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Comment by chaps | Hacker News Reader

  They're matching specific descriptions of cars to incidents, like, "this vehicle has been present at the site of 5 previous package thefts".

You're hand-waving a hell of a lot of things away and you expect that everyone knows what you're talking about. Please stop doing that.

- Who is "They"?

- Why do you say "nobody has time for that"? What is "that"?

- Why are you dismissing genuine concerns through unhelpful language like, "coming to it with movie plot concerns".

- Why wouldn't "that" be a big deal? What is "that"?!

- What are the deeply problematic things?

- "They're matching specific descriptions of cars to incidents" -- no they're not. Just looking at Bloomingdale's audit logs, there are 13k examples of searches done for the simple reason, "suspicious".

- Why does municipalities being the primary operators matter?

Asking from a place of genuine confusion by how you think about these things.

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Hey, Chaps! Sorry, I write the way I write.

"They" are public bodies operating ALPR devices; in the main, municipal police forces, though obviously other public bodies (like the Illinois State Police) operate them as well.

The antecedent of the first "that" was "the use of cameras to detect cars with politically disfavored bumper stickers".

I am, yes, dismissing the concern that ALPRs are being used to detect cars with politically unfavorable bumper stickers. I think that if advocates for ending our Flock contract had come to the board table with that concern, rather than the quality of Illinois LEADS, we'd still have the cameras up.

The antecedent of the second "that" is "organizing around easily dismissible movie-plot concerns, like that municipal police are going to dragnet for people with anti-police bumper stickers". Unwinding the sentence, the "big deal" is, as I just said, that centering implausible risks takes real risks out of focus, and gives ammunition for advocates of the cameras --- of which there are a great many --- to push back on efforts to get the cameras down.

I spelled the "deeply problematic" things out elsewhere on the thread.

Feel free to tell me more about what Bloomingdale was doing with their cameras. With no detail, I'm inclined to believe the force simply didn't give a shit about the description field in the search request, because no serious, rigorous effort was made to regulate ALPRs in Bloomingdale, and so there isn't much signal in the logs.

My common experience is that people dismiss these risks without evidence, while I've seen plenty of stories of such things happening in this context and in others. Possibly those stories add up to a lot of anecdotes, but these aren't arguments based on reason or evidence:

> easily dismissible movie-plot concerns

> implausible risks

Those are just words. People who use them, IME, imply their conclusions are already well-established. But they never are. Where is the evidence and argument for these claims?

Please actually just look at any audit log and just search yourself. If you think there's no signal, then you clearly haven't looked. If you're going to continue to be lazy in your analysis, then ask a damn LLM. There are 528 agencies who used "suspicious". This is not a bloomingdale problem; it's much larger. Just fucking look, man.

  select count(*),org_name from flock_bloomingdale where reason = 'suspicious' group by org_name order by count desc;


   count |                     org_name
  -------+--------------------------------------------------
  2678 | Skokie IL PD
   828 | Joliet IL PD
   678 | Houston TX PD
   391 | Fayette County IL SO
   309 | Chicago IL PD
   256 | Katy TX PD
   245 | Itasca IL PD
   244 | Steger IL PD
   229 | Athens-Clarke County GA PD
   215 | Lucas County OH SO
   209 | Oak Lawn IL PD
   208 | Westmont IL PD
   199 | La Salle County IL PD - OLD
   194 | Zion IL PD
   191 | La Grange Park IL PD
   174 | Kenosha County WI SO
   173 | Champaign County IL SO
   170 | Roselle IL PD
   160 | Lake Villa IL PD
   152 | Bradley IL PD
   152 | Madison County IN SO
   143 | LaSalle Co. IL SO - New
   135 | Flossmoor IL PD
   132 | Sauk Village IL PD
   116 | Oak Brook IL PD
   106 | Crete IL PD
   104 | Villa Park IL PD
   101 | Darien IL PD
    97 | Cicero IL PD
    94 | Wilmington IL PD
    89 | Rockford IL PD
    80 | Lake County IL SO
    80 | Dolton IL PD
    79 | Texas Department of Public Safety
    76 | Will County IL SO
    75 | Naperville IL PD
    72 | Minooka IL PD
    68 | Hillside IL PD
    63 | Carpentersville IL PD
    55 | Kent County MI SO
    55 | Zanesville OH PD
    54 | Winnebago County IL SO
    51 | Logan County NE SO
    46 | Romeoville IL PD
    46 | Menomonee Falls WI PD
    46 | Homewood IL PD
    44 | Burnham IL PD
    44 | Baldwin County GA SO
    43 | Venice FL PD
    39 | Elmwood Park IL PD
    37 | DuPage County IL SO
    36 | Greensboro NC PD
    34 | Lowndes County GA SO
    34 | Henry County GA PD
    34 | Tinley Park IL PD

You're going to need to tell me why I'm supposed to be freaked out by the word "suspicious". Further, it is not my claim that (1) ALPRs are not problematic or (2) that they don't direly need more regulation; that's exactly the work I was doing in Oak Park before we cancelled our contract.

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