obfuscated GPS receiver.
Yes, worked for speed camera company. It does have a cellular modem connecting over VPN or some tunneling with cloud infrastructure.
So they aren't even hardwired to the net and can easily be jammed with commonly available Jamming hardware?
Pretty casual about committing federal crimes.
Not an american, here in germany you'd barely get a fine if they even bother to prosecute you for using a jammer for a few minutes here and there. But I don't yet have to deal with ai powered surveillance cams by private companies in my city.
Well that is too bad. I am glad it is taken seriously here in the US because wireless jamming is a serious public safety issue.
if the EU maintains it's current trajectory, you'll be dealing with this or a similar problem in the future.
Dog whistle!
It would be a shame if people starting to break it
There was a YouTube video published about them yesterday - https://youtu.be/vWj26RIlN_I
It is really amazing how much power and impact private company can have on public.
Wow. License plate readers are everywhere.
Relevant video about Flock's ALPRs
https://youtu.be/vWj26RIlN_I [18:56]
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety
Literally looks like every stereotypical villain in any “crime prevention” movie, which is usually the puppet of some other entity behind him.
"Are we the baddies?"
Yes. Absolutely. We incrementally pushed society to this point by incrementally approving more and more surveillance and government intervention across a myriad of issue until it ultimately built up the institutions and precedents and honed the workflows that we're now seeing used for stuff that even the stupid are at least kinda uneasy about.
Is there a good public list of Flock Safety cities? Would be particularly interesting to see where they are in blue states.
The best you can get is https://deflock.me/map, which is crowd-sourced, and therefore both incomplete and inaccurate.
Cities tend to resist public records requests for camera locations.
But Flock is currently in ~5,000 communities around the country. They have managed to spread very quickly, and very quietly, and the public has only become aware of it relatively recently.
There is also a good site at https://eyesonflock.com/ that parses data from the transparency pages that some places publish.
You can search for cities' transparency portals. Not sure if every Flock customer has one though.
They don’t have a public list, but this blog post conveniently has a map of their locations: https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/introducing-law-enforcement...
Judging by the places they advertise, it’s mostly smaller cities/towns. I think the larger cities in the US tend to run their own cameras.
There's a crowdsourced collection of ALPRs in OpenStreetMap. deflock.me/map has a display of that data.
>Would be particularly interesting to see where they are in blue states
The answer is going to be "the snooty inner ring suburbs and wealthy rural-ish commuter communities that already had overstaffed PDs harassing teenagers"
https://deflock.me/map
Check your assumptions, the Bay Area and LA are littered with them. They're in Berkeley for fucks sake.
I was thinking Fairfax county VA when I wrote that but Berkley fits the bill really well too.
Big enough to have enough "real city" problems to get people who have no real existential problems worried, but not enough to keep the police/security busy with "real crime", small enough these people can think that there's serious accountability preventing mundane abuse/misuse (whereas almost nobody in NYC would think that there's accountability for any misuse that isn't regional news worthy) and rich enough to not have to seriously care about resource allocation toward unnecessary security apparatus.
They installed some here at a Home Depot parking lot right when the ice raids started. It was weird that only the home deport owned portion of the parking lot got them which lead to some investigation into who put them up and sure enough flock has a contract with HD.
Blue city in SoCal with lots of migrant laborers.
Home Depot has had an incredibly aggressive retail theft problem for about half a decade now across virtually every market.
Their response of putting 10 ALPRs in each store's parking lot and locking up everything seems rational based upon what I've seen. There's something about stealing Milwaukee tools that gets certain groups of people very excited. They even have some tool manufacturers designing activation at checkout mechanisms to discourage theft.
I have a hard time believing this stuff is making them any money or is a secret government arrangement. It seems purely about loss prevention in the case of HD. They have been an easy target up until recently.
Home Depot seems like the one compelling win I've seen so far regarding these cameras. You'd have to be pretty crazy to try and steal tools these days. The speed with which law enforcement can react to these signals is incredible. I don't necessarily like the implications for other things but it does make shopping in certain retail environments feel much safer.
So, cameras in the HD and Apple Store parking lots seem acceptable to me based upon the risk these businesses endure. Cameras in public I don't like, but without them the ones in private wouldn't be able to accomplish as much (I.e., interception of felony retail theft suspects while they still have all of the evidence on them).
Every Lowes nationwide has installed them at the entrances to all of their stores and/or plazas they're in, even if they're not on the map.
So, if I understand you correctly, Home Depot was actively collaborating with ICE to get their best customer lures arrested? How the fuck does that make sense?!
Because it's relevant to many on this site, most bay area cities are users
If I were a corrupt government official I would:
- install these cameras everywhere
- make the data available for everyone via an API
- make content about how we're all being spied on
- form sponsorship deals from Incogni & DeleteMe
- profit
That city should just make it legal that the citizens can paintball or spray those cameras anytime and anywhere.
This will escalate - every new car on the road comes with a bevy of cheap cameras integrated - I get 360 degree views when backing up from my 2018 Chevy Bolt. It's really only a matter of time before license plate scanning computers get integrated - there's already a cellular modem integrated into the vehicle - I don't use or pay for that feature, but it's an opportunity.
This will escalate - every new car on the road comes with a bevy of cheap cameras integrated
Back when DOGE was making headlines and a certain car salesman was using the Oval Office as daycare for his kid, there were a people on HN and elsewhere noting that every Tesla could easily be turned into a roving real-time government surveillance unit.
There's already a full cottage market of ALPR-on-cellphone applications. They can just mount a cellphone on the windshield and it's gonna run ALPR all day every day.
Same thing with fingerprint capture - they've now just got mobile apps to take a picture of your hands and submit for print processing.
Cop and other enforcement cars routinely get plate scanner cameras built in these days, so... that's already there.
Would destroying the cameras be a legitimate act of social disobedience, considering that the company shows a total defiance and lack of respect for the law and society? I would argue it is.
I would agree.
If these were installed without authorization, I assume citizens can rip them down without the same.
Black trash bags would be a cheap, non damaging way to cost them money removing them.
Or more likely, make use of the 2nd Amendment on them.
I've given this a lot of thought.
Unfortunately, in addition to being dangerous to others, this approach pretty much always comes with increased exposure to prosecution and increased penalties.
The optimal approach seems to be vandalism - spray painting over the front of the cameras, placing other objects to block their view, or permanently blinding them with lasers. All of these things are still illegal and would likely subject you to the legal system, but they at least require on-site intervention to remedy and keep the actor out of prison (but maybe not jail).
The least risky approach I've found is also the least effective - they're often on public property, so place _yourself_ in front of them. It takes them out of commission for a while and should be legal. Coordinated action would likely get the attention of Flock, law enforcement, and the media. Unfortunately, even that could be construed as "interfering with law enforcement operations" or similar, and/or conspiracy if you're organizing or participating in mass resistance.
If the federal government decides they want to step in on Flock's behalf, they could put you under the jail. :\
So Fun facts about digital cameras like these: Strong infrared leds at night blind them completely. They sometimes even switch into daymode and become useless at night. Also, lasers are usually not enough to destroy the ccd sensor but only cause small dots to appear[0]. But a Spraycan on a stick can be very effective and of course a silenced airgun for those hard to reach places can be very effective.
[0] Lab Test here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNWNQb2AvQM
Firing projectiles to destroy cameras (it doesn't matter how the slug is thrown) is... oh why bother, people won't change.
spray-chalk on a stick.
Installing cameras to _violate_ peoples rights is.. why bother, corporations won't change.
Nobody is saying "do nothing". The point is that shooting guns into the air is dangerous and you shouldn't do it. If you want to disable the cameras, do so in a way that doesn't recklessly endanger people (i.e spray chalk on a stick).
Shine a Blue laser at the iris of the camera, burn the sensor from inside out.
Hack the planet. But yeah, don't do this.
As I linked in my original post, that doesn't really work.
But airguns are usually much less regulated, much quieter and easier to supress and the legal liability for firing an airgun somewhere vs a firearm is usually much different. And they usually have enough power for that purpose without risking too much colleteral damage.
I don’t even think an airgun could really have an effect, but for anyone contemplating this kind of thing, please at least deconstruct the device and put it into something different looking. There is no point in getting offed with impunity by some Idiocracy goon because he saw a finger gun.
Better use of one’s efforts could be to support legal challenges of this clearly unconstitutional mass surveillance by the government through its corporate, or in this case, YC cutouts.
There are airguns available otc with the power equal to roughly a 45 ACP fired from a pistol. I doubt these cameras can resist that.
sounds like it’s your civic responsibility to take these devices offline.
I mean, your local enforcers have publicly stated they're annoyed about them there.
What are they gonna do other than wring their hands and say "oh no, anyway" if they go missing?
"Move fast, break things" seems to me that is also the Trump admin's MO at the sacrifice of democracy. The SV mantra has moved up into politics and is causing permanent damage. If rules aren't enforced why would anyone follow them?
Aside the topic, but I wonder how HN, as a community, and as a moderation team, weighs this on the intellectual curiosity vs primarily politics scale.
This seems politics to me. Very important politics that a lot of people in tech have a special interest for, but politics nonetheless, and much more pressing topics seem to be absent through the on-topic rule.
This site has always been fairly interested in mass surveillance stuff (which is, naturally, inherently political).
I tend to dislike it when purely political posts show up here, but I appreciate the ones that intersect with technology, particularly ones that relate to privacy issues.
That rule is ... kind of nonsense anyways.
One can't be intellectually curious and not think about politics. Politics is applied intellectual curiosity.
This does not seem to be a prevalent opinion on here, and I was trying to be diplomatic, but I guess it still comes out as "why is it OK to post / comment politics here if it's a less contentious topic many people on HN care about, but I regularly get downvoted for even relating information to my association with a demographic group forcefully enlisted to the front of the culture war".
Orange site bad.
Because this has a tech angle and its local. Plus it connects to big tech companies collecting data on everyone.
Which is different from a Gaza discussion which has no tech angle and two sides telling each other what the other side has done.
Calling anything "local" to HN is pretty funny US-centrism, for someone posting before 8 AM EST. And I'd never call what's happening in Gaza a "culture war", that would seem trivializing - although my issue seems to be escalating more and more as well.