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Comment by josefritzishere | Hacker News Reader

This sort of hyper-local protest is the way to go. Nobody wants to be surveilled.

Still hyper-local but much more efficient than one retiree holding a sign in front of one camera! Kudos to all doing it nondestructively.

I wonder if this is as efficient or as effective. The guy holding the skimmer was viral and garnered a lot of attention to the situation. This site, while something I support, probably won't. Maybe it'll be the place people find after learning about the guy holding the sign.

Now, if the guy holding the skimmer had a sign with the URL on it, then we're on to something.

> Now, if the guy holding the skimmer had a sign with the URL on it, then we're on to something.

Or a QR code.

(Extra points for a hand-drawn QR code. Yes, it takes patience (or grid paper), but it's easier than it sounds.)

Speak for yourself. I don't mind this type of surveillance personally.

That's your right, but the problem is that cameras are in public and some people do mind this.

I believe they mean they don’t mind if others are surveilled against their will

If you force surveillance on 10 people and even one of them doesn't consent, that's still a net bad. And this situation is probably closer to the inverse of those numbers, or at the very least 50/50.

And this isn't even to mention the criminal negligence of Flock, and the evils they have already enabled, as committed both by Flock employees and by government.

Is surveillance special in that it needs total buy in from society, or else it's bad? Is any other aspect of governance held to that standard?

Surveillance isn't populist. The Patriot Act, for instance, is not representative of what taxpayers want to spend money on.

It's hard to gauge the sincerity of these beliefs, and even harder to tell if you've actually tested these beliefs against the reality of mass surveillance, especially when it's been used to arrest and stalk innocent people.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/georgia-cops-keep-get...

https://cambridgeanalytica.org/surveillance-privacy/police-f...

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/the-cop-investigating-a...

Well, we need laws and oversight to stop these actions. Do you realize that people use phones to stalk innocent people? And yet you probably have a phone. Why is that?

> Well, we need laws and oversight to stop these actions.

Do you think this hasn't been tried?

We have laws on stalking. We've tried to rein in cops.

We have laws and oversight surrounding phone surveillance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawful_interception

Just like you say, it still gets abused both within and outside the government (eg. Salt Typhoon) because surveillance inherently threatens society.

Shouldn't we get rid of phones then?

More to your point, shouldn't we arrest anyone without a phone?

It's unfair that criminals can opt-out of surveillance, while Senators and CEOs cannot.

This is like the "why drive if it's so dangerous" fallacy. We trade cost for value, downsides for upsides, risk for reward. Cars and phones are highly valuable to normal people. Virtually all people do not experience immediate, constant, concrete benefits from public camera surveillance. And this is not even to mention that Flock cameras are more abused than phones (although scale makes that subjective, it's kind of apples-to-oranges right now).

Analogies are distracting. They are rhetorical junk food. Make an argument directly supporting Flock cameras - don't just say "it's like phones".

This was my exact point. I don't actually believe in banning phones and was just using it to point out how poor the argument is. I'm curious why you're jumping on me, but not OP. Is it because you agree with their opinions but not mine?

Saying "surveillance is bad because it has been abused in these instances" is not a particularly compelling argument because it doesn't talk about the "cost for value, downsides for upsides, risk for reward" aspects of flock.

https://iea.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/mister-gotcha-...

My phone wasn't designed to stalk other people. These systems are.

While such a surveillance system appears to (kinda) work in China, do you really trust American companies and the American police system to implement it at anywhere close to that level of competency?

It's not the cameras I mind per-se. They have legitmately been used to solve some crimes that might have gone unsolved otherwise.

But the problem is the cameras are pervasive. It's not like a red light camera, or a speed zone camera, or a toll road camera, that has a specific purpose in a specific location. And it's the building of a database, and correlation of data from point to point, and the potential abuse. We have documented cases of cops abusing Flock data to stalk exes, And history proves that any time you collect data about a group of people, it will eventually if not immediately be abused.

You can propose all the warrants and anonymizing and other restrictions that you might like to control who looks at the data and when, but at the end of the day it's all about trusting those in power who have control of the data, and that's not a good thing to do. The government does not (or should not) have the right to track the public to this degree as they go about their daily personal business.

That's because you haven't thought it through. "We only want info on the bad people" might not alarm you personally until any government entity changes the definition of bad and now you're a "bad guy".

There are all sorts of powers we afford law enforcement that could be abused; I hardly think cameras would be at the top of the list of concerns, honestly. NYC has had thousands upon thousands of cameras for quite a while without much fanfare, along with other major top cities worldwide.

They are abused.

They can be abused in the future even more.

Mass surveillance is abuse within itself.

There has been controversy in NYC.

No controversy doesn't make things right.

Yes, I have thought it through. Is this how you view the world? "Smart people agree with me and thoughtless people disagree with me"

There is no implication of that in the parent post. This is uncharitable to the point of trolling.

Edit: Actually, it's such an extreme misconstrual that I'm wondering if you thought you were replying to a different post?

OP knows only a very basic opinion of mine, and they tell me I'm wrong because I haven't thought about it, what else should I think? Do you think they know how much I thought about this?

Isn't the implication "if only you thought more and better about this topic, your opinion would match mine"?

Would you care to elaborate on why you don't mind individuals being stalked by employees with zero oversight or accountability, and why you don't mind protestors being monitored by the government? Since those are both part of "this type of surveillance", and are a pretty fucking crazy thing to state you're okay with with no argument for them. Do you perhaps lack the imagination to consider how this would affect your life if a government that did not agree with your political views came into power sometime in the future and were to use "this type of surveillance" against you?

Neither do the pedophiles in positions of power that want to watch you and your children.

I do actually

Great hand over the links to your 24hour live stream of your home and neighborhood. I promise I will only watch you.

I agree with the implication that the parent's use of the word "nobody" is incorrect. It might be hard to believe if you read some of the things I write, but I have enormous sympathy for people who want surveillance. Personal crime is a hideous affront to the comfortable society that we all deserve. Related: I even sympathize with people who want to be allowed to lethally attack any home invader, despite my being largely liberal. Such invasions are an indescribable violation of our sense of civilization and dignity, that I think many people don't appreciate.

However... the opinion of people who do not want to be surveilled is heavier than those who do, naturally. The effect of being surveilled, especially by a system that has already been demonstrated to be abused, is more dramatic than the effect of not being surveilled despite wanting it.

Surveillance is simply too double-edged in the long term (or, in this case, the short term, considering Flock's incompetence). We must resist the temptation to allow it just because it currently benefits us.

When you say "especially by a system that has already been demonstrated to be abused," what does that mean exactly? We have some of the largest and globally important cities with tens of thousands of cameras. Look at London, NYC, Singapore, Sydney, Seoul, Chicago, or Tokyo. Tens of millions of people live in those cities, and they have relied on massive camera networks for years without turning into dystopias.

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