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Comment by dekhn | Hacker News Reader

Many of us on this thread have experience with city councils and are anti-Flock and pro-civil disobedience. We're arguing with you from a point of praticality related to city business meetings. Practicing civil disobedience at a city council meeting is fraught with peril- for example, you're preventing other people from having their topics discussed/voted on. From my perspective, if your goal is to make actual change, getting arrested at a city council meeting speaking on the wrong topic is not a particularly effective method.

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I disagree with your assessment. These city councils undoubtedly are aware that Flock/ALPRs are a controversial issue, and in many cases, including this one, they don't allow people to speak on the topic.

I recall watching a meeting, I think it was in Austin? Where on every topic, most people coming up to talk did so because they refused to hear comments on the cameras. Instead, they had to deal with the frustration of constantly sending people off the podium.

The lesson being, if you know people will feel strongly, it should behoove you to schedule time for them to speak properly.

Thanks for being polite and thoughtful and laying out your thinking.

The issue is that city council meetings that schedule open discussion on topics often end up running late into the night (after midnight) and the discussion doesn't achieve much.

I don't thikn we can say with certainty that the chair tabled the discussion with the intent of disallowing people their right to discuss it. That's interpreting subjective intent.

Clearly, the best solution to a discussion taking forever, is for the powerful person to terminate the discussion and declare that the outcome was whatever the powerful person wanted.

They didn't do that, though. They sent it to committee. That doesn't achieve the city council's goals.

You could be right.

An alternative of course is to saw down the Flock cameras. I suspect people like the woman in the article though are trying to find legal ways to be heard—to elicit change.

Is there a legal alternative that you can think of that would be effective?

Everything that works is illegal because it works

Where should civil disobedience be practiced?

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