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Comment by NichoPaolucci | Hacker News Reader

Any breach of security on a system like this is a big flashing red-alert to me.

If it could lead an attacker to get ANY of their data... Persons, places, events, etc is pretty damning stuff to be exfiltrated.

Stalking/Domestic Violence, blackmail, timed robberies, you name it... That data shouldn't really be in anyone's hands in my opinion, but in anyone's hands (good guys / bad guys) it's pretty powerful.

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Getting persistent access to Flock's internal network is a high-priority item for every US adversary, who doesn't want free intel collection on the movements of persons of interest? Knowing who the FBI and local cops are monitoring in is the counter-counter-intelligence cherry on top of a self-inflicted dragnet surveillance cake.

Any entity with access to flock servers can virtually stake-out anyone/everyone driving past Flock camera to monitor their movements. In a hot war, this would provide actionable data to support assassination via road-side bomb/drone strikes.

.. with friends like these, who needs enemies

I mean... currently any cop can do that, and it's a lot easier to bribe a single cop than to break into flock network.

https://edition.cnn.com/2026/08/26/us/flock-kentucky-police-...

A single cop can do it 2000 times it seems before they get caught

And it's not a lone case: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/08/02/how-pol...

That's why you or I would care, but that doesn't answer the question of why they would.

Large companies tend to be amoral. Unless it affects them monetarily (possibly indirectly) they're not going to care. Given what they do to make money, I don't see any of these things hurting them.

It's a red-alert to you and me, but Flock won't care. People already don't want these cameras in their cities, but police departments buy them anyway. What does it matter if there's one more reason you don't want them?

Apparently police are accessing the network via their personal devices. I highly doubt their security practices online are any better than this. I wouldn't be surprised either to see things that chinese manufacturers do such as intentional back doors.

Overall this goes from disappointing to fairly repugnant.

Allegedly you can buy credentials on the darkweb to perform national searches. Might explain why some of the logged reasons for recent searches were “LMAO”

The normal explanation is plenty, unless you’ve never met, read about, or heard anyone talk about, law enforcement officers (who are human beings - for better and for worse).

How many of us have had coworkers who put something like that into a commit message? And that's a message that's at least notionally supposed to be helpful to you or your coworkers, rather than existing purely for the purposes of oversight you don't want in the first place.

I would expect law enforcement coworkers to understand the law, department procedure, and public requests for their data. That’s expecting too much from the academy, I guess.

Those that fail to meet standards should be fired to spare the taxpayers from the lawsuits coming from AI-assisted complainants.

It’s also too much for Flock’s YC-funded technology to implement a field filter that rejects “LMAO” as a valid request.

At the very least, your local staff’s nationwide stalking credentials being harvested by phishing and abused by others should carry criminal negligence penalties. Governments should pass that liability onto this YC-funded startup company.

It’s a federally protected right to skip over law enforcement officers candidates because they rank too high on an aptitude or IQ test.

Reasonable people would expect what you expect. We are not reasonable people.

This meme will not die, and here you can see it blossoming into something even weirder.

There is one (1) case in the literature, back in the early 2000s, where a department rejected a candidate as overqualified based on a cognitive assessment; the rejected applicant took that department to court and lost.

That's it; that's all the evidence.

Against that: most police departments around the country administer written tests with general cognitive components for which there is a floor score and no ceiling (the POST, the NTN, &c). And virtually no departments --- none I'm aware of --- administer IQ tests.

From all this, we've now got "a federally protected right"?

Yes, that’s how court / legal precedent works - for better and for worse.

Feel free to consult an attorney.

Edit: I thought the case went further up - but, “persuasive precedent” for other jurisdictions now exists all the same.

Edit2: since I’m seeing the username of someone with a decent clue,

> and no ceiling

was there one on paper for the hiring standards of the dept in the case in question?

Does that matter?, if there’s no legal issue with using it as a disqualifying factor? - for any candidate - whether or not they even score well?

Literally the only thing you know here is that one department didn't like one candidate and came up with a reason to deny him based on cognitive overperformance. For all you know, they didn't like his hair color, and came up with an excuse. And that's it: out of over 15,000 police departments in the US, almost 1,000,000 sworn officers, and over 25 years, this is the evidence you have for the claim that there's an enshrined "right" to reject police officer candidates who are "too intelligent".

It's an Internet urban myth. I'm just stepping in to call it out as such.

That it’s legal precedent is not Internet urban myth lol - regardless of the side-story of how the precedent came to be.

Many moons ago, I was involved in the technical side of volunteer work for domestic violence victims escaping abusive relationships with e.g. law enforcement (cops), who even fifteen years ago had sweeping powers to track and stalk their victims. Things like actual anonymous burner phones and the ability to e.g. create new email accounts without government identification were critical to the process of getting these people out safely, or alive, without fear of retaliation.

I can't even imagine how difficult this job must be nowadays, with bullshit like Flock spanning hundreds of police departments participating in their nationally-linked database. I have zero sources for what I'm about to say, but my instinct is that the political machines (expanding powers hidden behind "think of the children") behind how technology is evolving today has gotten people killed.

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