This is the big problem with mass surveillance as a whole. With enough time, they'll find some pretext to bring you in, even if the original crime they want you for is weak.
This will ruin lives, even if they're eventually let go. Jobs lost, evicted from homes, cars towed, pets surrendered and put down.
Lives will be completely derailed, police and judges will not be held accountable. The wrongful arrestees will still be in debt to the local jail and court for various fees they racked up. Trust in the justice system will continue to degrade and more and more violence will be used against people to maintain order.
We hold police to high standards for search/arrest because they have the monopoly on violence. Even if they're wrong, you can't shoot back. Even if they're slamming your loved ones into the pavement, breaking their teeth, you cannot kick the cop in the head or else they have permission to murder you both.
Someone that is innocent is going to get killed soon because flock flagged them incorrectly. I recall reading the auto journalist that got flagged for a stolen car while test driving a car. We have seen how often pull over/arrests can derail when a stupid cop that is aggressive pulls out their weapon first, fires fast and then investigates last. An innocent person that reacts wrongly is eventually going to make the news. :-(
You can be mauled by a police dog and if you hit the dog, you get an assault on a police officer charge. It's bad enough a cop can permanently disable you if you can't follow 3 conflicting orders being yelled, but they can also send an animal who literally doesn't know better.
Well the courts said they need probable cause for a search, so they needed an on-demand probable cause generator, or else they wouldn't be able to do pretextual searches on "randomly" stopped minorities anymore, which would be a violation of they(the police)'re civil rights.
Woman with SUV filled with minors pulled out by cops and handcuffed on the ground in Colorado based on flock ID'ing the license plate of stolen... motorcycle with same number (but from a different state). You can't make this shit up.
> "Why are you now placing these children on the ground face into the concrete? It's hot! In front of all of us? Screaming at them. They are telling you they are hurt," witness Jenni Wurtz said.
I cannot believe LE will use this technology within ethical bounds, since they are willing to force a very young child onto the asphalt of a hot parking lot, who cannot possibly have posed a risk to their safety.
I mean, even people who are guilty of many crimes shouldn't be summarily executed in the street. Stealing a television or driving a tractor trailer of illegal weed from coast to coast isn't a death sentence even after a jury trial & conviction, so we shouldn't really be all that sanguine about guilty people being killed either.
Depends on the situation. You'd absolutely be arrested. Get in front of a jury of 12 people and you might have a chance if you have enough evidence for a self-defense claim and the cop acting outside of the law.
Only if the jury believes in nullification, which isn't common. The jury is instructed to follow the law. The selection process asks "even if you think they were right, if it's against the law and they were guilty would you issue a guilty verdict?" and people answer "yes" consistently.
"Only if the jury believes in nullification, which isn't common. The jury is instructed to follow the law."
Not true. There is case law that allows for self-defense against unlawful use of force, or when when you reasonably believe the force was not coming from an officer (didn't announce, were not uniformed, believed to be imposters, etc).
The boyfriend in the Breonna Taylor case had charges dismissed, so you're right on this. Somehow none of the hail of 32 shots hit him.
But - to the OP's point, if you're trying to defend yourself against what appear to be police officers illegally shooting at you, the situation is just going to escalate. One police officer firing at you will shortly become many police officers firing at you. Taking cover or running is preferable to firing back at police.
As I rudely learned when I was preparing to use the "I'm gonna do jury nullification" thing during a jury selection, there are a few states, including mine, where jury nullification is explicitly "not-stated" but not a uniquely acceptable reason to strike a juror, despite what our juror handbook might claim about violating an "oath" (you cannot be punished for "violating an oath" if you are selected).
I was lucky that for unrelated reasons the trial didn't happen and none of the jury selection stuff went through, but in a few states you cannot just rely on this as an easy out. This is awesome, because for true believers, you can actually do jury nullification. This was actually somewhat recently and notably used: https://www.eenews.net/articles/bundys-acquitted-in-huge-set...
My last stint on grand jury we had a case that none of us felt great about. It was a felony theft charge where the thief likely used the vehicle regularly but took it in the middle of the night to return home. He was at a logging camp where he pays for accommodations but they had no work for him. After 3 days he got frustrated and left in the middle of the night. Camp foreman called the law reporting the vehicle stolen. The officer went and checked at the now missing guy's house and the vehicle was parked in his driveway.
The whole group felt the felony charge was too much for that series of events. Somebody said "I don't want to vote on this". I suggested that is a valid option. The vote was the weakest of all the cases we covered. Several abstentions but just enough to send the case to trial.
To me that is nullification in practice. It is "the community" deciding that they don't believe the State is right in pursuing conviction. Juries are meant to be a randomized "council of elders" type body not just cogs in the machine.
Using your belief in jury nullification as a tool to get out of your duty as a citizen rubs me the wrong way. You have to participate in the functions of civilization if you want it to reflect your beliefs.
Yes, it was technically theft. Officers found the vehicle at his house shortly after it was reported missing. Not really an opportunity to return it. If all laws were prosecuted to the exact letter of the law we would not need juries. The DA will prosecute any case that they feel has enough evidence to secure a conviction, as this case had. It is the juries that determine if prosecution in each case is "just".
Steal a car to rush somebody to a hospital then return it after and the letter of the law will convict you as a felon. It is the jury that could decide, as representatives of the community, that you should not be a felon for saving somebody's life even if you technically stole a car.
In most states the jury instructions are to make their judgement based solely on the evidence presented to them. These instructions make a jury a cog in the prosecution machine. The purpose of a jury is a final check on the government's execution of the law by members of the community.
> If all laws were prosecuted to the exact letter of the law we would not need juries. The DA will prosecute any case that they feel has enough evidence to secure a conviction, as this case had. It is the juries that determine if prosecution in each case is "just".
I think you're think of grand juries. They decide if there is enough evidence to go to trial, I.e. if the prosecution is just.
Even without grand juries, we'd still have juries that decide the verdicts. They decide if a conviction is just.
If they had previously allowed him to take the vehicle home, then I would presume he probably was planning to bring it back. Once you explicitly allow a person to do something, it becomes harder to claim harm when they do it again.
If they are going to seat me on the jury after I loudly proclaim my willingness to nullify - I'm game for the trial!
The main problem is the idea that I'm held captive by some fake contract to the state. I'm lucky that where I am the law is more just/libertarian than in most other places - meaning that in general the average arrested person is more likely to be actually guilty, but especially in places that are ultra authoritarian (i.e. Virginia), I need all the power I can get to protest their unjust system or I'm not going to have my time wasted.
Tons of people who smoke weed and had to say "yes" to the "are you not a drug user" and lied on a form to get guns were just found by the US Supreme Court 9-0 to not be violating the law:
Hunter Biden trial would never have happened now too because of this - many people at the time wanted him to fight it out and be the poster child for this rather than the Pakistani guy in this version of the case.
So actually, you can indeed just say "yes" and than "vote your conscious" anyway, even openly - at least in the case of the few states that don't have "willing to nullify" as an acceptable reason to strike a juror during jury selection.
Note in this case guy was in an illegal state and also had cocaine.
The exceptions to the rule are very rare. I can think of one case where a person shot back during a no-knock raid on the wrong address and had charges dropped because police didn't announce their presence well enough.
As long as they shout "police", they can knock down your front door, throw a flash-bang into your infant's crib and disable them for life, then go "whoops" when they realize they have the wrong address and you'll be on the hook for replacing the door they destroyed.
If you survive to get in front of a jury. That's a big if. Plus, even if you were falsely arrested and wounded by police and your rights clearly violated... were they violated in that EXACT same way in the past establishing precedent that it isn't ok to stalk/injure people? No? Qualified Immunity. FTP.
Honestly getting arrested would be lucky. If recent years have shown anything, they don't need to be particularly concerned about removing you from the picture more permanently regardless of the circumstances.
I'd highly doubt that. I've actually been on scene of a few LE-involved shootings (ex-paramedic).
If LE "just" shoots at you (i.e. you're not actively firing or an immediate threat - and without commenting on the "should" of that) then... you might be "fine", once you're disabled.
If you're actively firing at LE, they're going to hit you with "overwhelming force" (ever seen a news story where there's 50+ bullet holes in a car, or a suspect shot 15 times, by police? That's "overwhelming force") and any survival on your part is going to be sheer dumb luck and "not very likely".
The choice in this hypothetical scenario is to be killed initially through the unlawful use of force or potentially be killed at some later time before reaching trial.
worse than that, federal agencies - which can't access it directly - do so via their "law enforcement partners". So now you've got DHS and ICE using it for their own pseudo-law activities.
I went on a grand jury in early 2025, and it was eye opening to see that under my state's laws the "smell of weed" is enough to justify a traffic stop and search of a vehicle.
I am playing devil's advocate here, but mass surveillance can also save you.
Let's say your just broke up with your girlfriend, shortly after, her house get burgled and a bunch of jewelry is stolen, including some you gave her when you were together. A surveillance camera catches the burglar, a drug addict with a criminal record, he gets caught, tried and sentenced to 2 years in prison. The kind of case that won't get a news article, you may not even be aware of what happened.
Without the surveillance camera, you would be a prime suspect, and even if you don't get convicted in the end, there is a good chance for the police to give you a hard time.
Here is the asymmetry, if a surveillance camera prevents a wrongful arrest, no one will notice, because you don't notice things that don't happen. Only wrongful arrests caused by surveillance cameras will be noticed.
More surveillance doesn't mean more arrests, trials and convictions. These are limited by the availability of police forces, magistrates and jails respectively. Even with a total surveillance zero privacy dystopia, you can't have more arrests without the means to do so. What will change is on what grounds the arrests are made: video footage, a witness testimony, etc...
It doesn't mean I support mass surveillance (I told you I was going to play devil's advocate), but that alone doesn't mean more wrongful arrests as a whole unless something else in the system is promoting wrongful arrests.
There are legitimate concerns about Flock that don't involve wrongful arrests, such as misuse of data by operators, like for stalking, data security, which may leak to criminals, and usage for purpose other than law enforcement, like marketing. The fact that it is a private company funded by public money with dubious contracts is another concern.
Assuming cops actually present the evidence they have and don't hide it from the defense. The police and DA don't care if they put a guilty or not guilty person in jail, the 'tough on crime' faction that tends to get people elected cares about the number of people thrown in jail. The more the better. Throw 10,000 people in jail, you must be a damned good elected official and you get re-elected.
>you can't have more arrests without the means to do so.
Not exactly sure what you're trying to say... you can always have more arrests. Make more things crime. Pre-crime, thought crime, speech crime. When you run out of physical space you start stacking the prisoners 10 deep. When that runs out of space you start executing them and putting them in ovens.
What I was trying to say is that if no one is available to make an arrest, you can't make an arrest.
Why do you think people get away with minor traffic offenses all the time, something right in front of an officer? There simply isn't enough means to deal with these, so they just ignore most of them.
I mean, in an electronic prison, you just issue the ticket and wait. Eventually people have to do things like renew licenses and they are arrested there. This is very similar to systems states are using now preventing the renewal of expired things like licenses.
This is what the presumption of innocence is supposed to do. If you have an alibi, then big brother doesn’t get involved. These are cultural problems that we do not need big brother’s benevolence to solve for us. We need better cultural systems of accountability; the problem is that those are _way_ harder to build
Police regularly ignore evidence that disproves their claims. They will not prove your innocence for you. It will still be up to you to pay the lawyer 1000s of dollars to do the discovery against flock cameras to attempt to prove your innocence.
You don't have to prove your innocence; innocence is assumed. The prosecution has to prove you guilty, and inform the defense of all the evidence that they have. If they have evidence that exonerates you, they would be stupid to even bring a case to trial as it would be a waste of everyone's time.
We live in a world where, routinely, police plant evidence and prosecutors fail to bring forth exonerating evidence. They don't have to be stupid when they are being deceptive.
Search "Brady violation" on youtube for some examples.
> This is the big problem with mass surveillance as a whole. With enough time, they'll find some pretext to bring you in, even if the original crime they want you for is weak.
This sounds like a problem with an unaccountable police force. London has had a CCTV system for 60 years.
>This will ruin lives, even if they're eventually let go. Jobs lost, evicted from homes, cars towed, pets surrendered and put down.
Yes. That's exactly the point. Comply with every little thing, no matter how absurd, or else your life will unravel.
Look through a historical comment (especially from back when "big data" was the buzzword) thread on any subject where HN is pro regulation and pro government. This is EXACTLY what the useful idiots want.
They want some NYC liquor store owner to pay a hundred grand to the state because that one time he visited NH he loaded up his van with tax free henny to sell back home.
They want that exurban undeveloped lot owner to lose their house for letting their buddy with a tree service dump there and fill in a few hundred square feet over the course of half a decade.
They want some random industrial employer that makes nuts and bolts or something to be fined millions of dollars because their maintenance employees spray painted a piece of equipment in the parking lot without the PPE and pollution compliance measures befitting a commercial paint operation.
They want the jackboot on the throat of everyone who steps out of line on any axis that they care about.
They see the way the banking industry tries to stay away from weed, porn and guns because the upside isn't worth the risk of being combed over by the enforcers. And instead of seeing it as cautionary, they see it as a model that needs to be scaled down to the small businesses and the lowly individual peasants.
Of course they don't lay it out so plainly. They use words like "negative externality" and "antisocial" and "dis-incentivize" to whitewash it but that doesn't change what it is.
All very terrifying but you're building a "Hollow Man" by using an "Appeal to Extremes".
Instead of arguing against actual regulatory policy, you are mind-reading malicious intent into hypothetical scenarios (and people) you just invented. Or real examples that you're broadstroking against a "they" which is somehow "HN."
I am not sure how you can justify trying to paint so broad a stroke across an entire community, or feel justified in creating a bucket of "useful idiots" into which you just throw whole classes of unnamed people without engaging with any particular argument.
I get you're angry, my man, but maybe you should question exactly who it is you're angry with.
We don't need Canadians telling Americans that we're wrong to worry about American police, or that we need to be more specific with our concerns.
American police kill over 1,000 civilians and 10,000 dogs per year.
They routinely wrongly arrest people, and create life-ruining situations, especially as American workers do not enjoy as much job protection as Canadian workers.
I get that you want to be offended by his post, but maybe you should question why exactly you're offended at a post that has, at its heart, a lot of actual reality about life in America.
Because said person is sitting here saying "HN is stupid", it has nothing to do with the police, but the audience he's going after.
Read what he wrote and I wrote again. Nobody is excusing American police. I'm griping about his attempts to smear random people on this forum.
Nowhere did I tell you you're wrong to worry about American police. FFS, I worry about American police and I don't live there. Hence why I won't even go there.
>Because said person is sitting here saying "HN is stupid", it has nothing to do with the police, but the audience he's going after.
I said that if you go into policy discussions where HN is pro regulation you can see all sorts of commenters cheering for the pro-jackboot takes and peddlers thereof.
It's a subtle distinction between that and "the whole place is stupid" but it's there.
> I'm griping about his attempts to smear random people on this forum.
Want me to name names? I can go right down the leader board saying who wants jackboot applied and on what policy axis. I don't think that's productive.
This argument goes too far to the other end. Never name a group, cuz by golly you’re broad stroking. Only specific character assassination is allowed or keep quiet? Like a Cancel Culture Wittgenstein.
"This will ruin lives, even if they're eventually let go. Jobs lost, evicted from homes, cars towed, pets surrendered and put down."
No. The 'domestic violence and prohibited substances' is the part that will ruin lives directly.
Domestic violence, bad. The drugs, debatable, but that's a matter of getting 'weed' made legal, not a surveillance issue.
It's not 'destroyed lives from crime' - it's the 'destroyed civic fabric from an authoritarian surveillance state' ... that is the problem.
It's not the 'incident' that is the problem, because Flock is not helping cops be 'dirty cops' or anything.
It's the totality of it - and the pernicious grinding away of common civil liberties.
Probably we should not be able to use this 'interstate' unless for 'in pursuit of violent criminals leaving the scene of a violent crime' ... which is so rare that it wouldn't make sense.
The only place this should be tolerated is in 'acute areas of high crime, with annual review and judicial warrant' - aka where there is literally that much crime that it's a serious civic concern - and it has to be part of an overall civic plan by the municipality, in conjunction with social services, investment etc - never as a 'lone tool'.
So "this kind of speculative thing" isn't cops being bad cops?
What about when they stalk and pull over women they're infatuated with? That's not being a bad cop? You know they do that, right?
This literally does help them hide behind some tool. They can get away with all sorts of rights violations by the nature of "we didn't collect the data, we bought it" in the first place.
Then your argument is we should have no police 'because power corrupts'
I don't think this is reasonable or principled.
The evidence here is that Flock can be used maliciously, I don't think anyone doubts that, the question is it a tool that is inherently bad in it's normal functioning, and I don't think so.
Like ... 'pepper spray' can be used maliciously by cops, since it's 'less apparently extreme' they can get away with more shenanigans. But it's not 'inherently' bad tool, and perpetual use won't change policing.
If you see a story where cops use pepper spray maliciously, and it harms someone ... that's evidence of an incident, not of a bad tool.
The 'evil' of flock is the surveillance state, not in bad apple cops.
Maybe they can start enforcing the law when it comes to blatant offenders that terrorize large cities. Illegal blocking of sidewalk selling fake handbags, selling untaxed marijuana on street corners, violating traffic laws on e-bikes. A lot of wood to chop before they get to my jay walking so I think I’m safe for the time being. But I welcome more enforcement
Brother, you want mass surveillance because of bikes, handbags, and weed.
I guarantee there is _some_ group that finds some aspect of you, your life, or that of some of your loved ones at least as annoying as you find those things.
What group is that? Im part of the 95% that doesn't want filth and crime on our streets. Stop pretending like you don't understand. Like oh however can we decide whether homeless drug addicts w their pitbulls blocking the sidewalk is not optimal.
Heavy handed? How about light handed. You're not allowed to sell illegal drugs on the street? Why do we allow this? Do you just not believe that there should be no laws that prevent people from posting up convenience stores on street corners? Or that police should look the other way bc it's too heavy handed to just detain the few dozen ppl that do this until they stop.
This wasn't a thing 10 years ago and we weren't in a police state
> You're not allowed to sell illegal drugs on the street? ... Or that police should look the other way bc it's too heavy handed to just detain the few dozen ppl that do this until they stop.
I don't think you need to arrest someone because they're selling an untaxed legal substance, no. (And: weed should be legal, if we're talking about a place where it's not).
You can manage this situation better by getting their info and issuing a ticket. On its face, it doesn't warrant an escalation of force, the extra paperwork, or choking up the jails -- all of which represent very real costs to us, the taxpayers.
> This wasn't a thing 10 years ago and we weren't in a police state
Buddy, I have some news for you about the history of the US. Ten years ago, which country/countries had the highest incarceration rate in the world?
Lots of people are scared of those who are different or unfamiliar. They live in their own bubble - prefering homogenous suburbs, non-poor office workers, algorithmic feeds for their cognitive biases, etc.
And fear, whether real or induced by manipulation, has precipitated a -lot- of atrocities in the world.
The issues you are complaining about are not issues due to a lack of mass surveillance. You're arguing in favor of mass surveillance with a diatribe of complaints over petty crimes that you describe as terrorism, while ignoring any of the potential downsides of what you are arguing for. Consider that you also break laws yourself, even if you think you don't, and what you are arguing for can and will be used against you too (not that one needs to break any laws for mass surveillance to be utilized against them).
In Kherson the fiber controlled drones that drop explosives on civilians are terrorizing the cities, but that's nothing in comparison to illegal handbags!
It doesn't have to be like this. Why do you accept it? Serious question. You don't need a surveillance state. How many indignities do you stomach for what exactly? Some false sense of freedom? Freedom to buy illegal unlicensed untaxed weed? Freedom to get run over by a delivery ebike?
> How many indignities do you stomach for what exactly?
People selling handbags neither threatens my dignity nor makes me indignant.
When I think of "terrorize", I think of things like.. y'know, people strapped with explosives, blowing up buses full of civilians. Or something like the Rape of Nanking, where Japanese army killed and raped their way across the city. The Japanese terrorized the city, literally instilling a nightmarish-level of fear.
I can't place "they're terrorizing me by selling handbags" anywhere in the same universe. If you're genuinely frightened by this, I would like to gently suggest you talk this through with a therapist.
I don't. I work every day to help my community and I hope you do the same.
> You don't need a surveillance state
Then don't call for one. If you'd like to change your community, again, I'd recommend you to stop being scared and just start talking to more people around you.
You seem to think everyone should conform to one homogenous way of life. This was tried in Europe a little under a century ago and it did not turn out well.
Based on my observations (news reports, local chatter, etc) it seems that every state that borders a state with legal Cannabis does this. Idaho does this very frequently (since just about every border is a legal source). They take advantages of the bottlenecks on highways and have cameras and/or officers there.
If it is Flock, interagency communications, license plate readers or just "enhanced stops" for things like a crack in the windshield.
People seem to forget that while buying in one state is legal it actually can become a much larger crime than just possession as soon as you cross state lines. It "can" become a federal matter...
This person in the article attracted the gaze of Sauron.
North Idaho started adding license plate readers and cameras back in the early 2k's using funding given out after 9/11.
Locally there was a recent pushback on them and the sheriff basically said "They've been there forever" and "Don't worry...it's just us with the footage"
They are making an assumption that someone is buying when they go into the dispensary. Not necessarily the case. They aren't compelled to buy anything when entering.
Which if you know that's the case, it's a good way to f*ck with the police. Travel to the dispensary and be empty handed when the search comes. After 2-3 searches you file a cease-and-desist.
I am misunderstanding the article, if "The searches came to light in a Wisconsin criminal complaint against Edward Abrams-Phillips, who was wanted for bail jumping on domestic violence charges." he was wanted, why do they need a pretext for the stop?
> The case is an example of Flock cameras being used to arrest a wanted alleged criminal suspected of committing a violent crime. But it is also an example of police surveillance overreach *in that the cameras were specifically used to create a pretext to tack on additional petty crimes* based primarily on where a person’s vehicle had traveled.
I think everyone agrees. Where the disagreement lies is if this is how the technology is actually used, and the answer seems to be: no.
Regardless, even if the technology was used currently purely for good, when you’re “pro surveillance” you’re actually arguing it will always be used for good, even in some hypothetical future with hypothetical politics. That’s a very hard sell.
does this work for any allegation? if it was a serious one surely they could get a warrant. if it's not enough for that it might as well be gossip imo.
I watched them happily train officers from Agencies on doing things they were not allowed to do by law, that Flock knew they weren't.
That "Chinese wall" of separation is nowhere near as concrete as you like to act.
Flock might not set the laws, but when the Flock CEO says he would prefer you to be collateral damage on his company's mission for "a world without crime, thanks to Flock" than dare risk someone not get caught for a crime or alleged crime, via Flock, then sorry, they absolutely are participating in things, and complaints against them are entirely appropriately targeted.
Flock provides tools and information that influence and encourage bad behavior from police.
Yes, we need laws to help stop this. Ideally, those laws should entirely destroy Flock's business model and lead to its bankruptcy.
The issue is not whether cameras are useful for law enforcement. The issue is how that camera information is managed and overseen. What Flock is doing would fit right in in a cartoon authoritarian state, but it doesn't belong in the real world.
> The bail jumping charge was dismissed; Abrams-Phillips was found guilty only of weed possession in the case, according to the court records.
Apparently the bail jumping charge was weak? That seems like a black-and-white situation to me so no idea what the details were, but there was clearly something wrong with that charge.
If the charge was so weak then they probably couldn't get a warrant to arrest him outright? Therefore they needed the marijuana probable cause to stop and search him.
Regardless the disturbing part is that they're using surveillance state footage of a person traveling to a state where something is legal as "probable cause" for a crime.
Reading between the lines, I would bet the bail jumping charge was based on him crossing state lines back and forth, and was dismissed by the court when it became clear he wasn't actually running away anywhere. Thus the cops hunting for any and all petty bullshit to punish him with instead, like the marijuana possession.
IANAL - if they break the bail conditions the judge may issue a warrant depending on severity, clearly a warrant was not issued here, otherwise there’s no need for pretext like you said.
Article also states bail jumping charge was dismissed but the weed charge is the only charge that remains.
They still have to bother with actually going to a judge and actually getting that warrant. Why do that if you can just skip it and not deal with inconvenient questions.
Ok, the article is confusing but the complaint is a little better.
> The vehicle was registered to Edward 12-01-1993. Edward had an active Brown County felony warrant with nationwide extradition.
so he wasn't just wanted but also had an active warrant.
> Multiple Deputies checked the area but were unable to locate the vehicle at that time
Police tried arresting him before, but couldn't find him. The police then used flock to find a pattern of coming/going over the state line. I'm guessing they stationed someone nearby to wait for a flock alert and arrest him.
The following is total speculation on my part: The police are including the "Based on prior flock hits, the vehicle travels to Michigan frequently which is a known source State for Marijuana as it is legal there." to build probable cause for searching the car and finding the marijuana.
Otherwise the only PC is: "He declined consent to search his vehicle. However, DeputyKowalski informed him he would be conducting a search of his vehicle due to the odor of marijuana".
Maybe the olfactory skills of officers are so dubious that courts need more facts than just an odor? That'd be my guess.
They don't need probable cause to search his vehicle if he had a warrant. They can search his car because they are arresting him and towing the vehicle
> They don't need probable cause to search his vehicle if he had a warrant.
Incorrect. Warrants have to be specific. An arrest warrant is not a general search warrant (in fact, general search warrants aren't legal). You don't lose your rights because a cop is arresting you.
Now, what can happen (and probably would happen) is the cops can take a drug sniffing dog to the car when it goes to impound and while the owner isn't there and claim "Oh, the dog signaled on the car so we searched it".
The article claims multiple times that the cops used the interstate travel as a pretext for the search that turned up the marijuana, but in most jurisdictions, the arrest would have allowed them to inventory the car anyway as part of the impound process.
Unless this jurisdiction is an outlier, the pretext wasn't needed for the search. As the parent comment says, the cops used the interstate travel as a timing strategy to increase the charges.
I've seen it suggested to add a warrant requirement for police to use ALPRs. A warrant requirement is not a reasonable bandaid to consider allowing mass spying. There should be no mass spying by default.
A warrant requirement makes sense for something like the locations of customers on cellular networks, because it's built into the tech.
When you make the optional choice to create mass spying, safeguards do not make it acceptable.
Fun fact, they'd already need one if they weren't buying the data from private companies. This is because both the courts and legislature have been busy desecrating and burying the fourth amendment for decades.
> “Every child in this video is home tonight because Flock gave officers the right information at the right second,” ... “That’s the mission. That’s the whole company. I wouldn't trade that for anything.”
I think it's clear that, if these things (flock cameras) continue to be a part of modern society, they need significantly higher oversight. What's painful with statements like above is that it shows that we just don't have good enough leadership to set appropriate standards for when things like flock cameras are appropriate.
Here's my thoughts on how Flock and related tech should be handled. Nothing gets stored unless there's a specific judicial warrant. They can take a pic of my license plate, I'm in public, ok. But unless they have a warrant naming my license plate specifically, then nothing gets stored. At all. No log of the plate, no photo of the car, driver, etc. NOTHING. And this needs to be easily auditable.
Those are my thoughts, curious about holes in my idea.
If you ignore the policy question of do cops even need access to the kind of capabilities Flock tech provides, this particular case becomes a pretty clear example of user error amplified by the capabilities of the tech and not the issue with the tech itself.
The cops didn't realize that the license plate they were searching was a) incomplete and therefore fuzzily matched multiple unrelated vehicles, and b) wasn't even stolen to begin with.
This is similar to running `rm -r *` in a wrong folder and then shifting blame on rm for deleting the stuff you didn't want deleted. Sure, there's maybe a conversation here about overall rm ergonomics and if the average user is even competent enough to be allowed to run it, but the it's first and foremost a user error.
I used to get really upset when I saw a car on the road with obscured or disfigured plates. The rise of Flock/ALPRs has done a great deal to morally rehabilitate this behavior.
Not from the US, but I really wish folks from the US started thinking of creative ways to "produce probable cause" (if that makes any sense), get stopped without any harm, assemble enough individual cases into some kind of catalogue, and then be able to show people just how much the whole thing is bad with evidence that did not result in them actually getting what they were looking for.
If I asked a random person about this, they'd probably just say - "but they found weed, right?"
100% agreed, easy for me to talk about it from a distance... just giving out the idea as it could be something to build upon later.
I'm afraid that the way things currently stand, vast majority of people are only gonna see the cases where "it made sense to have that" for years and years, until they feel it one day on their own skin - and then their own story is not going to be heard, just like everyone else's before them. Frog boiling sometimes intentionally takes a lot of time
Mass surveillance based on social media is prohibited in The Netherlands and presumably other European countries. However, running specific profiles on police owned ANPR camera's could be declared a proportional breach of privacy and thus legal.
They used to do this with normal DOT cameras anyways. That doesn't make it okay. The neat part is when they use fake names and badge numbers to deny that the stop ever even happened in the first place. It's much harder to get away with that these days
Experienced this about 15 years ago, was lucky to have my friend along for the ride, who was a photographer. The pictures of those cops are the only evidence we have that it even happened. They wrote a whole pile of tickets that didn't exist when I went to try and pay them.
Another time I had a state trooper say I was doing 140 in a 130hp car. He claimed that because I was wearing cutoff sweatpant shorts that I was growing weed? These dudes are useless.
Forget about all of this, though. If you want to be mad, check out the solve rate for hit and runs over the past 20 years. Damage only cases are something like 1 in 10. Fatalities 2 in 5. With all these fucking cameras. What percentage of those 9 in 10 or 3 in 5 are cops, do you think?
Indeed. Like, no shit strapping a camera and microphone and sending it to an all knowing AI to analyze it all is going to reduce crime. But it's a violation of our human rights.
It's clear these people do not understand the importance of privacy or rights. Crime is already decreasing. The bigger improvements would come from improving society, not restricting people's rights for more "safety".
I know you are being sarcastic, but for others: I saw one literally yesterday of a game and wildlife officer tasing a man pumping gas. The gas spilled and then caught on fire. The tased man partially caught on fire and fell to the ground getting bruises.
The officer continued yelling at him to comply, all the while the man was ablaze, shocked, and bruised.
Cops should have tasers taken away. They believe they are "make people do what I say" devices rather than the rare "make this extremely violent person who is an imminent threat to life and person stop being violent temporarily so other officers can continue to use non-lethal force to de-escalate the situation".
I think at the end of each year that an officer didn't deploy their taser all year, they should get a bonus equal to $100 x [consecutive years of non-deployment]. The same incentive should be in place for discharging their firearm, except maybe x$1000.
IANAL but the probable cause here (traveling across state lines) seems really weak. There's a million legitimate/legal reasons for someone to travel across state lines. That's the issue that jumps out at me here.
I'm so confused, how is this creating a pretext? A pretext is a false reason. Like if they searched for one reason but they really did it for a different one. But that's not what I'm reading here? It seems they suspected something, they used that exact reason to perform a search, and that's exactly what they found. Terrible reason, okay, but why are they being accused of lying? If a thief threatens you saying you look like you have money, and it turns out you did, and he takes it, is that a pretext too?
The pretext is that his travel to another state was assumed to be to buy weed. They appear to be relying on his existing warrant and criminal record to justify having used Flock data to not just locate him, but manufacture probable cause.
Unless they have direct evidence (photo from Flock of him ripping bong hits in his car at a light) prior to the stop to attach probable cause to, it's a pre-crime judgment.
IANAL (if you are, feel free to poke holes), but I wouldn't presume it unlikely he walks under the 4th amendment, even if it's through appeals.
Police are actively using flock to identify people traveling over state borders to buy marijuana and search their cars.
What actually happened:
Police used flock to locate someone with an active warrant for their arrest related to domestic violence. They noticed a pattern of crossing state lines at certain times, and used that to nab him. It turns out it was to buy marijuana and his car reeked of it, so he was charged with that, too.
I don't quite get the thesis of the author here. Regardless of the view that one may have on Cannabis laws, they are illegal, if the system is correctly detaining people that break those laws, and you have a problem with that, is the problem with the enforcement system or the law?
If you don't like some aspect of this, should you be campaigning for removal of flock cameras? Or campaigning for cannabis rights and Controlled Substances reform?
The issue isn't prosecution for illegality, among other things it's the anti-Fourth-Amendment methods for constructing the case. So, I'm going to campaign for government entities to follow the Constitution (as amended).
So what happens when they use cameras outside of usps to crate pretext so a crazy alt right state judge issues a warrant under the assumption that you picked up pills in the mail?
"AG nominee tells faith leaders he will take action to restrict abortion drug access"
And relevant to interstate weed, what about kava, peptides, 7oh? they literally have million+ plus stakes in pushing drugs. Even when it means blocking worse drugs (7oh) so they can push slightly less addictive but still harmful garbage.
"Senate inquiry suggests Trump administration softened kratom and tobacco policies in quid pro quo"
"Trump Administration’s Fake Crackdown Leaves Most ‘Gas Station Heroin’ on the Shelves. According to March 2026 financial disclosures, Mullin invested between $500,001 and $1 million in Botanic Tonics, LLC, of Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, the company that makes Feel Free Classic – the tonic found in the victim’s bedroom. Mullin reportedly urged officials to remove language from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) website warning of kratom’s harms."
I think the problem is that you're implicitly assuming a mutual exclusion, but it doesn't exist. IE you can have a problem with the law's existence, and also have a problem with an enforcement system that selectively enforces laws out of malice and/or as a false pretense. These are pretty synergistic values, as a matter of fact.
Y'all want to shit on hippie liberal states like Oregon that keep the police in a tight leash and de-facto decriminalized everything, but we had a whole state appeals court decision on this exact issue that means this should would NOT happen here:
I'm surprised Trump hasn't federally legalized marijuana as a last-ditch effort to boost his popularity. He's good at embracing popular left-wing policy measures when he needs a boost; stimulus checks worked well for this purpose during his 2016-2020 term.
The farm bill he enacted in his first term was a pretty solid legalization middle ground. The fact he flipped around on it in his second term makes me think it's more accidental than anything.
Again, I get downvoted by the fear-police on hacker news for this:
- Montana LLC ownership of vehicles. Don't own your vehicles ya'll, and at least those license plates won't be traced to you.
- Speak to a lawyer for how to meet any lawful use-tax obligations. Don't use this to avoid paying legitimate sales tax.
- Maybe the insurance company tied to you and your driving of this vehicle, has a partnership with the flock network. Someone argued they could give away your vin-tied identity, though I haven't seen proof this is happening. Plus, if the market shows a need for insurance companies to offer privacy protection, maybe that will emerge.
I trust we can figure out a way to normalize privacy to stand up against crimes and abusive behavior by state officials, the bad police, and an elected class of corrupted leaders who do not care about everyones rights to protect their own safety over yours. I would love if more people would send a powerful message to their officials of how this unconstitutional violation and compromise of basic decency, dignity and safety for most people for the benefit of a few has consequences.
Fake news. Heck of a twist on what really happened.
Wisconsin police used Flock travel history to locate an already wanted man and develop marijuana suspicion. An officer’s claimed marijuana odor led to a vehicle search.
This is the big problem with mass surveillance as a whole. With enough time, they'll find some pretext to bring you in, even if the original crime they want you for is weak.
This will ruin lives, even if they're eventually let go. Jobs lost, evicted from homes, cars towed, pets surrendered and put down.
Lives will be completely derailed, police and judges will not be held accountable. The wrongful arrestees will still be in debt to the local jail and court for various fees they racked up. Trust in the justice system will continue to degrade and more and more violence will be used against people to maintain order.
We hold police to high standards for search/arrest because they have the monopoly on violence. Even if they're wrong, you can't shoot back. Even if they're slamming your loved ones into the pavement, breaking their teeth, you cannot kick the cop in the head or else they have permission to murder you both.
Mass surveillance is a loophole to this contract.
Someone that is innocent is going to get killed soon because flock flagged them incorrectly. I recall reading the auto journalist that got flagged for a stolen car while test driving a car. We have seen how often pull over/arrests can derail when a stupid cop that is aggressive pulls out their weapon first, fires fast and then investigates last. An innocent person that reacts wrongly is eventually going to make the news. :-(
https://www.jalopnik.com/2219072/auto-journalist-harassed-by...
Link for the curious
Link straight from the source (the actual journalist)
https://www.thedrive.com/news/how-flock-cameras-wrongly-trac...
https://abcnews.com/US/man-speaks-after-police-release-9-tra... He was attacked by a police dog after a flock camera misread his license plate. He was then charged for "obstruction", which was dropped 4 months later.
Police dogs are another insane thing we allow.
You can be mauled by a police dog and if you hit the dog, you get an assault on a police officer charge. It's bad enough a cop can permanently disable you if you can't follow 3 conflicting orders being yelled, but they can also send an animal who literally doesn't know better.
And the absurdity of a dog sniffing around the car for contraband. Crazy that’s allowed and taken seriously by the justice system
Well the courts said they need probable cause for a search, so they needed an on-demand probable cause generator, or else they wouldn't be able to do pretextual searches on "randomly" stopped minorities anymore, which would be a violation of they(the police)'re civil rights.
That might already have happened for all we know
Woman with SUV filled with minors pulled out by cops and handcuffed on the ground in Colorado based on flock ID'ing the license plate of stolen... motorcycle with same number (but from a different state). You can't make this shit up.
https://www.kxlf.com/news/america-in-crisis/aurora-police-de...
glad you posted this.
> "Why are you now placing these children on the ground face into the concrete? It's hot! In front of all of us? Screaming at them. They are telling you they are hurt," witness Jenni Wurtz said.
I cannot believe LE will use this technology within ethical bounds, since they are willing to force a very young child onto the asphalt of a hot parking lot, who cannot possibly have posed a risk to their safety.
I mean, even people who are guilty of many crimes shouldn't be summarily executed in the street. Stealing a television or driving a tractor trailer of illegal weed from coast to coast isn't a death sentence even after a jury trial & conviction, so we shouldn't really be all that sanguine about guilty people being killed either.
They have already destroyed at least one life. There was that woman arrest
Flock doesn't kill people. Cops do.
The systems we have in place kill people. Aiming to blame just one point of failure, in a complex network of systems, is a failure itself
> We have seen how often pull over/arrests can derail when a stupid cop that is aggressive pulls out their weapon first
I'll bite. I'm sure it has happened. But how often?
"Even if they're wrong, you can't shoot back."
Depends on the situation. You'd absolutely be arrested. Get in front of a jury of 12 people and you might have a chance if you have enough evidence for a self-defense claim and the cop acting outside of the law.
Only if the jury believes in nullification, which isn't common. The jury is instructed to follow the law. The selection process asks "even if you think they were right, if it's against the law and they were guilty would you issue a guilty verdict?" and people answer "yes" consistently.
"Only if the jury believes in nullification, which isn't common. The jury is instructed to follow the law."
Not true. There is case law that allows for self-defense against unlawful use of force, or when when you reasonably believe the force was not coming from an officer (didn't announce, were not uniformed, believed to be imposters, etc).
The boyfriend in the Breonna Taylor case had charges dismissed, so you're right on this. Somehow none of the hail of 32 shots hit him.
But - to the OP's point, if you're trying to defend yourself against what appear to be police officers illegally shooting at you, the situation is just going to escalate. One police officer firing at you will shortly become many police officers firing at you. Taking cover or running is preferable to firing back at police.
* (didn't announce, were not uniformed, believed to be imposters, etc).*
Okay, but what if they just wear masks and use unmarked vehicles?
Then do they get a pass for shooting you in the back?
Obviously. It sounds like the kind of question you always say yes to unless you're trying to get out of jury duty. And yet, people aren't machines.
No one who has answered "no" made it thru the selection process, so there might be some survivor bias at play here.
As I rudely learned when I was preparing to use the "I'm gonna do jury nullification" thing during a jury selection, there are a few states, including mine, where jury nullification is explicitly "not-stated" but not a uniquely acceptable reason to strike a juror, despite what our juror handbook might claim about violating an "oath" (you cannot be punished for "violating an oath" if you are selected).
I was lucky that for unrelated reasons the trial didn't happen and none of the jury selection stuff went through, but in a few states you cannot just rely on this as an easy out. This is awesome, because for true believers, you can actually do jury nullification. This was actually somewhat recently and notably used: https://www.eenews.net/articles/bundys-acquitted-in-huge-set...
My last stint on grand jury we had a case that none of us felt great about. It was a felony theft charge where the thief likely used the vehicle regularly but took it in the middle of the night to return home. He was at a logging camp where he pays for accommodations but they had no work for him. After 3 days he got frustrated and left in the middle of the night. Camp foreman called the law reporting the vehicle stolen. The officer went and checked at the now missing guy's house and the vehicle was parked in his driveway.
The whole group felt the felony charge was too much for that series of events. Somebody said "I don't want to vote on this". I suggested that is a valid option. The vote was the weakest of all the cases we covered. Several abstentions but just enough to send the case to trial.
To me that is nullification in practice. It is "the community" deciding that they don't believe the State is right in pursuing conviction. Juries are meant to be a randomized "council of elders" type body not just cogs in the machine.
Using your belief in jury nullification as a tool to get out of your duty as a citizen rubs me the wrong way. You have to participate in the functions of civilization if you want it to reflect your beliefs.
So, uh, was the guy planning on bringing the vehicle back to the logging camp? It's not obvious to me that this wasn't in fact vehicle theft.
Yes, it was technically theft. Officers found the vehicle at his house shortly after it was reported missing. Not really an opportunity to return it. If all laws were prosecuted to the exact letter of the law we would not need juries. The DA will prosecute any case that they feel has enough evidence to secure a conviction, as this case had. It is the juries that determine if prosecution in each case is "just".
Steal a car to rush somebody to a hospital then return it after and the letter of the law will convict you as a felon. It is the jury that could decide, as representatives of the community, that you should not be a felon for saving somebody's life even if you technically stole a car.
In most states the jury instructions are to make their judgement based solely on the evidence presented to them. These instructions make a jury a cog in the prosecution machine. The purpose of a jury is a final check on the government's execution of the law by members of the community.
> If all laws were prosecuted to the exact letter of the law we would not need juries. The DA will prosecute any case that they feel has enough evidence to secure a conviction, as this case had. It is the juries that determine if prosecution in each case is "just".
I think you're think of grand juries. They decide if there is enough evidence to go to trial, I.e. if the prosecution is just.
Even without grand juries, we'd still have juries that decide the verdicts. They decide if a conviction is just.
I was referring to both grand and petit jury in general but yes, that is correct.
If they had previously allowed him to take the vehicle home, then I would presume he probably was planning to bring it back. Once you explicitly allow a person to do something, it becomes harder to claim harm when they do it again.
If they are going to seat me on the jury after I loudly proclaim my willingness to nullify - I'm game for the trial!
The main problem is the idea that I'm held captive by some fake contract to the state. I'm lucky that where I am the law is more just/libertarian than in most other places - meaning that in general the average arrested person is more likely to be actually guilty, but especially in places that are ultra authoritarian (i.e. Virginia), I need all the power I can get to protest their unjust system or I'm not going to have my time wasted.
Tons of people who smoke weed and had to say "yes" to the "are you not a drug user" and lied on a form to get guns were just found by the US Supreme Court 9-0 to not be violating the law:
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-supreme-court-backs-chal...
Hunter Biden trial would never have happened now too because of this - many people at the time wanted him to fight it out and be the poster child for this rather than the Pakistani guy in this version of the case.
So actually, you can indeed just say "yes" and than "vote your conscious" anyway, even openly - at least in the case of the few states that don't have "willing to nullify" as an acceptable reason to strike a juror during jury selection.
Note in this case guy was in an illegal state and also had cocaine.
The exceptions to the rule are very rare. I can think of one case where a person shot back during a no-knock raid on the wrong address and had charges dropped because police didn't announce their presence well enough.
As long as they shout "police", they can knock down your front door, throw a flash-bang into your infant's crib and disable them for life, then go "whoops" when they realize they have the wrong address and you'll be on the hook for replacing the door they destroyed.
If you survive to get in front of a jury. That's a big if. Plus, even if you were falsely arrested and wounded by police and your rights clearly violated... were they violated in that EXACT same way in the past establishing precedent that it isn't ok to stalk/injure people? No? Qualified Immunity. FTP.
Honestly getting arrested would be lucky. If recent years have shown anything, they don't need to be particularly concerned about removing you from the picture more permanently regardless of the circumstances.
I'd highly doubt that. I've actually been on scene of a few LE-involved shootings (ex-paramedic).
If LE "just" shoots at you (i.e. you're not actively firing or an immediate threat - and without commenting on the "should" of that) then... you might be "fine", once you're disabled.
If you're actively firing at LE, they're going to hit you with "overwhelming force" (ever seen a news story where there's 50+ bullet holes in a car, or a suspect shot 15 times, by police? That's "overwhelming force") and any survival on your part is going to be sheer dumb luck and "not very likely".
You absolutely do have a chance to get acquitted: https://www.police1.com/legal/articles/man-cleared-in-deputy...
Good luck living long enough to see a jury
The choice in this hypothetical scenario is to be killed initially through the unlawful use of force or potentially be killed at some later time before reaching trial.
How do the municipalities "own" this data if anyone from any agency outside of a jurisdiction is allowed to access the data?
worse than that, federal agencies - which can't access it directly - do so via their "law enforcement partners". So now you've got DHS and ICE using it for their own pseudo-law activities.
I went on a grand jury in early 2025, and it was eye opening to see that under my state's laws the "smell of weed" is enough to justify a traffic stop and search of a vehicle.
I am playing devil's advocate here, but mass surveillance can also save you.
Let's say your just broke up with your girlfriend, shortly after, her house get burgled and a bunch of jewelry is stolen, including some you gave her when you were together. A surveillance camera catches the burglar, a drug addict with a criminal record, he gets caught, tried and sentenced to 2 years in prison. The kind of case that won't get a news article, you may not even be aware of what happened.
Without the surveillance camera, you would be a prime suspect, and even if you don't get convicted in the end, there is a good chance for the police to give you a hard time.
Here is the asymmetry, if a surveillance camera prevents a wrongful arrest, no one will notice, because you don't notice things that don't happen. Only wrongful arrests caused by surveillance cameras will be noticed.
More surveillance doesn't mean more arrests, trials and convictions. These are limited by the availability of police forces, magistrates and jails respectively. Even with a total surveillance zero privacy dystopia, you can't have more arrests without the means to do so. What will change is on what grounds the arrests are made: video footage, a witness testimony, etc...
It doesn't mean I support mass surveillance (I told you I was going to play devil's advocate), but that alone doesn't mean more wrongful arrests as a whole unless something else in the system is promoting wrongful arrests.
There are legitimate concerns about Flock that don't involve wrongful arrests, such as misuse of data by operators, like for stalking, data security, which may leak to criminals, and usage for purpose other than law enforcement, like marketing. The fact that it is a private company funded by public money with dubious contracts is another concern.
Assuming cops actually present the evidence they have and don't hide it from the defense. The police and DA don't care if they put a guilty or not guilty person in jail, the 'tough on crime' faction that tends to get people elected cares about the number of people thrown in jail. The more the better. Throw 10,000 people in jail, you must be a damned good elected official and you get re-elected.
>you can't have more arrests without the means to do so.
Not exactly sure what you're trying to say... you can always have more arrests. Make more things crime. Pre-crime, thought crime, speech crime. When you run out of physical space you start stacking the prisoners 10 deep. When that runs out of space you start executing them and putting them in ovens.
What I was trying to say is that if no one is available to make an arrest, you can't make an arrest.
Why do you think people get away with minor traffic offenses all the time, something right in front of an officer? There simply isn't enough means to deal with these, so they just ignore most of them.
I mean, in an electronic prison, you just issue the ticket and wait. Eventually people have to do things like renew licenses and they are arrested there. This is very similar to systems states are using now preventing the renewal of expired things like licenses.
This is what the presumption of innocence is supposed to do. If you have an alibi, then big brother doesn’t get involved. These are cultural problems that we do not need big brother’s benevolence to solve for us. We need better cultural systems of accountability; the problem is that those are _way_ harder to build
Police regularly ignore evidence that disproves their claims. They will not prove your innocence for you. It will still be up to you to pay the lawyer 1000s of dollars to do the discovery against flock cameras to attempt to prove your innocence.
You don't have to prove your innocence; innocence is assumed. The prosecution has to prove you guilty, and inform the defense of all the evidence that they have. If they have evidence that exonerates you, they would be stupid to even bring a case to trial as it would be a waste of everyone's time.
We live in a world where, routinely, police plant evidence and prosecutors fail to bring forth exonerating evidence. They don't have to be stupid when they are being deceptive.
Search "Brady violation" on youtube for some examples.
Of course. Our entire concept of government relies on everyone acting in good faith, even with checks and balances. Reality is often messier.
> This is the big problem with mass surveillance as a whole. With enough time, they'll find some pretext to bring you in, even if the original crime they want you for is weak.
This sounds like a problem with an unaccountable police force. London has had a CCTV system for 60 years.
And it's the least free western country.
What you describe could pass for the USSR all over again.
Too many people will see this type of thing and go "I don't smoke weed so this is not a problem for me"
Maybe the goal isn't really to protect the public's interests, but to protect a privileged class of people.
Necessary reading: "Ham Sandwich Nation: Due Process When Everything is a Crime"
https://ir.law.utk.edu/utklaw_facpubs/468/
>This will ruin lives, even if they're eventually let go. Jobs lost, evicted from homes, cars towed, pets surrendered and put down.
Yes. That's exactly the point. Comply with every little thing, no matter how absurd, or else your life will unravel.
Look through a historical comment (especially from back when "big data" was the buzzword) thread on any subject where HN is pro regulation and pro government. This is EXACTLY what the useful idiots want.
They want some NYC liquor store owner to pay a hundred grand to the state because that one time he visited NH he loaded up his van with tax free henny to sell back home.
They want that exurban undeveloped lot owner to lose their house for letting their buddy with a tree service dump there and fill in a few hundred square feet over the course of half a decade.
They want some random industrial employer that makes nuts and bolts or something to be fined millions of dollars because their maintenance employees spray painted a piece of equipment in the parking lot without the PPE and pollution compliance measures befitting a commercial paint operation.
They want the jackboot on the throat of everyone who steps out of line on any axis that they care about.
They see the way the banking industry tries to stay away from weed, porn and guns because the upside isn't worth the risk of being combed over by the enforcers. And instead of seeing it as cautionary, they see it as a model that needs to be scaled down to the small businesses and the lowly individual peasants.
Of course they don't lay it out so plainly. They use words like "negative externality" and "antisocial" and "dis-incentivize" to whitewash it but that doesn't change what it is.
All very terrifying but you're building a "Hollow Man" by using an "Appeal to Extremes".
Instead of arguing against actual regulatory policy, you are mind-reading malicious intent into hypothetical scenarios (and people) you just invented. Or real examples that you're broadstroking against a "they" which is somehow "HN."
I am not sure how you can justify trying to paint so broad a stroke across an entire community, or feel justified in creating a bucket of "useful idiots" into which you just throw whole classes of unnamed people without engaging with any particular argument.
I get you're angry, my man, but maybe you should question exactly who it is you're angry with.
We don't need Canadians telling Americans that we're wrong to worry about American police, or that we need to be more specific with our concerns.
American police kill over 1,000 civilians and 10,000 dogs per year.
They routinely wrongly arrest people, and create life-ruining situations, especially as American workers do not enjoy as much job protection as Canadian workers.
I get that you want to be offended by his post, but maybe you should question why exactly you're offended at a post that has, at its heart, a lot of actual reality about life in America.
Because said person is sitting here saying "HN is stupid", it has nothing to do with the police, but the audience he's going after.
Read what he wrote and I wrote again. Nobody is excusing American police. I'm griping about his attempts to smear random people on this forum.
Nowhere did I tell you you're wrong to worry about American police. FFS, I worry about American police and I don't live there. Hence why I won't even go there.
>Because said person is sitting here saying "HN is stupid", it has nothing to do with the police, but the audience he's going after.
I said that if you go into policy discussions where HN is pro regulation you can see all sorts of commenters cheering for the pro-jackboot takes and peddlers thereof.
It's a subtle distinction between that and "the whole place is stupid" but it's there.
> I'm griping about his attempts to smear random people on this forum.
Want me to name names? I can go right down the leader board saying who wants jackboot applied and on what policy axis. I don't think that's productive.
This argument goes too far to the other end. Never name a group, cuz by golly you’re broad stroking. Only specific character assassination is allowed or keep quiet? Like a Cancel Culture Wittgenstein.
You started out right but this:
"This will ruin lives, even if they're eventually let go. Jobs lost, evicted from homes, cars towed, pets surrendered and put down."
No. The 'domestic violence and prohibited substances' is the part that will ruin lives directly.
Domestic violence, bad. The drugs, debatable, but that's a matter of getting 'weed' made legal, not a surveillance issue.
It's not 'destroyed lives from crime' - it's the 'destroyed civic fabric from an authoritarian surveillance state' ... that is the problem.
It's not the 'incident' that is the problem, because Flock is not helping cops be 'dirty cops' or anything.
It's the totality of it - and the pernicious grinding away of common civil liberties.
Probably we should not be able to use this 'interstate' unless for 'in pursuit of violent criminals leaving the scene of a violent crime' ... which is so rare that it wouldn't make sense.
The only place this should be tolerated is in 'acute areas of high crime, with annual review and judicial warrant' - aka where there is literally that much crime that it's a serious civic concern - and it has to be part of an overall civic plan by the municipality, in conjunction with social services, investment etc - never as a 'lone tool'.
> Flock is not helping cops be 'dirty cops' or anything.
Yes it very much is, there's plenty of evidence
Note that all the other charges against this person were dropped.
No, there's nothing specific or inherent about Flock that is specifically helping cops bad bad.
This is not like something that helps them cover their tracks, or hide behind some tool.
I don't like Flock, but it's the 'surveillance state' part of it that is bad.
In terms of 'cops being bad cops' - that's a separate thing.
Also - Flock for sure should not be allowed to be used in this kind of speculative kind of thing.
So "this kind of speculative thing" isn't cops being bad cops?
What about when they stalk and pull over women they're infatuated with? That's not being a bad cop? You know they do that, right?
This literally does help them hide behind some tool. They can get away with all sorts of rights violations by the nature of "we didn't collect the data, we bought it" in the first place.
> It's not the 'incident' that is the problem, because Flock is not helping cops be 'dirty cops' or anything.
That's exactly what Flock is doing. It's just the latest variation on "power corrupts".
Then your argument is we should have no police 'because power corrupts'
I don't think this is reasonable or principled.
The evidence here is that Flock can be used maliciously, I don't think anyone doubts that, the question is it a tool that is inherently bad in it's normal functioning, and I don't think so.
Like ... 'pepper spray' can be used maliciously by cops, since it's 'less apparently extreme' they can get away with more shenanigans. But it's not 'inherently' bad tool, and perpetual use won't change policing.
If you see a story where cops use pepper spray maliciously, and it harms someone ... that's evidence of an incident, not of a bad tool.
The 'evil' of flock is the surveillance state, not in bad apple cops.
Maybe they can start enforcing the law when it comes to blatant offenders that terrorize large cities. Illegal blocking of sidewalk selling fake handbags, selling untaxed marijuana on street corners, violating traffic laws on e-bikes. A lot of wood to chop before they get to my jay walking so I think I’m safe for the time being. But I welcome more enforcement
Brother, you want mass surveillance because of bikes, handbags, and weed.
I guarantee there is _some_ group that finds some aspect of you, your life, or that of some of your loved ones at least as annoying as you find those things.
What group is that? Im part of the 95% that doesn't want filth and crime on our streets. Stop pretending like you don't understand. Like oh however can we decide whether homeless drug addicts w their pitbulls blocking the sidewalk is not optimal.
> "filth and crime"
checks, it's "people selling untaxed marijuana"
Yeahhhh, we have radically different ideas about what constitutes "they're terrorizing my city".
Casual use of heavy-handed law enforcement makes things much, much worse, not better.
Heavy handed? How about light handed. You're not allowed to sell illegal drugs on the street? Why do we allow this? Do you just not believe that there should be no laws that prevent people from posting up convenience stores on street corners? Or that police should look the other way bc it's too heavy handed to just detain the few dozen ppl that do this until they stop.
This wasn't a thing 10 years ago and we weren't in a police state
> This wasn't a thing 10 years ago and we weren't in a police state
Curious then that you are arguing in favor of a police state with mass surveillance to solve these issues...
> You're not allowed to sell illegal drugs on the street? ... Or that police should look the other way bc it's too heavy handed to just detain the few dozen ppl that do this until they stop.
I don't think you need to arrest someone because they're selling an untaxed legal substance, no. (And: weed should be legal, if we're talking about a place where it's not).
You can manage this situation better by getting their info and issuing a ticket. On its face, it doesn't warrant an escalation of force, the extra paperwork, or choking up the jails -- all of which represent very real costs to us, the taxpayers.
> This wasn't a thing 10 years ago and we weren't in a police state
Buddy, I have some news for you about the history of the US. Ten years ago, which country/countries had the highest incarceration rate in the world?
Selling untaxed Marijuana in a legal state is not selling 'illegal drugs', just saying.
Lots of people are scared of those who are different or unfamiliar. They live in their own bubble - prefering homogenous suburbs, non-poor office workers, algorithmic feeds for their cognitive biases, etc.
And fear, whether real or induced by manipulation, has precipitated a -lot- of atrocities in the world.
The issues you are complaining about are not issues due to a lack of mass surveillance. You're arguing in favor of mass surveillance with a diatribe of complaints over petty crimes that you describe as terrorism, while ignoring any of the potential downsides of what you are arguing for. Consider that you also break laws yourself, even if you think you don't, and what you are arguing for can and will be used against you too (not that one needs to break any laws for mass surveillance to be utilized against them).
Wow I never knew the 90 year old racist grandpa with the barely functioning pickup truck who lives on my block had a HN account.
In Kherson the fiber controlled drones that drop explosives on civilians are terrorizing the cities, but that's nothing in comparison to illegal handbags!
> terrorize large cities
Oh I wonder what kind of terror he's talking about
> Illegal blocking of sidewalk selling fake handbags
Jesus Christ. If this is what brings you to a surveillance state with open arms maybe you should talk to people outside of your bubble.
It doesn't have to be like this. Why do you accept it? Serious question. You don't need a surveillance state. How many indignities do you stomach for what exactly? Some false sense of freedom? Freedom to buy illegal unlicensed untaxed weed? Freedom to get run over by a delivery ebike?
> How many indignities do you stomach for what exactly?
People selling handbags neither threatens my dignity nor makes me indignant.
When I think of "terrorize", I think of things like.. y'know, people strapped with explosives, blowing up buses full of civilians. Or something like the Rape of Nanking, where Japanese army killed and raped their way across the city. The Japanese terrorized the city, literally instilling a nightmarish-level of fear.
I can't place "they're terrorizing me by selling handbags" anywhere in the same universe. If you're genuinely frightened by this, I would like to gently suggest you talk this through with a therapist.
> Why do you accept it?
I don't. I work every day to help my community and I hope you do the same.
> You don't need a surveillance state
Then don't call for one. If you'd like to change your community, again, I'd recommend you to stop being scared and just start talking to more people around you.
You seem to think everyone should conform to one homogenous way of life. This was tried in Europe a little under a century ago and it did not turn out well.
This comment is satire, correct?
take a quick scroll through their substack, there's even funnier stuff than fake handbag outrage
Not even close. Welcome to the mind of the average right wing boomer
You seem hateful.
Ah yes, the sheer terror of someone selling handbags.
If you consider that terrorizing, you need help.
Also Flock, in the past week:
All of Winona Police Department's Flock cameras cut down and stolen
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49171656
241 comments
How Cops Are Trying to Hide Their Use of Flock
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49172076
9 comments
Flock's CEO Faced Me After Its Cameras Led to My Wrongful Stop
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49156650
118 comments
Flock – Chilling Effects: Long Island's Emerging Open-Air Prison
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49148541
38 comments
Leaked Flock Guide Shows How It Teaches Cops to Promote Its Tech
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49158837
17 comments
Man outlines how hardened criminals take down Flock cameras, detailing it step-by-step:
https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1v78ihu/...
Hopefully none of those hardened criminals know that a circular saw is the fastest way by far to cut through posts!
Kickback would be bad if it binds in the kerf - I think sawzall is better/safer for cutting pipe that's under load.
You spelled "heroes" incorrectly.
"For legal reasons my lawyer has advised me to call the criminals"
Based on my observations (news reports, local chatter, etc) it seems that every state that borders a state with legal Cannabis does this. Idaho does this very frequently (since just about every border is a legal source). They take advantages of the bottlenecks on highways and have cameras and/or officers there.
If it is Flock, interagency communications, license plate readers or just "enhanced stops" for things like a crack in the windshield.
People seem to forget that while buying in one state is legal it actually can become a much larger crime than just possession as soon as you cross state lines. It "can" become a federal matter...
This person in the article attracted the gaze of Sauron.
They did this in my state, and now that other state has been legal for over a year and a half, but the cameras are all still there
North Idaho started adding license plate readers and cameras back in the early 2k's using funding given out after 9/11.
Locally there was a recent pushback on them and the sheriff basically said "They've been there forever" and "Don't worry...it's just us with the footage"
They are making an assumption that someone is buying when they go into the dispensary. Not necessarily the case. They aren't compelled to buy anything when entering.
Which if you know that's the case, it's a good way to f*ck with the police. Travel to the dispensary and be empty handed when the search comes. After 2-3 searches you file a cease-and-desist.
I am misunderstanding the article, if "The searches came to light in a Wisconsin criminal complaint against Edward Abrams-Phillips, who was wanted for bail jumping on domestic violence charges." he was wanted, why do they need a pretext for the stop?
1. those charges were dismissed
2. the article address that specifically:
> The case is an example of Flock cameras being used to arrest a wanted alleged criminal suspected of committing a violent crime. But it is also an example of police surveillance overreach *in that the cameras were specifically used to create a pretext to tack on additional petty crimes* based primarily on where a person’s vehicle had traveled.
I think using technology to capture alleged criminals is a good thing.
I agree. You stole $5 from me and I'm glad with the help of Flock you can be tracked down and brought to justice.
I can confirm. I saw him take the $5.
I think everyone agrees. Where the disagreement lies is if this is how the technology is actually used, and the answer seems to be: no.
Regardless, even if the technology was used currently purely for good, when you’re “pro surveillance” you’re actually arguing it will always be used for good, even in some hypothetical future with hypothetical politics. That’s a very hard sell.
I'm pro technology. Being pro something does not mean I'm arguing it will always be used for good. What kind of standard is that?
The Party was great at using Viewscreen technology to catch thought criminals.
does this work for any allegation? if it was a serious one surely they could get a warrant. if it's not enough for that it might as well be gossip imo.
According to Flock's CEO, yes. He has stated he sees a false positive as a better outcome than a false negative.
Flock provides technology. They don't set the laws. It's like complaining about the CEO of Ford bc a police Ford vehicle damaged some property
Sure. I actually worked for Flock.
I watched them happily train officers from Agencies on doing things they were not allowed to do by law, that Flock knew they weren't.
That "Chinese wall" of separation is nowhere near as concrete as you like to act.
Flock might not set the laws, but when the Flock CEO says he would prefer you to be collateral damage on his company's mission for "a world without crime, thanks to Flock" than dare risk someone not get caught for a crime or alleged crime, via Flock, then sorry, they absolutely are participating in things, and complaints against them are entirely appropriately targeted.
Flock provides tools and information that influence and encourage bad behavior from police.
Yes, we need laws to help stop this. Ideally, those laws should entirely destroy Flock's business model and lead to its bankruptcy.
The issue is not whether cameras are useful for law enforcement. The issue is how that camera information is managed and overseen. What Flock is doing would fit right in in a cartoon authoritarian state, but it doesn't belong in the real world.
> The bail jumping charge was dismissed; Abrams-Phillips was found guilty only of weed possession in the case, according to the court records.
Apparently the bail jumping charge was weak? That seems like a black-and-white situation to me so no idea what the details were, but there was clearly something wrong with that charge.
If the charge was so weak then they probably couldn't get a warrant to arrest him outright? Therefore they needed the marijuana probable cause to stop and search him.
Regardless the disturbing part is that they're using surveillance state footage of a person traveling to a state where something is legal as "probable cause" for a crime.
The bail jumping charge was actually dropped in the end, so weed possession was the only charge.
Reading between the lines, I would bet the bail jumping charge was based on him crossing state lines back and forth, and was dismissed by the court when it became clear he wasn't actually running away anywhere. Thus the cops hunting for any and all petty bullshit to punish him with instead, like the marijuana possession.
That makes sense yes.
IANAL - if they break the bail conditions the judge may issue a warrant depending on severity, clearly a warrant was not issued here, otherwise there’s no need for pretext like you said.
Article also states bail jumping charge was dismissed but the weed charge is the only charge that remains.
They still have to bother with actually going to a judge and actually getting that warrant. Why do that if you can just skip it and not deal with inconvenient questions.
The Flock camera network is much less of a stickler for those pesky civil liberties being respected
Ok, the article is confusing but the complaint is a little better.
> The vehicle was registered to Edward 12-01-1993. Edward had an active Brown County felony warrant with nationwide extradition.
so he wasn't just wanted but also had an active warrant.
> Multiple Deputies checked the area but were unable to locate the vehicle at that time
Police tried arresting him before, but couldn't find him. The police then used flock to find a pattern of coming/going over the state line. I'm guessing they stationed someone nearby to wait for a flock alert and arrest him.
The following is total speculation on my part: The police are including the "Based on prior flock hits, the vehicle travels to Michigan frequently which is a known source State for Marijuana as it is legal there." to build probable cause for searching the car and finding the marijuana.
Otherwise the only PC is: "He declined consent to search his vehicle. However, DeputyKowalski informed him he would be conducting a search of his vehicle due to the odor of marijuana".
Maybe the olfactory skills of officers are so dubious that courts need more facts than just an odor? That'd be my guess.
direct link to the complaint (it's also embedded in the article) https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/28537132/2025cf000671...
They don't need probable cause to search his vehicle if he had a warrant. They can search his car because they are arresting him and towing the vehicle
> They don't need probable cause to search his vehicle if he had a warrant.
Incorrect. Warrants have to be specific. An arrest warrant is not a general search warrant (in fact, general search warrants aren't legal). You don't lose your rights because a cop is arresting you.
Now, what can happen (and probably would happen) is the cops can take a drug sniffing dog to the car when it goes to impound and while the owner isn't there and claim "Oh, the dog signaled on the car so we searched it".
It's called an "Inventory Search": https://www.fletc.gov/sites/default/files/imported_files/tra...
Alright, thanks. I was unaware of this exception.
Cops have used the "odor of marijuana" for years as probable cause to search vehicles. AFAIK the courts have generally supported it.
It depends on the federal district you are in. It also can depend on the state you are currently in.
For example, in the 3rd district in New Jersey the odor is not enough because MJ is legal in NJ.
Looks like for this specific case odor is enough. [1]
[1] https://www.wisbar.org/NewsPublications/InsideTrack/Pages/Ar...
The article is wrong on this point: the fact that he was crossing state lines was not a pretext for the stop.
They actually wanted to add another charge. The cameras helped them find the right opportunity to do that.
If they just picked him up driving around, they would only be able to charge those existing crimes.
By waiting for him to cross state lines, they have a chance to add on another charge.
They already had enough PC for the stop, and they could have searched the car as incident to the arrest at any time.
Unless I'm misreading this is all covered explicitly in the article.
The article claims multiple times that the cops used the interstate travel as a pretext for the search that turned up the marijuana, but in most jurisdictions, the arrest would have allowed them to inventory the car anyway as part of the impound process.
Unless this jurisdiction is an outlier, the pretext wasn't needed for the search. As the parent comment says, the cops used the interstate travel as a timing strategy to increase the charges.
I'm using legal liability for stalking and illegal searches as a tactic to get my town to take these down. Has anyone tried this route? https://rmnoflock.com/2026/07/29/rolling-meadows-flock-camer...
I've seen it suggested to add a warrant requirement for police to use ALPRs. A warrant requirement is not a reasonable bandaid to consider allowing mass spying. There should be no mass spying by default.
A warrant requirement makes sense for something like the locations of customers on cellular networks, because it's built into the tech.
When you make the optional choice to create mass spying, safeguards do not make it acceptable.
Fun fact, they'd already need one if they weren't buying the data from private companies. This is because both the courts and legislature have been busy desecrating and burying the fourth amendment for decades.
https://i.ibb.co/WWWYznHX/flock-future.png
;-)
See also:
* https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2019/06/06/web-of-knowledge/
* https://medium.com/@speechgeek/scaling-joy-part-2-the-tech-t...
Also see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-crime
> “Every child in this video is home tonight because Flock gave officers the right information at the right second,” ... “That’s the mission. That’s the whole company. I wouldn't trade that for anything.”
I think it's clear that, if these things (flock cameras) continue to be a part of modern society, they need significantly higher oversight. What's painful with statements like above is that it shows that we just don't have good enough leadership to set appropriate standards for when things like flock cameras are appropriate.
Here's my thoughts on how Flock and related tech should be handled. Nothing gets stored unless there's a specific judicial warrant. They can take a pic of my license plate, I'm in public, ok. But unless they have a warrant naming my license plate specifically, then nothing gets stored. At all. No log of the plate, no photo of the car, driver, etc. NOTHING. And this needs to be easily auditable.
Those are my thoughts, curious about holes in my idea.
If you ignore the policy question of do cops even need access to the kind of capabilities Flock tech provides, this particular case becomes a pretty clear example of user error amplified by the capabilities of the tech and not the issue with the tech itself.
The cops didn't realize that the license plate they were searching was a) incomplete and therefore fuzzily matched multiple unrelated vehicles, and b) wasn't even stolen to begin with.
This is similar to running `rm -r *` in a wrong folder and then shifting blame on rm for deleting the stuff you didn't want deleted. Sure, there's maybe a conversation here about overall rm ergonomics and if the average user is even competent enough to be allowed to run it, but the it's first and foremost a user error.
Guaranteed this is being used against journalists and their sources by the feds.
I used to get really upset when I saw a car on the road with obscured or disfigured plates. The rise of Flock/ALPRs has done a great deal to morally rehabilitate this behavior.
Not from the US, but I really wish folks from the US started thinking of creative ways to "produce probable cause" (if that makes any sense), get stopped without any harm, assemble enough individual cases into some kind of catalogue, and then be able to show people just how much the whole thing is bad with evidence that did not result in them actually getting what they were looking for.
If I asked a random person about this, they'd probably just say - "but they found weed, right?"
>> "produce probable cause" (if that makes any sense), get stopped without any harm, ...
This is a very dangerous game, especially if you're not white.
100% agreed, easy for me to talk about it from a distance... just giving out the idea as it could be something to build upon later.
I'm afraid that the way things currently stand, vast majority of people are only gonna see the cases where "it made sense to have that" for years and years, until they feel it one day on their own skin - and then their own story is not going to be heard, just like everyone else's before them. Frog boiling sometimes intentionally takes a lot of time
This seems like a reach. Guy had an outstanding warrant and they did not need any pretext to arrest him.
Mass surveillance based on social media is prohibited in The Netherlands and presumably other European countries. However, running specific profiles on police owned ANPR camera's could be declared a proportional breach of privacy and thus legal.
They used to do this with normal DOT cameras anyways. That doesn't make it okay. The neat part is when they use fake names and badge numbers to deny that the stop ever even happened in the first place. It's much harder to get away with that these days
Experienced this about 15 years ago, was lucky to have my friend along for the ride, who was a photographer. The pictures of those cops are the only evidence we have that it even happened. They wrote a whole pile of tickets that didn't exist when I went to try and pay them.
Another time I had a state trooper say I was doing 140 in a 130hp car. He claimed that because I was wearing cutoff sweatpant shorts that I was growing weed? These dudes are useless.
Forget about all of this, though. If you want to be mad, check out the solve rate for hit and runs over the past 20 years. Damage only cases are something like 1 in 10. Fatalities 2 in 5. With all these fucking cameras. What percentage of those 9 in 10 or 3 in 5 are cops, do you think?
is it legal for police to track your movements in a state they have no jurisdiction in?
is anyone else old enough to remember when cops first got tasers
suddenly EVERYONE was getting tased
it's like that
give them a new "toy" to combat violent crime and instead it's used on everything else because zero repercussions
I am starting to see Flock on the side of the road at every major shopping center
unfortunately like "kavanaugh stops" I suspect the supreme court is going to put their permission into concrete regardless how they are abused
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kavanaugh_stop
>give them a new "toy"
Indeed. Like, no shit strapping a camera and microphone and sending it to an all knowing AI to analyze it all is going to reduce crime. But it's a violation of our human rights.
It's clear these people do not understand the importance of privacy or rights. Crime is already decreasing. The bigger improvements would come from improving society, not restricting people's rights for more "safety".
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskLE/comments/1srugkv
"Don't flock camera me bro"
Um, what? Have you seen any cop tasing videos? I've never seen it abused in every video I've seen (hundreds).
I know you are being sarcastic, but for others: I saw one literally yesterday of a game and wildlife officer tasing a man pumping gas. The gas spilled and then caught on fire. The tased man partially caught on fire and fell to the ground getting bruises.
The officer continued yelling at him to comply, all the while the man was ablaze, shocked, and bruised.
Cops should have tasers taken away. They believe they are "make people do what I say" devices rather than the rare "make this extremely violent person who is an imminent threat to life and person stop being violent temporarily so other officers can continue to use non-lethal force to de-escalate the situation".
I think at the end of each year that an officer didn't deploy their taser all year, they should get a bonus equal to $100 x [consecutive years of non-deployment]. The same incentive should be in place for discharging their firearm, except maybe x$1000.
Not long until we have the first abortion capital punishment case when one of these death cult states tracks a lady across state lines...
IANAL but the probable cause here (traveling across state lines) seems really weak. There's a million legitimate/legal reasons for someone to travel across state lines. That's the issue that jumps out at me here.
I'm so confused, how is this creating a pretext? A pretext is a false reason. Like if they searched for one reason but they really did it for a different one. But that's not what I'm reading here? It seems they suspected something, they used that exact reason to perform a search, and that's exactly what they found. Terrible reason, okay, but why are they being accused of lying? If a thief threatens you saying you look like you have money, and it turns out you did, and he takes it, is that a pretext too?
The pretext is that his travel to another state was assumed to be to buy weed. They appear to be relying on his existing warrant and criminal record to justify having used Flock data to not just locate him, but manufacture probable cause.
Unless they have direct evidence (photo from Flock of him ripping bong hits in his car at a light) prior to the stop to attach probable cause to, it's a pre-crime judgment.
IANAL (if you are, feel free to poke holes), but I wouldn't presume it unlikely he walks under the 4th amendment, even if it's through appeals.
What this article wants you to believe:
Police are actively using flock to identify people traveling over state borders to buy marijuana and search their cars.
What actually happened:
Police used flock to locate someone with an active warrant for their arrest related to domestic violence. They noticed a pattern of crossing state lines at certain times, and used that to nab him. It turns out it was to buy marijuana and his car reeked of it, so he was charged with that, too.
I don't quite get the thesis of the author here. Regardless of the view that one may have on Cannabis laws, they are illegal, if the system is correctly detaining people that break those laws, and you have a problem with that, is the problem with the enforcement system or the law?
If you don't like some aspect of this, should you be campaigning for removal of flock cameras? Or campaigning for cannabis rights and Controlled Substances reform?
The issue isn't prosecution for illegality, among other things it's the anti-Fourth-Amendment methods for constructing the case. So, I'm going to campaign for government entities to follow the Constitution (as amended).
Which of the events would be in violation of the 4th amendment here?
A reply to another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49189750
The two hang together. You campaign in your state to legalize something. Some other state, where you have very little influence, goes the other way.
It isn't just cannabis.
what if the law categorizes abortion as felony/murder?
what if the law categorized certain types of sexual behavior as felony?
Already happening. They're pissed abortion is up. These alt-right/christian nationalists are trying to force their <s>'morals'</s> on the rest of us
"She Got an Abortion. So A Texas Cop Used 83,000 Cameras to Track Her Down"
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/05/she-got-abortion-so-te...
it gets worse federally.
"Blanche assures anti-abortion supporters that Dobbs will be ‘permanent in every single state’"
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/08/03/blanche-pledged-abo...
So what happens when they use cameras outside of usps to crate pretext so a crazy alt right state judge issues a warrant under the assumption that you picked up pills in the mail?
"AG nominee tells faith leaders he will take action to restrict abortion drug access"
https://stateline.org/2026/08/04/ag-nominee-tells-faith-lead...
And relevant to interstate weed, what about kava, peptides, 7oh? they literally have million+ plus stakes in pushing drugs. Even when it means blocking worse drugs (7oh) so they can push slightly less addictive but still harmful garbage.
"Senate inquiry suggests Trump administration softened kratom and tobacco policies in quid pro quo"
https://www.statnews.com/2026/08/05/senator-ron-wyden-invest...
"Trump Administration’s Fake Crackdown Leaves Most ‘Gas Station Heroin’ on the Shelves. According to March 2026 financial disclosures, Mullin invested between $500,001 and $1 million in Botanic Tonics, LLC, of Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, the company that makes Feel Free Classic – the tonic found in the victim’s bedroom. Mullin reportedly urged officials to remove language from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) website warning of kratom’s harms."
https://www.citizen.org/news/trump-administrations-fake-crac...
It's all disgusting. Their voters deserve these consequences.
But they're forcing the rest of us to suffer.
I think the problem is that you're implicitly assuming a mutual exclusion, but it doesn't exist. IE you can have a problem with the law's existence, and also have a problem with an enforcement system that selectively enforces laws out of malice and/or as a false pretense. These are pretty synergistic values, as a matter of fact.
Y'all want to shit on hippie liberal states like Oregon that keep the police in a tight leash and de-facto decriminalized everything, but we had a whole state appeals court decision on this exact issue that means this should would NOT happen here:
https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/or-court-of-appeals/212471...
As usual, homie was in the wrong state.
I'm surprised Trump hasn't federally legalized marijuana as a last-ditch effort to boost his popularity. He's good at embracing popular left-wing policy measures when he needs a boost; stimulus checks worked well for this purpose during his 2016-2020 term.
The farm bill he enacted in his first term was a pretty solid legalization middle ground. The fact he flipped around on it in his second term makes me think it's more accidental than anything.
Again, I get downvoted by the fear-police on hacker news for this:
- Montana LLC ownership of vehicles. Don't own your vehicles ya'll, and at least those license plates won't be traced to you.
- Speak to a lawyer for how to meet any lawful use-tax obligations. Don't use this to avoid paying legitimate sales tax.
- Maybe the insurance company tied to you and your driving of this vehicle, has a partnership with the flock network. Someone argued they could give away your vin-tied identity, though I haven't seen proof this is happening. Plus, if the market shows a need for insurance companies to offer privacy protection, maybe that will emerge.
I trust we can figure out a way to normalize privacy to stand up against crimes and abusive behavior by state officials, the bad police, and an elected class of corrupted leaders who do not care about everyones rights to protect their own safety over yours. I would love if more people would send a powerful message to their officials of how this unconstitutional violation and compromise of basic decency, dignity and safety for most people for the benefit of a few has consequences.
I’m sorry but your solution is “don’t own a car?”
Fake news. Heck of a twist on what really happened.
Wisconsin police used Flock travel history to locate an already wanted man and develop marijuana suspicion. An officer’s claimed marijuana odor led to a vehicle search.