The growing vigilante movement to knock out Flock surveillance cameras

Often times common crime (petty/violent) is viewed as a totally different area as white-collar crime or corruption. But they’re related.

As someone who’s had bikes stolen and car broken into, I sympathize with the desire for surveillance (especially in San Francisco). But Flock has no safeguards against cops using it to stalk ex-wives or misusing a partial match.

Maybe everyone should be keeping an eye on more things than they have been.

For this to work as a public service it needs to be a public service.

All the streams should be live and easily available in real-time to the public who should have an ongoing say in where they want cameras and where they do not to begin with, along with frequent citizen reviews regarding things like relocation.

Detectives are just going to have to face facts no differently than everybody has already admitted there are not enough cops to watch all the cameras all the time, so nobody can deny if the public eyes got involved the amount of stolen property recovered would be through the roof compared to what the department can ever accomplish no matter what. So there is no valid excuse if you are serious about public service or curtailing crime.

I would think the wisest communities would only allow commercial cameras as a public service beyond reproach, and as a fairness gesture should never have to pay anything whatsoever for not only the camera and the stream but all the related software that is supposed to be so helpful to the public.

Assuming Flock is going to sell the data to whomever they can well beyond complete local control whether they are supposed to or not, at least the locals who allow the cameras shouldn't have to pay anything ever. In fact they should always be licensing each public camera on strict terms so Flock can pay the community more than the cost of ongoing administration along with getting all the data and the latest state-of-the art local processing in the deal. If they really want to be a public service instead of having the public consider them a public nuisance.

>helping government agencies respond if a camera is damaged.

>“We’ve planned for it,” the company wrote, adding that protection plans are available for purchase.

No no no no no, this is so wrong, Flock should always be paying the local communities just to have each camera in place and if they can not generate enough community goodwill to keep vandalism from escalating it should be a cost they alone should bear.

Flock should be expected to do just fine in places that were never considered a "free country" to begin with and where things like freedom and liberty don't ring a bell.

If you're in the USA why even start out just the opposite of the American way if you were capable of anything that was more worthwhile?

Didn't know about this! Pretty neat

https://dontgetflocked.com/

I'm going off personal research though so I could be wrong.

One could even argue communicating over the phone or internet lacks the destructive component. Irl behavior is heavily modified by it.

Verbal communication is a work in progress. We really want it to work. Sometimes you have to make people listen. Get them back in the program :)

We can either have a functioning democracy and justice system, where responsibility is delegated to people whose job it is to uphold society's values, or we can have individual people that do job themselves. If a judge or police officer isn't going to carry out justice, then eventually people are going to do it themselves. That tends to get messy, so we stopped doing that with good reason, and built institutions to better service justice, but if the institutions aren't doing their jobs, they should be reformed or thrown out.

Kind of like how practically every Scientologist filed suit against the IRS over CoS having their tax exempt status revoked, to which the IRS eventually relented.

[0] https://youtube.com/@theguardrailguy

No way man that award goes to cloudflare

>No Federal agency may purchase, deploy, operate, access, or contract for any automated surveillance system that identifies, tracks, or records individuals [. . .]

Emphasis mine.

Am I wrong or does this 1. not outlaw the purchase of the data, just the systems themselves, 2. not outlaw the use of the data unless it was obtained by the federal government through a system they have purchased, and 3. not outlaw local or state law enforcement from buying it, just outlaws the use of federal funds to buy these systems.

So flock feed the data through brokers instead of directly, correct? Or am I reading this wrong?

It's another thing entirely if a private oligarch owns the cameras.

Flock and ULEZ are not the same.

This kind of suggests that the people ever sat together and decided on a political system that would benefit them. The reality is that even the most egalitarian and liberal system has been put into place by the ruling class and naturally was designed to benefit them. I'd say this is and was true for at least all major western societies. "By the people, for the people" is propaganda to legitimize said political systems after the fact. And we believe it, because it's the ruling ideology.

2. If we are so interested in enforcing laws, what about all of the white collar crime, crypto scams, insider trading, and grifting off of the public sector? Clearly doing more harm to society than some dog poop. Where are the $8bn market cap companies that go around enforcing securities laws?

That tends to be people's experience with this sort of thing. Laws the police generally wouldn't bother enforcing are maximally enforced, because it generates revenue.

They got rid of that camera eventually because it was "too easy for people to get out of tickets", meaning they were getting tossed when people challenged them.

Generally the things cameras like that are good for enforcing are handled by local law enforcement. Probably at the city/county level, at most the state. So prior to Flock and their ilk, camera surveillance was used by local people in the community to enforce laws enacted by the community.

Flock enables that but also provides a nation wide, searchable database available to local and federal law enforcement. Recently SCOTUS ruled that broad geo-based warrants (law enforcement would ask Google for all devices in an area for a time frame) are illegal and overbroad.

A nationwide Flock network with facial recognition ends up in the same place of being able not only to enforce laws, but track people in a warrantless way.

Conceptually at least, this feels very similar to government attacks on encryption where a government wants to see and have access to everything without cause just in case, which is definitely at least in sprint opposed to the right of free association. Flock does the same kind of thing but in the physical world.

I also think a general computer security rule of thumb probably applies here, where for the best security/safety, trust should be provable. If trusting a human is required to make a system work correctly, the system is flawed.

All of that to say I don't think the majority of pushback is against enforcing laws by camera specifically, but a Panopticon-ness of it and all the downstream effects that causes.

And that argument is just really hard to defend, so much so that most people feel confident just dismissing it entirely.

I liked president Obama, now we have Trump. It's barely been over a decade. If this stuff was installed under president Obama, I would have protested it then, too. Even though I didn't foresee Trump. And we still don't know if this is "the end". The US could slip into a completely totalitarian fascist state. It's happened to many countries before.

Even if our laws were actually written with perfect enforcement in mind, only outlawing what's actually antisocial, I don't think I could ever trust a government enough to give it that kind of power. Mass surveillance makes it easier to enforce any law, just or not, and most countries haven't been able to go even one lifetime without turning into a totalitarian hellhole or at least persecuting part of their population.

Another part of it may be that emigrating is so costly (not just in money) that most people won't ever be able to do it. When you're de facto forced to live in a country whose laws you (partly) disagree with, it's easier to add barriers to law enforcement than to get those laws changed.

The cameras enable good and reasonable prosecutions as much as they do oppressive political ideologies.

It is in essence an attack on the human spirit.

Same reason why for example banning encryption “to save the children” is laudable but it would weaken the ability to exchange messages privately so much that it’s unacceptable. The powers that be would very much like messages not to be private, partly because it would neuter any ability people would have to organize and challenge the current powers.

It’s unfortunate that giving up these cameras or the ban of encryption would also empower other types of crime but to most the trade-offs are too big and so we’d rather have stronger privacy at the cost of (potentially) a little more unpunished crime.

Both.

Even if a hypothetical perfect police force could serve justice better with a panopticon, that is A.) not the police force that exists today, and 2.) who's to day that there won't be a worse government in X years that will use that panopticon and police force to be dicks?

The benefit of minor crimes being addressed today is very small compared to the potential disaster of tomorrow.

Because such hypothetical police does not exist and cannot ever exist.

Humans are corrupted by power, basic human nature.

So if a system is staffed by humans, it must be designed to take human nature into account. It needs to be designed to be resilient against the flaws of human nature that will inevitably happen, such as corruption and bribery and self-interest.

  > I want to know if there's a reason beyond that why widespread surveillance shouldn't be a thing.

Mass surveillance like Flock is basically one of systems you need to create low trust authoritarian country.

If you build it, they will come. Except this time it's gonna be authoritarian leaders.

The majority of my job more or less reduces to mitigating the consequences of having all the stakeholders dreams come true. Most normal people consider rules as run by people. They expect them to ignore rules that don't make sense, apply rule of thumb, get the gist, and do what it takes to achieve success.

When you take these sorts of rules and try to put them into silicon, the end result is often an undesirable result despite all the rules being successful implemented.

The law are these sorts of rules. They're designed to be "executed" by people using judgement. Part of the reason why the law works is specifically because we don't have a bunch of computers watching everyone all the time. Secure in your person and papers is literally right there in the constitution. Like they didn't know about computer surveillance when they added that amendment but they knew that without privacy the law doesn't work as intended.

For example, there's a small local park near me that serves as a handy shortcut between two different neighborhoods, but technically nobody is allowed to enter it between 11pm and 6am. The assumption is that if you're in a park during these hours, it must be for some nefarious purpose.

The problem with arguments like yours is the implied premise everyone must be surveilled because they are potential criminals who just haven't been caught yet, the exact opposite of the legal presumption of innocence and the founding values of the US (other countries' mores about the default moral state of humanity vary, of course). It's only a short leap from arguing that if everyone needs to be surveilled for everyone else's safety, then being surveillable by being out and about at the wrong time of day is itself suspicious, and that curfew should be the default.

Surprisingly, some 70-80% of US cities have curfew rules of some kind (usually against minors) and they're often ramped up significantly in response emergencies. Most other developed countries just don't have curfews. European countries have business regulations like barring minors from some businesses such as nightclubs, but US-style curfews do not exist. A Swiss town (interlaken) that voted to impose them had to hire private security guards because the police refused to enforce the rule. Curfews are somewhat common in developing nations like the Philippines and Thailand, but again don't really exist in developed nations in Asia. I didn't do an exhaustive global survery, but to my general knowledge the US is an outlier in this regard.

The fundamental problem with the curfew mentality is this assumption of malignity, and there's no end to it once you introduce it. Suppose we claim that crime has fallen since security cameras were deployed. And yet, there's still some crime and not all of it appears on our public camera network! It turns out quite a lot of crimes are committed in private. Maybe we should just put cameras inside people's homes - after all, why would anyone object...unless they wanted to commit crime? Maybe we should do away with warrants - they're time-consuming to apply for and create paperwork (we hate bureaucracy, don't we folks). Sure they're in the constitution, but haven't you noticed how people who insist on seeing a warrant always turn out to be the worst sort of people? Obviously innocent people would welcome the police into their home, and take pride in demonstrating their innocence. Why, I think most right-thinking folks would be prepared to sacrifice some of their own liberty if it meant catching just one extra criminal.

See copypasta https://pastebin.com/GQBGWjv8 for full explanation of the four counter arguments below, too long to post here.

> > "You have nothing to fear" This is a very dangerous mindset. The argument is frequently raised in debates by pro-big brother hawks, and doing so is dangerous, cowardly and dishonest.

> > There are at least four good reasons to reject this argument solidly and uncompromisingly: the rules may change, it's not you who determine if you're guilty, laws must be broken for society to progress, and privacy is a basic human need.

> Guy takes his dog for a walk, doesn't pick up, boom, cameras plus AI finds the person and issues a fine.

In the 1980s depending on your jurisdiction there were some kind of sodomy or gross indecency law. Applying AI and surveillance to that. Guy goes for a walk, kisses his boyfriend, boom, cameras plus AI finds the person and issues a fine and/or jails them.

Most arguments boil down to not trusting current or future government because the government can commit violence against you, deprive you of liberty, or take away your possessions. With a combination of the rules may change, and it's not you who determines guilt.

From: https://www.sfu.ca/~palys/Solove-2011-TheNothingToHideArgume...

> > in Friedrich Durren-matt's novella Traps, which involves a seemingly innocent man put on trial by a group of retired lawyers for a mock trial game, the man inquires what his crime shall be. "'An altogether minor matter,' the prosecutor replied .... 'A crime can always be found."'

Dave Eggers' The Circle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Circle_(Eggers_novel) - also a movie - explores the concept of people going fully "transparent" effectively mass surveilling themselves

Flock is building a giant camera network that records people’s comings and goings across the nation and maintains those records despite any link to crime for an indeterminate amount of time.

The other players like Axon and Motorola are looking to follow Flock's lead, but mass surveillance is the main problem.

There have been systems designed & deployed that make ALPRs look like kittens.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARGUS-IS

Trends are random. This one has a large underlying informed group, deflock, centered in a Discord server. It then became common internet opinion to be opposed to it.