Hacker News Reader

Comment by llm_nerd | Hacker News Reader

What makes Flock bizarre is that it's a private business, and this is precisely how police departments are getting around a lot of traditional gates and checks on this sort of thing.

Police setting up a 1984 monitoring system throughout your city, tracking every car, person, activity -- yields lots of questions, oversight, concerns, debate, challenges, etc.

Some private business doing the same, and then letting the same police use it at will as a paying customer -- yay, all of the invasive monitoring with none of the oversight.

View on HN

And of course, it's compounded by being pooled. Like RealPage, ALPR services like Flock, Axon Fleet Hub, and Motorola Vigilant VehicleManager offer data laundering so that organizations that shouldn't be talking can communicate.

Privacy laws now.

The real joke is that the 1984 system was already in place long before flock. We all carry phones. Either from tower records ot google advert tags, private industry already tracked our every movement. Licence plate readers? Why bother when every car now has bluetooth enabled and so is constantly prodcasting its LAP id. (Some cities have tracked cars this way for over a decade, mostly for traffic management.)

Police had to at least play 'parallel reconstruction' and pretend they weren't using Stingrays though. And we all knew it and nodded along, and the lines moved, and the rules blurred a little more, and now we are at the next phase of the erasure of civil liberties.

That's actually the one thing that does make sense: police has always wanted to be able to do this, but they legally can't. But they can reward a private company willing to do it for them, so that they can "ask for the data" without ever breaking the law.

The police can, in fact, operate cameras in public spaces and they have done so for decades. ALPRs have been widely deployed since the 1990s.

I'm frequent surprised by how many people think that privacy laws block the police from recording their activities in public. For whatever reason, Flock is getting a lot of press, but this is hardly a new field.

ANPR has not been widely deployed since the 1990's in the US and the US court system has consistently held that the degree to which a technology automates monitoring, searching, etc is very relevant to whether it violates people's reasonable expectations of privacy for very obvious reasons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number-plate_recogni...

> However, ANPR did not become widely used until new developments in cheaper and easier to use software were pioneered during the 1990s. The collection of ANPR data for future use (i.e., in solving then-unidentified crimes) was documented in the early 2000s.

“Fascism should rightly be called corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power.”

- Benito Mussolini

Nah. Fascism only tolerates one power, that being itself. It can emerge from either the state or corporate side, and necessarily subsumes or destroys the other, just as it subsumes or destroys unions, families, friend networks, communications, and anything else that can establish power. That doesn't mean the merger of two of them is the defining feature.

Corporations generally tend to only tolerate the state to the extent that guns or courts mandate that they must. How many billions of corporate dollars have gone to fund campaigns to deregulate, to skirt authority, to do whatever is necessary to make sure profits go up?

That's also the degree to which dogs tolerate unions - doesn't really mean anything

That’s true of every system of government

No. Power can be delegated. I'd say capitalism puts ultimate power on the government who delegates power to holders of capital. (If that stops, it's not capitalism any more)

Fascism was corporative, but in Italian the word has a very different meaning compared to the English one.

This is an underrated comment. "Corporate" power did not mean, in 1920s-30s Italy, what Americans think it means.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com