Flock was pitched as the triumph of technology over criminality. It's surveillance network was supposed to end crime. However, when people witness extreme criminality thriving unpunished at the top levels of U.S. politics, the lie becomes evident. Flock isn't about ending crime. It's a tool of control to be used by criminals.
It's a nice idea. Everything is backwards right now. It should to be the other way around: random citizens should be essentially anonymous while all members of the government are surveilled 24/7. Surveillance should scale with power.
Funnily enough, the whole "social credit" thing that Westerners like to meme about was supposed to work like that. Although it never really got implemented, it was meant to be a score applied exclusively to business leaders, politicians, etc.
And it was actually mostly meant to track corporations rather than individuals. That's why the full name of it was Corporate Social Credit System. It was supposed to increase trust in the Chinese market
Yeah, this is really messed up. I think our instincts ("tribal leader is powerful and has extra rights") are doing us a disservice. In democracies, all politicians are our employees: They are supposed to do our bidding, and if they act on their own, only in our direct or indirect (no bullshit interpretations please) interest.
It is pretty much a descent into tribalism. All wealth flows upwards to the leaders of the tribe, who can do anything they want without repercussions or criticism of their actions. The tribe has no use for education, or progress, or infrastructure. The tribe is about what the chief wants right now, with no need for future planning or thinking about consequences. And most of all the tribe is violent, petty and revenge-seeking.
This is a perspective I hadn’t heard or considered before.
Often times common crime (petty/violent) is viewed as a totally different area as white-collar crime or corruption. But they’re related.
As someone who’s had bikes stolen and car broken into, I sympathize with the desire for surveillance (especially in San Francisco). But Flock has no safeguards against cops using it to stalk ex-wives or misusing a partial match.
I'm not sure if you know what you're talking about? Flock cameras have definitely involved in detecting people who come into SF in stolen cars or with stolen plates, who proceed to go on sprees of breaking into cars and stealing things.
I really dislike Flock as a company, but their cameras absolutely do get used in the way they're publicly pitched.
Flock doing bad things does not justify coming into this thread and stating as fact things that are patently false.
Plates can be retroactively searched, backtracked, subjects followed back to other cars and tracked back to where they left from, or other cars that are repeatedly in the area prior to cars being stolen before being used for other crimes can be identified and tracked backward. A plate doesn’t need to be flagged prior to a crime. It’s the same way they can tell which tolls and which plate readers a vehicle has passed recently when running a plate, and is frequently used to identify or trip up drug runners.
Translation: you are wrong and seem to be making things up to fit your position, because this is exactly what people have a problem with — that this data is retained regardless of suspicion.
I don’t think that’s true; my understanding is that there are (currently opt in, I don’t it should be) monitoring that flags any such requests for administrative review and a number of officers have been fired because of it. It is no different than a cop running their own or someone else’s license outside of actual police business, which frequently results in administrative reprimands/write-ups because of the same types of monitoring.
You might disagree on the punishments or protections, and that’s not to say it couldn’t happen, but it seems false to say there are no safeguards.
I do not “support” Flock. I would have less issue if there was mandated data retention policies (by law) that limited to thirty days without a court order. Afterward, Flock should be welcome to perform mandated anonymization/obscure biometrics/obfuscate identifiers to retain anonymous data at that point. Either someone is suspected of being a criminal and a judge agreed it warranted access and retention, or they are an ordinary private citizen in public. The government’s position that because the government doesn’t own the company they can get data from at any time, it isn’t government surveillance, is…
Well, I think it’s just lying but that is an opinion.
Yea, that's the thing: I could almost get behind mass surveillance if it actually solved crime. Probably not, but almost. But it doesn't! Having a camera on every street corner doesn't do anything to solve crime if the police won't look at it and actually follow up. So we get the downsides of mass surveillance without any upside.
Same thing with things like "find my iPhone". Great in theory, but if your phone actually gets stolen and you tell the cops "Hey, my phone is at this exact address, I can prove it with Find My," they still don't give a shit and don't lift a finger to solve it, so the technology is in reality useless.
We need a police force who is actually motivated to solve crime rather than just find black people to beat and show up in force when someone protests something.
the cops were in the apartment where my phone was stolen when my phone was stolen and had a video recording of it getting stolen clearly showing the person who stole it who was known to the police because it was the person the police were called about.
I said: can you get my phone back? They said: use find my, then come to the police station. I did. The police said: sorry, this location only shows the building and not the apartment, so we can't enter the apartment and get your phone
> Same thing with things like "find my iPhone". Great in theory, but if your phone actually gets stolen and you tell the cops "Hey, my phone is at this exact address, I can prove it with Find My," they still don't give a shit and don't lift a finger to solve it, so the technology is in reality useless.
I put privacy over ending crime. That’s the unspoken stance everyone needs to decide on. Ubiquitous surveillance will end most crime but do we want that if the cost is our privacy?
The optimal amount of crime is non-zero. We can "catch all criminals" quite easily, just install a totalitarian state panopticon where everybody is guilty by default and constantly surveilled by an omniscient intelligence apparatus, problem solved.
People are going to need to accept some amount of crime if they want to have some semblance of freedom and basic human dignity.
It doesn't even do that, is the worst part. So the trade is to give up all privacy, but low-level crime continues unchanged.
Anyone who has tried to get the police interested in a theft where you have clear HD video of the action and a clear view of their faces and/or license plate, has lived this experience.
Yeah, and notice all the critical surveillance footage that happens to conveniently disappear? I could start a list, but anyone who knows it won't need one.
That's a HUGE assumption about the ability of surveillance to succeed, and it goes against the evidence of the most surveillance-heavy states in the present and history. There are flaws in systems that go beyond collecting evidence, for example corruption can undermine any technical approach as we see in places like China where surveillance is omnipresent.
Hell if "total surveillance" was the secret to ending crime, prisons would paradise. The panopticon would have been a great success. In reality the only way to make it work is to assign people two-by-two to watch each other 24/7, and that only works if they're both honest, attentive, and incorruptible.
Again by this logic prisons should be free of crime, rather than hotbeds of it. Insisting that something is true because it makes sense to you doesn’t make it true.
Prisons don’t have cameras in cells where most “bad” stuff happens. It’s a also a manpower problem but that’s probably going to go away with LLMs being able to auto review videos at some point.
This assumes the people watching actually cared about stopping crime enough to step in and arrest the offenders.
To echo the topmost comment's point, you can't convince the public that law enforcement actually cared when the elites who flew on the Lolita express to the child rape island are facing zero consequences while urinating on the side of a highway gets you put on a list forever.
It would only solve crime if the police actually followed up on all areas where surveillance pointed out crime. Surveillance itself can't arrest a criminal.
Passed an old guy sitting on the side of the road with a lawn chair today, he was holding a pool skimmer with cardboard attached at the end to block a flock camera. There was a local news story about it [1]. Happy to see it.
Despite differences in political beliefs you probably have more in common with this man than any of the politicians that claim to care about your or your values.
This is widely true if you look at popular support for issues that politicians refuse to implement or even address. That said, the trick is getting most people to actually recognize and admit that. As soon as some people sense you're "on the other team", their brain shuts down and they refuse to acknowledge any common ground with you. Not everyone, of course, but more than enough that it has led to the extreme political polarization we see today.
The wonder of modern representative democracies is the ability for people unlike me to extract progress for my objectives. I don’t require cos(them, me) = 1. I only require my objectives to progress more than they would under the alternatives.
I've done a lot of thinking on this, even crowdsourcing the coverage with people standing on sidewalks using their phones with a specific app, which collects similar data. Stand near the court house, politicians homes. However Flock tends to say that the people that contract them own the data to get around a lot of the liabilities, so they themselves "don't own the data". That is the hard part to emulate as a citizen who doesn't have same protections as a cop or city council.
I'm going off personal research though so I could be wrong.
As a company there may be liability to collecting the data, not sure. But as a private person as long as you are recording in public and not in a restricted space, you have a right to do so.
How does the claim that the people whom they contract with own the data square with Flock sharing data with Federal government and not disabling cameras when contract ends.
It would seem that the cities would be able to sue Flock in these cases since Flock is accessing their data without authorization. I am sure that there are some state laws that mirror the CFFA...Google tells me all 50 have something.
That would be a fun avenue for someone motivated to pursue.
Edit add: You could do the same as Flock. Each person uploads/streams their videos and they own it, data resides in their data bucket. You are only providing extra analysis of their(and everyone's in aggregate) data...
Yeah it’s quite common it seems. Similar to the ULEZ camera takedowns. And the ULEZ cameras were also supposedly a tool of government control. As were SF’s speed cameras. And so on and so forth.
I am not convinced. I am happy with the speed cameras, and I’m happy with the ULEZ cameras, and I’m happy with Flock cameras.
The position that we must destroy state function is outrageous to me. We have a path to peace and safety and the ensuing prosperity. The cameras must be preserved.
How does a centralized power structure knowing every action millions of people take bring about "peace and safety and the ensuing prosperity"? I guess you didn't mean for most of us.
On some level, it feels like (some) politicians haven't realised this, or have forgotten it.
We can either have a functioning democracy and justice system, where responsibility is delegated to people whose job it is to uphold society's values, or we can have individual people that do job themselves. If a judge or police officer isn't going to carry out justice, then eventually people are going to do it themselves. That tends to get messy, so we stopped doing that with good reason, and built institutions to better service justice, but if the institutions aren't doing their jobs, they should be reformed or thrown out.
When money is speech the loudest speakers have the deepest pockets.
When money is speech taxes become censorship.
When money/taxes are depressed to certain groups, or are given to other
certain groups, that money/speech is being recycled into legal bribes/
campaign donations. The 'speech' become circular.
Politicians are donation/bribe demanding machines. Legislation is bribe facilitating speech. Pay go play, follow the money.
I had this thought just the other day. It is not possible for any governing body to completely ignore the governed unless the governed have no issues that that lead to speach/action. There will always be a petition/revolt/exodus which results in the governing body hearing the governed.
> the governed unless the governed have no issues that that lead to speach/action
What about if the speech is censored, shadow-banned, limited etc in some other ways? Where the governed does not know their speech was limited in reach, censored etc? (which btw is a real approach social media companies are taking today).
You’re getting at the distinction between the right to speak and the right to be heard.
There are tons of time-and-place limitations that make perfect sense. I can’t interrupt a city council meeting to give a speech about, well, anything not on the agenda.
And of course social media companies have no legal obligation to allow free speech at all, which is their own right to speech.
Core freedom of speech means the government cannot arrest you for what you say. Going beyond that to private companies being obligated to ensure your reach can be a moral argument but not a legal one.
What's actually more dangerous isn't shadow banning it's angel banning. With the ability to manufacture agents that simulate positive user feedback while making your posts hidden - Twitter was experimenting with this years ago.
Ah I can agree with that. It sounds like of like astroturfing as well, but we have AI now so it's probably AI generated. I've been noticing content that felt like this a while ago on different social medias, including hacker news, I think today they are hardly discernible from humans.
edit: like as an example, ironically, your posts or mine could be an example of that.
edit2: I'm the human mannan my account is linked to, no agent talks on my behalf on my social media yet.
... or infighting, or self-destruction, or doomscrolling... the pressure will go somewhere but not necessarily into channels that relieve it. That takes more effort and persistence, and also a society (our consumer societies hardly rate as such in my books).
Yes as you said. Will the relief be productive? Especially when the other mechanisms/outlets for expression that are not digital (i.e. social media, the viable option in todays age - I'd love to know if anyone has succeeded wit any other outlet or medium today if they get shadow-banned on social media - share your real experience or study on this).
This is touching at the debate of "should social media be regulated or treated like the commons when it gets so large?"
You have a single company with the power and size of a country. Humans were never intended to be using something privately controlled with such an expansive reach & power differential, and then be told "they're private, if you're banned go elsewhere" except well this could be more like a public resource when it becomes that large. We haven't found a good answer to this in a capitalist system because the solution is non-capitalist.
the right to free speech has nothing to do with what social media companies do. Social media companies are not compelled by anything, in law or otherwise, to amplify your particular post.
IANAL, but just a web searcher. It appears that legally, in the US, public-facing private spaces are in a weird place. A lot depends on the specifics of the space. The closes analogy I can think of is shopping malls, which are privately owned but used as if they were public spaces.
In general,
"Private spaces used by the public, like shopping malls or private campuses, are typically non-public forums. The government cannot compel access to private spaces, but private operators may allow or restrict expression under private law and policy, balancing property rights with constitutional protections in some cases."
However, there have been cases where constitutional free-speech protections were extended into malls. This can happen if the property takes part in federal programs or gets federal subsidies or tax breaks.
You are distinguishing between Freedom and Civilization, the latter is, of course, rule by the strongest gang.
Freedom doesn't exist, except perhaps in your personal allodium, and war is necessary to obtain one. However, the average gang doesn't have the muscle.
One can argue that they are the most natural way of communicating. Words and paper are less destructive abstractions we've created on top, which has so far worked out for a majority of people.
Why is the company called Flock? Because the oligarchy and their police/government/tech enforcers view citizens as sheep. It's so flagrant, a sci-fi author couldn't come up with something more on the nose.
This isn't a vigilante movement. These cameras are being installed without any constitutional basis. And people don't need legal authority to correct an unlawful camera installation problem that cities are not handling.
the problem with pitching Flock as "the triumph of technology over criminality" is that because of all the bogus edicts, an average american commits three felonies every single day. and whoever picks who gets prosecuted for what, is the owner running the plantation.
Three Felonies a Day
http://www.harveysilverglate.com/books/
In 2006, the Code of Laws of the United States of America: 200000 pages (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Code)
with 500 pages/week it's about 10 years just to read it, i.e. to have a chance not breaking it (but this wrongly assumes that it's not growing meanwhile).
In 2012: Federal Code: 75000 pages, Tax Code: 72000 pages.
“There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for me to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What’s there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed or enforced nor objectively interpreted – and you create a nation of law-breakers – and then you cash in on guilt.”
— Ayn Rand (1905–1982), 'Atlas Shrugged' (1957)
Lets instead talk about the growing vigalante action by Flock corporation refusing to allow cities to remove cameras from their property after the contract is cancelled. Some cities have been forced to cover the cameras with trash bags.
Local politicians need to coordinate to remove their Flock cameras at the same time and pass laws to prevent any new one from being put up. Flock doesn't have the resources to sue every single one of them, especially if every city commits to dragging out the process for as long as possible by creating as many legal hurdles as they can, all of which Flock would have to have a court rule on.
Kind of like how practically every Scientologist filed suit against the IRS over CoS having their tax exempt status revoked, to which the IRS eventually relented.
It's also wild to me we live in a country where people who _live_ in a region are not allowed to make decisions about something as foul as surveillance cameras. If people who live, work, and are affected by these don't want them that should be the end of the conversation.
It should be to the people who live in an area to make decisions about it. With the legal ability to tell a company like Flock to fuck off.
I think it should depend on what residents living in the street want with several tiers. Public cam, paywall, law enforcement 24/7 or for a specific case, encrypted court order only, fake cams.
Each with different aproval requirements. A public cam would require 100%. Fake cams req only one vote. etc
I think I may have a minority view about surveillance. At least I need someone to explain something to me.
Is the backlash really about privacy, or is the real problem a complete lack of trust in government?
Because if I thought someone would actually use the cameras to enforce the law, that's not actually such a bad outcome. You aren't supposed to speed, you aren't supposed to let your dog poop without cleaning up after it, and there's a bunch of other offences as well.
Why would I not support a hypothetical police that enforced these rules? Guy takes his dog for a walk, doesn't pick up, boom, cameras plus AI finds the person and issues a fine. Enforcing a social norm, cheaply. There seems to be evidence that it works with speeding: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/04/250402181306.h...
The kind of story that I've actually come across is that someone with access to the public database abuses it. They peek into their ex girlfriend's records, that kind of thing. Obviously nobody thinks that's ok, and I can understand if the main pushback people have is that none of the first thing will happen and lots of the second thing will happen. But that doesn't seem to address the principle itself.
So what exactly is the argument for why we shouldn't have cameras catching people who break the law? Presumably we would have no issue with a cop seeing someone breaking the law, and enforcing. The issue comes up when we replace the policeman with a system that is always on and way cheaper to run than a cop.
EDIT
Just to be clear, I understand it if people don't trust the government. What I'm looking for is an argument other than that. Thus far every response has been along the lines of "you can't trust the government to use this fairly/correctly".
That's known, everybody can see that argument.
I want to know if there's a reason beyond that why widespread surveillance shouldn't be a thing.
Our laws only work because of a hidden assumption that trivial or victimless crimes won't be prosecuted. This assumption isn't always upheld, but automatic surveilance would break it pretty much every time.
Even if our laws were actually written with perfect enforcement in mind, only outlawing what's actually antisocial, I don't think I could ever trust a government enough to give it that kind of power. Mass surveillance makes it easier to enforce any law, just or not, and most countries haven't been able to go even one lifetime without turning into a totalitarian hellhole or at least persecuting part of their population.
Another part of it may be that emigrating is so costly (not just in money) that most people won't ever be able to do it. When you're de facto forced to live in a country whose laws you (partly) disagree with, it's easier to add barriers to law enforcement than to get those laws changed.
Real world results are poor. I've gotten a ticket for not coming to a "full and complete stop" at an empty intersection at 2AM. I drove up to the corner extremely slowly instead. A $500 fine.
That tends to be people's experience with this sort of thing. Laws the police generally wouldn't bother enforcing are maximally enforced, because it generates revenue.
They got rid of that camera eventually because it was "too easy for people to get out of tickets", meaning they were getting tossed when people challenged them.
This answer might be US specific but one significant reason for the pushback (at least from me) is the centralizing force.
Generally the things cameras like that are good for enforcing are handled by local law enforcement. Probably at the city/county level, at most the state. So prior to Flock and their ilk, camera surveillance was used by local people in the community to enforce laws enacted by the community.
Flock enables that but also provides a nation wide, searchable database available to local and federal law enforcement. Recently SCOTUS ruled that broad geo-based warrants (law enforcement would ask Google for all devices in an area for a time frame) are illegal and overbroad.
A nationwide Flock network with facial recognition ends up in the same place of being able not only to enforce laws, but track people in a warrantless way.
Conceptually at least, this feels very similar to government attacks on encryption where a government wants to see and have access to everything without cause just in case, which is definitely at least in sprint opposed to the right of free association. Flock does the same kind of thing but in the physical world.
I also think a general computer security rule of thumb probably applies here, where for the best security/safety, trust should be provable. If trusting a human is required to make a system work correctly, the system is flawed.
All of that to say I don't think the majority of pushback is against enforcing laws by camera specifically, but a Panopticon-ness of it and all the downstream effects that causes.
At least for me, the technical chops to be able to program a computer was always just table stakes for software engineering.
The majority of my job more or less reduces to mitigating the consequences of having all the stakeholders dreams come true. Most normal people consider rules as run by people. They expect them to ignore rules that don't make sense, apply rule of thumb, get the gist, and do what it takes to achieve success.
When you take these sorts of rules and try to put them into silicon, the end result is often an undesirable result despite all the rules being successful implemented.
The law are these sorts of rules. They're designed to be "executed" by people using judgement. Part of the reason why the law works is specifically because we don't have a bunch of computers watching everyone all the time. Secure in your person and papers is literally right there in the constitution. Like they didn't know about computer surveillance when they added that amendment but they knew that without privacy the law doesn't work as intended.
You know how animals in captivity behave differently from animals living in the wild and why this is judged to be a bad thing for the animals? Humans under surveillance also act differently from free humans and it's a bad thing for the same reason.
Although this is by no means a consensus view on the human spirit. Culture and civilization are in many ways simply what you describe, means of domesticating the human animal. It's quite loaded to assume everyone who isn't on board with the Taxi Driver view of the human spirit is 'bad'.
Another user points to the Panopticon which wasn't viewed as evil or 'dystopian'. It was thought of as a humane, progressive reform of prisons that does away with the violence and privation you had in prisons up until that time. In a lot of Confucian cultures that remains today, you don't find a lot of Koreans, Japanese or Chinese people who think law enforcement and surveillance is crushing the human spirit, they'd tell you these are tools to cultivate civilized human beings so you don't end up like monkeys in the banana factory.
I think this is reason enough. The US (and others) are turning a little more despotic and totalitarian every day. Imagine what they can do with such tools?
Same reason why for example banning encryption “to save the children” is laudable but it would weaken the ability to exchange messages privately so much that it’s unacceptable. The powers that be would very much like messages not to be private, partly because it would neuter any ability people would have to organize and challenge the current powers.
It’s unfortunate that giving up these cameras or the ban of encryption would also empower other types of crime but to most the trade-offs are too big and so we’d rather have stronger privacy at the cost of (potentially) a little more unpunished crime.
I'd like to point of the recent case where a women crossed state lines for reproductive healthcare and the local police used flock to track those movements and prosecute.
The cameras enable good and reasonable prosecutions as much as they do oppressive political ideologies.
> I want to know if there's a reason beyond that why widespread surveillance shouldn't be a thing.
See copypasta https://pastebin.com/GQBGWjv8 for full explanation of the four counter arguments below, too long to post here.
> > "You have nothing to fear"
This is a very dangerous mindset. The argument is frequently raised in debates by pro-big brother hawks, and doing so is dangerous, cowardly and dishonest.
> > There are at least four good reasons to reject this argument solidly and uncompromisingly: the rules may change, it's not you who determine if you're guilty, laws must be broken for society to progress, and privacy is a basic human need.
> Guy takes his dog for a walk, doesn't pick up, boom, cameras plus AI finds the person and issues a fine.
In the 1980s depending on your jurisdiction there were some kind of sodomy or gross indecency law. Applying AI and surveillance to that. Guy goes for a walk, kisses his boyfriend, boom, cameras plus AI finds the person and issues a fine and/or jails them.
Most arguments boil down to not trusting current or future government because the government can commit violence against you, deprive you of liberty, or take away your possessions. With a combination of the rules may change, and it's not you who determines guilt.
> > in Friedrich Durren-matt's novella Traps, which involves a seemingly innocent man put on trial by a group of retired lawyers for a mock trial game, the man inquires what his crime shall be. "'An altogether minor matter,' the
prosecutor replied .... 'A crime can always be found."'
> Is the backlash really about privacy, or is the real problem a complete lack of trust in government?
Both.
Even if a hypothetical perfect police force could serve justice better with a panopticon, that is A.) not the police force that exists today, and 2.) who's to day that there won't be a worse government in X years that will use that panopticon and police force to be dicks?
The benefit of minor crimes being addressed today is very small compared to the potential disaster of tomorrow.
Its really about priorities. Public surveillance is something that is distracting from the real problem: Government/Corporate corruption. That needs to be handled before anything else. The fact that we are focusing on them putting in surveillance cameras instead of us working together to bring these criminal to justice proves that the distraction its working.
> Why would I not support a hypothetical police that enforced these rules?
Because such hypothetical police does not exist and cannot ever exist.
Humans are corrupted by power, basic human nature.
So if a system is staffed by humans, it must be designed to take human nature into account. It needs to be designed to be resilient against the flaws of human nature that will inevitably happen, such as corruption and bribery and self-interest.
There are many things that are technically illegal but arguably should not be.
For example, there's a small local park near me that serves as a handy shortcut between two different neighborhoods, but technically nobody is allowed to enter it between 11pm and 6am. The assumption is that if you're in a park during these hours, it must be for some nefarious purpose.
The problem with arguments like yours is the implied premise everyone must be surveilled because they are potential criminals who just haven't been caught yet, the exact opposite of the legal presumption of innocence and the founding values of the US (other countries' mores about the default moral state of humanity vary, of course). It's only a short leap from arguing that if everyone needs to be surveilled for everyone else's safety, then being surveillable by being out and about at the wrong time of day is itself suspicious, and that curfew should be the default.
Surprisingly, some 70-80% of US cities have curfew rules of some kind (usually against minors) and they're often ramped up significantly in response emergencies. Most other developed countries just don't have curfews. European countries have business regulations like barring minors from some businesses such as nightclubs, but US-style curfews do not exist. A Swiss town (interlaken) that voted to impose them had to hire private security guards because the police refused to enforce the rule. Curfews are somewhat common in developing nations like the Philippines and Thailand, but again don't really exist in developed nations in Asia. I didn't do an exhaustive global survery, but to my general knowledge the US is an outlier in this regard.
The fundamental problem with the curfew mentality is this assumption of malignity, and there's no end to it once you introduce it. Suppose we claim that crime has fallen since security cameras were deployed. And yet, there's still some crime and not all of it appears on our public camera network! It turns out quite a lot of crimes are committed in private. Maybe we should just put cameras inside people's homes - after all, why would anyone object...unless they wanted to commit crime? Maybe we should do away with warrants - they're time-consuming to apply for and create paperwork (we hate bureaucracy, don't we folks). Sure they're in the constitution, but haven't you noticed how people who insist on seeing a warrant always turn out to be the worst sort of people? Obviously innocent people would welcome the police into their home, and take pride in demonstrating their innocence. Why, I think most right-thinking folks would be prepared to sacrifice some of their own liberty if it meant catching just one extra criminal.
Lack of trust in government is a very American thing, to be sure. But the issue is they have now truly alienated pretty much all of the population for one reason or another. I used to think libertarians were crazy until we actually had government agents breaking, entering, and killing without warrants. Accountability is all we want. Surveillance with proper oversight is very much possible, but those in power are unwilling, so must be voted out.
Even if our current government is perfect, there's a misunderstanding of the argument here. When you argue for building vast surveillance infrastructure, you're not implicitly arguing the government is perfect. You're arguing every government, until the end of time, including hypothetical unknowable governments of the future, will be perfect.
And that argument is just really hard to defend, so much so that most people feel confident just dismissing it entirely.
I liked president Obama, now we have Trump. It's barely been over a decade. If this stuff was installed under president Obama, I would have protested it then, too. Even though I didn't foresee Trump. And we still don't know if this is "the end". The US could slip into a completely totalitarian fascist state. It's happened to many countries before.
There's a social norm that it's rude to follow someone around watching everything they do, and that the state shouldn't do it unless they have good reason to suspect that person of a crime.
1. If someone is running to a cop because someone didn’t pick up after their dog, that is a sad state of affairs.
2. If we are so interested in enforcing laws, what about all of the white collar crime, crypto scams, insider trading, and grifting off of the public sector? Clearly doing more harm to society than some dog poop. Where are the $8bn market cap companies that go around enforcing securities laws?
Congratulations, Flock, on establishing the most successful honeypot of all time!
No matter what the level of corruption, no matter which side of the surveillance state you support, no matter which side of the cameras you're on, Flock has a way to shine a spotlight on you and bring you out of the closet!
Currently following a YouTuber who knows all the roadside regulations for signposts and he points out how the Flock poles are all installed dangerously wrong, and will surely impale the next driver to crash out on the shoulder!
>No Federal agency may purchase, deploy, operate, access, or contract for any automated surveillance system that identifies, tracks, or records individuals [. . .]
Emphasis mine.
Am I wrong or does this 1. not outlaw the purchase of the data, just the systems themselves, 2. not outlaw the use of the data unless it was obtained by the federal government through a system they have purchased, and 3. not outlaw local or state law enforcement from buying it, just outlaws the use of federal funds to buy these systems.
So flock feed the data through brokers instead of directly, correct? Or am I reading this wrong?
AFAICT, municipalities get paid to put up the cameras, which isn't federal, so flock can then use those cameras to freely gather data and sell it to police
> municipalities get paid to put up the cameras
I've read lots of FOIAd flock contracts, and I have yet to see any municipality get paid by flock - they pay flock per-camera. Is that just a hunch, or are there cases of towns getting money from flock?
So they knock out Flock. Then Axon comes in and replaces them with superior versions, built into streetlights and municipal infrastructure. The sentiment seems reasonable but any expectations that our overlords will ever abandon total control and surveillance is delusional. Something far more sophisticated than vandalism would be necessary, and I'm not sure anything exists. The value of public opinion is at an all time low and scheduled to continue dropping.
Edit: Our society begged for a technocratic rulership. We largely supported the process through our hardware and software purchases, but facilitated it too through decades of indolence and indifference until it got kinda too late. Aside from a few micro victories, mostly more symbolic than effective, I think the future is easily enough foreseen by imagining something a lot worse.
Totally decided against vandalism. Violations of the social contract suck.
Edit to invite explanations.
If you approve of vandalism to flock cameras, what are your feelings about vandalizing abortion clinics, mosques or opposition political headquarters?
I would also ask, what are your feelings on vandalizing concentration camps? It's about authoritarian control, not bodily autonomy, or religious freedom.
Most are targeted ALPR camera systems that take pictures of license plates, check the plates against local hot lists, and then flush the data if there’s no hit.
Flock is building a giant camera network that records people’s comings and goings across the nation and maintains those records despite any link to crime for an indeterminate amount of time.
The other players like Axon and Motorola are looking to follow Flock's lead, but mass surveillance is the main problem.
Don't touch Americans' cars. Notice how more people die from cars than guns and there's no outcry.
Trends are random. This one has a large underlying informed group, deflock, centered in a Discord server. It then became common internet opinion to be opposed to it.
Flock was pitched as the triumph of technology over criminality. It's surveillance network was supposed to end crime. However, when people witness extreme criminality thriving unpunished at the top levels of U.S. politics, the lie becomes evident. Flock isn't about ending crime. It's a tool of control to be used by criminals.
Who watches the watchers? Everyone.
It's a nice idea. Everything is backwards right now. It should to be the other way around: random citizens should be essentially anonymous while all members of the government are surveilled 24/7. Surveillance should scale with power.
Funnily enough, the whole "social credit" thing that Westerners like to meme about was supposed to work like that. Although it never really got implemented, it was meant to be a score applied exclusively to business leaders, politicians, etc.
And it was actually mostly meant to track corporations rather than individuals. That's why the full name of it was Corporate Social Credit System. It was supposed to increase trust in the Chinese market
Yeah, this is really messed up. I think our instincts ("tribal leader is powerful and has extra rights") are doing us a disservice. In democracies, all politicians are our employees: They are supposed to do our bidding, and if they act on their own, only in our direct or indirect (no bullshit interpretations please) interest.
It is pretty much a descent into tribalism. All wealth flows upwards to the leaders of the tribe, who can do anything they want without repercussions or criticism of their actions. The tribe has no use for education, or progress, or infrastructure. The tribe is about what the chief wants right now, with no need for future planning or thinking about consequences. And most of all the tribe is violent, petty and revenge-seeking.
It's legal for anyone to do what Flock did
This is a perspective I hadn’t heard or considered before.
Often times common crime (petty/violent) is viewed as a totally different area as white-collar crime or corruption. But they’re related.
As someone who’s had bikes stolen and car broken into, I sympathize with the desire for surveillance (especially in San Francisco). But Flock has no safeguards against cops using it to stalk ex-wives or misusing a partial match.
> As someone who’s had bikes stolen and car broken into, I sympathize with the desire for surveillance (especially in San Francisco).
That isn't what it is being used for. That would still require cops to be investigating petty theft as if they cared about it.
> That isn't what it is being used for.
I'm not sure if you know what you're talking about? Flock cameras have definitely involved in detecting people who come into SF in stolen cars or with stolen plates, who proceed to go on sprees of breaking into cars and stealing things.
I really dislike Flock as a company, but their cameras absolutely do get used in the way they're publicly pitched.
Flock doing bad things does not justify coming into this thread and stating as fact things that are patently false.
You said it - they only care when it's a spree.
and one with a plate that's already reported stolen. trnslation: it's a zero effort publicity project.
Plates can be retroactively searched, backtracked, subjects followed back to other cars and tracked back to where they left from, or other cars that are repeatedly in the area prior to cars being stolen before being used for other crimes can be identified and tracked backward. A plate doesn’t need to be flagged prior to a crime. It’s the same way they can tell which tolls and which plate readers a vehicle has passed recently when running a plate, and is frequently used to identify or trip up drug runners.
Translation: you are wrong and seem to be making things up to fit your position, because this is exactly what people have a problem with — that this data is retained regardless of suspicion.
Plenty of places this is happening.
I got to teach a Detective the technical limitations of Find My, and also successfully recovered some of my property from a UHaul truck during a stop.
All for bikes - but it contributed to two arrests, and contributed to a larger, interstate theft case.
I don’t think that’s true; my understanding is that there are (currently opt in, I don’t it should be) monitoring that flags any such requests for administrative review and a number of officers have been fired because of it. It is no different than a cop running their own or someone else’s license outside of actual police business, which frequently results in administrative reprimands/write-ups because of the same types of monitoring.
You might disagree on the punishments or protections, and that’s not to say it couldn’t happen, but it seems false to say there are no safeguards.
I do not “support” Flock. I would have less issue if there was mandated data retention policies (by law) that limited to thirty days without a court order. Afterward, Flock should be welcome to perform mandated anonymization/obscure biometrics/obfuscate identifiers to retain anonymous data at that point. Either someone is suspected of being a criminal and a judge agreed it warranted access and retention, or they are an ordinary private citizen in public. The government’s position that because the government doesn’t own the company they can get data from at any time, it isn’t government surveillance, is…
Well, I think it’s just lying but that is an opinion.
I think it would be kind of different if people were having cars broken into less often or bikes returned after being stolen
But it's clear that increased surveillance hasn't been leading to stolen property being recovered.
Yea, that's the thing: I could almost get behind mass surveillance if it actually solved crime. Probably not, but almost. But it doesn't! Having a camera on every street corner doesn't do anything to solve crime if the police won't look at it and actually follow up. So we get the downsides of mass surveillance without any upside.
Same thing with things like "find my iPhone". Great in theory, but if your phone actually gets stolen and you tell the cops "Hey, my phone is at this exact address, I can prove it with Find My," they still don't give a shit and don't lift a finger to solve it, so the technology is in reality useless.
We need a police force who is actually motivated to solve crime rather than just find black people to beat and show up in force when someone protests something.
the cops were in the apartment where my phone was stolen when my phone was stolen and had a video recording of it getting stolen clearly showing the person who stole it who was known to the police because it was the person the police were called about.
I said: can you get my phone back? They said: use find my, then come to the police station. I did. The police said: sorry, this location only shows the building and not the apartment, so we can't enter the apartment and get your phone
Take a lesson from the UK where there are cameras everywhere.
Brothers van parked in London. Window broken, bag stolen off front seat. Right under camera.
He calls police and miracle of miracles they actually attend. Must have been in the area.
Plod:"Shouldn't have left your bag on view"
Bro:"Can you check the CCTV"
Plod:"You watch too much TV mate, we don't have time for that"
But cameras will one day help catch a murderer and suddenly everyone will want them everywhere.
Tell them someone said "from the river to the sea". They'll drop everything to look.
This is such a lie. UK arrests people for flying UK flags. Pro Palestinian terrorists get away with assaulting police all the time.
> Same thing with things like "find my iPhone". Great in theory, but if your phone actually gets stolen and you tell the cops "Hey, my phone is at this exact address, I can prove it with Find My," they still don't give a shit and don't lift a finger to solve it, so the technology is in reality useless.
This is location-dependent.
Sounds like a mini version of Habermas’s legitimation crisis playing out in real time
I put privacy over ending crime. That’s the unspoken stance everyone needs to decide on. Ubiquitous surveillance will end most crime but do we want that if the cost is our privacy?
The optimal amount of crime is non-zero. We can "catch all criminals" quite easily, just install a totalitarian state panopticon where everybody is guilty by default and constantly surveilled by an omniscient intelligence apparatus, problem solved.
People are going to need to accept some amount of crime if they want to have some semblance of freedom and basic human dignity.
https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...
You can't even fix broken laws without crime. Alcohol prohibition wouldn't have ended if everyone followed it.
> Ubiquitous surveillance will end most crime
It doesn't even do that, is the worst part. So the trade is to give up all privacy, but low-level crime continues unchanged.
Anyone who has tried to get the police interested in a theft where you have clear HD video of the action and a clear view of their faces and/or license plate, has lived this experience.
Yeah, and notice all the critical surveillance footage that happens to conveniently disappear? I could start a list, but anyone who knows it won't need one.
> Ubiquitous surveillance will end most crime
How, praytell, will surveillance end wage theft?
> if the cost is our privacy?
If the cost is freedom. Privacy is an abstract technicality to many, but it's necessary for freedom, and freedom rings everywhere.
That's a HUGE assumption about the ability of surveillance to succeed, and it goes against the evidence of the most surveillance-heavy states in the present and history. There are flaws in systems that go beyond collecting evidence, for example corruption can undermine any technical approach as we see in places like China where surveillance is omnipresent.
Hell if "total surveillance" was the secret to ending crime, prisons would paradise. The panopticon would have been a great success. In reality the only way to make it work is to assign people two-by-two to watch each other 24/7, and that only works if they're both honest, attentive, and incorruptible.
Total surveillance would be watching people all the time, indoors too aka Fahrenheit. It would absolutely end 95% of crime.
Again by this logic prisons should be free of crime, rather than hotbeds of it. Insisting that something is true because it makes sense to you doesn’t make it true.
Prisons don’t have cameras in cells where most “bad” stuff happens. It’s a also a manpower problem but that’s probably going to go away with LLMs being able to auto review videos at some point.
This assumes the people watching actually cared about stopping crime enough to step in and arrest the offenders.
To echo the topmost comment's point, you can't convince the public that law enforcement actually cared when the elites who flew on the Lolita express to the child rape island are facing zero consequences while urinating on the side of a highway gets you put on a list forever.
> It would absolutely end 95% of crime
It might solve much of existing crime, but that’s not the same as a net reduction in crime.
Bribery, blackmail, and coercion would just fill the crime vacuum.
It would only solve crime if the police actually followed up on all areas where surveillance pointed out crime. Surveillance itself can't arrest a criminal.
Passed an old guy sitting on the side of the road with a lawn chair today, he was holding a pool skimmer with cardboard attached at the end to block a flock camera. There was a local news story about it [1]. Happy to see it.
[1] https://www.cltampa.com/news/a-77-year-old-republican-man-is...
> and the FlockHopper app can be used to navigate without passing any of them.
Didn't know about this! Pretty neat
https://dontgetflocked.com/
Well that is just art and quite the signal.
I'm sure my politics are very different than that man's, but at least we agree on the fact that Flock fucking sucks.
Despite differences in political beliefs you probably have more in common with this man than any of the politicians that claim to care about your or your values.
This is widely true if you look at popular support for issues that politicians refuse to implement or even address. That said, the trick is getting most people to actually recognize and admit that. As soon as some people sense you're "on the other team", their brain shuts down and they refuse to acknowledge any common ground with you. Not everyone, of course, but more than enough that it has led to the extreme political polarization we see today.
The wonder of modern representative democracies is the ability for people unlike me to extract progress for my objectives. I don’t require cos(them, me) = 1. I only require my objectives to progress more than they would under the alternatives.
Someone should start a surveillance company and put up their cameras pointed at the politicians houses.
If they then try to get them taken down using legal action they could sue under equal protection clause.
Edit add: Make data stream of cameras public for general population but charge if LEO or aggregate data search.
I've done a lot of thinking on this, even crowdsourcing the coverage with people standing on sidewalks using their phones with a specific app, which collects similar data. Stand near the court house, politicians homes. However Flock tends to say that the people that contract them own the data to get around a lot of the liabilities, so they themselves "don't own the data". That is the hard part to emulate as a citizen who doesn't have same protections as a cop or city council.
I'm going off personal research though so I could be wrong.
As a company there may be liability to collecting the data, not sure. But as a private person as long as you are recording in public and not in a restricted space, you have a right to do so.
How does the claim that the people whom they contract with own the data square with Flock sharing data with Federal government and not disabling cameras when contract ends.
https://youtube.com/shorts/t_ewIN7YhYI?is=08KRHQK3AMYA0FJn
It would seem that the cities would be able to sue Flock in these cases since Flock is accessing their data without authorization. I am sure that there are some state laws that mirror the CFFA...Google tells me all 50 have something.
That would be a fun avenue for someone motivated to pursue.
Edit add: You could do the same as Flock. Each person uploads/streams their videos and they own it, data resides in their data bucket. You are only providing extra analysis of their(and everyone's in aggregate) data...
Yeah it’s quite common it seems. Similar to the ULEZ camera takedowns. And the ULEZ cameras were also supposedly a tool of government control. As were SF’s speed cameras. And so on and so forth.
I am not convinced. I am happy with the speed cameras, and I’m happy with the ULEZ cameras, and I’m happy with Flock cameras.
The position that we must destroy state function is outrageous to me. We have a path to peace and safety and the ensuing prosperity. The cameras must be preserved.
How does a centralized power structure knowing every action millions of people take bring about "peace and safety and the ensuing prosperity"? I guess you didn't mean for most of us.
When people feel like their voice isn’t heard, this is the inevitable result.
On some level, it feels like (some) politicians haven't realised this, or have forgotten it.
We can either have a functioning democracy and justice system, where responsibility is delegated to people whose job it is to uphold society's values, or we can have individual people that do job themselves. If a judge or police officer isn't going to carry out justice, then eventually people are going to do it themselves. That tends to get messy, so we stopped doing that with good reason, and built institutions to better service justice, but if the institutions aren't doing their jobs, they should be reformed or thrown out.
When money is speech the loudest speakers have the deepest pockets. When money is speech taxes become censorship. When money/taxes are depressed to certain groups, or are given to other certain groups, that money/speech is being recycled into legal bribes/ campaign donations. The 'speech' become circular.
Politicians are donation/bribe demanding machines. Legislation is bribe facilitating speech. Pay go play, follow the money.
Flock pays, it is heard.
I had this thought just the other day. It is not possible for any governing body to completely ignore the governed unless the governed have no issues that that lead to speach/action. There will always be a petition/revolt/exodus which results in the governing body hearing the governed.
Yeah speech is the first way the populace indicates to the ruling what they want.
Physical action is inevitable if the speech isn't listened to.
> Physical action is inevitable if the speech isn't listened to.
see also: "The Four boxes of liberty"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_boxes_of_liberty
> the governed unless the governed have no issues that that lead to speach/action
What about if the speech is censored, shadow-banned, limited etc in some other ways? Where the governed does not know their speech was limited in reach, censored etc? (which btw is a real approach social media companies are taking today).
You’re getting at the distinction between the right to speak and the right to be heard.
There are tons of time-and-place limitations that make perfect sense. I can’t interrupt a city council meeting to give a speech about, well, anything not on the agenda.
And of course social media companies have no legal obligation to allow free speech at all, which is their own right to speech.
Core freedom of speech means the government cannot arrest you for what you say. Going beyond that to private companies being obligated to ensure your reach can be a moral argument but not a legal one.
---I can’t interrupt a city council meeting to give a speech about, well, anything not on the agenda.
and if you can't get your issue onthe agenda....?
Or, you arent aware of jury nullificaton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
Or your pockets aren't deep enough to influence the police, city manager, council members, etc...?
What's actually more dangerous isn't shadow banning it's angel banning. With the ability to manufacture agents that simulate positive user feedback while making your posts hidden - Twitter was experimenting with this years ago.
Ah I can agree with that. It sounds like of like astroturfing as well, but we have AI now so it's probably AI generated. I've been noticing content that felt like this a while ago on different social medias, including hacker news, I think today they are hardly discernible from humans.
edit: like as an example, ironically, your posts or mine could be an example of that.
edit2: I'm the human mannan my account is linked to, no agent talks on my behalf on my social media yet.
Theyll see no effect of their speech, and try something else. Like voting, protests, and violence. In thay order
... or infighting, or self-destruction, or doomscrolling... the pressure will go somewhere but not necessarily into channels that relieve it. That takes more effort and persistence, and also a society (our consumer societies hardly rate as such in my books).
Yes as you said. Will the relief be productive? Especially when the other mechanisms/outlets for expression that are not digital (i.e. social media, the viable option in todays age - I'd love to know if anyone has succeeded wit any other outlet or medium today if they get shadow-banned on social media - share your real experience or study on this).
This is touching at the debate of "should social media be regulated or treated like the commons when it gets so large?"
You have a single company with the power and size of a country. Humans were never intended to be using something privately controlled with such an expansive reach & power differential, and then be told "they're private, if you're banned go elsewhere" except well this could be more like a public resource when it becomes that large. We haven't found a good answer to this in a capitalist system because the solution is non-capitalist.
Soapbox, ballot box, jury box, ammo box - the four boxes of liberty
the right to free speech has nothing to do with what social media companies do. Social media companies are not compelled by anything, in law or otherwise, to amplify your particular post.
Is there any historical precedent for a defacto public square?
We can't relegate (unwillingly even) every bit of our lives to the private sector and suddenly say rights shouldn't exist.
IANAL, but just a web searcher. It appears that legally, in the US, public-facing private spaces are in a weird place. A lot depends on the specifics of the space. The closes analogy I can think of is shopping malls, which are privately owned but used as if they were public spaces.
In general,
"Private spaces used by the public, like shopping malls or private campuses, are typically non-public forums. The government cannot compel access to private spaces, but private operators may allow or restrict expression under private law and policy, balancing property rights with constitutional protections in some cases."
However, there have been cases where constitutional free-speech protections were extended into malls. This can happen if the property takes part in federal programs or gets federal subsidies or tax breaks.
https://bridgelegal.org/what-legally-defines-public-space/
If we want a digital public square we should fund one with public tax dollars.
We had one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_doctrine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-time_rule isn't the same thing.
Violence and destruction are perfectly natural ways of communicating. Some animals use sounds and almost all use body language.
One could even argue communicating over the phone or internet lacks the destructive component. Irl behavior is heavily modified by it.
Verbal communication is a work in progress. We really want it to work. Sometimes you have to make people listen. Get them back in the program :)
> Violence and destruction are perfectly natural ways of communicating. Some animals use sounds and almost all use body language.
Except that animals don't have knives, guns, bombs and nuclear warheads.
> Sometimes you have to make people listen. Get them back in the program :)
Works great until you're the one being made to listen.
You are distinguishing between Freedom and Civilization, the latter is, of course, rule by the strongest gang.
They certainly have knives, go look at what a tiger is sporting on his paws
also check out the bombardier beetle for the rest
> Except that animals don't have knives, guns, bombs and nuclear warheads.
Yeah, animals will spill your intestines out on the ground and start eating you asshole first while you scream.
And they may even do it for fun and not even eat you, and just let your fleshy bits rot in the sun.
The rhinoceros are still wondering what part of stay away we dont understand.
One can argue that they are the most natural way of communicating. Words and paper are less destructive abstractions we've created on top, which has so far worked out for a majority of people.
NO! Even if your voice is heard, the state doesn't need to track your every move.
"This" presumably refers to vigilante action against Flock and other surveillance equipment, not the surveillance itself.
Ever hear of Total Information Awarness, or Eric Snowdon?
I'm proud to have mapped an impressive amount of cameras. You see a lot of things on a bicycle.
I also add non ALPR cameras. There are multiples more of those. I see no reason those can't detect license plates either.
Why is the company called Flock? Because the oligarchy and their police/government/tech enforcers view citizens as sheep. It's so flagrant, a sci-fi author couldn't come up with something more on the nose.
This isn't a vigilante movement. These cameras are being installed without any constitutional basis. And people don't need legal authority to correct an unlawful camera installation problem that cities are not handling.
Perhaps you meant it's not a vandalism movement?
Flock is a vigilante movement.
eh? it's still vigilantism if they're 'correcting' something unlawful?
the problem with pitching Flock as "the triumph of technology over criminality" is that because of all the bogus edicts, an average american commits three felonies every single day. and whoever picks who gets prosecuted for what, is the owner running the plantation.
Three Felonies a Day http://www.harveysilverglate.com/books/ In 2006, the Code of Laws of the United States of America: 200000 pages (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Code) with 500 pages/week it's about 10 years just to read it, i.e. to have a chance not breaking it (but this wrongly assumes that it's not growing meanwhile). In 2012: Federal Code: 75000 pages, Tax Code: 72000 pages.
The Criminalization of Everyday Life http://www.cryptogon.com/?p=42372 http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175781/
John Stossel's Illegal Everything https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBiJB8YuDBQ John Stossel - Technically, That's Illegal https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mf-uPAItVtM
“There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for me to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What’s there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed or enforced nor objectively interpreted – and you create a nation of law-breakers – and then you cash in on guilt.” — Ayn Rand (1905–1982), 'Atlas Shrugged' (1957)
Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal: War Stories from the Local Food Front by Joel Salatin https://www.amazon.com/Everything-Want-Do-Illegal-Stories/dp...
Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
Lets instead talk about the growing vigalante action by Flock corporation refusing to allow cities to remove cameras from their property after the contract is cancelled. Some cities have been forced to cover the cameras with trash bags.
https://www.404media.co/flock-objects-to-our-removing-their-...
https://www.wmtv15news.com/2026/06/05/dane-county-covers-flo...
Local politicians need to coordinate to remove their Flock cameras at the same time and pass laws to prevent any new one from being put up. Flock doesn't have the resources to sue every single one of them, especially if every city commits to dragging out the process for as long as possible by creating as many legal hurdles as they can, all of which Flock would have to have a court rule on.
Kind of like how practically every Scientologist filed suit against the IRS over CoS having their tax exempt status revoked, to which the IRS eventually relented.
It's also wild to me we live in a country where people who _live_ in a region are not allowed to make decisions about something as foul as surveillance cameras. If people who live, work, and are affected by these don't want them that should be the end of the conversation.
It should be to the people who live in an area to make decisions about it. With the legal ability to tell a company like Flock to fuck off.
If I were a city government, I would just start charging Flock rent.
That's probably federally illegal for some reason
They'll be gone the next day!
I think it should depend on what residents living in the street want with several tiers. Public cam, paywall, law enforcement 24/7 or for a specific case, encrypted court order only, fake cams.
Each with different aproval requirements. A public cam would require 100%. Fake cams req only one vote. etc
They’re hiring software engineers!
I think I may have a minority view about surveillance. At least I need someone to explain something to me.
Is the backlash really about privacy, or is the real problem a complete lack of trust in government?
Because if I thought someone would actually use the cameras to enforce the law, that's not actually such a bad outcome. You aren't supposed to speed, you aren't supposed to let your dog poop without cleaning up after it, and there's a bunch of other offences as well.
Why would I not support a hypothetical police that enforced these rules? Guy takes his dog for a walk, doesn't pick up, boom, cameras plus AI finds the person and issues a fine. Enforcing a social norm, cheaply. There seems to be evidence that it works with speeding: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/04/250402181306.h...
The kind of story that I've actually come across is that someone with access to the public database abuses it. They peek into their ex girlfriend's records, that kind of thing. Obviously nobody thinks that's ok, and I can understand if the main pushback people have is that none of the first thing will happen and lots of the second thing will happen. But that doesn't seem to address the principle itself.
So what exactly is the argument for why we shouldn't have cameras catching people who break the law? Presumably we would have no issue with a cop seeing someone breaking the law, and enforcing. The issue comes up when we replace the policeman with a system that is always on and way cheaper to run than a cop.
EDIT
Just to be clear, I understand it if people don't trust the government. What I'm looking for is an argument other than that. Thus far every response has been along the lines of "you can't trust the government to use this fairly/correctly".
That's known, everybody can see that argument.
I want to know if there's a reason beyond that why widespread surveillance shouldn't be a thing.
Our laws only work because of a hidden assumption that trivial or victimless crimes won't be prosecuted. This assumption isn't always upheld, but automatic surveilance would break it pretty much every time.
Even if our laws were actually written with perfect enforcement in mind, only outlawing what's actually antisocial, I don't think I could ever trust a government enough to give it that kind of power. Mass surveillance makes it easier to enforce any law, just or not, and most countries haven't been able to go even one lifetime without turning into a totalitarian hellhole or at least persecuting part of their population.
Another part of it may be that emigrating is so costly (not just in money) that most people won't ever be able to do it. When you're de facto forced to live in a country whose laws you (partly) disagree with, it's easier to add barriers to law enforcement than to get those laws changed.
Real world results are poor. I've gotten a ticket for not coming to a "full and complete stop" at an empty intersection at 2AM. I drove up to the corner extremely slowly instead. A $500 fine.
That tends to be people's experience with this sort of thing. Laws the police generally wouldn't bother enforcing are maximally enforced, because it generates revenue.
They got rid of that camera eventually because it was "too easy for people to get out of tickets", meaning they were getting tossed when people challenged them.
This answer might be US specific but one significant reason for the pushback (at least from me) is the centralizing force.
Generally the things cameras like that are good for enforcing are handled by local law enforcement. Probably at the city/county level, at most the state. So prior to Flock and their ilk, camera surveillance was used by local people in the community to enforce laws enacted by the community.
Flock enables that but also provides a nation wide, searchable database available to local and federal law enforcement. Recently SCOTUS ruled that broad geo-based warrants (law enforcement would ask Google for all devices in an area for a time frame) are illegal and overbroad.
A nationwide Flock network with facial recognition ends up in the same place of being able not only to enforce laws, but track people in a warrantless way.
Conceptually at least, this feels very similar to government attacks on encryption where a government wants to see and have access to everything without cause just in case, which is definitely at least in sprint opposed to the right of free association. Flock does the same kind of thing but in the physical world.
I also think a general computer security rule of thumb probably applies here, where for the best security/safety, trust should be provable. If trusting a human is required to make a system work correctly, the system is flawed.
All of that to say I don't think the majority of pushback is against enforcing laws by camera specifically, but a Panopticon-ness of it and all the downstream effects that causes.
At least for me, the technical chops to be able to program a computer was always just table stakes for software engineering.
The majority of my job more or less reduces to mitigating the consequences of having all the stakeholders dreams come true. Most normal people consider rules as run by people. They expect them to ignore rules that don't make sense, apply rule of thumb, get the gist, and do what it takes to achieve success.
When you take these sorts of rules and try to put them into silicon, the end result is often an undesirable result despite all the rules being successful implemented.
The law are these sorts of rules. They're designed to be "executed" by people using judgement. Part of the reason why the law works is specifically because we don't have a bunch of computers watching everyone all the time. Secure in your person and papers is literally right there in the constitution. Like they didn't know about computer surveillance when they added that amendment but they knew that without privacy the law doesn't work as intended.
Mass surveillance like Flock is basically one of systems you need to create low trust authoritarian country.
If you build it, they will come. Except this time it's gonna be authoritarian leaders.
Laws are not perfectly moral, and future laws might be even less so. Same goes for governments - their power should not outweigh the governed's.
You know how animals in captivity behave differently from animals living in the wild and why this is judged to be a bad thing for the animals? Humans under surveillance also act differently from free humans and it's a bad thing for the same reason.
It is in essence an attack on the human spirit.
>It is in essence an attack on the human spirit.
Although this is by no means a consensus view on the human spirit. Culture and civilization are in many ways simply what you describe, means of domesticating the human animal. It's quite loaded to assume everyone who isn't on board with the Taxi Driver view of the human spirit is 'bad'.
Another user points to the Panopticon which wasn't viewed as evil or 'dystopian'. It was thought of as a humane, progressive reform of prisons that does away with the violence and privation you had in prisons up until that time. In a lot of Confucian cultures that remains today, you don't find a lot of Koreans, Japanese or Chinese people who think law enforcement and surveillance is crushing the human spirit, they'd tell you these are tools to cultivate civilized human beings so you don't end up like monkeys in the banana factory.
I think this is reason enough. The US (and others) are turning a little more despotic and totalitarian every day. Imagine what they can do with such tools?
Same reason why for example banning encryption “to save the children” is laudable but it would weaken the ability to exchange messages privately so much that it’s unacceptable. The powers that be would very much like messages not to be private, partly because it would neuter any ability people would have to organize and challenge the current powers.
It’s unfortunate that giving up these cameras or the ban of encryption would also empower other types of crime but to most the trade-offs are too big and so we’d rather have stronger privacy at the cost of (potentially) a little more unpunished crime.
I'd like to point of the recent case where a women crossed state lines for reproductive healthcare and the local police used flock to track those movements and prosecute.
The cameras enable good and reasonable prosecutions as much as they do oppressive political ideologies.
> I want to know if there's a reason beyond that why widespread surveillance shouldn't be a thing.
See copypasta https://pastebin.com/GQBGWjv8 for full explanation of the four counter arguments below, too long to post here.
> > "You have nothing to fear" This is a very dangerous mindset. The argument is frequently raised in debates by pro-big brother hawks, and doing so is dangerous, cowardly and dishonest.
> > There are at least four good reasons to reject this argument solidly and uncompromisingly: the rules may change, it's not you who determine if you're guilty, laws must be broken for society to progress, and privacy is a basic human need.
> Guy takes his dog for a walk, doesn't pick up, boom, cameras plus AI finds the person and issues a fine.
In the 1980s depending on your jurisdiction there were some kind of sodomy or gross indecency law. Applying AI and surveillance to that. Guy goes for a walk, kisses his boyfriend, boom, cameras plus AI finds the person and issues a fine and/or jails them.
Most arguments boil down to not trusting current or future government because the government can commit violence against you, deprive you of liberty, or take away your possessions. With a combination of the rules may change, and it's not you who determines guilt.
From: https://www.sfu.ca/~palys/Solove-2011-TheNothingToHideArgume...
> > in Friedrich Durren-matt's novella Traps, which involves a seemingly innocent man put on trial by a group of retired lawyers for a mock trial game, the man inquires what his crime shall be. "'An altogether minor matter,' the prosecutor replied .... 'A crime can always be found."'
Dave Eggers' The Circle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Circle_(Eggers_novel) - also a movie - explores the concept of people going fully "transparent" effectively mass surveilling themselves
> Is the backlash really about privacy, or is the real problem a complete lack of trust in government?
Both.
Even if a hypothetical perfect police force could serve justice better with a panopticon, that is A.) not the police force that exists today, and 2.) who's to day that there won't be a worse government in X years that will use that panopticon and police force to be dicks?
The benefit of minor crimes being addressed today is very small compared to the potential disaster of tomorrow.
Its really about priorities. Public surveillance is something that is distracting from the real problem: Government/Corporate corruption. That needs to be handled before anything else. The fact that we are focusing on them putting in surveillance cameras instead of us working together to bring these criminal to justice proves that the distraction its working.
> Why would I not support a hypothetical police that enforced these rules?
Because such hypothetical police does not exist and cannot ever exist.
Humans are corrupted by power, basic human nature.
So if a system is staffed by humans, it must be designed to take human nature into account. It needs to be designed to be resilient against the flaws of human nature that will inevitably happen, such as corruption and bribery and self-interest.
There are many things that are technically illegal but arguably should not be.
For example, there's a small local park near me that serves as a handy shortcut between two different neighborhoods, but technically nobody is allowed to enter it between 11pm and 6am. The assumption is that if you're in a park during these hours, it must be for some nefarious purpose.
The problem with arguments like yours is the implied premise everyone must be surveilled because they are potential criminals who just haven't been caught yet, the exact opposite of the legal presumption of innocence and the founding values of the US (other countries' mores about the default moral state of humanity vary, of course). It's only a short leap from arguing that if everyone needs to be surveilled for everyone else's safety, then being surveillable by being out and about at the wrong time of day is itself suspicious, and that curfew should be the default.
Surprisingly, some 70-80% of US cities have curfew rules of some kind (usually against minors) and they're often ramped up significantly in response emergencies. Most other developed countries just don't have curfews. European countries have business regulations like barring minors from some businesses such as nightclubs, but US-style curfews do not exist. A Swiss town (interlaken) that voted to impose them had to hire private security guards because the police refused to enforce the rule. Curfews are somewhat common in developing nations like the Philippines and Thailand, but again don't really exist in developed nations in Asia. I didn't do an exhaustive global survery, but to my general knowledge the US is an outlier in this regard.
The fundamental problem with the curfew mentality is this assumption of malignity, and there's no end to it once you introduce it. Suppose we claim that crime has fallen since security cameras were deployed. And yet, there's still some crime and not all of it appears on our public camera network! It turns out quite a lot of crimes are committed in private. Maybe we should just put cameras inside people's homes - after all, why would anyone object...unless they wanted to commit crime? Maybe we should do away with warrants - they're time-consuming to apply for and create paperwork (we hate bureaucracy, don't we folks). Sure they're in the constitution, but haven't you noticed how people who insist on seeing a warrant always turn out to be the worst sort of people? Obviously innocent people would welcome the police into their home, and take pride in demonstrating their innocence. Why, I think most right-thinking folks would be prepared to sacrifice some of their own liberty if it meant catching just one extra criminal.
Lack of trust in government is a very American thing, to be sure. But the issue is they have now truly alienated pretty much all of the population for one reason or another. I used to think libertarians were crazy until we actually had government agents breaking, entering, and killing without warrants. Accountability is all we want. Surveillance with proper oversight is very much possible, but those in power are unwilling, so must be voted out.
Even if our current government is perfect, there's a misunderstanding of the argument here. When you argue for building vast surveillance infrastructure, you're not implicitly arguing the government is perfect. You're arguing every government, until the end of time, including hypothetical unknowable governments of the future, will be perfect.
And that argument is just really hard to defend, so much so that most people feel confident just dismissing it entirely.
I liked president Obama, now we have Trump. It's barely been over a decade. If this stuff was installed under president Obama, I would have protested it then, too. Even though I didn't foresee Trump. And we still don't know if this is "the end". The US could slip into a completely totalitarian fascist state. It's happened to many countries before.
It’s hard to parse this, it’s like asking, apart from the murdering, what’s wrong with murder?
There's a social norm that it's rude to follow someone around watching everything they do, and that the state shouldn't do it unless they have good reason to suspect that person of a crime.
1. If someone is running to a cop because someone didn’t pick up after their dog, that is a sad state of affairs.
2. If we are so interested in enforcing laws, what about all of the white collar crime, crypto scams, insider trading, and grifting off of the public sector? Clearly doing more harm to society than some dog poop. Where are the $8bn market cap companies that go around enforcing securities laws?
Congratulations, Flock, on establishing the most successful honeypot of all time!
No matter what the level of corruption, no matter which side of the surveillance state you support, no matter which side of the cameras you're on, Flock has a way to shine a spotlight on you and bring you out of the closet!
Currently following a YouTuber who knows all the roadside regulations for signposts and he points out how the Flock poles are all installed dangerously wrong, and will surely impale the next driver to crash out on the shoulder!
This one [0] by chance?
[0] https://youtube.com/@theguardrailguy
> Congratulations, Flock, on establishing the most successful honeypot of all time!
No way man that award goes to cloudflare
@theguardrailguy is great, love his work, highly recommend.
Related:
H.R.9800 - Protection Against Mass Surveillance Act - https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/9800...
Not to be too cynical but
>No Federal agency may purchase, deploy, operate, access, or contract for any automated surveillance system that identifies, tracks, or records individuals [. . .]
Emphasis mine.
Am I wrong or does this 1. not outlaw the purchase of the data, just the systems themselves, 2. not outlaw the use of the data unless it was obtained by the federal government through a system they have purchased, and 3. not outlaw local or state law enforcement from buying it, just outlaws the use of federal funds to buy these systems.
So flock feed the data through brokers instead of directly, correct? Or am I reading this wrong?
AFAICT, municipalities get paid to put up the cameras, which isn't federal, so flock can then use those cameras to freely gather data and sell it to police
> municipalities get paid to put up the cameras I've read lots of FOIAd flock contracts, and I have yet to see any municipality get paid by flock - they pay flock per-camera. Is that just a hunch, or are there cases of towns getting money from flock?
I appear to have misread some things. I'll have to re-research the stuff.
So they knock out Flock. Then Axon comes in and replaces them with superior versions, built into streetlights and municipal infrastructure. The sentiment seems reasonable but any expectations that our overlords will ever abandon total control and surveillance is delusional. Something far more sophisticated than vandalism would be necessary, and I'm not sure anything exists. The value of public opinion is at an all time low and scheduled to continue dropping.
Edit: Our society begged for a technocratic rulership. We largely supported the process through our hardware and software purchases, but facilitated it too through decades of indolence and indifference until it got kinda too late. Aside from a few micro victories, mostly more symbolic than effective, I think the future is easily enough foreseen by imagining something a lot worse.
Undecided on Flock.
Totally decided against vandalism. Violations of the social contract suck.
Edit to invite explanations. If you approve of vandalism to flock cameras, what are your feelings about vandalizing abortion clinics, mosques or opposition political headquarters?
Social contract also includes the expectation that, over all, businesses work for the benefit of society, not its detriment.
I would also ask, what are your feelings on vandalizing concentration camps? It's about authoritarian control, not bodily autonomy, or religious freedom.
Flock is definitely not the only provider of this kind of surveillance. What is the real reason that this is getting so much media attention?
Most are targeted ALPR camera systems that take pictures of license plates, check the plates against local hot lists, and then flush the data if there’s no hit.
Flock is building a giant camera network that records people’s comings and goings across the nation and maintains those records despite any link to crime for an indeterminate amount of time.
The other players like Axon and Motorola are looking to follow Flock's lead, but mass surveillance is the main problem.
I think Flock might be a "limited hangout" to distract from much more powerful surveillance technology.
There have been systems designed & deployed that make ALPRs look like kittens.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARGUS-IS
Don't touch Americans' cars. Notice how more people die from cars than guns and there's no outcry.
Trends are random. This one has a large underlying informed group, deflock, centered in a Discord server. It then became common internet opinion to be opposed to it.