Americans are destroying Flock surveillance cameras
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
- Flock decision-makers and customers holding ethics as a priority, and not taking the actions they are due to sense of duty, community, morals etc
- Peer pressure resulting in ostracization of Flock execs and decision makers until they stop the unethical behavior
- Governments using legislation and law enforcement to prevent the cameras being used in the way they are
What has worried me for years is that Americans would not resort to this level. That things are just too comfortable at home to take that brave step into the firing lines of being on the right side of justice but the wrong side of the law.
I'm relieved to see more and more Americans causing necessary trouble. I still think that overall, Americans are deeply underreacting to the times. But that only goes as far as to be my opinion. I can't speak for them and I'm not their current king.
I recommend the book "The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution and the Fate of the Empire"
I don't know about the american revolution, but that's wrong for the french revolution. I'll link to french wikipédia pages since they are far better on the subject. https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89tats_g%C3%A9n%C3%A9raux_... Here we can see the first National Assembly was half nobility and clergy. The third estate was the other half.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiers_%C3%A9tat > Par ailleurs, les députés du tiers état aux états généraux représentaient essentiellement la bourgeoisie[2].
Which indicate that the majority of the third estate representative were bourgeois.
The bourgeois are the middle class.
> The bourgeoisie are a class of business owners, merchants and wealthy people, in general, which emerged in the Late Middle Ages, originally as a " middle class" between the peasantry and aristocracy. They are traditionally contrasted with the proletariat by their wealth, political power, and education, as well as their access to and control of cultural, social, and financial capital.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourgeoisie
Today the meaning of bourgeoisie, still applies to "business owners, merchants and wealthy people", but is now seen as upper class.
These are no longer impossibles.
But I wouldn't bet on another three of these.
I watched a few analyses on this and it really comes down to faith.
I really wish it weren't kidding. The resistance against this economic downturn comes a large part due to conservative skewing financiers who believe "Trump won't let the economy crash". And that faith somehow keeps people pushing their chips in in times where they'd have probably long pulled out of Biden.
2025-6 will truly be a "vibe-cession" in so many ways.
Well one of those is already on the fast tracking to happening (economy stalling).
Unfortunately, I don't have much faith that people will turn against the administration during any kind of major depression/food scarcity. I foresee people turning against each other for survival instead.
Herman Cain denied COVID's severity right up until it killed him, and them even after he died, his team was still tweeting that "looks like COVID isn't as bad as the mainstream media made it out to be." When I saw that people were literally willing to die to "own the libs", I knew shared reality was toast.
Starvation isn't avoidable and you can't ride it out. There isn't any chance that starving to death could be less severe than getting a bad flu. Nobody can avoid not eating for an extended period of time. If there is not enough food, it will affect everyone directly.
Propaganda works.
The knowledge worker class often believes their training will afford them some level of protection against it. Even then, with those warding effects, they're still susceptible. Consider further that most people in society are significantly less educated or trained in epistemological functions than they are - a large portion of society is defenseless against a liar with a megaphone.
Propaganda won't contest that starvation is occurring. It will claim that the reason for the starvation is a specific foe, internal or external e.g. It's China's fault we're starving or the immigrants have caused this food security crisis and once they're gone we'll have enough food for our own people, etc. They'll workshop and see which ones poll well, then run with the talking point that seems to perform best.
Since the government harnessing that discontent has no real desire to fix that problem, all they need to do is maintain the perception that they're the solution, while not addressing the problem itself.
For example, consider climate change. Climate change causes draughts, which causes food shortages in countries heavily dependent on their agricultural sector. This, in turn, causes famine.
A certain western power will blame that country's government for mismanaging their agricultural sector instead of pointing out the unusual and dramatic weather changes contributed to the famine. This is, of course, because the western power does not publicly admit climate change is real in order to avoid taking any responsibility for their contribution to this climate change.
I don't know if China will work. It's not halfway around the world, but that's the mentality many people have of it. They won't buy that a country on the other side if taking food from their local grocery store.
But it doesn't matter. they blame it on: everyone gets hurt. People fighting on the streets, charital servings overran, private businesses raided, governmental buildings having doors banged on (assuming the soldiers don't simply desert their duties). Then that escalates to riots and perhaps small skirmishes for remaining resources.
When you're truly hungry, nothing is beyond reproach. And I don't think America has a true famine to point to as an example. That's pretty much why it's the one thing all politicians will avoid at all cost. a famine will make a depression seem like a cloudy day.
You can take a look at the global hunger index; countries with less food security are certainly less stable than those that aren't, but by no means are countries like India and Pakistan undergoing constant revolution. By contrast, countries with comparatively solid food security like Egypt underwent revolution that toppled the government sparked by changes in the (comparatively affordable) price of food. Hunger itself doesn't tell the story. It's how society perceives it.
The zeitgeist matters more than whether or not everyone in society can eat, and you can change the zeitgeist with propaganda.
>When you're truly hungry, nothing is beyond reproach.
When you're truly hungry, you can't plan a revolution. Anti-government efforts are generally spearheaded by groups that are fed, connected, and have the incentive to incite rebellion. It's more Navalny and less Oliver Twist. This means that both pro and anti-government groups will be engaged in a similar recruitment effort. The two groups will have competing accounts of why the hunger is occurring, complete with different evidence regarding the magnitude of the issue, the source of the issue, etc. Hunger doesn't short circuit that process, and propaganda doesn't lose it's force because it's a more persuasive and simpler motivator than, say, discontent over tax burden shifting or some other policy point.
> Consider further that most people in society are significantly less educated or trained in epistemological functions than [knowledge workers] are - a large portion of society is defenseless against a liar with a megaphone.
The only thing I'd add is polarization adding impetus to never seeing someone on my side as a liar, whatever they claim.
When democracy becomes a team sport, its collective intelligence lessens: perhaps the biggest hole in the US founder's future vision.
But then again, "voter" had a very different definition in their time. And I don't think you can fault them for not enshrining anti-party ranked choice et al.
We're in a K-Shaped Economy right now and half the folks will deny there is any K and insist everything is amazing.
Have you treated many patients with COVID? I’ve heard the opposite of your claim from those who have.
“How exactly would Dr Dan Erickson know if someone else’s patient said this?”
There was massive regional differences in how different parts of the country and even different parts of the same state responded to COVID.
Flawed in many ways: https://www.acep.org/corona/COVID-19-alert/covid-19-articles...
Most people tended to accept reality when their body started failing, but there were a non-zero number that refused to believe they were infected with coronavirus to the end.
Politicians and social media click farmers spouting lies do influence people, and not everyone starts with a basic understanding of biology and/or science.
There were actually lots of people doing exactly this. Perhaps "largely" is the key word here but there were plenty of people dying of covid and refusing ventilators because they believed it was a conspiracy theory.
Ah yes you say, another psycho. He probably eats ivermectin for breakfast and chases it with bleach. But I ask you, after a chlorinated burp: how come Africa didn't die out? Why was the death rate pretty much the same in Florida and California? Did the EU really need to buy enough vaccine for ten-plus years?
But yet here you are saying it. Whether it's true or not probably requires a great deal of analysis, but your self-applied "psycho" label may be accurate enough if you've managed to apply lots of cognitive biases to end up with your "truth".
I'd agree the governments overreacted in many sense, but a non BoJo/Trump-government has a duty to be overcautious rather than a flippant attitude of "So what, x% dead is acceptable". Some other rules are based on dumb science: two meters distance from each other is probably a joke, a compromise between "keep everyone at home!" (what China did when there was a breakout) and a "Keep going to the pubs!", my own theory is that if you could smell someone's cigarette smoke from 2 meters away, virus particles being exhaled from their lungs would reach you too. Later we figured out getting the virus from surfaces is very unlikely, but people were still wiping surfaces down anyway...
I'd say that's still a good thing. Surfaces can get so dirty, so I'm glad COVID made people more aware of properly clearning their surfaces.
Because it's an airborne virus and Africa isn't 1) as connected with the world to begin with and 2) as closely concentrated as urban areas. That's before really looking into Africa's response compared to other countries.
>Why was the death rate pretty much the same in Florida and California?
Because we didn't isolate fast enough between Trump trying to claim it being a hoax early on and desperate political attempts to keep "essential workers" running business. The locality doesn't matter for an airorne virus; just that people continue to go outside and not develop herd immunity.
>Did the EU really need to buy enough vaccine for ten-plus years?
I don't have a crystal ball into 2030. But yes, people still can catch COVID in 2026. Buying only enough for 2020-2022 would be reckless.
Any other questions?
one of my family members who was in a coma for over a month and in the hospital for months still denies it was covid despite multiple doctors telling him otherwise. some people live in a very real state of denial entirely separated from reality.
sadly i’m not sure the person you replied to is too far off.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proclamation_of_Rebellion
Interestingly y'all Americans pay much more tax now than you did to England back in the day. Turns out King George was right, and it was just about changing who the tax was paid to.
The degree to which legislation in the US is bought by big companies and rarely reflects democratic desires we may be in another "no taxation without representation" era.
It had already intentionally been forgotten how well that worked the first time.
I understand that the civil war was about a lot of things, but the precipitating issue was slavery. Slavers should be obliterated by war if they aren't willing to give up their slaves unconditionally.
If the southern agricultural states didn't want to be with the free states in the Union any more anyway, it might have been the only opportunity to withdraw without a war.
Individually, without a confederacy, which instead quickly amounted to a large vengeful adversary where there didn't have to be.
It would have been a tough decision for each state to make, under non-emergency conditions, whether they wanted to remain with the country that possessed Wall Street or not.
After all it was Wall Street companies who were often financing the plantations to begin with, before stock traders escalated to funding the slave trade once its human cargo became more lucrative than most.
As it turned out, besides all the death & destruction suffered by all states, Washington itself went into such deep debt to Wall Street in order to fully vanquish the Confederate States, that it set the stage for untenable "permanent" debt where the lenders never got paid back real well for so many decades.
Wall Street has possessed Washington ever since.
Otherwise there would never have been a FED as we know it.
Today millions of new wage slaves flood into the country to further devalue the citizens labor and vote.
Think about how it was in a state like North Carolina in the 1850's where they were building textile mills which could add great value to the cotton before it was shipped.
This was enough of a threat to Northern manufacturing without their factories having to compete with unpaid labor. They were not happy campers, they had always been making way more money per ton of cotton in the well-established Northern textile mills than the plantations had ever been. And banking it just in case.
In the factory it would be a lot higher-skilled labor than down on the farm, it was still unpaid but never without cost. A dollar would go a long way back then but everything was still relative. Imagine that $10000 was the annual cost of having the labor in a factory without any wages. Accommodations, family support, infrastructure and things like that are what makes this total.
1859 rolls around and the guy in the green visor adds it up and shakes his head, "sheesh it's $11000 this year, when is it going to end?"
War comes & goes eventually, slaves are freed like they should/could have been the whole time, the dust settles and after a year of actually paying wages for the first time to laborers, the guy in the green visor about drops out of his seat because his total labor cost is now $15000. All he can say is "when is it going to end?" Where have we heard that before?
Same thing with the guy in the bank in New York whose employer had been raking it in from all their investments in Southern companies. It just wasn't the same and never was going to be that way again.
At least not exactly.
>war simply made everyone a slave
The same thing in my message, from almost the reverse point of view, how the way some factory-working slaves were turned into employees by the same war in the 19th century.
What's the difference anyway?
The difference between wage slave and fully-owned has been based mainly on freedom-of-movement and payment for labor, which have always been big enough to destroy a republic.
But not big enough for any difference in tasks or financial considerations to be the major thing for something like a government or corporation.
In some ways not much more modern than the Romans.
For the elites, they have always benefited most from a majority of subjects whose wages, if wages were involved, were not that much more significant than zero when it comes to the bottom line.
Look, I hate the elites as much as anyone and bemoan their outsized power over regular citizens, but to compare literal chattel slavery to the post-civil war U.S. is wild. Actual, real life, slavery was a deeply integrated part of their culture. Our democracy has a ton of problems, to be sure, but I find it very hard to blame that on the civil war.
Where there’s an opportunity to be the 1%, folks will find a way to be the 1%
Much of what makes America unique is tied to this essentially once in a generation event that will never happen again on this planet, a contingent confluence of Earth's parallel geographic and biological evolution... it's fairly easy to rebel or become a superpower when other powers have to contend with peer conflicts right on their borders. A break with England was inevitable why take orders from people an ocean away in the age of sail?
Humans aren't the endpoint of evolution. Something will come after us, and if we're spread out on a ton of planets, there would need to be explicit counteracting forces (genetic modification, tremendous volumes of interstellar human travel, etc.) to make sure whatever comes after us is uniform among our interstellar backyard.
When it comes to neutral mutations, we can literally see constant variance creation in plenty of non-coding areas of DNA over time.
Drift occurs at a fairly consistent rate that reflects the intrinsic error rate of the particular replication machinery that a given organism uses. You can measure the statistical error rate of different ribosomal complexes.
Different planets are going to have different selection pressures. They'll have different conflicts. Different crises. Different cultures. Different reproductive preferences. Imagining that these populations will converge on the same wildtype by sheer chance is lunacy.
- Alfred Henry Lewis
The UK looks at the use of cameras and feels threatened for its Nanny State title. We Yanks have laughed at that name while the water around us slowly came to a boil.
Some cities and/or states have banned the use of cameras at stop lights to issue tickets. Not really sure what caused that to happen, except the cynic in me thinks some politician received a ticket in the mail from one of the cameras.
It first dawned on me when i visited NYC some 30 years ago. I stepped over some arbitrary yellow line I wasn't supposed to - the uniformed cop that noticed that went from 0 to 100 in 0.1 second and behaved as if I just pulled a gun. Zero time to reflect and assume I might have made a legitimate mistake. Since then I've visited U.S. >150 times, and in my experience it was always thus in the U.S. - the law enforcement is on hair trigger and the populace has seemingly grown used to it and considers this behaviour normal. Geez.
(Go live in any northern european country for comparison. Any interaction with law enforcement is almost certainly going to be pleasant, cordial, and uniformed police typically does not rely on threats of violance for authority).
On the broader topic, I'm not sure that just voting is the way that we'll get out of this mess, but I think a large part of the problem is how our focus on wider, national issues has eroded the interest in the local. So people seem to be most disenfranchised from the level of politics where they can actually have the most influence, both by voting and direct action (protests, calls, etc).
It also represents an opportunity for upstarts. If you want to get into local politics, this is a single issue that will unit voters and bring them in.
We had a city councilperson elected on the sole issue of replacing the purple street lights. She won decisively and her entire campaign was literally signs everywhere promising to fix the purple streetlights. (yes, they were fixed).
[1]: https://www.theburnerseattle.com/post/mayor-elect-wilson-won...
Then 2 years later a new city council gets elected and they install flock cameras in your city too. You can never get rid of them because it already passed and nobody wants to relitigate the same thing every couple of years.
Local politics does not work here.
Either that or getting creative with well-directed, statically charged aerosolized oil droplets.
Those who care about their privacy should relitigate at every opportunity. "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance"; if you're not willing to fight for it, you will lose it, and deservedly so. Those who give up in advance are beyond fucked, because they'll have to take whatever is sent their way.
The majority of random people don't have combination of desire, corruption, sophistication, and political experience to pull off this kind of bribery.
Virtually every elected politician does.
~Everything about the election process selects for the worst kinds of people.
But what you could do is vote with a string attached and a penalty for being recalled that is going to make people think twice about running for office if their aim is to pull some kind of stunt. The 'you give me four years unconditionally' thing doesn't seem to work at all.
The twist on that body however is that voting is mandatory and ballots have a non of the above option on them. If a super majority (say 60-75%) vote none of the above the election is a do-over with all the people on the ballot being uneligable to run for that seat for say 5-10 years.
I could also envision an endless cycle of elections with 75%+ of the population voting "none of the above" because of issues like "Not my personal favorite candidate" or "eats the wrong mustard" or "I hate the idea of government"
In Belgium (Ostbelgien) the German-speaking community has a permanent sortition-based Citizens’ Council wired into the parliamentary process; In Ireland they've already run national, randomly selected Citizens’ Assemblies on high-stakes constitutional topics.
These are basically production prototypes - maybe we should ask ourselves why they don't push it further?
To quote a well-known study on the topic: “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”
(Gilens & Page, Perspectives in Politics)
Frankly, Obama _tried_ to close Guantanamo Bay. He significantly shrunk the population of inmates, but it was ultimately Congress, and the courts that prevented the closure
Obama spent a huge amount of time and political capital trying to clean up Bush's messes.
I wanted Gitmo closed, but I don’t want it closed in a way that further expands the executive branch by once again nibbling at the edges of another branch’s authority.
I guess now that the US has normalized relations with the Taliban, maybe they'll end up sending them to them, not sure who else will take the last ones.
Obviously it was also politically infeasible to admit them into the general US.
If they’re indeed innocent and can’t be deported because nobody will take them, then they have to be allowed to stay in the US. That’s unfortunate but not really their fault given that the US brought them into its jurisdiction against their will in the first place.
It seems transparently unfair to capture someone and then keep them forever because nobody else wants them.
Separation between the executive and the judiciary is important, but separation from the legislature doesn’t really seem to be.
Even among countries that do have such a separation, the US is unique in making it so difficult for the legislature to pass anything, which IMO is the most serious flaw in its system. The permanent deadlock is what creates such a temptation for the executive to circumvent the rule of law and try to seize power wherever it can.
Obama and Biden both led to meaningful policy improvements and they were far more stable than the current admin.
That did not happen, quite the contrary in fact.
There was a social panic to “protect us against terrorism” at pretty much any cost. It was easy for the party in power to demonize the resistance to the power grab and nobody except Libertarians had a coherence response.
To be clear, I personally don‘t think stuff like this should ever be on the ballot in any democracy. Human rights are not up for election, they should simply be granted, and any policy which seeks to deny people human rights should be rejected by any of the country’s democratic institutions (such as courts, labor unions, the press, etc.)
This is wrong and ignorant of how we select elected representatives. They have no incentive to do “what is right” and all of the incentives to do “what is popular”. The representatives who stood up against the Patriot Act, the surveillance state, “you’re either with us or either the terrorists”, etc were unable to hold any control in Congress.
The reason we have stereotypes of politicians as lying, greasy, corrupt used car salesmen is because their incentives align with those qualities.
I am exclusively discussing the _is_, not the _ought_ (which is where I would agree with you)
I also don‘t think mine is a widely unpopular opinion either. That scholars of democracy and human rights agree that a democracy should not be able to vote them selves into a dictatorship, that human rights are worth something more than what can be ousted by a popular demand. So I don’t think this is an unreasonable historical framework, from which I judge the actors of this history of.
Every time I hear this I cringe, whether this subject or any other. The people did vote and this is what they got - not necessarily what they specifically voted for. Different people hold things in different importance. Flock security cameras (or similar) generally don't even get noticed by the people voting on taxes, guns, abortions, etc.
My hope in the US is that folks at least take the time to evaluate their options and/or candidates; voting a straight ticket just because someone calls themselves something can lead to undesirable outcomes.
It really bothers me that so few people in the modern West understand just how lucky they are. If you didn't have the control you already have over your government, you'd be fighting for it.
The single biggest improvement to American society would be to implement multi-member districts for legislature, OR to implement STAR voting - any kind of system that promotes the existence of more parties, more political candidates, to break the two party cycle.
Far too many people fail to vote or research candidates due to how shitty our democracy is. Far too few candidates exist as a blend of values, and we are stuck with "every liberal policy" vs. "every conservative policy".
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To that end, it seems the cities that are banning Flock for proper privacy reasons are all in liberal states and cities. Conservative/moderate areas seem a lot less engaged on the topic. "That's just how it goes, of course government is going to tread on us, what can be done about it".
I'm entirely unsurprised if the majority of places taking a stand against flock cameras are liberal. From what I've seen conservatives tend to fetishize police and punishment. There's a lot of boot-licking going on for a group of people who posture as being rebels and anti-government, but I think there's also an assumption that only (or mainly) "others" will be targeted and punished. To the extent that it's true, I sure wouldn't expect it to stay that way.
I remember being horrified the first time I heard this was legal in the USA.
How can the US citizens accept such a brutal denying of good governance is beyond me.
There is 1 funding bill per year which only requires a 50% vote instead of a 60% / 67% to pass that all other spending bills require.
Every member with a goal tries to attach it to the big annual funding bill. The bill becomes so large that nobody likes the bill as a whole, but everybody has something in it they will defend.
And the old filtering process (committees which recommend the content of bills) are dominated by majority party leadership. This is maybe the closest symptom to blackmail.
To make matters worse, labor unions are equally politically inactive, and most often their only political moves are endorsing candidates. When they do voice support for or opposition against bills, those bills are often stuff related to their industry, and seldom do they actually oppose an over reaching government by threatening general strikes etc.
The press here is also very right leaning. All the big media are owned by capitalist conglomerates and as such most people never hear real challenges to the capitalist power structure. As long as the government class acts favorable to the capitalist interest, then the press has aligning interest, and is thus heavily incentivized to never challenge the government to much.
This isn’t true, UAW almost got Biden to transfer wealth directly from taxpayers to them via the union made EV credit bonus, laundered through government motors
Though I wouldn't be surprised if the idea goes back to Roman times.
It’s all just identity politics. I will say that Trump has proven the exception to this rule, enacting a whole lot of policy that circumvents the law and has real effects. (And is likely mostly unconstitutional if actually put to the test)
So while locally, voting can be powerful, it’s mostly bread and circuses at the federal level since regulatory capture is bipartisan.
But also if a small portion of Americans disparately plan to do stuff like sabotage surveillance camera, it's still newsworthy.
Politics is like water boiling - it’s just going to be little bubbles at first but all of a sudden it will start to really rumble.
The trouble is at least in the high population areas (AFAICT) a huge swath of "average" people seem to be stuck living life on a paycheck-to-paycheck basis, renting, no prospect of property ownership, minimal to zero retirement savings, no realistic way to afford children, etc. Not abnormal by historic or global standards but very abnormal when compared to the past ~150 years of US history.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2025-economic-we...
I think maybe we need a new CPI metric for HCOL areas that takes the form of a ratio. Something along the lines of midrange laptops per studio apartment month.
True luxuries (not having to worry, not having to waste time) are increasingly out of reach for most people.
Buying housing is utterly unaffordable for a very, very large percentage of young people even educated professionals in in-demand fields. Covering expenses is awful. That famous Emirati quote of “my father had a camel, I have a Land Rover, my son will have a Lamborghini, his son will have a Land Rover, his son will have a camel” - our parents had the Lamborghinis. The majority of my generation (milllenials) are worse off than their parents. Very few have kids because they can’t afford to have them. There are exceptions everywhere but if you just listen or see the culture it is a given that our future is fucked unless something radical changes - income inequality is the highest it’s EVER BEEN. Higher than the time of the French Revolution. Higher than the “Gilded age”.
It’s foolish to think that people are okay or that nothing will come politically of this. Go look out the window in any major city, the stark differences are there for anyone’s eyes to see.
They'll stop once the police (or ICE, more likely) start dishing out horrific punishments for it.
The people, or even states, could escalate in response. The worst case is escalating to violence; ICE isn’t trained, equipped, or numerous to deal with deploying into a violently hostile area. The army could, but then we’re in full blown civil war.
A more realistic middle ground is that it pushes people or states into nonviolent non-compliance by eg refusing to pay federal taxes. Frankly if California and New York alone stopped paying federal taxes the system would probably crumble.
When it hurts the billionaires, they will tell their politicians to invoke the 25th.
It's the only way, we've lost our democracy, but we still have economic power.
Also under these conditions of food distribution and transportation being actively disrupted, why would anyone be at school? Huge numbers of American schools are unsafe and unpleasant places for kids to be in ordinary times, and a massive disruption to ordinary life is not going to make that situation any better.
the next sentence after they mention "necessary trouble" is literally:
"But that only goes as far as to be my opinion."
they are just stating their opinion.
everyone decides when the time for "necessary trouble" is individually, based on their accumulated experience, opinion, etc. no arbiter required, just a critical mass of people with aligning opinions.
American society was created for the benefit of straight white Christian men alone. Every right held by any other group, every ounce of political power, every bit of basic human dignity, has had to be taken by force of "necessary trouble." There is no "arbiter." How could there be? An arbiter presupposes an objective moral ideal and a just society, neither of which we have. In the end, America can only be trusted to live up to its principles at the point of a gun.
To put things in perspective, the whole humankind, as in 99.99% of population, is utterly underreacting.
Doesn't breakdown in rule of law happened when a corporation (surely) bribed local officials to install insecure surveillance devices with zero concern for the community living near them?
It really comes down to whether you consider an individual’s right to privacy more important than your state’s security. Neither is really a perfect options in this case, but having the Flock camera means some part of your property is under the panopticon of local law enforcement that could arrest you (loss of privacy).
Going with chinese tech, you are probably more private in regards to your own government, but you’re probably having some negative effect on state security based on the marginal benefit of CCP surveillance/ potential malware in your network.
The dichotomy is false. People could have cameras which report to no one, but that’s less useful for all governments involved.
The human is doing what you would expect the human to do when faced with limited options in an operating environment that is not favorable to them. Crime has been trending down for some time [3], Flock cameras are a business driven on fear like Shotspotter, where the results are questionable at best and you're selling to the unsophisticated.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2026/02/17/nx-s1-5612825/flock-contracts...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_privacy
[3] https://time.com/7357500/crime-homicide-rate-violent-propert... | https://archive.today/vMACL
> there are alternatives
This does not consistently appear to be the case in the US unfortunately.
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/12/effs-investigations-ex...
[2] https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/flock-roundup
you wouldn't consider someone vandalizing your home or the infrastructure in your neighborhood to be violence? of course it is violence, an attack on the place i live (whether that's limited to just my home or to the larger community i live in) is an attack on me
is it not violence to, for example, burn down a business where people work in if you do it at a time where no one is around to get immediately hurt as a consequence? can i not call the financial damage caused both to the workers and the owners of that place violence?
No, I file an insurance claim and move on with my life. It is just property, and almost all property can be trivially replaced. Your property is not you. It is just property. We simply see the world differently, that's all. Good luck to you.
also, i consider a security camera in a place i live to be security infrastructure, you should not be able to come into a place and do act like a vigilante imposing your view on what should and should not be recorded through force, if you have a problem with the way things work you should try to work within the law
again, this is what separates civilization from chaos
Very obviously not. Words have meaning. You are misusing words to garner emotional support for your preferred political position.
Burning down anything (including a business) is arson. Not violence. It only becomes violence if people are present and at imminent risk of physical harm.
Financial damage is not violence. Speech is not violence. Please take your doublespeak back to reddit; it doesn't belong on HN.
a case where you can argue speech can be violence would be a verbal threat to hurt or kill someone, but that has nothing to do with what we're talking about, i don't know why you're bringing up speech, are you trying to say that destroying these cameras is a form of expressing freedom of speech? (not accusing you of this btw, just genuinely curious what you meant by that)
I included speech as an example, the same as your bringing up property damage, arson, and financial damage. It seemed relevant given the general shape of what you were expressing.
Someone being driven to suicide or unable to pay for medication is not an example of violence. It might be many things but violence is most certainly not one of them.
> you cannot pretend that disrupting someone's livelihood is not at all related to attacking their liberty and/or life
Indeed it is _related_ but that does not magically make it "violence". Violence is direct physical harm. Not indirect and not anything other than physical.
> a case where you can argue speech can be violence
Speech is _never_ violence. That's about as close to definitionally impossible as you can get. (Here's a fun related observation: violent rhetoric is not itself violent.)
Respectfully, you seem to be having extreme difficulty comprehending the fact that words have meaning. It's impossible to engage in meaningful discussion with someone who either can't or won't conduct themselves in accordance with that fact.
That being said - the destruction of flock cameras is in no way violence. No one sees that and takes it as a threat of harm - at least no one acting in an honest way.
Brandishing a gun at someone is a threat that you'll shoot them but, importantly, is not the same thing as actually making good on the threat. (From the victim's perspective the distinction is rather important.)
If enough people can be convinced that those cameras are somehow helping Trump, you’ll find a lot of people in here and Reddit saying “yes”, I’ll imagine. Before this we had people vandalizing Teslas because of Elon.
(All US specific)
All this shit flows downhill from Citizens United.
That was the wellspring of all this shit.
I don't like all this surveillance stuff, but Flock is just the tip of the iceberg and "direct action" against Flock is just as likely to backfire as it is to lead to changes. More importantly, once you give folks moral license to do this stuff it's hard to contain the scope of their activity.
You don't want to give people "moral license" to do this broadly, but we've hit a point where there are no options available that don't have downsides. Stated another way: Taking no action can also be unethical.
I believe in surveillance, but Flock is just the tip of the iceberg and rolling out mass public surveillance is just as likely to backfire as it is to lead to changes. More importantly, once you give folks moral license to do this stuff it’s hard to contain the scope of their activity.
Everything you said is true, but I suspect, also irrelevant, because options short of vigilante justice aren't going to be seen by the public as viable for much longer (if they're even seen so now). America's social contract is breaking, and existing institutions make it clear, daily, that they will strengthen that trend rather than reverse it. And as JFK said, 'Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.' That doesn't make the violence laudable, or even desirable. It is simply inevitable without seemingly impossible positive change from an establishment that is hostile to such.
the threat has to be credible, which is where things like this, and luigi are quite valuable
Yearly reminder to read:
https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/kurz-the-discourse-of-vol...
[1] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/record-low-crime-rates-are-...
https://www.uscourts.gov/educational-resources/educational-a...
Having lived or spent time in a lot of 3rd world shitholes, including a civil war, I've only really felt freedom in places with lawless lack of government, never places with 'rule of law' -- that always gets twisted for the elite.
Of course the same happens in lawless regions, but power is fractured enough, there is a limit on power they can wield against the populace, as the opposing factions ultimately are a check on any one side oppressing the population to leave. They can't man machine guns at all the 'borders' and ultimately corruption becomes cheap enough that it is accessible to the common person which arguably provides more power to the common man than representative democracy does.
I think this element of factions in competition was part of the original genius of the '50' states with the very minimal federal government. But the consolidation of federal power and loss of the teeth of the 10th amendment and expansion of various clauses in the constitution means there is now no escape and very few remaining checks.
Living under a tyrant at least tends to provide predictability and stability of a sort. The kind of violence that exists in a lawless society tends not to exist. State sanctioned violence, sure, but that's more often than not targeted.
Basically, given the choice of Somalia or North Korea, there will be a diversity of opinions as to which someone prefers. I'm not saying I prefer one to the other, just that "Somalia" is not an objectively correct choice.
It's actually not lawless, it just uses a decentralized (polycentric) legal system that is poorly understood by westerners. They've had better outcomes under this system than under democratic government of FGS, which led to all or nothing tribalism influences coming into office.
Any long-running human society will over time crystallize into some structure that resembles having a legal system. When people say a place is "lawless" it doesn't mean someone can just murder their neighbor in broad daylight for no reason, and all the other neighbors just shrug and say "well, gee, darn, I guess there was no law against that".
The real meaning behind the original comment I replied to is that in both the lawless and tyrannical governments, it really comes down to "might makes right". In the "lawless" society, anyone can gain might and use violence against others if they have accumulated enough power. In the tyrannical society, the State has gained this power and uses is capriciously and unpredictably.
The question is really "would you rather the main source of potential violence against you be the armies and police of a dictator, or would you rather have to deal with your local warlord, while having the potential to become your local warlord?".
A government that can't do anything to police unions is also the government living in fear of the governed. A government that can't rein in (say) PG&E is also a government living in fear of the governed. When political representatives are shot by a right-wing anti-abortion terrorist that is also (and perhaps even more viscerally so) a government living in fear of the governed. And I'm certainly not 100% okay with this.
How can you look at the current state of affair and say this with a straight face... It's a mafia, they're all millionaires, they're all friends, thay all go to the same schools, they all work for the government and instantly bounce to lobby for the private sector, they all use their insider knowledge to profit, &c. Only someone who went through the American education system can believe the US is anywhere close to what you described, it's a farce
Murder is implied in the Epstein files with an email about burying girls on the property.
Eating sounds like an unhelpful exaggeration, unless I missed a major news story.
There's a bunch of mentions of "jerky" in the files, some people have taken it to mean eating people.
Society is like a pressure cooker, with built-in safety release valves to prevent the pressure from getting too high. If your solution to the safety release is to block off the valves, with authoritarian surveillance, draconian laws, and lack of justice for the elites committing crimes, it just moves it somewhere else. Block off too many, and it explodes.
- JFK
More people need to understand that the system is working as designed, and the elimination of peaceful, incremental reform based on popular demand, along with mass manipulation of human emotions through media and advertising, means that this sort of resistance is the sole outcome left before devolving into naked sectarian violence.
Say what you will, but the anti-Flock camera smashers are at least doing something beyond wishcasting from a philosophical armchair in comment sections or social media threads.
If you tell people this will help stop crime and that's it, everyone and their mama is gonna say yes.
If you tell people the truth, that police don't really care to look at the data and this surveillance is going to be used to target innocent people for unrelated "crimes" on the taxpayers dollar, then everyone would say no.
This is also why 99% of surveys are broken. You can get people to agree to literally anything if you just lie a little. After all, Adolf Hitler got elected by promising to fix the German economy and, in a way, he did.
I don't know what "surveys" have to do with this. Voters voted on it; it was a campaign issue in our trustee election.
Once again, we look at Adolf Hitler. He told voters his intention behind power was helping the German people, but that was not true. That was just a tool he used to grab said power.
We see this with a lot of things in the US. The intention behind giving ICE tens of billions of dollars and a license to kill and ignore due process is "your protection". But that's not true.
You might say we don't actually know anyone's intention, and that is technically true. But I prefer not to play stupid, and even if you're correct, it's not worth the risk.
These things bring huge amounts of risk with them. Even if everyone involved is perfectly benevolent, which I don't think even a child could believe, there's no guarantee it will stay that way. We are building out infrastructure that practically begs to be abused. And when you say it's okay, you're essentially saying you believe everyone will stay good forever. That's quite bold, no?
When phrased that way, your position does not seem reasonable. You have to understand, this is how some people see it, and when you understand that perspective, you can understand what you're actually asking for.
In fact the capital criminals in this matter are the people violating and betraying that supreme law; the politicians, sheriffs, city councils, and even the YC funders behind Flock, etc.
It is in fact not even just violating the supreme law, but though that betrayal, it is in fact also treason.
https://journals.law.unc.edu/ncjolt/blogs/under-surveillance...
I seem to remember something about tea in Boston having a different outcome.
The combination of ubiquitous scanners, poor data controls on commercially owned date, and law enforcement access without proper warrants compounds to a situation that for many rational people would fail the test of being fair play under the Fourth Amendment. For similar reasons, for example, it has been held by the Supreme Court that installing a GPS tracker on a vehicle and monitoring it long-term without a warrant is a 4A violation (US v Jones). Similar cases have held that warrants are needed for cellphone location tracking.
So far, however, courts have not held Flock to the same standard -- or have at least held that Flock's data does not rise to the same standard.
I personally think this is a mistake and is a first-order reason we have this problem, and would prefer the matter to stop there rather than rely on ethics. (Relying on ethics brought us pollution in rivers, PFAS and Perc in the ground, and so on.)
Given the state of politics and the recent behavior of the Supreme Court, however, I would not hold my breath for this to change soon.
Sorry, try again!
You are simply imposing your own views on others. Just because you disagree with Flock doesn't give you the right to destroy license plate readers that my tax dollars paid for. Who appointed you king?
And civil disobedience is basically necessary to have a functioning society long term.
If you are a taxpayer in a local jurisdiction with Flock cameras and you want them removed, show up to every single meeting and maximize use of public comment time.
Local government is a place individuals can actually be extremely effective but also almost nobody ever actually does.
Wait until the governance fails to the point data centers start getting burned down
Some might think it is somehow a Fourth Amendment violation, but I'm pretty sure it has already been ruled on enough times now that there is no expectation of privacy on government-owned roads, except for what's inside your car.
Similarly if there is a law that says the government can't build cameras everywhere to track you 24/7 without a warrant then post facto get a warrant to justify the prior tracking. Many people believe there is a breakdown in the rule of law when The government can pay someone else who has built cameras everywhere to track you 24/7 without a warrant then post facto get a warrant to justify the prior tracking.
And I don't think respecting the law still matters when the lawmakers are so evil.
I applaud the people destroying these cameras. It's not violence against people, it's just property.
This is absolutely the right thing to do.
Remove and smash the cellular modem in your car while you are at it.
This was in regards to: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2025/01/...
I don't have facebook, X, or tiktok installed on my phone.
https://darkanswers.com/how-your-location-is-sold-to-adverti...
I don't have the same choice with cameras everywhere that feed into a company with a security team run by donkeys and that provides minimal to no oversight to the government bodies using the camera data to do an end run around the fourth amendment.
It seems incongruous to me that people are willing to recognize the benefits that these tools provide law enforcement at solving crimes but when it comes to Flock cameras somehow things are totally different. They're just cameras with really good software, and law enforcement likes them because it makes their jobs easier.
A ring doorbell camera provides the individual with tangible benefits. It is installed by the individual on personal property. It does however typically capture some amount of public space which I think is problematic.
Government run centralized surveillance does not provide the individual with tangible benefits. It almost exclusively captures public spaces (that's usually the entire point of the exercise after all). It generally is not realistic to opt out short of being denied access to any surveilled public spaces. If that happens to include the majority of roads near your home then I guess you'll want to look into moving.
It certainly can if you're willing to see it from a different perspective.
Imagine a thief, stalker, abuser or anyone that commits a crime against you, but police normally would not be able to locate them after they run away. Having those cameras can absolutely help them locate them quickly in order to arrest them shortly after you report an incident.
I'm not trying to defend surveillance, I certainly don't want it, I'm just saying there can technically be non-obvious benefits.
Which as of 2018 requires a warrant to get access to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpenter_v._United_States
We want a government and law enforcement that can investigate wrongdoing, but we want that access to be checked and limited, and, most importantly, we want the government actually following the checks and limitations they're supposed to be subject to.
Which brings us back to data laundering companies like Flock.
Only if it's the government wanting the data directly from the provider. The provider itself, any malicious actor within, or any companies they might be selling your data to, can still get the subscribers' location data. And the government can still legally purchase that info from a data broker without it being labeled a "search". And that's nothing to say of governments acting illegally, there are still ways they can access that data.
My point was that not having "facebook, X, or tiktok installed on my phone" does nothing to stop your carrier (or anyone else they might be working with) from tracking your exact location in much worse ways than any individual app normally would.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide-area_motion_imagery
I strongly recommend not breaking the law until you've fully considered the omniscient demigod threat model. You never know who is watching and what their capabilities might be.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARGUS-IS
https://www.extremetech.com/defense/146909-darpa-shows-off-1...
Tech deployed to distant lands will eventually be turned on the empire's own.
Like it or not, we're all stuck on the same boat. Normalizing the abuse and mistreatment of some parts of the world means normalizing it for everyone.
Until recently very few people could articulate the real risk this tech posed, now you can literally see it play out (depending where you live)
You can scream up and down about how building such things is a horrible idea because it can one day be used for evil, and folks will either yawn or call you paranoid or worse.
Then the thing actually gets (very lightly) abused/used for something folks don't like and omg it's an emergency no one could have ever predicted! And oh look - it's often times far too late to do a damn thing about it other than surface level 'fixes' that are nothing of the sort.
It gets very frustrating living in such a society, but it might simply be the way humans are wired. If it's not in your face and actively a major problem to you in the moment, it's simply not a concern.
I was always anti-IoT for this exact reason.
The way to avoid masked gestapo thugs is to ensure that not even your preferred leaders are able to create them.
They weren't being used to build concentration camps before.
2. What you mentioned sucks. But it's hard to get the public to care about things that don't directly affect them and their day to day lives. My wife somehow browses the internet without an ad blocker even though I've told her that they track you and are basically malware, but knowing that doesn't change her browsing habits or make her even want to use an ad blocker, even if the ads are hostile to her experience.
3. Once the ICE thing came to light, suddenly people were like, wait, they can use this information to deport us or kill us? That's not OK.
1. They didn't know about it. It's only recently that there have been popular youtube videos on the topic. Critical mass can take time.
2. Before "the whole ice thing" there wasn't a team of masked brownshirts terrorising communities and using all available technology they could access in order to undertake said terrorising. That these cameras are part of that available technology, the timing ain't weird at all. In fact, it was pretty predictable.
But, yes, should have been up in arms beforehand, but likely the knowledge and visceral demonstration of the effects were not known. Visceral demonstration does pretty heavy lifting.
Well who could've seen that coming.
Figure out how to put an LCD in front of many of the ALPR cameras and play a slideshow of car images of license plates that exist almost exclusively in different geolocations. Make the Flock data so noisy that it becomes useless.
[0] https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=video+r...
There's more of us then there are of them - so their wealth can't protect them from everything. They can and do buy privacy so there must be something worth protecting that the masses can expose using their same methods.
> Why can't any random company request to put up a camera on a random power pole?
Not owning the pole is usually the show stopper
This is the sort of thing that should be put to a city referendum.
I wonder how resistant the cameras are to strong handheld lasers. I suppose they could harden them against some common wavelengths with filters, but that'd affect the image clarity in normal use.
I assume you're concerned about reflections from the camera lens or housing? In my mind, the archetypal camera is mounted on a nice tall pole, silhouetted against open sky, and painted matte black.
> watt class lasers
Surely those would be excessive for someone attacking the sensor, unless they want to remotely sear some graffiti by burning away paint.
Most of his work was dealing with and accounting for reflections that left the machine. If you have a prism that’s sending 95% of the light where you want it to go, when it’s a multi watt laser you can’t just let that 5% go wherever it wants. You will blind someone. So his job was getting black bodies in all the right spots to absorb the lost light.
His safety goggles looked like even more expensive Oakleys of that era and they were (much more expensive).
Please, don't play with lasers. At all. Even supposedly "safe" lasers can output far more light than expected.
How can one know what is dangerous for the eyes or not? Years ago I got an "IR illuminator" (from aliexpress, probably) that I wanted to use with my raspberrypi NoIR camera, for fun. Say filming myself during the night to see how much I move while sleeping, or making my own wildlife camera trap.
But I was scared that it could be dangerous and never used it (I tested it in an empty room, but that was it).
Is there a safe way for a hobbyist to get an IR illuminator and be sure that I won't make somebody blind with it?
If it's a cluster of garden variety through-hole LEDs with domed tops (like you would see on a TV remote), they're necessarily low power on account of having poor thermal performance.
Another way to tell is if nothing gets warm at all. It's pretty hard to hurt someone with an emitter that both doesn't have a focusing optic and doesn't get warm.
Let me be clear - you're still responsible for verifying the safety of your stuff, and I am in no way assuring you that the device you have is benign, because I can't do that without inspecting it directly.
> Let me be clear - you're still responsible for verifying the safety of your stuff
Obviously yeah. I was just wondering if there were known rules like "these wavelengths under this power are fine for humans and wildlife, even if they put the LEDs right in front of their eyes", and also if you have an array of such IR LEDs, how they cumulate.
And curious about things like: if I don't see it, can it hurt my retina?
I probably will never do it: I wouldn't want to blind a fox just because I wanted to make my own wildlife camera :).
I think it would be a cool exercise to figure out how much optical power you would see at, idk, 5cm from your illuminator. I assume it's a shortwave IR close to visible light, so you can assume it will focus like visible light, more or less.
Ideally you'd use an optical power meter but you could get a first pass by looking at the circuit and seeing how many mW pass through each LED, applying a conservatively high efficiency factor of W_optical/W_electrical, projecting that into a radiated cone for each LED and multiplying the power received on a dilated pupil sized spot at 5cm by the number of emitters.
Then you have to work out what the irradiance at the retina is once the light is focused. The hazard criteria include a time factor, so you'll have to decide if you/foxes would like to stare directly into the beam for 10 seconds? Or for the entire duration of your meditation session.
I assume CCTV surveillance cameras are usually fine because people cannot go and stare at it from very close then :-).
https://www.cehrp.org/dissection-of-flock-safety-camera/
https://www.arducam.com/product/arducam-ov5647-noir-camera-b...
This is a nerd fantasy thing, but it's a really bad idea. It's hard to hit a tiny lens from a distance and it only takes one slip of the hand to shine it straight into traffic or someone walking down the sidewalk.
They knew what they were voting for. The cruelty (and the authoritarianism) is the point.
1. https://theday.com/photo-single/1006536/?mode=team
2. https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/people-take-pi...
3. https://www.wusf.org/courts-law/2025-12-22/attorneys-urge-ju...
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/01/trump-roles-sup...
Currently, his approval rating is hovering in the mid to high 30s, which tracks.
We should spend our energy on the people who can be convinced; don’t get discouraged by thinking they’re all the same.
They've had a decade and a half to be convinced! They weren't convinced by Trump's easily-disprovable birther nonsense in 2011, his "Mexico is sending their rapists" speech, his "grab 'em by the pussy" recording, etc etc. And that's just in his first term. But they're convinced now?
I don't buy it. And I don't want fascists as my comrades-in-arms. Or even fascist-adjacent people, which IMO is a distinction without a difference. If they truly understood the full consequences of their vote for Trump and actually regretted it, right now they'd be seeking forgiveness from the people they, frankly, victimized. But they're not. That's not an ally I can rely on. That's not a coalition which will last. Even if Trump goes, Trumpism will be around for the foreseeable future. The people who voted for him will vote for the next fascist the first chance they get.
I choose moral clarity, even if it's at the expense of political effectiveness. Maybe that makes me an extremist- so be it. None of the literally thousands of horrible things Trump has done over the years were deal-breakers for Republicans. It was only when gas prices went up 5 cents per-gallon that they started to have misgivings. So forgive me if I ask myself whether they consider Trump's fascism to be a bug, or a feature.
A vote for Trump should never wash off. It should be an embarrassing family secret for generations to come.
1. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/04/republican-part...
2. https://www.esiweb.org/newsletter/100-million-expulsions-pro...
3. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/06/europe-zohra...
- Lots of them in Epstein files
- Mass importations of unchecked non-citizens
- Trying harder to look cool to Europe vs helping Americans
- Overregulation (things like California Coastal Commission)
- Massive fraud (LA -> SF bullet train, tens of billions for "homelessness" that don't go towards homeless at all, building permits, etc)
- Antifa burning down 3rd party businesses for reasons unknown
- Attempts to squash 1st amendment, particularly on gender
Since you linked sites like the Guardian and Atlantic, I figured the bar was low enough that you can just google any of these points and find an opinionated piece of similar quality.
The bubble I refer to is the fact that seemingly all you see is the bad on one side and good on the other. As easy as you claim one side are Nazis trying to kill off non-whites, the people on the other side claim the left is trying to force movie/music propaganda to eradicate all white people. Both sides have millions of posts from terminally online people wildly claiming outrageous things. Both "sides" have bad people. If you can't agree to that, you are in a bubble or just lying.
explain yourself
The equivalent actions on the left that you posed, increasing non-white representation in media, a) is not government policy and b) is fair assuming proportional representation for the existing 1 out of 3 non-white Americans. And the actual Biden policy allowing what you call "non-citizens" to enter the US is simply the international treaty for asylum seekers; these are all people going through the immigration system.
Regarding my sources, ESIWeb is a European think-tank that rigorously and objectively evaluates claims. The Atlantic and The Guardian are respected for their journalism world-wide. These aren't op-eds; I have been following this story for a while and choose my sources carefully.
There are a few other dubious items on your list--e.g., "Antifa" which doesn't represent mainstream Democrats, isn't an organization, and hasn't been linked to "burning down businesses". Epstein? At least a dozen people in this administration are implicated, with Trump being one of the principal pedophiles. "Massive corruption"? The list would be too long for this message if we got into the Trump administration.
If you don't believe me, just look at the CCP. It already happened there.
They disagree on the authority, not the methods, and help the two institutional parties cooperate to destroy civil liberties by accusing their counterparts of abusing ("weaponizing") civil rights to commit crimes, spy for foreign governments, and/or abuse children.
It just depends on if you're on the up portion of the K or the down stick. The larger picture might show an increase but if you split the data apart one leg is actually declining while the other is growing.
https://www.arducam.com/arducam-ov5647-standard-raspberry-pi...
If you want a fancy one with a lens and an IR cut filter it'll run you a grand total of $35:
https://www.arducam.com/arducam-ov5647-noir-camera-board-w-m...
Sure, the extra stuff like LTE modem, battery, solar panels, casing, etc, costs a whole lot more money, but these things clearly are built cheap. The optics and imaging sensor is a joke compared to real, proper cameras.
Nest: video was recovered from 'residual data located in backend systems' even though there was no active subscription.
Ring: employees accessing people's videos.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/05/...
I am an American and I am doing something about it. Co-founded a company that manufactures privacy-centric, on-prem video monitoring devices. No cloud.
> We are committed to protecting human privacy and mitigating bias in policing with the development of best-in-class technology rooted in ethical design, which unites civilians and public servants in pursuit of a safer, more equitable society.
And that's one of the reasons we made it architecturally impossible for someone to access the data externally. The user decides how and where to send the data.
Additionally, that you draw the line at sharing that juicy data with law enforcement. I mean sure, yeah, but even before that, sharing essentially all your movement data with some company because...?
https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2020/02/technologis...
what good is their platform if it is easily defeated by a guy with a ladder and a hammer?
I assume their primary use case is combating organized retail theft rings, as companies like Target spend a great deal on this problem (to include famously having their own accredited crime lab).
Cameras on the street is another matter altogether. Should not be allowed unless the citizens of the town vote to allow it.
Why is no one in democratic countries complaining about mass surveillance?
And I mean real cameras (not license plate readers) recording 24/7?
I'm talking about UK, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, etc.
Would you like the government driving around in government vehicles doing hit and runs and having zero accountability?
Or criminals for that matter?
LPRs are absolutely mass surveillance when used without proper legal restraints
the legal restraints are the big difference between regular police, who operate without very specific boundaries to protect individual rights -- and ICE, who can do whatever they want with impunity. That's what separates "police" from "Gestapo".
so, yeah, the stakes are different now. and if the "blue party" was the one pulling this shit I'd be just as mad
"Could I be making wrong assumptions? No I'm a hacker, it must be everyone else who is wrong."
Police states are like autoimmune diseases under the hygiene hypothesis. They'll keep ramping up their sensitivity until they're attacking everything, even when it's benign.
There obviously isn't a future without crime. This is just a tool to make it easier for police to do their job and deter criminals somewhat, but that is probably marginal.
There will always be kidnappings, there will always be property damage. Having technology available to make it easier to solve those crimes seems obvious to me.
I do not want to live in a society where police are watching everything I do in the name of solving minor property damage. "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" is bullshit. I don't do anything illegal in my bathroom, but I do not wish to have a camera in there, even if it could solve a hypothetical crime.
If you want to put a camera in your personal toilet you absolutely can.
edit: I live in Dallas so, although we sometimes hear gunshots when the Cowboys score a touchdown, i'm not in an active war zone.
Everyone that shoots their gun like that have come to the conclusion they vastly outnumber the police and know they are very unlikely to have anything happen. The cops are just holding their breath that nobody else recognizes this too
Must be pretty quiet all year 'round then.
There are other ways to sacrifice your privacy for a sense of safety that doesn't impose your 'understanding of right and wrong' on the entire public.
Edit: And I don’t even know how to have good faith conversations about this topic in these spaces, because the hive mind has decided that anything but absolute outrage is untenable. I’m getting downvoted for sharing my opinion.
Regardless, I’m happy to take a results oriented approach here. Does tracking license plates make it easier to catch criminals? Does it make it easier to track stolen vehicles? I suspect cities wouldn’t be signing these expensive contracts if they didn’t see any benefits.
And finally, surveillance of public spaces is not inherently at odds with personal freedoms. Your mobility is not restricted at all, your core rights have not been touched. And you are always welcome to go live in the woods off the grid.
I firmly believe that living in dense urban areas with millions of others requires a reasonably limited expectation of privacy in public spaces.
I can drive down highways in most cities in the USA without my license plate being read (Flock isn't on highways). Also Flock as integrated mostly just records license plates. It's not recording video 24/7.
But while our surveillance is not as widespread as other developed nations, it is still quite commonplace. There are cameras everywhere and recording license plates seems like such a tiny and justifiable expansion.
People in the US also get angry at speed cameras or red light cameras, yet I personally think both are very rational things to want in busy areas!
The amount of damage these cameras have caused is totally disproportional to whatever meager benefit they may have wrought. These are antisocial machines.