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Comment by hombre_fatal | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile in Texas we can’t even have red light cameras to automatically ticket people willing to kill you just to catch a light.

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"Meanwhile in <location> we can't even have Flock cameras to automatically catch people who may have killed someone"

Hopefully the absurdity of broad scale surveillance can't be so easily lost in hyperbole

Flock doesn't automatically catch people who killed someone. Red light cameras do catch people who run red lights.

And people that don't run red lights and suffer selective enforcement and are used for arbitrary surveillance and so on and so on. Don't let your naive view of what you want these things and their handlers to do distract you from reality, regardless of the brand or intent of widely deployed cameras.

Traditional red light cameras take a still frame and are triggered only during a red light violation.

That's actually a problem because sometimes they catch people who weren't running the red light, but easily fixed by capturing a bit more.

Thank goodness you found a basic flaw in red light and speed enforcement cameras. It's shame it's taken decades for someone to realize this issue and now we can finally start working on solutions like taking two photos.

No one in law enforcement is trying to help you. That's not what it's for.

That's why I'd prefer automatic enforcement of the most dangerous, anti-social behaviors instead of requiring an LEO to have to wait around and catch you in the act.

Having been in Texas last month these cameras are all over your state. I saw them everywhere from the smallest city to houston

https://imgur.com/a/P7WxKpU

They're all basically turned off by law, just not removed

Go visit Harris County where Houston is, they are definitely active and more are getting deployed constantly. More commercial businesses are also installing them in their parking lots. It's not just Lowe's/Home Depot, I've seen new ones popping up at grocery stores and storage unit businesses.

To go from my house to the grocery store 4 miles away, I have to drive by 6 flock camera deployments. Hardware store 6 miles away? That's at least 9-12 cameras I have to pass.

I literally cannot leave my neighborhood without Flock knowing about it because they've installed them at every single entrance.

And that's just the driving portion of a trip. I stopped going to Big box stores almost completely because I'm tired of looking up as I walk down the aisles and see a fucking screen showing me on camera with big red letters stating "Recording in progress". That's not enough though, you go to the self checkout and have cameras above you and in the checkout machines watching and recording and analyzing your every movement and facial expression.

It's blatantly obvious what's going on if people would look up from their phones for 10 minutes and pay attention.

> if people would look up from their phones for 10 minutes and pay attention.

Ah, that's a big ask in 2026...

Make sure you're not looking at traffic control cameras. These are used to monitor traffic for the traffic lights.

I'm talking about red light cameras. Texas legislature ruled in 2019 that their photo evidence can't be used in court.

Instead, a cop has to catch you in the act so now everyone runs red lights; I'm not even sure Houston puts cops on the traffic beat.

And eventually you kinda entitle yourself to it too since the first part of your green light was spent waiting for other people to run their red light.

That is ridiculous. Some level of surveillance is necessary to bring the society closer to the optimal state.

Americans don't want to be optimal, they want to be free.

Honestly I like that policy. What's the legality of flock in Texas?

Totally legal.

The operating theory of all of these cameras is that anything happening in public sight is by its nature not private. The federal government is dumping millions and millions of dollars into grant programs for municipalities to buy it… It’s a giant federal surveillance program disguised as decisions made by individual police departments.

It’s hilarious and depressing to contrast the HN community reaction to Snowden versus the mostly meh response to flock.

The last 20 years has burned privacy into the ground for a large part of the population.

The plain view doctrine dates back to the 70s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_view_doctrine

Context matters. At the time cameras were large and bulky. Computers were massive and extremely power hungry. The world's communication networks didn't have the bandwidth to shuttle video around in bulk.

What meh response? There has been a continued and very vocal response against flock here.

If you pointed out any of the many problematic aspects of Snowden in those days, you’d be shouted down and voted into oblivion immediately.

Good, because nothing “problematic” about an individual matters one bit when presented with nefarious government activities. It’s obvious distraction technique 101.

You're mistaken if you think the community is still the same percentage of humans.

That’s a fair point that I didn’t consider, thank you.

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