Flock CEO calls Deflock a “terrorist organization” (2025) [video]
youtube.com
youtube.com
https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/privacy/2026/02/flock-came... > A separate “statewide lookup” feature had also been active on 29 of the city’s 30 cameras since the initial installation, running for 17 straight months until Mountain View found and disabled it on January 5. Through that tool, more than 250 agencies that had never signed any data agreement with Mountain View ran an estimated 600,000 searches over a single year, according to local paper the Mountain View Voice, which first uncovered the issue after filing a public records request.
A different town (Staunton, VA) also turned of their Flock installs after their CEO sent out an email claming:
https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/flock-ceo-goes-... > The attacks aren't new. You've been dealing with this for forever, and we've been dealing with this since our founding, from the same activist groups who want to defund the police, weaken public safety, and normalize lawlessness. Now, they're producing YouTube videos with misleading headlines.
In fact, if anyone knows of municipalities that have done so let me know. I'd like to spend tourist money in those places that I haven't been able to spend in authoritarian-leaning locales as a reward for valuing freedom over suffocation of the constitution for little to no benefit.
Hows that for taking no as an answer? My god, we are in big trouble if this is going to be a regular thing. IMHO we need to shut this country down.
[0]: https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/09/29/after-evanston-fir...
After the city deactivated the existing cameras, Flock got caught putting more up. The city terminated their contract with Flock for material breach.
Santa Clara County (which includes MV) seems on the precipice of doing the same
Evanston, IL found them to be in violation of state privacy laws and disabled them in Sep.
In Eugene, OR the police tried to disable them in December but Flock turned them back on
Here is a map of upcoming city council meetings in the US where Flock surveillance will be discussed: https://alpr.watch/
> The company took down 15 of the 18 stationary cameras by Sept. 8, only to reinstall all of them by Tuesday. This was apparently without authorization from city officials, who sent Flock a cease-and-desist order to take them back down. [1]
> Flock CEO Garrett Langley released a statement ... where he writes that “some of our public statements inadvertently provided inaccurate information” about the company’s relationship with federal law enforcement, confirming that there were “limited pilots” with agencies under the U.S. Department of Homeland Security focused on “combatting human trafficking and fentanyl distribution.” [2]
L O fucking L
[1] https://evanstonroundtable.com/2025/09/25/city-covers-up-flo...
[2] https://evanstonroundtable.com/2025/08/26/evanston-shuts-dow...
INTERVIEWER: Surveillance is becoming more prevalent everywhere. There's an organization called Deflock that's become fairly well-known in activist circles. They take an aggressive approach—counting cameras and maintaining a Discord channel where they discuss potential activities to move against surveillance expansion and stop organizations like Flock. What's your perspective on this organization and their methods?
FLOCK CEO: I see two distinct groups of activists here. There are organizations like the ACLU and the EFF that take an above-board approach to fighting for their viewpoint. We're fortunate to live in a democratic, capitalistic country where we can fight through the courts. I have a lot of respect for those groups because they engage in reasonable debate while following the law.
FLOCK CEO: Unfortunately, there are also what I'd call terroristic organizations like Deflock, whose primary motivation appears to be chaos. They're closer to Antifa than anything else. That's disappointing because I don't want chaos - I value law and order and a society built on safety.
FLOCK CEO: For those groups, I think it's regrettable they haven't chosen a more constructive approach to achieve their goals. They do have the right to their views, but that's why we have a democratically elected process. We're not forcing Flock on anyone. Elected officials understand that communities and families want safety, and Flock is the best way to create safe communities.
INTERVIEWER: Deflock probably wouldn't agree with the "terroristic" label you've applied to them, but...
----
Yeah. "They have a right to their views" buuut also, they are terrorists, and implicitly therefore deserve to have their freedom taken away because of said views. So giving the public a map of flock cameras and organizing to advocate against these being used in our communities is terroristic, I suppose. There's one party here that should be in jail here. Seems like that ought to be the creeps that are filming everyone against their consent, but I guess that makes me a terrorist...
so at the very beginning, the thing that threatens him the most is: simple ideas that sound objective and that make Gary Tan wary of putting $50m instead of $25m.
that said, very few things do that, bring "unseen crime" from N to 0. for example, legalization of something does that! he has found a very successful business nonetheless. it's more interesting to explore why. if he wanted to level constructive criticism at Deflock, i suppose we should wonder: how do they disrupt enterprise sales? flock is just, yet another failed IT project. it shouldn't be too hard. obviously, the best thing you can do is getting elected, and simply putting it in the law to not adopt the technology.
Well I think this is the issue. The value of Flock is not what it says on the tin, it's everything else. Solving petty crimes yeah sure, yadda yadda. Ever had your bike stolen and told a cop about it?
It's the tracking part. That's where the juice is. Well obviously it'd violate the 4th amendment to slap a GPS tracker on your car to see if you're going to [known antifa member's] house - we'd never do that, but gee, this private company just happens to have a database of everywhere every person's car has ever been ...
how do you figure? everyone already has a perfect tracker carried around with them at all times, a cell phone. and i suppose, if someone is smart enough to not visit a thing with a phone, he'll be smart enough to not use a car, so... do you see what i mean? it still boils down to, "the technology is not really as good as it says it is." i mean i know that you say that it's not, it is. It is all about what it says on the tin.
That's enterprise sales. People have to stop making it about cerebral, academic political stuff. If municipalities understood that Flock is a waste of money, they wouldn't adopt it.
While Google and Apple may be hesitant, what are your thoughts about AT&T or Verizon?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2026/02/03/hom...
A nice “grab their data” button for the current administration.
https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/dhs-is-circumve...
Bonus, no amount of jailbreaking or trickery can get around the fact that if your baseband chip is connected to the network, they have your rough location.
Aggressive? Any more passive and it would be nil!
And millions nod along.
Reality writes great satire.
so publishing the location of cameras is chaos? also, Antifa's goal is chaos? wtaf?
> We're not forcing Flock on anyone.
except that Flock put cameras back up when cities cancelled their contracts and took them down; that sounds like forcing to me
At this point, I'm planning to tattoo my "terrorist" affidavit on my arm, assuming i survive the encounter after filming ICE through my window next time they tear gas a child in front of my house (which they did do, here in Chicago, but i don't want to be more specific than that for obvious reasons)
The nazi's did the same shit, claiming they had to do what they did because of "degeneracy" from the weimer republic.
... and the one with more capital has an outsized chance of winning - which is us. <insert evil laughter>
Translation: we're fortunate enough we can buy the courts, brainwash the populous, and crush all legalistic opposition; but even with all that might, we can't yet hunt down every last of you painting over our spewing camera network.
Make of this what you will and adjust your methods accordingly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_SxlRQhHOA&list=RDZD8N9tDDQT4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vzXHhRBLnA&list=RDTgoAgYR4584
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHCg47cWIUc&list=RDXHCg47cWIUcSome real-world examples of "the whole being greater than the sum of its parts":
- If your plate and another person's plate consistently show up at the same locations at the same times, that's evidence of a relationship. Now multiply that across everyone. You can map social networks, figure out who's meeting with who, identify affair partners, figure out who attends the same AA meeting every Tuesday.
- Regular trips to a mosque, a church, a union hall, a gun range, a protest staging area, a political campaign office. No single trip is meaningful, but the pattern over months tells you someone's affiliations and beliefs.
- Repeated visits to an oncology clinic, a methadone clinic, a fertility specialist, a psychiatrist's office. That's health information that would normally be protected under HIPAA if obtained through medical channels.
- When you leave for work, when you come home, what routes you take, when your house is empty. This is exactly the kind of information a stalker would want, and it's sitting in a database that (depending on the jurisdiction) may have minimal access controls.
The key point is that none of these individual observations are particularly sensitive. It's the longitudinal aggregation that transforms mundane location data into an intimate portrait of someone's life. And importantly, that portrait exists for essentially every driver, not just people under investigation.
You could argue that the 4th Amendment constrains state action, not corporate behavior. But it's not like Flock is collecting this data for some independent commercial purpose and the government occasionally subpoenas it. The product is government surveillance, just privatized. Outsourcing surveillance to a private contractor to avoid 4th Amendment scrutiny is arguably worse than the government doing it directly, because it bypasses the oversight mechanisms that keep the government in check (or at least, are supposed to do so).
And it's ironic because there are clearly "real terrorists" (i.e. 9/11 guys).
It is pretty informative, even in the dramatic context of the show, to see police interactions and the respect for / erosion of individual rights when you view the seasons before 9/11/2001 and after 9/11/2001.
The cast of 24 was brought to run a panel for the Heritage Foundation in one of their gatherings.
It was a different world when you were a kid. People weren’t as incendiary in their speech.
Louis CK has a good bit on this https://youtu.be/VrpKQ0ISZl4?si=7IcugNOccB6m7LET&t=93
"...and then unfortunately there is terroristic organizations like DeFlock, whose primary motivation is chaos. They are closer to Antifa than they are anything else."
"We're not forcing Flock on anyone..."
It is a short 1:32 video, I encourage people to watch it for themselves.
I thought DeFlock was just publishing locations of cameras and lawfully convincing local governments to not use Flock, primarily through FOIA requests.
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/weakness-strongmen-step...
So they just said "These people are anti-fascist and this is a bad thing"
Aren't authoritarians great.
A: "Hey guys, I think think this PATRIOT act thing is bad"
B: "Wait, you're saying patriots are bad? What are you, some sort of seditious non-patriot?"
If Antifa’s record speaks for itself, then you don’t need to play these kinds of word games. If some CEO spoke unflatteringly of The Red Cross or Habitat For Humanity, that would say more about them than anything, not because they have virtuous sounding names (though they admittedly do) but because they’ve established a specific track record of public service.
If Flock's reputation spoke for itself, their CEO wouldn't have to play these kind of legal games.
But I _do_ know that when someone tags someone as "antifa" they are making a political statement and aligning themselves with a certain group that perceives "antifa" a certain way. "See, I hate those damn' antifa terrorists, I'm in the same camp as you! Please help my company make money!"
I'm deeply curious why you think someone would identify as an anti-fascist if they were not, in fact, anti-fascist. Do you think they just really like the flag logo or...?
Identifying as anti-fascist in the current environment, if anything, confers suspicion.
> If some CEO spoke unflatteringly of The Red Cross or Habitat For Humanity,
Those are organizations. "Antifa" is a descriptive term that many people and organizations use, whether they have connections to one another or not. What is the comparison you are trying to draw here?
> If Antifa’s record speaks for itself, then you don’t need to play these kinds of word games.
You are using the possessive here, "Antifa's", in a way that seems grammatically incorrect to me.
"Antifa" is usually an adjective, but sometimes a known, like "vegan" or "blonde". Saying "if blonde's record speaks for itself", it seems like obviously broken English.
Usually you'd use this phraseology to describe a person or organization, "Joe's record", "Nabisco's record", etc.
What is the entity or entities whose record(s) you are trying to describe?
How's this different than say how "alt right" is pejoratively used by the left?
On the AltRight side people might point to, say, Steven Miller and his Nazi adjacent statements, or to Nick Fuentes and the Groypers, or to Andrew Anglin and The Daily Stormer for more trad. Nazi views.
To be honest I'm not entirely sure what the leading antifa groups in central north america might be.
But plenty of people will say that they are traditional conservatives, and say "I'm not alt-right". Virtually nobody describes their own political views by saying "I'm not anti-fascist."
> So they just said "These people are anti-violence and anti-hate and this is a bad thing"
(Frankly, our political situation is rife with insanity. I think the hotheads across the political spectrum need more nous and less thumos.)
"Despite the name, Antifa is not just 'anti-fascist' but is actually _________"
What goes in the blank?
And anyone from the OTHER group is the enemy. Stop thinking, you have arrived to the conclusion. Now, here are some news ... I mean, entertainment, to make you fear them more.
[1] https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2026/02/antifa-safehouse...
I see I have to spell things out for you. It is of no relevance whether Antifa is a formalized organization with formal membership. That's why it's called an ANALOGY. You seem to have confused analogy with univocity...which is precisely what analogy is not. The essential point, which you seem to have missed by a mile, is that labels are irrelevant. That "Antifa" comes from "anti-fascist" tells me very little, if anything, about what the movement is actually, empirically about: what its principles actually are, what political ends it seeks to achieve, what means it uses to achieve them, and so on. The fact that the movement is informal actually makes the actions more relevant in characterizing and judging the movement, regardless of the label it uses.
In summary: the name given to a thing tells me nothing certain about the thing, and I would think this would be obvious to anyone.
Pointing out the "socialist" in NSDAP or whatever is idiotic. Just because they used the same word later used by other people doesn't equate both. You can't say the Spanish socialist party is racist because they happen to use the word also used by the Germans 100 years ago.
The other slight of hand you're doing is reification - talking about an abstract concept as if it were concrete. Again, where is the national hq of Antifa? You can't tell me because there isn't one. And that is because it is not a single, organized movement.
When people like you say they are anti antifa, it doesn't take a lot of IQ to read between the lines. You don't need there to be a single formal entity to fight against because you are not against a concrete, specific movement. You are against the idea of anti fascism.
Although at odds with the official narrative of your country, this is hardly surprising or unprecedented. The US has a long and rich history of being anti anti fascist, or more simply, pro fascist.
> Pointing out the "socialist" in NSDAP or whatever is idiotic.
Where did I make this claim exactly? In fact, the essence of your claim here agrees with mine. The label does not give us a certain picture of the thing labeled.
> The other slight of hand you're doing is reification - talking about an abstract concept as if it were concrete. Again, where is the national hq of Antifa? You can't tell me because there isn't one. And that is because it is not a single, organized movement.
What? Reification has no relevance here. I never made any comment about the institutional status of the movement. Of course, for "Antifa" to have any meaning, it must refer to something, right? My only remark concerned the relation between label and labeled. I was criticizing a fallacious inference from the former to the latter.
> When people like you say they are anti antifa, it doesn't take a lot of IQ to read between the lines. You don't need there to be a single formal entity to fight against because you are not against a concrete, specific movement. You are against the idea of anti fascism.
What truly bizarre remark. Calling this projection would be an understatement. Perhaps log off social media? I didn't say anything about my personal stance w.r.t. "Antifa" (whatever you mean by that). AGAIN, my comment was a correction of the earlier claim that because "Antifa" stands for "antifascism", it follows that whatever falls under the name of "Antifa" is antifascist. This is called the nominal fallacy. That's it. The rest is your baggage, I'm afraid. And frankly, it is comical to hear someone claim that if they're against "Antifa", you must be against "anti-fascism", whatever that means, given how ignorant of the meaning of the word "fascism" so many are who throw around that term.
> Although at odds with the official narrative of your country, this is hardly surprising or unprecedented. The US has a long and rich history of being anti anti fascist, or more simply, pro fascist.
You don't know what my country is. You might be surprised by the truth. (FYI, my family suffered under a brutal double occupation, by both a certain fascist state, and by a certain socialist/communist state. Chew on that.) You know nothing about me, but you certainly presume a good deal and have placed me in a box in your intellectually impoverished worldview. Your views are childish and shallow, full of weird personal attacks; I suggest you try to enrich yourself instead of lazily absorbing what is clearly an unsophisticated and emotionally unhinged ideological stance. You don't have to fall prey to the insane cultural and political patterns and paradigms of our times.
>calm down and knock off the puerile snark.
There was no "snark" or personal attack on my first comment, unlike yours, which is now just eristic and name-calling.
My mistake on assuming you were an American, I apologize (neither am I) - you did write "Frankly, our political situation is rife with insanity" though, and this is a topic about something happening in the US.
My point is that Americans tend to fabricate a concrete Antifa (which does not exist as a single entity) so that they can use it as a proxy to attacking the idea itself. It is not yet acceptable to be openly pro-fascism, but it is very much acceptable to be against terrorism, which is how the US government classifies Antifa ("Domestic Terrorist Organization ").
So you got my point backwards: I'm not saying that these people are pro-fascism because they are anti-Antifa, I'm saying many Americans are already pro-fascism, and a politically acceptable way to express that today is by being anti-antifa -- which does not mean that _all_ people against specific Antifa-related groups are pro-fascist.
You don't even need to use examples that westerners find polarizing because they want to minimize or maximize their badness for political reasons.
Africa is full of factions with grand names doing less than grand things that nobody here has any attachmennt to and do not cause complexities when comparing to.
Yes, but they are illustrative, because apparently, some people have a problem understanding that labels don't necessarily reflect the thing labeled. African factions are too foreign for most Westerners to appreciate the analogy. But if that helps someone understand what should be an obvious principle for any adult, then that's great.
Terrorist. Racist. Colonist. Fascist. Historically-rooted and precise terms that are collectively decohering in a self-amplifying and propagating way as everyone feels increasingly free to detach more and more words from their original meanings.
[0] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/umberto-eco-ur-fasci...
Didn't say that. I'm saying I've seen the term thrown around wildly to apply to all manner of things. Like the other terms.
The term is probably fundamentally fucked. If you asked Hitler if he's a Nazi, he'd say yes. If you asked Mussolini if he's a Fascist, he'd say yes. These were the words they used to describe themselves. The reason I'm describing the phenomenon versus blaming the folks using the terms broadly is because I don't think this is a personal failing by anyone as much as something that's linguistically happening.
Valid. This is a real linguistic process. But it absolutely debases the original term. I’m not convinced we have to choose between empathy, on one hand, and accuracy, on the other hand.
So our desire for word-correctness should be tempered by our desire for word-utility.
How many of those people who got called Nazis are now fighting against the administration's lawless crackdown?
George Orwell - What is Fascism? https://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/e...
A former partner's mother was once called a liberal or a democrat for something minor, I forget what now possibly asking for a tip, and her response was "No sir, I'm a communist".
I'm never actually delved too deeply into the mother's political views, but my ex herself was openly, explicitly, literally, a communist.
(For various reasons, even though said ex is American by birth, I suspect her well-documented politics may now cause me difficulty entering the USA were I to attempt it).
My Polish-German godmother asked me, as a kid, "who would you hide."
I didn't get the question. And 6-year old me wasn't ready for Holocaust with grandma. But it comes back to me from time to time.
Who would you hide. Who would you stake your wealth and life on to keep from undeserved suffering. The stickers are good. But they only mean something if you're willing to fight for them. At least in America, I'm unconvinced most sticker-toters are willing to sacrifice anything. (It's what makes Minnesota and Texas different.)
Some geniuses proudly, openly self describe as anti antifa. Guess what that double negation makes you?
Are some people who call themselves antifa secretly fascists? I'm sure they are. So?
If a loose-knit ideology/movement called "Anti-Rapists" emerged that evolved into a cohort of various disconnected thugs who targeted homosexuals for violence, would being Anti-"Anti-Rapist" make you a supporter of rapists or rapist-adjacent supporter?
Obviously, in the scenario you describe, people will continue describe themselves as "anti-rapist" and everybody will understand that they mean that they are opposed to rape.
There is no "loose-knit ideology/movement" called "antifa" - there are groups like SDS and Don't Shoot PDX and a zillion others who describe themselves as "antifa", using it as an adjective. I'm aware of no person or organization who has attempted to proclaim that they are the one true antifa org.
Leading isolated cells by social media is the new techique to cause change/chaos (depending on your viewpoint).
The right's play wasn't to invent antifa from the whole close, but to imply that those kinds of views are universal or nearly so among people who call themselves that.
(To be fair, it doesn't help that the historical antifa, i.e. KPD's Antifaschistische Aktion, considered social democrats to be its enemies, calling them "social fascists". It boggles my mind that anyone on the left who isn't a hardline Marxist-Leninist would adopt the name for themselves given its history.)
Antifa is an adjective that people with no connection to one another self-apply. I'm antifa, and I imagine you are too, but it doesn't mean that we've ever met or coordinated with one another in any meaningful way.
The word "antifa" is basically meaningless altogether, since virtually every person since the end of WW2 claims to oppose fascism.
But it's not about meanings of words with these people. It's about exercising power. Facts and logic don't matter.
It's obvious that the vast, overwhelming majority of people consider themselves anti-fascist. So I really don't think it possible for this term to ever actually describe a particular group of people, excluding other groups of people.
These attempts to shoehorn the word "antifa" into some kind of distinct organization seem like they are just a lingual change to make it more difficult to use this phrase, or more difficult to advance critiques of fascist tendencies wherever they may appear.
It's not. Antifa is just a shortened form of the word anti-fascist. Anyone can call themselves antifa. And typically, only people who view themselves as fighting fascism call themselves antifa.
In short, saying "antifa are the real fascists" is like saying "vegetarians are the real meat eaters". It doesn't make sense.
Antifascism is just a political stance. It's shared by a wide range of disparate people who have nothing to do with each other. Just like vegetarianism is just the practice of not eating meat.
What does being anti-vegetarianism say about one's stance towards meat eating? Sure, you can look at any one guy or specific group of people who call themselves vegetarian, be against them for reasons unrelated to vegetarianism, and that doesn't say anything about your stance towards meat-eating. But being broadly anti-vegetarian?
...What does being broadly anti-antifascism say about one's stance towards fascism?
> Every faction in Africa calls themselves by these noble names - Liberation this, Patriotic that, the Democratic Republic of something-or-other... I guess they can't own up to what they usually are: the Federation of Worse Oppressors than the Last Bunch of Oppressors. Often, the most barbaric atrocities occur when both combatants proclaim themselves Freedom Fighters.
So no, it doesn't just mean "anti-fascist".
And that they're sharing their data with other non-local agencies (eg. ICE as it stands) without a warrant? That's outrageous, IMHO.
https://ij.org/issues/ijs-project-on-the-4th-amendment/
This Project includes work to fight technologies such as Flock's in the courts:
https://ij.org/issues/ijs-project-on-the-4th-amendment/licen...
I've always felt good contributing to IJ and the topic and takes in the posted video are precisely why I do so.
Definition of terrorism is:
the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.
couldn't be further apart from that.
>> “I was stunned to learn late yesterday that after convening a task force of local and national experts, Mayor Johnston has been negotiating secretly with the discredited CEO of Flock Safety and signing another unilateral extension of this mass surveillance contract with no public process and no vote from the City Council or input from his own task force,” Councilmember Sarah Parady told The Denver Gazette.
There are tens of millions of people pirating software and media and blocking ads. There are not enough prisons to hold them all so the law is not enforceable at that scale.
Likewise there have always been and will always be effective non violent forms of resistance with sufficient systems of coordination and communication, because the public is always larger in number than the oppressors.
LOL. Love that. You got to have a better attitude if you want to fight the system my friend.
When it benefits me.
This guy gives all villain vibes you see in futuristic movies, funny how he resembles a young version of “Fletcher” in minority report movie, a movie about mass surveillance to provide a “safer community” to all.
Flock btw isn’t just an ALPR, it is a car finger printing technology, I have seen some videos of police IDing cars with no plates and they knew the owner by using flock cams.
Everything about his body language screams, "I'm doing something slimy and I know it, but here, listen to these words spoken authoritatively whilst I wave my hands around and forget about it."
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
Even if hypothetically speaking you could support volunteers to follow them around and film them, I would think the asymmetry of resources would practically make it impossible. It's not about privacy, it's about wealth. Take their wealth away and then they'll actually have to live the way they tell you to. They don't care because they don't live in the world they are creating, you do.
Would he be happy with this, or would he become a "terrorist" by objecting?
I've also been on the receiving end of secret Federal subpoenas for private user information at a YC backed startup. They include gag orders and management does not question the orders - they simply comply. It happens more often than you think.
However you feel about the current administration, imagine this power in the hands of the other.
Flock isn't American in any sense of the word. We should work in our communities, through legal, procedural, and civil means to eliminate these terrible, terrible cameras. The cost is much worse than the benefits on offer.
That's how you know the DeFlock strategy is effective. They aren't playing the game that the CEO wants to play, they are playing the actual game. The actual game is minimizing the impact of cameras that are now everywhere.
Some individuals may take it upon themselves to vandalize the cameras, which can't be planned via conspiracy (that would be illegal), but those radical individuals can be "set up for success" through information. This strategy of creating an environment where effective vandalism is easy, is also part of the actual game.
I've never heard about Deflock, but your tantrum motivated me to know it. And I like it!
But the best part are the implications: it is ok for Flock to spy people, it isn't ok for people to spy Flock.
In the Netherlands the municipality would remove all the cameras; and the national authorities would fine the company into the ground and arrest key persons.
In Belgium much the same, except multiple overlapping authorities would tear it apart.
Germany would dissolve the company, destroy their data, hunt down many of the employees for criminal conspiracy; and the Bundestag would hear of it. Germany has... experience. [1]
[1] Depending on legal theory. I'm going for the good old 'and we're going to put them in prison for 200 years' worst case scenario. ;-)
My state (WA) is currently trying to pass a bill that places considerable restrictions on Flock - not an outright ban, but limits on data sharing, how long data can be retained etc; really basic stuff that you'd think wouldn't be controversial. So far as I can tell, every single LEO organization in the state is vocally against it.
- “law and order” is “good”, when _de facto_ most of constitution is not being applied for a year and laws or court orders are applied selectively. Not to say that “law and order” is vastly different depending on the size of your bank account;
- “terrorist” now is anything you don’t like, especially if it’s anti establishment. True freedom of speech is now apparently “violence” (and of course this dictatorial (adjacent) government would think that, as it’s biggest danger);
- “antifa” is apparently now a boogeyman, though I’d say he used it correctly as he is (apparently) fascist;
Also it is forced against people, how population can choose otherwise?
He can shove his cameras deep in his ** as far as I'm concerned.
The "system" is not hapless or ignorant here. In fact, this company would not exist, if the "system" didn't have specific desires to effectively enslave the entire population.
Who wouldn't want to become a new age digital pharaoh? Wouldn't this be precisely the type of panopticon they would try to create?
Most trailers do not require license plates.
The fee for the first time you get caught without a plate on your registered vehicle is $10 (2nd is $20).
Trailer hitch balls do not "count" when considering whether a vehicle's plate is obstructed — I literally have one hung across my Camry, not technically obstructing the plate (but you can't see shit).
YMMV. Lasers might be a good offensive, but defense is more important.
My local newspaper retracted a story this month about how the police were able to locate a certain colored vehicle within minutes. Perhaps it was too revealing for general consumption?
My "obstruction" is more (legal) protest? Better to just move to a de-flocked city/state..?
[•] https://xkcd.com/1105/ [License Plate Police]
[0] I consider this similar to how some property appraisal maps allow people to remove their names from searches (either through LLC or black-out), but you can still request beneficial owner information of specific parcels; just one/two additional layers of protection to throw off the scent (have to know what you're looking for, not just simple plate# lookup — although I'm sure there are aliases/forwarders in advanced CCTVai systems).
Of course he's "thankful" for that, since in our "beautifully democratic and capitalistic" society, Flock can use their $658 million of VC funding [1] to wage lawfare against the have-nots with their armies of lobbyists and lawyers. [2]
1. https://websets.exa.ai/websets/directory/flock-safety-fundin...
2. https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/lobbyis...
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/felony-contempt-busine...
Given how much the typical Apple consumer skews left and has extreme brand loyalty, if Apple got tariffed simply because Tim failed to bow down, Apple would be in a stronger position to fight it than any other tech company. They could have stood up, but chose not to.
> Given how much the typical Apple consumer skews left
In reality they are very much interested in facts, because they give them info who to oppress harder
The goal is not to accurately target people, the whole point is you don't care. The exercise of power is the point.
It doesn't matter who's door you kicked in: you were right to do it no matter what, and they were guilty no matter what.
They don't need it, but it's convenient.
Possessions that are "yours" are only yours insofar as you can either defend it or others recognize it as yours. Thus you end up with situations like "Barbeque" in Haiti owning the streets and much of the rich's land/assets are now magically in the hands of barbeque or his crew and whatever money that one thought they could use to resist that turned out to not be their money anymore. The "rich" thus still hold all the cards but who is rich and who isn't isn't the same as when it started.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_images_in_the_So...
> Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov (Russian: Николай Иванович Ежов, IPA: [nʲɪkɐˈlaj ɪˈvanəvʲɪtɕ (j)ɪˈʐof]; 1 May 1895 – 4 February 1940), also spelt Ezhov, was a Soviet secret police official under Joseph Stalin who was head of the NKVD from 1936 to 1938, at the height of the Great Purge. Yezhov organized mass arrests, torture, and executions during the Great Purge, but he fell out of favour with Stalin and was arrested, subsequently admitting in a confession to a range of anti-Soviet activity including "unfounded arrests" during the Purge. He was executed in 1940 along with others who were blamed for the Purge.
This guy was head of the secret police, didn’t help him out when he was purged aka murdered.
I mildly disagree mostly because I can’t get hard evidence, but everything’s I’ve heard from faang workers is that they are basically run like nation states on a logistical level. Complete with their own forms of courts to handle interdepartmental disputes and PMCs that they like to keep very quiet about.
The US military is famously a logistics network that dabbles in shooting things, and companies like Amazon are already very very good at that.
If you own everything, and you bomb the populace, you bomb your own stuff.
If everybody works for you, and you bomb the populace, you bomb your own serfs.
And those faceless individuals who are actually holding the weapons, and actually know how they work, and actually know, in a detailed, hands-on way, how to do coordinated violence with them? It turns out they're secretly members of the populace. You'd better make sure they think it's in their interest to keep using the weapons the way you want them to.
You can bomb people into oblivion but if you actually want to control them, most of the things that give superiority to a fixed group of rich are useless. Violence is still democratic if you're trying to get anything useful out of the people you seek to control. If you have 5 people and 3 of them are slaves with an AK-47 and a donkey, you have 0 slaves not 5 slaves.
Obviously the rich/powerful can't stay that way in a glass desert with no plebs to do their bidding, at least for now, so most of the technology the government and rich have are useless for subjecting a hostile populace.
Tech CEOs can easily outlive their usefulness once the machinery is built, and can easily find themselves labeled "terrorists" if they try to fight back with whatever feeble power they have.
Political factions, purges and patronage is what comes next, amd despite their inflated egos, they won't be the patrons.
Cards that only work because of the current system that they are hacking away at. Revolutions tend to eat their young, wannabe American oligarchs should check on how things turned out for the majority of post-soviet Russian oligarchs.
In an authoritarian regime, it's all competition, no co-operation. Whoever the big dog is gets to say what happens, right up until a bunch of the little dogs drag him down and then fight each other to replace him. If he's lucky and skillful he'll have worked this out and kept the little dogs at each other's throats so they don't gang up on him.
The whole operation of government becomes about "who's the boss?" and the boss gets to run the government to favour himself and his cronies, acquiring more power and wealth.
Any pause to consider the ordinary folks caught up in this is a weakness, that will be taken advantage of by the other wannabe bosses.
It's not a utopia for any of them because of the constant paranoia and fighting. Try to rest on your laurels and enjoy the spoils of what you got for a second, and boom; you get thrown out of a window.
See the recent purges of the military leadership in China. Or Putin's cronies continually accidentally falling out of windows. It's not safe near the top.
"When the last tree has fallen
and the rivers are poisoned
you cannot eat money, on no."
-- Aurora, The Seed
[0] https://cdn8.openculture.com/2017/08/20195126/800px-Soviet_c...
[1] https://live-production.wcms.abc-cdn.net.au/41868a585464d87b...
..That said, what you're saying could be true. I think the truth is that we don't know, and I'm pretty sure we would've felt the same way about the people in the above pictures.
Which also tends to lean on a political set. But poor people will be deprived of their liberties be them left or right. For those useful to power it will take just a little bit longer to notice.
it's always interesting to hear the silent part out loud. in this case, he's saying "I can get what I want because I can game the courts".
And really, why should they? We've learned now that there was actually a worldwide network of child rapists purchasing girls from other wealthy child traffickers in positions of power in seemingly every Western nation, and the consensus thus far is to do exactly nothing about it.
Laws are for the poors.
False, he is forcing Flock on EVERYONE
No one has permitted themselves to be surveilled. And no, under the radar agreements with local cops and govts do NOT constitute my permission to be surveilled. If they want to go in with fully informed referendums in each community, then I'd accept it. But that is not Flock's business model.
> No one has permitted themselves to be surveilled
As much as I dislike Flock, this is bad logic. There's no such thing as opting out of surveillance in public spaces. Public spaces are defined by being public, in that everyone (even governments/corporations!) is free to observe everyone else in that same setting.
So in reality, everyone has permitted themselves to be surveilled, purely through the act of being in public.
This idea that there's some kind of difference between me watching you in public and Flock watching you in public is, quite frankly, bogus.
There are even weirder stuff than companies being considered a "moral person". For example if a person speeds way too much in France (say more than 50 kilometers/hour above the speed limit on the highway, e.g. 180 km/h // 111 mph instead of the 130 km/h // 80 mph)... Well then that person gets arrested. And his driving license is confiscated on the spot. But here's the absolute crazy thing: even if the car belong to someone else, to a company, to a rental company... Doesn't matter: the French state consider that the car itself was complicit in the act. So the car is seized too (for 8 days if it doesn't belong to the person who was driving it and potentially much more if it does belong to the person driving it).
Companies are persons and cars (I'm not even talking about self-driving cars) have rights and obligations. That's the world we live in.
The idea that there's not a scale difference is, quite frankly, bogus.
To paraphrase the quote, quantity has a quality of its own.
The central dogma of machine learning. Which Flock and its defenders know very well.
I don't disagree that quantity has a quality of it's own in some circumstances, but that's not an inherent property of "quantity".
Everyone doing it 24/7 via their cameras and running it through AI analysis and providing it to the cops for $$$ is not.
What if I recruit a few friends around my town to do the same, and we share data and findings? Is that also fine?
What if I pay a bunch of people I don't know to collect this data for me, but do all the analysis myself?
Where do you draw the line? Being able to concretely define a line here is something I've seen privacy proponents be utterly incapable of doing. Yet it's important to do so, because on one end of the spectrum is a set of protected liberties, and on the other is authoritarian dystopia. If you can't define some point at which freedom stops being freedom, you leave the door wide open to the kind of bullshit arguments we see any time "privacy in public" comes up: 100% feels, and 0% logic.
Because it seems clear to me that if an individual was to surveil and build up a dossier on any random stranger as much as an entity like Facebook or Google does that this would be considered stalking.
I've never been able to quite figure out why incorporating and doing it to basically everyone some how makes it legal. I think the secret ingredient is money but I'm not exactly sure how that works.
There are many things in life where the exact location of the line isn't clear, but quite a few cases are clearly over said line.
As examples: Fraud, threats, child abuse/neglect, obscenity.
How does this apply to the topic at hand, though? I think you're straying too far into hypotheticals, perhaps?
Stalking is targeted. Passively observing and making that information easy to search for a limited period of time is not quite the same thing, and the distinction has important implications
they could instead be limiting flock to private places.
> This idea that there's some kind of difference between me watching you in public and Flock watching you in public is, quite frankly, bogus.
if you followed me everywhere and took pictures of me everywhwre i went outside from my door in the morning to my door in the evening, id want to get a restraining order on you as a stalker. this is stalking
But again, this is not what Flock is doing.
By this same logic, traffic cameras and CCTV surveillance are "stalking", which doesn't seem accurate?
I’d like to give the benefit of the doubt, but it feels very sea-liony and intentionally disingenuous.
Scenario B: An array of cameras is installed (approximately) everywhere and takes a series of photos that include you, and the sequence of photos of your activities (approximately) wherever you go in public is assembled in real-time.
You claim these are different.
Other than details of the the technology, they are the same. The result is the stalker has a complete surveillance of your activities.
Scenario B is even worse, as the stalker now has a complete surveillance of EVERYONE, for the same cost, with zero regard for legitimate legal suspicion.
Stop being pedantic and ignoring reality
Ironic, coming from someone blatantly ignoring the reality of things like retention policies.
Scenario B reduces to "you were never seen or followed" if no one has a reason to search for you within the retention window.
Scenario A requires intent. Scenario B only reduces to Scenario A when that intent exists. When it does not, Scenario B is essentially a noop, and has 0 actual impact on you
Nonsense.
Sure, scenario A requires intent in advance
Scenario B requires intent ANY TIME. Someone in the system can decide they want to track me RETROACTIVELY and do it even more effectively than if they had planned in advance. With malicious intent, they can find or fabricate charges retroactively.
Yes, it is only potential, until it is actualized. Potential energy is still energy, and it is still different from not having potential energy in place.
Banning ALPRs outright is a strictly inferior solution, when compared to putting strict limits on their data retention.
This also inherently limits their potential for misuse, which seems to be your primary concern here?
If this is what they thought was possible, why write the 4th Amendment?
Unreasonable search and overbearing government was one of the key issues of the American Revolution.
They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety - Ben Frank
Iirc he was a founder
Mission creep and abuse are major concerns. Examples are documented where systems introduced for limited purposes — like traffic enforcement or terrorism prevention — expand into broader, unchecked surveillance by multiple agencies, commercially and maybe gray or black markets, too. Imagine cameras initially deployed in work zones may later be used citywide, enabling mass tracking of individuals without probable cause.
Lack of oversight and due process further fuels opposition. Automated systems, such as those issuing speeding tickets without human review, deny individuals fair recourse. The absence of judicial warrants and transparency in deployment is seen as enabling government overreach and hidden revenue generation, disproportionately impacting low-income communities. Long-term record keeping may contain errors, omissions and misjudgements that remain uncorrected.
Financial and civil costs are real. Surveillance systems are expensive, yet studies show limited effectiveness in actually preventing crime or terrorism. Civil libertarians argue that resources should instead support community-based safety solutions that respect constitutional freedoms.
Ultimately, strict legal limits or outright bans on public video surveillance are in effect right now in many places, and those cases can be discussed among an informed voting public.
I was skeptical from the first sentence, but I stopped here.
This "chilling effect" is a favorite of privacy advocates, but it's purely a hypothetical. I have asked for and received no evidence of its practical effect in the real world, and can find plenty of evidence to the contrary.
New York City, for example, is one of the most highly-surveilled cities in the US, and yet turnout for things like protests is seemingly unaffected.
This is one of the centerpieces of your entire argument, yet is literally taken on faith.
aren't you declaring that you did not even read the whole post?
I agree that the hypothetical "chilling effect", as presented, is plausible and reasonable, but it lacks evidence. As such, I saved myself the effort of reading what might be a plausible argument until such time as it becomes supported by evidence.
I went back and read it, and you supported it with more hypotheticals, not evidence. So congratulations, you made me waste a couple minutes of my life! But this just tells me I once again made the right judgement call in not reading it the first time, and doesn't really help further your cause, or convince me I'm mistaken in this regard.
>> No one has permitted themselves to be surveilled
> As much as I dislike Flock, this is bad logic. There's no such thing as opting out of surveillance in public spaces.
You're agreeing that he is forcing flock on people. Legality doesn't make it not-forced. Not needing consent is different from receiving consent.
Again, I'm pretty anti-Flock, but place the blame where it's due and use good logic to support that.
I mean, you're welcome to buy an Apple Vision Pro, but you making poor decisions with your money doesn't make Apple responsible for that.
Do you have an answer? I certainly don't
If you followed me around all day taking photographs of my every move for no other reason than you felt like it, I would very likely have recourse via stalking and harassment laws.
There is no difference to me that some company does it via technology.
If I'm interesting enough to get a warrant for surveillance of my activities - fair game. Private investigators operate under a set of reasonable limits and must be licensed in most (all?) states for this reason as well.
It's quite obvious laws have simply not caught up with the state of modern technology that allows for the type of data collection and thus mass-surveillance that is now possible today. If you went back 50 years ago and asked anyone on the street if it was okay that every time they left the house their travel history would be recorded indefinitely they would talk to you about communist dystopias that could never happen here due to the 2nd amendment.
> There is no difference to me that some company does it via technology.
I feel like it's telling that no one has yet taken this logic to court. I think that means that while there may be no difference to you there is a difference according to the law. This gets at your later point.
Speaking of:
> If you went back 50 years ago and asked anyone on the street if it was okay that every time they left the house their travel history would be recorded indefinitely they would talk to you about communist dystopias that could never happen here due to the 2nd amendment.
I think you're doing a subtle motte-and-bailey here. As far as I'm aware, Flock has strict retention policies, numbering in the low single-digit months (Google says 30 days "by default"). There is no "recorded indefinitely" here, which significantly changes the characteristics of the argument here. This is roughly on par with CCTV systems, to the best of my knowledge.
I don't disagree that laws haven't caught up yet, but I also think a lot of the arguments against Flock are rife with hyperbolic arguments like this that do meaningfully misrepresent their model. I think this leads to bad solutioning, as a consequence.
I'd much rather have good solutions here than bad ones, because ALPRs and other "surveillance technologies" do drive improvements in crime clearance rates/outcomes, so they shouldn't be banned--just better controlled/audited/overseen
Read some cases of who's suffering now. Cops (or ICE) can choose a passing vehicle to run a ALPR search on, finding out what states it just passed through. When they consider it "suspicious", said driver gets stopped, searched, and even detained.
Look at how ALPR is being used and whose rights are being violated as a result. Hint: it's not criminals.
I think the suffering/abuse is able to be reasonably controlled through increased/better oversight, more publicly available information, and more strict regulations around the use of the data produced by these devices.
I also think they're able to impart a whole lot of good on their communities. If they contribute to an increase in the number of arrests and convictions for crimes, that might end up being a net good.
I think starting from the assumption that they are net bad, and then telling me I should only look at the negatives is an uncompelling argument.
I need not look further than the testimony of people who used to commit crimes in areas with increased surveillance (i.e., San Francisco), and I see a compelling argument for their upsides. Now I have to weigh the positives and negatives against each other, and it stops being the clear-cut argument you're disingenuously presenting it as.
If you're only reading the stories of the homosexual people in Germany in the 1940s, you're making your judgements on only a fraction of the available information.
How about you give me your bank account details and permission to make free use of all your money, and then IF I contribute more value with your money than you do that MIGHT end up being a net good, so let's try it first and find out later?
"stop reading about the abuses of power, just ignore them" is a really poor position to take.
I'm not starting from this argument, though. I'm starting from the argument that we shouldn't be inherently opposed to putting up more of we think the benefit outweighs the negatives or risks of abuse
Your level of strawmanning here tells me you're not arguing in good faith
This is a really silly thing to say. It’s the “stop hitting yourself” of surveillance bullshit. Come on. Calling them “fixed cameras” so you can ignore the intent in the original comment is middle school shit.
There is a difference, the company is doing it to everyone, technology enables new things to happen and laws don't cover it. Before it was impractical for police to assign everyone a personal stalker but tech has made it practical.
By default if something is new enough it has a pretty good chance of being legal because the law hasn't caught up or considered it in advance.
Being okay with people watching me in public does not imply being okay with someone aggregating the information about my whereabouts 24/7 even though it's "the same" information.
Btw it's a fallacy similar to the one debunked in "what colour are your bits". The context matters, not just the abstract information.
Courts made a pretty reasonable set of tradeoffs around the 4th amendment for search warrant vs. subpoena, police officers observing you, etc.
During the 19th century.
Unfortunately, modern data processing completely undermines a lot of the rationale about how reasonable and intrusive various things are. Before, cops couldn't follow and surveil everyone; blanket subpoenas to get millions of peoples' information weren't possible because the information wasn't concentrated in one entity's hands and compliance would have been impossible; etc.
The actual legal problem is that, the above does not apply to private companies. You have no fourth amendment rights from private companies. The constitution gives you no rights against companies.
So the company does exactly what the police aren't allowed to do, and then sell access to the police. For some reason, this literal circumvention of their restrictions has been explicitly allowed.
This is why Surveillance Capitalism is such a big deal. It is a direct circumvention of your explicit constitutional rights, and it just so happens to accomplish that because of the profit earned in the process. For a lot of assholes, this is the winingest of win-wins.
There isn’t a sweeping precedent that says “mass surveillance is illegal.
The Supreme Court has signaled concern (Knotts’ “dragnet-type” reservation; echoed in Jones/Carpenter), but mostly we rely upon older third-party/plain-view doctrines and very fact-specific scope/retention questions.
So we have things like law enforcement successfully subpoenaing gmail metadata at large scale.
The law is perhaps changing, slowly -- we have geofencing heading to the Supremes, and active litigation about ALPR.
Also, “private company” isn’t an automatic workaround—if a vendor is acting as an agent of law enforcement, Fourth Amendment limits apply.
This is like when people complain that Facebook and Google are "selling their data". They aren't, but they are doing a closely-related thing: selling access to you, based on your data. These are not the same thing, and the difference is important when it comes to finding solutions to the problems it causes!
If we all voted to ban companies like Facebook and Google from selling your data, they'd shrug and say "sure I guess, we weren't selling it anyway", and nothing would change.
If we all voted to ban Flock from "tracking all of us", they'd shrug and say "that's already true" and it would not have any impact on their operations.
What we should instead vote for is strict controls over how long they can store the data, and how it is allowed to be used, and apply steep penalties for its misuse or unauthorized disclosure.
The idea that me an individual observing you, and a large, well funded company allied with the US government observing you has no difference, quite frankly, leads me to conclude* you are arguing in bad faith.
You can make an ideological argument that is the case, but not one based on fact and reality.
*edited for spelling
I mean, in both cases, I'm being observed in public, with unknown intent. Until that observation becomes action of some kind, there is no difference to me.
That tells me it's the concrete result of the surveillance that makes the difference, not whether or not it's an individual or a government doing the surveillance.
As far as I can tell, if no one searches for my vehicle in Flock's database within 30 days of being observed, whether or not Flock observed me becomes moot. For the vast majority of individuals observed by Flock, there will not exist any permanent record of their movements.
Now, all that is assuming they're above board with their retention policies, which they may well not be! I trust them about as far as I can throw them, but I haven't seen any evidence that they're lying about their retention practices, or that they're engaging in "dragnet-style" surveillance. I'm optimistic that any lawfare they engage in will out any bad behavior in that regard, thanks to discovery.
This does pose an interesting question: is an individual with perfect memory, who regularly sees you in public and who could recall every detail of every time they've ever seen you, better or worse than Flock, which "forgets" you after 30 days?
> This idea that there's some kind of difference between me watching you in public and Flock watching you in public is, quite frankly, bogus.
Might I interest you in the concepts of stalking and restraining orders?
I mean, it might be a viable way to push back against them.
Okay: Just how long would you permit someone to follow you around with a camera, recording everything you do?
The thing about a stranger watching you in public is that eventually you go somewhere else, and they can't watch you anymore. A surveillance organization like Flock, however, is waiting for you wherever you go. In this sense they're much more like a stalker following you around than a stranger who happens to see you.
This analogy bears out in practice: Cops have used Flock data to stalk their exes.¹
[1]: https://www.kwch.com/2022/10/31/kechi-police-lieutenant-arre...
Probably not long. I might also make it clear I'm not a fan, but at the end of the day, they're generally within their rights to record me in public. Sucks, but not much I can do.
> The thing about a stranger watching you in public is that eventually you go somewhere else, and they can't watch you anymore. A surveillance organization like Flock, however, is waiting for you wherever you go. In this sense they're much more like a stalker following you around than a stranger who happens to see you.
I mean, I don't buy this argument, because a stranger can legally follow me to all the same places where Flock is present. I mean, surely if I get into a car and drive away, they can get into a car and follow me. So long as we're both in public roads, they're within their rights to do so?
Granted, if they keep it up long enough, I can probably file charges for stalking. Perhaps the same can be done against Flock? Hell, this would even be a situation where Flock would be useful: proving that someone was following me around all day, thus supporting my bid for a restraining order or something.
> This analogy bears out in practice: Cops have used Flock data to stalk their exes.¹
Indeed, and this is where oversight, strict rules around usage and retention, and effective penalties for violations are needed.
Banning Flock is not the only solution! I mean, I would be in favor of banning Flock specifically (because they've demonstrated a willingness to act in bad faith), but I would not support a ban of ALPRs entirely. They do provide benefits, and coupled with the right rules, can be a net benefit to society.
You should not test this. If you record someone for hours or days in public, you may find yourself with a restraining order, a ticket for stalking (or assault), or a civil suit for invasion of privacy or IIED or something similar. This depends on the jurisdiction and the person you are recording, but what you are citing about not having an expectation of privacy is mostly meant with regards to point-in-time instances (one photo), not ongoing continuous surveillance.
Yes, the only distinction between any and all of these things and a legal recording is the length of time and the invasiveness of the collection of data. No, there is no bright line where you are definitely guilty or definitely safe (few things in law have one).
If you want to manually observe me in public, as in WITH A HUMAN PERSON'S LIVING EYEBALLS, go right ahead.
Even if you want to use a manually-operated still or video camera and microphone, one device per person, go ahead. Or even a radar gun operated by a human, one observer with one device.
But if you start littering the entire planet with cameras and create a panopticon, even if it is absolutely in public space, that is ENTIRELY DIFFERENT, and absolutely infringing on any reasonable concept of public/private space!
Consider simple speeding. An ordinary person who usually follows speed limits will rarely get stopped and fined, even if they occasionally exceed a limit in an emergency or when doing the safest thing in dense traffic that is over the speed limit, match the speed of traffic. But with universal surveillance, even watching 100% in public spaces, that person in an emergency could get dozens of tickets for minor infractions.
This is setting up Cardinal Richlieu's ideal tyranny: "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged."
With a panopticon of all public spaces, any petty tyrant can find enough evidence in six minutes to imprison anyone.
It's a good thing, then, that most criminal convictions require a jury of our peers, and not just the word of a tyrant. And that appeals exist, etc etc.
> With a panopticon of all public spaces, any petty tyrant can find enough evidence in six minutes to imprison anyone.
This is a blatant strawman. Said "panopticon" already exists in major areas, and this kind of abuse of power still rarely happens. It's possible to have increased surveillance come with stricter rules and increased oversight, you know.
For example, it's pretty telling that Mandani, largely seen as a promising progressive candidate, has opted to change so little about the NYPD, which conducts massive city-wide surveillance, on the level of your "panopticon". Perhaps it's because he understands the benefits it provides to public safety, and is implicitly voting in confidence of its current level of oversight?
It is not even close to "rarely happens"
It happens in EVERY authoritarian state that has the technology, to BILLIONS of people around the world.
It is also already happening a LOT in the US (presumably where your comment is limited to).
Flock is used specifically to create parallel construction, where they observe cars moving "in a pattern" that might indicate "smuggling immigrants" such as driving from a border county, or working with pro-immigrant groups (a 100% legal activity), and local/regional police are alerted to find a pretext to stop the car, and often results in charges for someone who would otherwise never have been noticed.
Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
This has been known for thousands of years.
This type of systems are only a step away from absolute power
>> most criminal convictions require a jury of our peers
Tell that to the people kidnapped by ICE, with ZERO due process, based on just a sighting and tracking with a camera that matches a racial profile, then they wind up in detention and deported, or dead, with zero judicial intervention.
Stop acting like this doesn't happen or the current 'administration' actually follows the rules. This administration is on the well-traveled road to corrupting democracy and implementing fascism, and systems like Flock actively help it happen.
You are arguing sophistry on the wrong side of the facts, the wrong side of civil society, and the wrong side of history. Reconsider your life
You and I have very different definitions of "rarely", apparently.
It is rare, by most definitions of "rare" (at least in the US, where I'm implicitly limiting this discussion, in general). What's yours?
If your definition of "rarely" is "more than never", a) you're setting an unreasonable standard, and b) letting the lack of perfection be an easy way to discredit anyone who disagrees with you, which is intellectually lazy.
I certainly agree that abuse happens! Unfortunately, that's just a fact of life. The best we can do is minimize abuse, and we should be making every effort to do so.
But this does not mean reactionary banning of every new technology, regardless of the benefits it may bring. That's just reactionary conservatism, which I think (based on the rest your comment), you vehemently disagree with!
> Flock is used specifically to create parallel construction, where they observe cars moving "in a pattern" that might indicate "smuggling immigrants" such as driving from a border county, or working with pro-immigrant groups (a 100% legal activity), and local/regional police are alerted to find a pretext to stop the car, and often results in charges for someone who would otherwise never have been noticed.
[Citation needed]. This is certainly plausible, but is currently presented without evidence, and can likewise be dismissed without evidence.
> Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Cool truism. Except we're not talking about "absolute power" by any stretch of the definition.
> This type of systems are only a step away from absolute power
Okay this is just bullshit and hyperbole.
The rest of your comment is equally disingenuous and wildly emotional. I refuse to engage with this. Either calm down and have a real conversation, or go away. Your subsequent ad-hominems and strawmen are entirely unwarranted and uncalled-for.
You are awfully quick to dismiss what you do not know and are too lazy to even do a quick search. I literally read about these parallel construction scenarios here on HN and they are sufficiently common and severe to generate multiple legal actions and be repeatedly reported in mainstream press, e.g., [0],[1],[2],[3], and Flock even stopped cooperating due to these issues[4]. so, there's five citations, doing your homework for you.
>>we're not talking about "absolute power"; bullshit and hyperbole.
A corporate-government alliance that can track every movement of you and every other resident and arrest you on any pretext (e.g., "these two photos show you averaging 5mph over the speed limit, oh, you refuse a car search? GET OUT OF THE CAR...") is functionally indistinguishable from absolute power.
There is a reason such a panopticon is a core feature of many dystopian novels or movies - if they always know what you do, you have zero freedom to do anything they do not want you to do.
With that kind of power, there are endless examples of opportunities for abuse, and the burden of proof is on those trying to defend implementing such a system.
Repeatedly yelling "strawman!" or "citation needed" as if they were a magical argument winning incantations dismissing statements based on "tone" are not arguments. You really read like a high-school poster who got a hold of one of his older sister's college philosophy books over the holidays and now fancies himself a master logician. Of course it feels powerful to take an absolutist stand, and you can argue it forever, but such sophistry doesn't convince anyone and is extremely boring and pointless.
You had one good point upstream that one needs to draw a line somewhere between a single CATV camera and a panopticon. Yes, it is difficult to draw that line. Discussing THAT makes sense.
CBP is already creating surveillance networks to identify "suspicious" routes, and in real-time identify people coincidentally driving that direction, and having local police cook up a reason to stop them.
[0] https://apnews.com/article/border-patrol-surveillance-licens...
[1] https://apnews.com/article/immigration-border-patrol-surveil...
[2] https://www.404media.co/ice-taps-into-nationwide-ai-enabled-...
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45030853
[4] https://apnews.com/article/immigration-abortion-license-plat...
No, I know that if I search for something, I will find examples of it, devoid of any sense of scale. In order to understand whether or not something is "rare", one must be able to define its relative frequency, not just provide absolute numbers (in most cases).
This Border Patrol program you reference is indeed concerning! But this is not what this topic thread was about (Flock cameras, if you recall), so you are moving the goalposts, if subtly.
> I literally read about these parallel construction scenarios here on HN and they are sufficiently common and severe to generate multiple legal actions and be repeatedly reported in mainstream press, e.g., [0],[1],[2],[3]
None of your sources support the "parallel construction" claim, though? I understand that you're making multiple claims in this statement, but these "multiple sources" you provide only support one of them, and are multiple references to the same thing. So please understand why this isn't exactly convincing?
> A corporate-government alliance that can track every movement of you and every other resident and arrest you on any pretext (e.g., "these two photos show you averaging 5mph over the speed limit, oh, you refuse a car search? GET OUT OF THE CAR...") is functionally indistinguishable from absolute power.
a) this is not what's happening, even in the examples you cite, b) this is just hyperbolic imaginary scenarios, and c), this still is not "absolute power"? Run for office and make it a priority to put some limits on Border Patrol's programs, or support those who do? It's not easy to put limits on these programs once they get started, but it can be (and often is!) done on a regular basis.
The fact that they're running these programs within their legal limitations tells me that this is literally the opposite of "absolute power". It's limited by definition! Are the limitations too loose? Probably! But there are limits, and they still must respect them.
> Repeatedly yelling "strawman!" or "citation needed" as if they were a magical argument winning incantations dismissing statements based on "tone" are not arguments.
And neither does citing hypotheticals as facts, which you keep repeatedly doing? And you have been literally strawmanning my argument this entire time! And literally presenting claims without evidence!
I'm saying those things not because I think they "win" me the argument; I'm saying them because they're the reasons you're not being convincing in the slightest.
> You had one good point upstream that one needs to draw a line somewhere between a single CATV camera and a panopticon. Yes, it is difficult to draw that line. Discussing THAT makes sense.
That's literally what I've been trying to do this whole time. Meanwhile, you keep trying to conflate what we have now with "panopticons" or "absolute power" or other hyperbolic nonsense.
I might accept it for this specific case. But, in general, just because the majority wants to do something doesn't mean it's legitimate to force everyone to accept it.
I mean, isn't that the literal definition of democracy? I tend to agree that "tyranny of the majority" can have some pretty bad outcomes, but that is what a democracy ultimately boils down to, is it not?
> I mean, isn't that the literal definition of democracy?
isn't relevant. A) we're not in a pure democracy, and B) no one argued that something is or would not be democracy.
But all these rich people want to go back to a time when they could impregnate their 14 year old housekeeper.
That's why countries have constitutions, that usually can not be completely replaced.
Except, of course, by the action of a (super)majority, at least in the US.
The rich aren't the only ones who can "flood the field".
File all the lawsuits, Flock. Let's get some discovery going. Who is the CEO cozied up with?
People today can become wealthy, and wealthy people can lose wealth, much much easily than nobility was created or revoked under feudalism.
There's objectively more social mobility. That's an improvement. Don't confuse "it's an improvement" with "it's an acceptable and desirable end state".
How many people in the US have been born into a lower to middle class family, and gone on to make more than $10 million in the last 30 years?
There are likely to be many other examples. These are just well known ones.
Now I have been taken to communicate that Genghis Khan with his KPI of human ears was an example of positive social mobility.
This is peak move fast across the steppe and break things mindset.
Probably not great for investor relations for him to be hyping up the democracy angle. They get a big chunk of their funding from Andreesen Horowitz.
Capitalism is great… when it has limits.
Why they supported the fascist:
https://a16z.com/podcast/trump-is-about-to-change-everything...
When Flock decides to track people's activities, they're "following the law" and "open to reasonable debate," but when people decide they want to track Flock's activities right back, that makes them terrorists.
Watch out, I'm a mad man!
;-)
Too many people are focused on the criminal aspects of this (4th amendment) and government surveillance. The fact that this is a corporation may give you more options.
You can also do FOIA requests directly to departments, like this one: https://www.muckrock.com/foi/novato-296/flock-alprs-cameras-...
Good news is that even the images captured by the cameras is FOIA-able! https://www.404media.co/judge-rules-flock-surveillance-image...
Flock's terrorist cameras must be destroyed. With airstrikes and poisoned ice cream.
From what I can tell no one from YC has issued a statement about Flock since the public realized how terrible they are.
Flock is Fa---
Telling illiberal authoritarians to go fuck themselves is reasonable. But power is still more important than insults.
no: terror is strictly about civilians.
Pointing cameras at cameras? Terrorist organization
It's to make people like Garrett Langley feel protected from us.
Are they though? The odds of any kind of coordinated response that could seriously threaten the billionaires seem next-to-none. Flock seems to be a lot more offensive than defensive - it enables the targeting and mass surveillance in order to find and punish the 'right people', as well as mass tracking to create yet another datapoint to understand the way people move, think and coordinate. The defensive side is already covered through internet services, like social media. They don't have much to fear. I reckon that a powerful/rich enough person could kill a stranger on the street in plain view of a huge crowd and have absolutely nothing happen to them.
Life is literally no less safe for CEOs in the US post-Mangione then prior. The whole narrative that he represented some kind of social or cultural inflection point against CEOs was simply false, and the ones that are actually afraid already hire security because getting kidnapped for ransom is a much bigger threat than being shot in the street.
Source article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2025/09/03/ai-st...
Discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45119847
and at the same time:
Pump the Brakes on Your Police Department's Use of Flock Safety
> 5 months ago? c'mon OP
Thankfully OP is posting about it again, because I missed it the first time. Thank you OP!
Anyway, assuming I've gotten the gist of it - I support De-flocking and de-surveillance'ing and will be happily to carry the label of an antifa terrorist all day long :-)
"I put cameras in your neighbourhood to track every aspect of your public life" == Apple pie and sunshine
"You get together with your neighbours and make a map of their locations" == terrorist
It makes me wonder what his values are.
We must, as a society, reject the full capability of technology to observe the public.
Unfortunately for me i was born in 1991 and so i wasn't actually screaming in 1994 or 1998 or 2001 or 2003 but god damnit EVERYONE just decided "ah, typical left wing cranks" and said fuck it, let's let the president do whatever he wants, it's fine?
Obama executed a US citizen without trial on allegations of terrorism. I was absolutely screaming then.