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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

I don't know much of anything about any other jurisdictions. I'm saying that my municipality took the cameras down with zero drama. I'm on one of its commissions with oversight on this.

(More precisely: there was drama, but it was all public drama from residents who didn't want the cameras taken down.)

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Curious. Why didn’t they want them taken down?

They do have a legitimate purpose and help to solve crimes. The network effect, funded by federal grants to make a surveillance infrastructure nationally is the biggest issue.

This is the part that upsets me. They really could help solve crimes without sacrificing privacy.

How? Whatever the system is now is clearly not preserving privacy

Have an independent non-profit with strong oversight manage the data. Grant access with a warrant.

The police should show that a crime has likely been committed, and get access to just the data that probably has evidence.

You still have people with very tempting access to a whole lot of data. I don't see how this is different from the current situation other than it's just different (corruptible) people with access.

I think motivations matter. Putting a for-profit company hired by the police, and the police in charge is just the worst.

There are many other contexts where we trust properly supervised people who lack an immediate and obvious incentive to abuse the system. Combined with good overall software design, auditing and transparency almost all of the harms could be mitigated. And the tech does have some pretty major benefits.

Every piece of technology deployed by the police is provided by a for-profit company.

I’m against flock the company. I’m in favor of a narrower form of plate recorders.

How do you do a warrant for a device that alerts when a car on a hotlist transits an intersection?

Record the plates. Don’t alert, search. And just for a specific crime.

The whole pitch for the cameras is alerting! The point is to interdict the cars right after they pass the camera.

That may be what police like, but in my town it’s sold to residents on solving crimes.

A stolen car is a crime though.

Sure. So file a request with a judge including evidence that the car has been stolen, and a reasonable time window and location.

Closed loop systems that require explicit consent to share outside the organization. Flock is like 50x worse than NSA stuff like PRISM that everyone freaked out about.

The Feds have full access to search everything, are no doubt exempt from any transparency on the platform, and ICE is already using it to abuse and intimidate political enemies.

It’s a nationwide surveillance system posing as a local police tool.

They're pretty comparable in that the people most het up about them tend not to know what either actually was. The feds do not have full access to search everything on Flock's platform except through the same mechanism by which they'd have access to search literally anything (a court order).

Fair. I’d argue that lack of friction is meaningful.

Also, the Feds are creative in their application of the law. Things like HIDTA designated areas led to Flock-predecessors - scaled infrastructure deployed decades ago. One of the “drug corridors” is the I-95 corridor from Miami to Maine.

Everybody is filter-bubbled and people on HN are profoundly filter-bubbled. Wait'll you find what a huge number of ordinary people think about NSA surveillance.

The cameras apprehend criminals. I can show with evidence that the juice isn't worth the squeeze, and in fact that the cameras had the effect of tasking our police force with doing municipal debt collection for Melrose Park and Maywood, at the cost of 5-7 hours of sworn officer time per "failure to appear warrant" arrest. But supporters of the cameras will point to multiple stolen car interdictions and recovered firearms.

If you go into these kinds of things assuming that the median resident of a municipality is anti-policing, you're already way, way off. And I find when I talk to anti-Flock advocates (that is: people who have "anti-Flock" as part of their personal identity, not just a person chosen at random who would happen to answer "no" to "should we ALPR") that many of them are operating from anti-policing premises, and so these kinds of responses are very surprising to them.

(Totally reasonable for your reaction to this to be "whoah, that was a lot more than I asked for", I just feel like I've been in these kinds of conversations a lot. It's not personal.)

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