I Reported on Flock's Cameras. Now I'm One of the System's Mistakes | Hacker News Reader

I Reported on Flock's Cameras. Now I'm One of the System's Mistakes

thedrive.com

54 pointsCharlesW10 comments

Systems like flock cannot by their nature be good for the average person unless maybe they are democratically controlled with strict oversight and transparency. Tools to concentrate power are, and will always be used to oppress. Flock is not popular anywhere and that it's being implemented upon us rather than by us should have all of us smashing flock cameras whenever we see them. 1312

unless maybe they are democratically controlled with strict oversight and transparency

Lets say it is strictly controlled today. What about in six months? What about next year, 2, 5, 10 years from now? There is no guarantee that strict controls that work today will work tomorrow. The only thing that is guaranteed is it will be abused by someone, at some point, even if it is miraculously tightly controlled today (which itself is not true, as we see from number reports of abuse already).

The only way to prevent data abuse is not to collect un-necessary data in the first place

I don't know that you can be absolutist about these things, we cede a lot of power to the government because it actually does make more sense to pay for and manage some things collectively. I'm deeply against surveillance like this but I don't think practically speaking we can get rid of it entirely. I think we should do our best to dismantle it as much as we can but enforcing the great responsibility part of great power on what's left is also a useful strategy.

It should not be lost on anyone that this incident could have easily cost Joel Feder his life, all because of the officer's faith in ultimately faulty OCR results.

What's that idiom? The purpose of a system is what it does?

Seems to me that we should be taking a close look at what law enforcement systems are doing right now. They seem to be producing a lot of fear

I don't recall ever seeing a vote on this, yet somehow they are cropping up everywhere. When your representatives (local, state, federal) do things they weren't elected to do and didn't ask the public, really makes you reconsider how democratic the system is. Who are their actual constituents beyond getting votes for the next election?

Eugene, OR citizens made this point and ended up getting EPD's and neighboring Springfield PD's contracts with Flock cancelled.

Flock needs to be shut down, and their c-suite needs to be imprisoned as agents of the state for constitutional violations

I mean, it seems pretty obvious to me that flock should be flagging this as a partial match in a very prominent way, so hopefully the police officers take a closer look and don't act recklessly. It is shoking to me that this wasn't included from the start.

Another journalist was picked up in a different state with another dealer plate (on a different vehicle) with the same partial match. TLDR: what's in Flock is a partial, but when Flock gives the pic they snapped to LEO they aren't giving what they alerted on they're giving what's in the pic they snapped and LEO is taking this pic with no provenance to the original report as gospel truth.

https://www.thedrive.com/news/inside-the-flock-dragnet-how-s...

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