What did they think would happen? Installing surveillance systems to monitor people is acceptable, as long as they're only used against the majority? I don't understand the logic here.
The police chiefs are usually the ones pushing the initiative. Have you ever voted for a police chief in your life?
In several other cities it has also led to all kinds of resistance by city councils and mayors in what can only be called an odd resistance against its own populace and constituents.
At least it seems that maybe something good will come of it when local people get more engaged and pay more attention and maybe even run for office against the corrupt narcissists of society that usually hold offices in local politics because people have not paid attention for a very long time.
Do you know your sheriff? Your city/county council members? The city manager? The mayor?
When you look at the deflock.me map and are astonished at how many cameras there are, you can thank people not paying attention in local politics and who their sheriff is, and you can thank the traitors at YC leadership who brought about this Orwellian system.
That's because the local authorities aren't the final customer. The final customer is the federal government, they want allllll the data.
Many times this isn't misleading, per se, but nudge nudge wink wink. "We trust you to follow your own data privacy policy. It's not our job to police how access to your data is configured." In Washington, for example, there is data that LE cannot collect, and LE cannot pay someone to collect directly for them to bypass that...
... but if someone just so happens to ALREADY be collecting it, they can pay to access it.
This type of use and expansion of scope was totally foreseeable by anyone paying attention to history. It always starts as some targeted thing, then it becomes the path of least resistance for similar subsequent things as the barrier to entry is extremely low.
This new technology will improve existing procedures. How can you oppose it?
This new procedure will use existing technologies. How can you oppose it?
But I guess if you elect judges pretty much all bets are off, no? Just find yourself a card carrying MAGA judge willing to sign off.
This is not at all comparable to appointed judges in other countries, where politicians usually don't have any input on the appointment process. Usually they are chosen by the current judges at that level, or by an entity like a bar association.
After all, how can you have a Trias Politica if the three branches aren't independent?
Appointment is the most common method of selecting lower- and higher-court judges in common-law countries, and for supreme and constitutional courts in civil- and mixed-system countries. In most countries, this appointment is by the executive, but there are systems that assign the minister of justice and members of the judiciary a role in the appointment process.[1]
If the public wants to make life miserable for a certain class it will be done. Democracy and the rule of law only exists by the will of the people.
So the judiciary is completely isolated from external accountability?
I do not see how this is a superior approach.
According to the article, it was foreseen. But the people who brought it up were ignored.
This is the most foreseeable consequence I can imagine. It’s up there with “When I throw this baseball where will it land?”. It shouldn’t even require conscious thought.
Redmond is under no obligation to assist them.
Specifically interesting is the section "State and local law enforcement agencies may not provide nonpublicly available personal information about an individual..." which puts police in a bind with Flock data: if the data is public, anyone can request it (including ICE) and they have to provide it to all comers. If they declare it not to be subject to public records request, then they also can't share it with ICE -- which is outside their control in practice, since Flock independently sells access to AI summaries of the data. In the face of this contradiction, turning the things off seems to be the only way to stay legal until the courts get done chewing on this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi
Back in a day, you did not have cameras yet, so one had to hire snitches. Luckily this is not the case anymore, as demonstrated by Chinese leading by an example:
Kinda funny if you think about it, the snitches are cut from the same cloth as the people clamoring for more cameras, more jackboot. If anything they should be pissed about being cut out.
Seems like something virtually everyone believes, and all that changes is where they draw the line of balance between intrusion and safety.
This is called "Salamitaktik" in Germany.
This new procedure will use existing technologies. How can you oppose it?
Don't forget the part where the useful idiots cheer because "I hate street racers and package thieves" or "I hate cults and drugs" depending on the decade
Stop acting like they're using the dragnet in the interest of the citizenry. They're not.
Then the data can be used for other purposes--no line prevents this.
So clearly we're allowed more nuanced takes than you think.
Not exactly true. This happened after the arrests and won't affect those arrests. This also doesn't prevent ICE from installing and using Flock cameras on federal properties (like the post offices). I would also bet that they could still comb the existing data if they wanted to, hence the shutdown of the cameras on the fear that they can't keep the data safe.
https://www.nwprogressive.org/weblog/2025/11/a-preliminary-v...
They're installing them in my mom's apartment complex after a vote.
Because im willing to bet a lot of answers would change when they knew the answer to those questions.
It might not even take that long, at the rate we're progressing.
There is no such thing as avoiding this trade off entirely.
Even today, it's not necessarily hypocritical for someone to argue that states should do more X while the federal government should do less X.
No, you've got it half-backwards.
He's saying the democratic legislature shouldn't forever give up the citizens' collective Liberty to tax the ultra-mega-rich (Penns) in exchange for a one-time Security payment from those rich near-nobles.
https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famou...
It's like saying I'm hypocritical for loving to write with pencils but being offended when someone else stabs me with one.
> Bro, you said you liked pencils, make up your mind!
This shit was wholly foreseeable but they flew right into the sun, not too close to it, right the fuck into it, because they just couldn't stop lusting after the idea of sending the jackboot after someone for a crime that amounts to petty deviance (I'd like to say they were using it to go after petty thieves, but we all know they weren't doing that).
People are allowed to leverage trust in society to make tradeoffs. Or should we ban all forms of delivery because it can be abused at the extremes of the system to mug the drivers? Should every single store have every product locked behind glass and armed guards to light up any shoplifters, lest it be their fault for being robbed?
You're acting like they should have known the President would take complete control of the government and all other branches should cede while a Gestapo was deployed against the populace. And even then, they would only be buying time. The fascists will install their own mass surveillance anyway whether you like it or not. They're fascists!
Maybe blame every Republican and Republican voter for installing a fascist government instead of a city that had the audacity to think they could leverage stability to make their lives a little better.
And, for what it's worth, I know folk here like to pretend "this is just to spy on you", but that's just your rhetoric. The city doesn't care about where you go. But this kind of data is used frequently rape and murder cases, as traffic cameras are often some of the best evidence available. And the analytics collecter can be useful for all sorts of civil engineering, policy, and architectural decisions.
Now do I agree with the mass surveillance? Do I think the motivations were entirely pure? No, not really. But do I think you're being a bit of a drama queen and blaming the wrong people? Absolutely.
People should know Germany was a republic before the Nazis took control.
Karen (I actually have spicier thoughts about exactly who's at fault here but "Karen" will have to do) who provided the political will to set up the cameras is not the victim here.
Her hapless landscaper (or whatever) is the victim.
This was not unforeseeable. This was playing with fire. For years we build up the police state's capabilities and made it VERY cheap to run (with all these cameras and whatnot). Something like this was unenviable. If not the feds going whole hog on something that some states didn't agree with it would likely have been some states doing their own similar thing in some other policy area. Every government accountability group, every privacy group, they've been screeching for years. It's not like every warning wasn't sounded.
>The city doesn't care about where you go. But this kind of data is used frequently rape and murder cases, as traffic cameras are often some of the best evidence available.
This is a BS red herring. "serious" crime has been very solvable for years with cell location data, metadata, private security cameras, etc. But all that takes "work" (read: nontrivial amounts of money and labor the expenditure of which must be authorized and somewhat justifiable), a single unaccountable bureaucrat can't do all the heavy lifting of determining who to dispatch the boots on the ground to go after from the comfort of their desk
The entire purpose of the government having these systems like Flock is exactly what it's being used for. It's so that the .gov can still do jackboot things (like round up illegals, or whatever) without the oversight of Amazon, Verizon, etc, (companies with public images they care about) saying "hey man, this is too much, we don't like the look for our business" and pushing back. The only reason we're even hearing a peep is any strife here is because the local governments interests aren't aligned with the feds.
The city doesn't care where "I" go until I check the right (wrong) boxes and then they'll be waiting for the chance to harass me. The government didn't "care" until something flipped, and then the .gov was all over them. The same is true for you and everyone else.
And yes I'm being sloppy with with my wording and my reasoning, I could not be, but I don't really care to write to that high a standard.
"I don't respect facts I don't like" is not a very respectable point of view and makes me not want to engage at all.
> with cell location data, metadata, private security cameras, etc
I'm sure you'd argue that the government should have access to all of that data and it could never be used for "jackbooting"?
EDIT: Even if you did genuinely support all that, you're doing exactly what this city did! Making a subjective judgement call about where to put the proverbial line, but still giving the government the ability to use this data because you value its ability to benefit us / provide safety guarantees.
All that data can just as easily be stolen and abused by a fascist government.
> It's so that the .gov can still do jackboot things (like round up illegals, or whatever)
You are quite literally posting in the context of TFA about them turning them off explicitly because they did not intend them to be used for "jackboot things". FFS.
The police (local or federal) don't have integrations with private CCTV, historical location data, etc, etc. When they want that stuff they have to email someone, ask someone, have a reason, maybe even get a warrant, etc. Heck, even to snoop on someone's facebook they create a paper trail going through the law enforcement portal This is not a big deal for "real crime" but for stuff the public doesn't actually support serious enforcement of it's a big PITA, creates a risky paper trail they don't fully control, there's potential oversight, etc. All that constrains how far they can go without local public support.
Being able to just "go fishing" from your desk like you can with Flock (and to a lesser extent Ring), like the NSA can with all our emails and metadata, etc, etc, and all that other 1984 type dragnet stuff, is a categorical difference and nobody should have that power.
Of all the poor thinking and rhetorical skills out there, the one that drives me the craziest is this insistence that ignoring context is not just acceptable but essential.