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Comment by beloch | Hacker News Reader

Flock was pitched as the triumph of technology over criminality. It's surveillance network was supposed to end crime. However, when people witness extreme criminality thriving unpunished at the top levels of U.S. politics, the lie becomes evident. Flock isn't about ending crime. It's a tool of control to be used by criminals.

Who watches the watchers? Everyone.

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It's a nice idea. Everything is backwards right now. It should to be the other way around: random citizens should be essentially anonymous while all members of the government are surveilled 24/7. Surveillance should scale with power.

Yeah, this is really messed up. I think our instincts ("tribal leader is powerful and has extra rights") are doing us a disservice. In democracies, all politicians are our employees: They are supposed to do our bidding, and if they act on their own, only in our direct or indirect (no bullshit interpretations please) interest.

It is pretty much a descent into tribalism. All wealth flows upwards to the leaders of the tribe, who can do anything they want without repercussions or criticism of their actions. The tribe has no use for education, or progress, or infrastructure. The tribe is about what the chief wants right now, with no need for future planning or thinking about consequences. And most of all the tribe is violent, petty and revenge-seeking.

It's legal for anyone to do what Flock did

Why downvote? It is. If you want your own personal Flock network to track Congresscritters, you can have one.

Funnily enough, the whole "social credit" thing that Westerners like to meme about was supposed to work like that. Although it never really got implemented, it was meant to be a score applied exclusively to business leaders, politicians, etc.

And it was actually mostly meant to track corporations rather than individuals. That's why the full name of it was Corporate Social Credit System. It was supposed to increase trust in the Chinese market

> Funnily enough, the whole "social credit" thing that Westerners like to meme about was supposed to work like that.

That’s not particularly funny and those memes are about the actual thing, not what it might have been in an ideal world. What it might have been in an ideal world, had it not been implemented by a totalitarian state is not very relevant.

The "actual thing" was never implemented. People meme about it because it's funny. Not based on reality

>Funnily enough, the whole "social credit" thing that Westerners like to meme about was supposed to work like that. Although it never really got implemented, it was meant to be a score applied exclusively to business leaders, politicians, etc.

I have a bridge to sell to anyone who took that at face value.

We meme about it because it's virtually guaranteed that corporations and government figures will be immune while the rest of us will be oppressed.

This is a perspective I hadn’t heard or considered before.

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.

I think it would be kind of different if people were having cars broken into less often or bikes returned after being stolen

But it's clear that increased surveillance hasn't been leading to stolen property being recovered.

Yea, that's the thing: I could almost get behind mass surveillance if it actually solved crime. Probably not, but almost. But it doesn't! Having a camera on every street corner doesn't do anything to solve crime if the police won't look at it and actually follow up. So we get the downsides of mass surveillance without any upside.

Same thing with things like "find my iPhone". Great in theory, but if your phone actually gets stolen and you tell the cops "Hey, my phone is at this exact address, I can prove it with Find My," they still don't give a shit and don't lift a finger to solve it, so the technology is in reality useless.

We need a police force who is actually motivated to solve crime rather than just find black people to beat and show up in force when someone protests something.

> Same thing with things like "find my iPhone". Great in theory, but if your phone actually gets stolen and you tell the cops "Hey, my phone is at this exact address, I can prove it with Find My," they still don't give a shit and don't lift a finger to solve it, so the technology is in reality useless.

This is location-dependent.

Take a lesson from the UK where there are cameras everywhere.

Brothers van parked in London. Window broken, bag stolen off front seat. Right under camera.

He calls police and miracle of miracles they actually attend. Must have been in the area.

Plod:"Shouldn't have left your bag on view"

Bro:"Can you check the CCTV"

Plod:"You watch too much TV mate, we don't have time for that"

But cameras will one day help catch a murderer and suddenly everyone will want them everywhere.

Tell them someone said "from the river to the sea". They'll drop everything to look.

This is such a lie. UK arrests people for flying UK flags. Pro Palestinian terrorists get away with assaulting police all the time.

the cops were in the apartment where my phone was stolen when my phone was stolen and had a video recording of it getting stolen clearly showing the person who stole it who was known to the police because it was the person the police were called about.

I said: can you get my phone back? They said: use find my, then come to the police station. I did. The police said: sorry, this location only shows the building and not the apartment, so we can't enter the apartment and get your phone

Sounds like a mini version of Habermas’s legitimation crisis playing out in real time

The phrase I constantly recite to people at this point is "Mass surveillance is not mass enforcement and the two are separate words and concepts for a reason." People don't seem to get it until there's an effort to point that out.

> As someone who’s had bikes stolen and car broken into, I sympathize with the desire for surveillance (especially in San Francisco).

That isn't what it is being used for. That would still require cops to be investigating petty theft as if they cared about it.

Plenty of places this is happening.

I got to teach a Detective the technical limitations of Find My, and also successfully recovered some of my property from a UHaul truck during a stop.

All for bikes - but it contributed to two arrests, and contributed to a larger, interstate theft case.

> That isn't what it is being used for.

I'm not sure if you know what you're talking about? Flock cameras have definitely involved in detecting people who come into SF in stolen cars or with stolen plates, who proceed to go on sprees of breaking into cars and stealing things.

I really dislike Flock as a company, but their cameras absolutely do get used in the way they're publicly pitched.

Flock doing bad things does not justify coming into this thread and stating as fact things that are patently false.

You said it - they only care when it's a spree.

and one with a plate that's already reported stolen. trnslation: it's a zero effort publicity project.

Plates can be retroactively searched, backtracked, subjects followed back to other cars and tracked back to where they left from, or other cars that are repeatedly in the area prior to cars being stolen before being used for other crimes can be identified and tracked backward. A plate doesn’t need to be flagged prior to a crime. It’s the same way they can tell which tolls and which plate readers a vehicle has passed recently when running a plate, and is frequently used to identify or trip up drug runners.

Translation: you are wrong and seem to be making things up to fit your position, because this is exactly what people have a problem with — that this data is retained regardless of suspicion.

That wasn't what I said at all, and you know this. Please don't deliberately misrepresent me

I don’t think that’s true; my understanding is that there are (currently opt in, I don’t it should be) monitoring that flags any such requests for administrative review and a number of officers have been fired because of it. It is no different than a cop running their own or someone else’s license outside of actual police business, which frequently results in administrative reprimands/write-ups because of the same types of monitoring.

You might disagree on the punishments or protections, and that’s not to say it couldn’t happen, but it seems false to say there are no safeguards.

I do not “support” Flock. I would have less issue if there was mandated data retention policies (by law) that limited to thirty days without a court order. Afterward, Flock should be welcome to perform mandated anonymization/obscure biometrics/obfuscate identifiers to retain anonymous data at that point. Either someone is suspected of being a criminal and a judge agreed it warranted access and retention, or they are an ordinary private citizen in public. The government’s position that because the government doesn’t own the company they can get data from at any time, it isn’t government surveillance, is…

Well, I think it’s just lying but that is an opinion.

I’ve been robbed, multiple times, I’ve had my bike stolen… once I was robbed in London, surveillance capital of the world. Do you think the cameras helped? Take a guess.

I don’t sympathise at all with anyone who wants the powerful to surveil the rest of us. It’s just another, powerful, tool used by the wicked people who seek power over the rest of us.

Instead spend that money on educating the poor.

I put privacy over ending crime. That’s the unspoken stance everyone needs to decide on. Ubiquitous surveillance will end most crime but do we want that if the cost is our privacy?

That's a HUGE assumption about the ability of surveillance to succeed, and it goes against the evidence of the most surveillance-heavy states in the present and history. There are flaws in systems that go beyond collecting evidence, for example corruption can undermine any technical approach as we see in places like China where surveillance is omnipresent.

Hell if "total surveillance" was the secret to ending crime, prisons would paradise. The panopticon would have been a great success. In reality the only way to make it work is to assign people two-by-two to watch each other 24/7, and that only works if they're both honest, attentive, and incorruptible.

Total surveillance would be watching people all the time, indoors too aka Fahrenheit. It would absolutely end 95% of crime.

Again by this logic prisons should be free of crime, rather than hotbeds of it. Insisting that something is true because it makes sense to you doesn’t make it true.

Prisons don’t have cameras in cells where most “bad” stuff happens. It’s a also a manpower problem but that’s probably going to go away with LLMs being able to auto review videos at some point.

“Most bad stuff happens” in cells? That seems like it could use more than assertion, and in fact plenty of prisons have cameras inside of cells.

This assumes the people watching actually cared about stopping crime enough to step in and arrest the offenders.

To echo the topmost comment's point, you can't convince the public that law enforcement actually cared when the elites who flew on the Lolita express to the child rape island are facing zero consequences while urinating on the side of a highway gets you put on a list forever.

I've heard the chances of being put on that list for that infraction is less that getting an STD from a toilet seat.

If you know people who say they've gotten put on a lost for peeing in public, you know someone who is a sex pest but won't admit it.

> It would absolutely end 95% of crime

It might solve much of existing crime, but that’s not the same as a net reduction in crime.

Bribery, blackmail, and coercion would just fill the crime vacuum.

It would only solve crime if the police actually followed up on all areas where surveillance pointed out crime. Surveillance itself can't arrest a criminal.

You're describing a (dystopian) fantasy. We're taking about the reality of such systems when deployed in the real world and operated by real people.

> Ubiquitous surveillance will end most crime

It doesn't even do that, is the worst part. So the trade is to give up all privacy, but low-level crime continues unchanged.

Anyone who has tried to get the police interested in a theft where you have clear HD video of the action and a clear view of their faces and/or license plate, has lived this experience.

Yeah, and notice all the critical surveillance footage that happens to conveniently disappear? I could start a list, but anyone who knows it won't need one.

Even the Secret Service - once considered a fairly reputable organization - deleted text messages related to the Jan 6 insurrection, after they had received a preservation request.

And the video gap for the Epstein suicide is just too ridiculous.

Someone should start an investigation into why records gaps so often occur right around the time they're most needed. Maybe it's aliens.

I was beginning to fear none concurred. We've named a pittance of the many examples. We are even seeing it with the Tyler Robinson (C Kirk) case, where the rooftop footage is null and the responding officer lost his body-cam footage, because the battery failed in the first 20 minutes. This shit goes on and on. And it is not only with cameras; even the Pulse Nightclub, where broadcastify went down during the most critical part of the event, and no public records were retained. The London bombing of 2007, on and on.

I know it seems unfair to boast an abundance and give only a few examples, but it seems nearly everyone has their own unique memory of a significant example and I gave up cataloging things long ago.

We seem to have enough integrity issues to warrant a little extra caution in our panoptiprudence.

The optimal amount of crime is non-zero. We can "catch all criminals" quite easily, just install a totalitarian state panopticon where everybody is guilty by default and constantly surveilled by an omniscient intelligence apparatus, problem solved.

People are going to need to accept some amount of crime if they want to have some semblance of freedom and basic human dignity.

https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...

You can't even fix broken laws without crime. Alcohol prohibition wouldn't have ended if everyone followed it.

> Ubiquitous surveillance will end most crime

How, praytell, will surveillance end wage theft?

> if the cost is our privacy?

If the cost is freedom. Privacy is an abstract technicality to many, but it's necessary for freedom, and freedom rings everywhere.

>Who watches the watchers? Everyone.

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?

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