It seems really obvious as soon as I read it, but for some reason as I've been working locally in my neck of the woods against Flock and worrying about it snowballing it hadn't really occurred to me that the snowball could work the other direction as well. The emergent effects of more and more deployments into a single unified storage/search system has always been the new and scary part. But "the whole is worth more than the sum of its parts" of course necessarily means "the parts are worth less than the whole" too. So managing to stop or reverse a deployment in your own locality, however small, also serves to help reduce the capability to everyone else across the nation whether they agree or not. That's really hopeful.
As the article notes, in some cases a locality might try to switch to a competitor, but the competitive community pressure here is still useful. Seems like a rare time where it creates an actual direct incentive to consider what will be popular amongst the people all over, even if certain LEAs etc personally might want more.
Yes, the whole is worth more than the individual parts. It's like if you're trying to catch someone who robbed a home, you may have a camera to catch the car and license. Great first step, but cars used in crimes are often stolen. So you follow the car, and then you enter a dead zone where anti-flock activists prevented cameras. You're now at a dead end.
So I guess that's a win as that first camera is not very useful. And this is a good thing? I don't see your point.
I have cameras around my home. If someone breaks in I have video recording that I can provide police. I also live in a safe expensive neighborhood and naturally we have police cameras and a well funded police force. They have what they need to make sure no one breaks into my house and get away with it.
On the flip side, you are Uber and you’re trying to decide if you should charge the “low price” or the “high price” to somebody who just opened your app.
Luckily the person you’re about to make an offer to lives within the flock network so you quickly get pings from the last week that they shopped at Whole Foods and dropped by a dispensary on the way home. Yeah this person probably has disposable income, let’s charge them the 30% increased rate.
Or maybe you’re a future employer - oh this guy stopped at a dispensary 12 years ago? The algorithm will give him +4 risk points before we make our hiring decision. Plus he regularly goes to this bad neighborhood (which the algorithm doesn’t know is where his sister lives that he visits), that’s another +9 risk points.
AND on the darker side — if you knew they did this, would you visit your sister less?
There's some proper shareholder-oriented thinking! Even I was falling into the trap of purely considering Flock in a governmental context, and thus the potential for law abuse. But of course, they're not government, they're a private (indeed YC backed, Summer 2017) company. Policing might be their tent-pole and install argument but once in place there's all sorts of potential profitable revenue streams they might turn their minds too.
Pretty sure flock network isn't available to Uber.
As an aside, some people have an uncanny ability to take two things that are different in every conceivable way except one, and use the one similarity as the basis for an analogy.
It seems that you are deliberately misunderstanding or not addressing the GP.
Your pro-flock argument is fine on its own. Delete the second paragraph and make your argument independently of the GP.
You did not address the primary argument against Flock cameras - the erosion of civil liberties (privacy) is not worth the higher rate of prosecution / conviction.
Have you ever been a victim of a non-violent crime?
Loads of those just fall through the cracks of the system.
"solving the case" is mostly keeping all documented until they stumble on to something obvious, like already known perp having your stuff hidden in his stashing place while they go grab him for something unrelated.
In my city's subreddit, last week there was both a post complaining about the police not doing anything about a car break in, and a post complaining about flock on the front page.
People hate all kinds of things police do until they need the police to do something.
If you don't have video evidence the vast majority of non violent crimes go unsolved. How many manhours is a car break in worth, or a break in? Especially when the end result more than likely is still not enough to convict someone on.
Rings surveillance network and the huge network of private CCTVs has shown even with video evidence cops refuse to do their job if nobody is dead. If you get a package stolen in apartment complex, the PMs won't let anyone but police see the footage and the police will not come out to view the footage. Cameras stopped being a deterrent when criminals realized there are no consequences when they are caught on camera.
The police will however stalk and harass their partners, people they personally dislike, etc because they can view the footage at their leisure.
Almost nothing like what is seen in police procedural television series, that’s for sure.
Although there is (allegedly) a fun feedback loop that cops more and more expect their jobs to be like police procedurals and try to solve crime as if reality was shaped by Dick Wolf.
Imagine coding like it’s shown in the Matrix, or Grandma’s Boy.
Well, that's the thing. Many crimes weren't solved, for precisely the problem that Flock solves. I never thought I'd rally in support of mass surveillance, but when criminals can brazenly flee a scene and not be pulled over because pulling over a suspicious vehicle is now considered "profiling". I find myself supporting an idea I used to be against.
This has always been how the dystopian sci-fi future works. If you can get just get to 'the <future/decayed sounding name> zone' you are outside the big brother tracking.
It's also why a big brother system will always become full on/more and more big brother, because it needs to suck up and remove all the dead ends.
So to put the overall point first: democracy and freedom can require putting some money and effort into protecting rights, preventing abuse, preventing dragnets, and honestly addressing second/third/nth order effects that people are worried about, etc, even if you're trying to improve something. In this particular case, it's REALLY not difficult to envision systems that would achieve a better balance for the "officially stated case" [0] you describe, and thus be more likely to win the public's approval. We could use the same basic from-the-founding historical check of requiring a warrant and specifics for a search for example, and update that for modern times. The US judiciary could establish a solid internal PKI system and every judge could have an HSM of their own, then we could have a system where all footage, search capabilities and so on were encrypted and it literally required a judge's cryptographic signature on a warrant that had enforceable technical boundaries in time and space, with everything immutably documented. That wouldn't prevent the occasional bad judge and bad warrant, but just as with traditional searches it'd be a strong low pass filter and change incentives and accountability significantly.
So you have presented (amongst other things) a very black & white false dichotomy. You're claiming a bad, prone to abuse system is the only possible way to respond to your stated threat scenario. But it's just not. And you do actually need to win the public's approval not just browbeat them.
Moving on:
>It's like if you're trying to catch someone who robbed a home
It's notable how you didn't say "trying to catch someone who had gay sex" (a felony in some states until 22 years ago), "trying to catch someone who had an abortion" (back as a felony all of a sudden), "trying to catch someone brought as a child to the US who is in the green card process", "trying to catch someone who had a state reported stolen because the car dealership reported the car missing 6 months ago but it was found 2 months ago but the databases were never designed to get real time updates so there's a lag" and so on and so forth. Or more straight forwardly "it's like if you're a cop trying to catch your ex-girlfriend who said mean things about you on social media". You're on HN, you've been part of plenty of this, I don't think it's good faith discussion on your part to reach for an emotional tug and a lot of people here recognize and resent the technique.
And again see the first thing: in this case, why could the police not get a proper narrowly tailored warrant? They have plenty of clear, straight forward probable cause do they not?
>So you follow the car, and then you enter a dead zone [...] You're now at a dead end.
Wait, you said you were following the car? Police can do that you know, without massively networked surveillance nets, they have cars too, and they can follow cars. They can also put out an alert to keep an eye out. You'll need to quantify the gain here vs the cost.
>So I guess that's a win as that first camera is not very useful. And this is a good thing? I don't see your point.
I truly don't think you're making a good faith effort to see anyone's point at all.
----
0: I'm using scarequotes there and giving it a footnote because I also want to emphasize that part of our suspicion is that, precisely because of obvious improvements, the "stop the robber!!", like "think of the children1!!!!", is primarily a cover story for far... less popular things that elite powers want to do to us. Meaningful checks and balances are possible, implementation importance aside that they haven't even bothered to try from the start tells a story of absence all by itself.
Can someone enlighten me why Flock cameras are worse than the average security camera? How is it such a big topic now when their large network suggests that they've been in operation for quite some time by now?
Louis Rossmann likes to point out that the "CC" in "CCTV" means "closed circuit." Traditional security cameras are displayed maybe in a security booth in real time somewhere, and then recorded onto an on-prem hard drive. When the drive fills up the oldest video is overwritten. They're only ever looked at after recording if there's a reason to look at them.
The Flock cameras, on the other hand, upload all data to Flock which stores all video forever. They also do image recognition to identify license plates as well as other identifiable information (they've claimed to not do facial recognition but the implication is they can).
They then make this searchable so any cop with a flock login can put, say, your license plate into a flock search and it will give him a complete record of all your movements all across the country.
Network effects. Massive difference between police having to go talk to a local business owner or private citizen and say "hey, there was a robbery here, can you please go pull the footage you got last night at 8pm and see if you can share it with us please?" and being able to do a one-click nationwide query.
They have not been in operation for quite some time now. The large network is not a product of a long and steady roll out, but instead significant financial investment - much of which coming from people who are on record saying that democracy is a flawed system and other authoritarian soundbytes.
the best place to start, if you're legitimately curious, would probably be the many news paper articles and the many recorded city meetings where flock's controversies are brought up.
Flock is a large panopticon used to control the population. It became apparent recently how Flock cameras would be used by a new administration to purge law abiding workers and residents whose only crime was their immigration status. Whether you agree or not with the policy of this purge, you still witnessed the frightening efficiency with which authorities could now track and enforce whatever policy would come down the pipe. It made clear through show of force the new threat to a free people.
If it were a single camera or location, there is much less ability to track and attempt to coerce a large population.
Bob is the town mayor. The police want XYZ. The police request from flock a detail breakdown of everywhere that Bob went in the last 5 years (this example is after flock has been around a while) and then feeds that into AI looking for patterns. The police find a mistress. The police now get everything they want for the rest of mayor Bob's term.
Just one data point, but I've been to many policing conferences since 2020 and I think one of the main drivers of the Flock problem is a disconnect between what the public understands 'crime prevention' to mean, and what is sold to police under the same verbiage. Something I believe strongly is that healthy public safety requires both responsive action and crime prevention. When I talk about this, I will show quadrants with axes for Give/Take and Planned/Responsive, and try to get people to classify their public safety activities to see where they fall. To me it should be somewhat balanced. Everything concentrated in Take/Responsive is an incomplete strategic plan.
However, most tools available to police are designed to be responsive; they help catch a criminal that has already done something bad. This is not crime prevention. Nothing was prevented. Anyone living in an American city knows these cameras don't prevent much.
It is also (unfortunately) a very vendor driven industry. IACP is a big deal each year, and Flock / Axon / Motorola go all out on spending to influence decision makers.
Talking to communities, in my experience, they ask for crime prevention. People want the actual incident to never have occurred in the first place. When vendors go around saying they are solving crime once and for all, but all they deliver is surveillance, it builds distrust. It feels like lying, while the companies themselves get rich on public money.
Then they go on huge PR campaigns to tell the public actually what they're feelings is wrong and they should accept the surveillance. It's silly.
In the policing communications world, people often say trust is built in drops, and lost in buckets.
>Indeed, the broad backlash against Flock has grown so strong that the surveillance company last week announced mandatory new audit controls and lower default data retention periods for US users.
I'm a bit disappointed that they didn't call out how much bullshit was in that statement. They are just changing the default settings for new customers. That's it. All the deployed cameras remain the same, and new customers can just toggle those settings off of the defaults. It is so obvious that they were attempting to get credit for doing nothing, and reporters should call that out.
Vote with money, and spread the info about this cancer far and wide so everybody else votes with money. Its not a minor technical issue, the whole concept of how they operate their devices is amoral and/or unlawful in many parts of the world.
Thats the only stick with carrot these companies follow, rest is just empty PR not worth anyone's time.
I was wondering the other day, while reading about a woman thrown in jail based on a false report form Flock... How can Flock be fully insulated from the consequences of making thousands of false reports to the police? People can go to prison for less.
The same way my neighbors are insulated from consequences when they make an outright false complaint: they claim that they believed the information was true.
People go to prison for providing incorrect data without malicious intent? Are you sure? Anyway, working under contract with the police is not the same as calling in a report. Even if you wish it were.
I would like to live in a world where Flock is liable for providing unreliable insights to law enforcement, who then use it to infringe upon civil liberties.
If they’re not liable in specific circumstances, then at least they’re liable on aggregate for false claims of reliability.
Lots of forensic science is dubious, if not quackery. At least in court as the accused you can challenge such evidence with expert testimony. The uncharitable interpretation of your comment is that it would be just fine and dandy if citizens had no redress against Flock and law enforcement due to poor insights.
There is such thing as criminal negligence. Not saying that's what happened here, but people do sometimes go to prison for being uniquely bad at their jobs.
It would be interesting to me who you identify as “the state” in America in 2026, especially given the bureaucratic and executive upheaval of the past two years, and the newly-formed relationships between corporations and government agencies.
The implication of “local” in “local police” is that the demand for flock has grown organically without a centralized strategy.
I wouldn’t discount the role of the law enforcement industry, with prior greatest hits including Street Cop Conference, Bulletproof Warrior, Killology, etc.
Imagine all the scumminess and questionable ethics of pharmaceutical reps, but instead of a medical treatment, its ways to infringe on your civil liberties.
> Nearby Grand Chute canceled its Flock deal in early June, switching to a competing product from Axon. Grand Chute Police Chief David Maas told Fox 11 News that the Axon system “benefits the community in multiple ways and also respects resident privacy in a way that feels more comfortable, quite honestly.”
> Perhaps it’s the local summer diet of deep-fried cheese curds, corn on the cob, and Spotted Cow, but Wisconsin residents have been feeling pretty dyspeptic about Flock’s automated license plate cameras.
Or... perhaps it's because Wisconsin is a hotbed of progressive politics? Especially in the Madison area.
Wisconsin is a "purple" state, but that's somewhat misleading, because the people aren't generally "centrist". Rather, the state is deeply divided between left wing and right wing, as evidenced by Wisconsin's polar opposite Senators Tammy Baldwin and Ron Johnson.
It’s not as uninteresting as you imply. There’s also a strong union-blue presence (also seen on the south side of Chicago), where there are swaths of blue collar union workers who vote blue due to financial progressivism rather than social progressivism. You’ll find pockets of people who have no problem pulling out racial slurs but also voted for Kamala.
There’s also what I call the “Janesville conservative”, or people who likely worked or know someone who worked for Scott Walker and/or Paul Ryan. Their politics are much more conservative coastal elite / country club rather rural / pastoral.
The largest number of union members in Wisconsin may be government workers. (Incidentally, the outgoing Governor was originally a public school teacher.)
> people who likely worked or know someone who worked for Scott Walker and/or Paul Ryan.
What do you mean by "worked for"? If you meant that literally, it wouldn't be an electorally significant number of people.
WRT "uninteresting", this phrasing I found reductive to the rather interesting political dynamics in Wisconsin:
> Wisconsin is a "purple" state, but that's somewhat misleading, because the people aren't generally "centrist". Rather, the state is deeply divided between left wing and right wing, as evidenced by Wisconsin's polar opposite Senators Tammy Baldwin and Ron Johnson.
WRT union-blue presence, I'm speaking from a position of firsthand experience: friends and family who are union-blue and not public sector workers. Paper mill workers and railroaders, specifically.
WRT "worked for", you'll notice my full phrasing included "or know someone who worked for". Janesville is not a sprawling metropolis and most people know most people. Paul Ryan and Scott Walker have deep connections with the south-central part of the state, which has a thick flavor of coastal / country club elite that is not found elsewhere in Wisconsin. Ryan and Walker's success in Wisconsin is interesting given how much they were not rural yokels and would stick out like a sore thumb in most taverns north of the conifer line. Ron Johnson was part of that same anti-Obama political wave, but he's maintained his presence by embracing MAGA in a way that Ryan and Walker never did.
Do you believe that this somehow contradicts my point? You show an election result with a very small margin, less than 1%. I said in my original comment that Wisconsin is a purple state, "deeply divided between left wing and right wing, as evidenced by Wisconsin's polar opposite Senators Tammy Baldwin and Ron Johnson."
Wisconsin is a hotbed of progressive politics. It's also a hotbed of regressive politics. Nowadays the urban/rural difference tends to be very stark.
What do you mean by "hotbed", then? Do you just mean, "there exists a party with that alignment?" What state is not a "hotbed of progressive politics" by this interpretation?
> What do you mean by "hotbed", then? Do you just mean, "there exists a party with that alignment?"
No, I mean very active and influential, achieving real, significant political results. The submitted article is about how they've achieved results, not only fighting Flock but winning and getting rid of Flock.
My links about the history of Wisconsin progressivism show that they were winning elections.
>The submitted article is about how they've achieved results
"They" meaning just Wisconsinites. The only political point I can find with a quick skim of the article is
>“There are well-documented concerns about how this company operates and uses its technology to violate people’s Fourth Amendment rights [against unreasonable searches],”
which is not what I would call a progressive political stance. If anything, it's conservative in the literal sense, of maintaining existing political institutions in their present state. It'd be more progressive (again, in the literal sense) to want to embrace more unrestricted surveillance.
I think you're missing the point. A "stance" is passive. I'm talking about activism, grassroots organizing, protests, political action. That's why I called it a "hotbed". A stance must be pushed forcefully to overturn the status quo.
> It'd be more progressive (again, in the literal sense) to want to embrace more unrestricted surveillance.
> which is not what I would call a progressive political stance. If anything, it's conservative in the literal sense, of maintaining existing political institutions in their present state. It'd be more progressive (again, in the literal sense) to want to embrace more unrestricted surveillance.
1) The word "progressive" has multiple meanings. Your overly "literal" interpretation is not particularly useful in the political context.
2) The Flock cameras were already in place, so getting them removed is "progressive" even under your odd interpretation. But I don't even want to argue semantics. That seems like a silly argument to me.
Right vs left wing is a silly idea. What does my position on health care have to do with my position on defense? Now consider the above question, but substitution any two of the thousands of different things the government does. At best the two are a loose alignment, but there is no unity.
Support for Trump is not crumbling. His base still supports him. What is crumbling is the alliance of "right wing" people who never really liked/supported Trump, but were willing to accept him for the alliance. This is enough to turn the next election, but the "right wing" (again, whatever that is...) is still there and mostly hasn't change positions.
You so completely lost my point that I can't even figure out how you got to your reply from mine (after reading both again), much less how to get you back on track. I know I'm not the best writer, but I didn't think I'm that bad.
I'm only responding at all in hopes that someone can help me understand the confusion and perhaps explain things in a way you can understand.
It seems really obvious as soon as I read it, but for some reason as I've been working locally in my neck of the woods against Flock and worrying about it snowballing it hadn't really occurred to me that the snowball could work the other direction as well. The emergent effects of more and more deployments into a single unified storage/search system has always been the new and scary part. But "the whole is worth more than the sum of its parts" of course necessarily means "the parts are worth less than the whole" too. So managing to stop or reverse a deployment in your own locality, however small, also serves to help reduce the capability to everyone else across the nation whether they agree or not. That's really hopeful.
As the article notes, in some cases a locality might try to switch to a competitor, but the competitive community pressure here is still useful. Seems like a rare time where it creates an actual direct incentive to consider what will be popular amongst the people all over, even if certain LEAs etc personally might want more.
Yes, the whole is worth more than the individual parts. It's like if you're trying to catch someone who robbed a home, you may have a camera to catch the car and license. Great first step, but cars used in crimes are often stolen. So you follow the car, and then you enter a dead zone where anti-flock activists prevented cameras. You're now at a dead end.
So I guess that's a win as that first camera is not very useful. And this is a good thing? I don't see your point.
Let's install cameras in your house first. Then we can see if it stops crime there.
I have cameras around my home. If someone breaks in I have video recording that I can provide police. I also live in a safe expensive neighborhood and naturally we have police cameras and a well funded police force. They have what they need to make sure no one breaks into my house and get away with it.
Try coming up w a better analogy
How does any random law enforcement officer pull up the footage from your cameras when ever they want check you aren't breaking the law?
Can the police log in to your cameras at any time and pull footage? Because they can with Flock cameras.
After all, how do we know domestic abuse isn't happening there without cameras?
On the flip side, you are Uber and you’re trying to decide if you should charge the “low price” or the “high price” to somebody who just opened your app.
Luckily the person you’re about to make an offer to lives within the flock network so you quickly get pings from the last week that they shopped at Whole Foods and dropped by a dispensary on the way home. Yeah this person probably has disposable income, let’s charge them the 30% increased rate.
Or maybe you’re a future employer - oh this guy stopped at a dispensary 12 years ago? The algorithm will give him +4 risk points before we make our hiring decision. Plus he regularly goes to this bad neighborhood (which the algorithm doesn’t know is where his sister lives that he visits), that’s another +9 risk points.
AND on the darker side — if you knew they did this, would you visit your sister less?
There's some proper shareholder-oriented thinking! Even I was falling into the trap of purely considering Flock in a governmental context, and thus the potential for law abuse. But of course, they're not government, they're a private (indeed YC backed, Summer 2017) company. Policing might be their tent-pole and install argument but once in place there's all sorts of potential profitable revenue streams they might turn their minds too.
Pretty sure flock network isn't available to Uber.
As an aside, some people have an uncanny ability to take two things that are different in every conceivable way except one, and use the one similarity as the basis for an analogy.
Police work is supposed to be difficult.
It seems that you are deliberately misunderstanding or not addressing the GP.
Your pro-flock argument is fine on its own. Delete the second paragraph and make your argument independently of the GP.
You did not address the primary argument against Flock cameras - the erosion of civil liberties (privacy) is not worth the higher rate of prosecution / conviction.
Good Lord what a dystopian hellscape America must've been before Flock! How did police solve anything?
Have you ever been a victim of a non-violent crime?
Loads of those just fall through the cracks of the system.
"solving the case" is mostly keeping all documented until they stumble on to something obvious, like already known perp having your stuff hidden in his stashing place while they go grab him for something unrelated.
In my city's subreddit, last week there was both a post complaining about the police not doing anything about a car break in, and a post complaining about flock on the front page.
People hate all kinds of things police do until they need the police to do something.
If you don't have video evidence the vast majority of non violent crimes go unsolved. How many manhours is a car break in worth, or a break in? Especially when the end result more than likely is still not enough to convict someone on.
Rings surveillance network and the huge network of private CCTVs has shown even with video evidence cops refuse to do their job if nobody is dead. If you get a package stolen in apartment complex, the PMs won't let anyone but police see the footage and the police will not come out to view the footage. Cameras stopped being a deterrent when criminals realized there are no consequences when they are caught on camera.
The police will however stalk and harass their partners, people they personally dislike, etc because they can view the footage at their leisure.
The lack of cameras is absolutely not what's stopping police from doing their job, its the complete lack of accountability or responsibility.
Someone breaks into a car. There is no camera, no witnesses immediately came forward.
Please do tell me what you want the police department to do here.
Almost nothing like what is seen in police procedural television series, that’s for sure.
Although there is (allegedly) a fun feedback loop that cops more and more expect their jobs to be like police procedurals and try to solve crime as if reality was shaped by Dick Wolf.
Imagine coding like it’s shown in the Matrix, or Grandma’s Boy.
Well, that's the thing. Many crimes weren't solved, for precisely the problem that Flock solves. I never thought I'd rally in support of mass surveillance, but when criminals can brazenly flee a scene and not be pulled over because pulling over a suspicious vehicle is now considered "profiling". I find myself supporting an idea I used to be against.
> when criminals can brazenly flee a scene and not be pulled over because pulling over a suspicious vehicle is now considered "profiling"
You know full well that stopping a know car fleeing the robber and profiling are two massively different actions. They are not the same thing at all.
Also, it would be nice if people stopped fantasying about crime and basing their arguments on cool movies scenes.
[flagged]
This has always been how the dystopian sci-fi future works. If you can get just get to 'the <future/decayed sounding name> zone' you are outside the big brother tracking.
It's also why a big brother system will always become full on/more and more big brother, because it needs to suck up and remove all the dead ends.
So to put the overall point first: democracy and freedom can require putting some money and effort into protecting rights, preventing abuse, preventing dragnets, and honestly addressing second/third/nth order effects that people are worried about, etc, even if you're trying to improve something. In this particular case, it's REALLY not difficult to envision systems that would achieve a better balance for the "officially stated case" [0] you describe, and thus be more likely to win the public's approval. We could use the same basic from-the-founding historical check of requiring a warrant and specifics for a search for example, and update that for modern times. The US judiciary could establish a solid internal PKI system and every judge could have an HSM of their own, then we could have a system where all footage, search capabilities and so on were encrypted and it literally required a judge's cryptographic signature on a warrant that had enforceable technical boundaries in time and space, with everything immutably documented. That wouldn't prevent the occasional bad judge and bad warrant, but just as with traditional searches it'd be a strong low pass filter and change incentives and accountability significantly.
So you have presented (amongst other things) a very black & white false dichotomy. You're claiming a bad, prone to abuse system is the only possible way to respond to your stated threat scenario. But it's just not. And you do actually need to win the public's approval not just browbeat them.
Moving on:
>It's like if you're trying to catch someone who robbed a home
It's notable how you didn't say "trying to catch someone who had gay sex" (a felony in some states until 22 years ago), "trying to catch someone who had an abortion" (back as a felony all of a sudden), "trying to catch someone brought as a child to the US who is in the green card process", "trying to catch someone who had a state reported stolen because the car dealership reported the car missing 6 months ago but it was found 2 months ago but the databases were never designed to get real time updates so there's a lag" and so on and so forth. Or more straight forwardly "it's like if you're a cop trying to catch your ex-girlfriend who said mean things about you on social media". You're on HN, you've been part of plenty of this, I don't think it's good faith discussion on your part to reach for an emotional tug and a lot of people here recognize and resent the technique.
And again see the first thing: in this case, why could the police not get a proper narrowly tailored warrant? They have plenty of clear, straight forward probable cause do they not?
>So you follow the car, and then you enter a dead zone [...] You're now at a dead end.
Wait, you said you were following the car? Police can do that you know, without massively networked surveillance nets, they have cars too, and they can follow cars. They can also put out an alert to keep an eye out. You'll need to quantify the gain here vs the cost.
>So I guess that's a win as that first camera is not very useful. And this is a good thing? I don't see your point.
I truly don't think you're making a good faith effort to see anyone's point at all.
----
0: I'm using scarequotes there and giving it a footnote because I also want to emphasize that part of our suspicion is that, precisely because of obvious improvements, the "stop the robber!!", like "think of the children1!!!!", is primarily a cover story for far... less popular things that elite powers want to do to us. Meaningful checks and balances are possible, implementation importance aside that they haven't even bothered to try from the start tells a story of absence all by itself.
Can someone enlighten me why Flock cameras are worse than the average security camera? How is it such a big topic now when their large network suggests that they've been in operation for quite some time by now?
Louis Rossmann likes to point out that the "CC" in "CCTV" means "closed circuit." Traditional security cameras are displayed maybe in a security booth in real time somewhere, and then recorded onto an on-prem hard drive. When the drive fills up the oldest video is overwritten. They're only ever looked at after recording if there's a reason to look at them.
The Flock cameras, on the other hand, upload all data to Flock which stores all video forever. They also do image recognition to identify license plates as well as other identifiable information (they've claimed to not do facial recognition but the implication is they can).
They then make this searchable so any cop with a flock login can put, say, your license plate into a flock search and it will give him a complete record of all your movements all across the country.
Network effects. Massive difference between police having to go talk to a local business owner or private citizen and say "hey, there was a robbery here, can you please go pull the footage you got last night at 8pm and see if you can share it with us please?" and being able to do a one-click nationwide query.
My child's daycare has cameras, accessible to management, with some time period of ring buffering, available at the DVR. I know everyone with access.
Playgrounds with flock cameras allow folks I don't know to watch children live.
Why would a flock camera be at a playground, they're automatic license plate readers, I thought, not surveillance cameras with real time video.
I've seen a lot of anti flock arguments but the comment you're responding to is the first I've seen pull out 'for the children'.
Their Condor cameras are not ALPR, they are normal surveillance cameras with pan-tilt-zoom.
Flick doesn’t just do license plate readers. They do all kinds of surveillance cameras.
They have not been in operation for quite some time now. The large network is not a product of a long and steady roll out, but instead significant financial investment - much of which coming from people who are on record saying that democracy is a flawed system and other authoritarian soundbytes.
the best place to start, if you're legitimately curious, would probably be the many news paper articles and the many recorded city meetings where flock's controversies are brought up.
even https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flock_Safety#Controversies is a good start
https://cambridgeanalytica.org/surveillance-privacy/police-f...
(ironic URL)
Flock is a large panopticon used to control the population. It became apparent recently how Flock cameras would be used by a new administration to purge law abiding workers and residents whose only crime was their immigration status. Whether you agree or not with the policy of this purge, you still witnessed the frightening efficiency with which authorities could now track and enforce whatever policy would come down the pipe. It made clear through show of force the new threat to a free people.
If it were a single camera or location, there is much less ability to track and attempt to coerce a large population.
Bob is the town mayor. The police want XYZ. The police request from flock a detail breakdown of everywhere that Bob went in the last 5 years (this example is after flock has been around a while) and then feeds that into AI looking for patterns. The police find a mistress. The police now get everything they want for the rest of mayor Bob's term.
Just one data point, but I've been to many policing conferences since 2020 and I think one of the main drivers of the Flock problem is a disconnect between what the public understands 'crime prevention' to mean, and what is sold to police under the same verbiage. Something I believe strongly is that healthy public safety requires both responsive action and crime prevention. When I talk about this, I will show quadrants with axes for Give/Take and Planned/Responsive, and try to get people to classify their public safety activities to see where they fall. To me it should be somewhat balanced. Everything concentrated in Take/Responsive is an incomplete strategic plan.
However, most tools available to police are designed to be responsive; they help catch a criminal that has already done something bad. This is not crime prevention. Nothing was prevented. Anyone living in an American city knows these cameras don't prevent much.
It is also (unfortunately) a very vendor driven industry. IACP is a big deal each year, and Flock / Axon / Motorola go all out on spending to influence decision makers.
Talking to communities, in my experience, they ask for crime prevention. People want the actual incident to never have occurred in the first place. When vendors go around saying they are solving crime once and for all, but all they deliver is surveillance, it builds distrust. It feels like lying, while the companies themselves get rich on public money.
Then they go on huge PR campaigns to tell the public actually what they're feelings is wrong and they should accept the surveillance. It's silly.
In the policing communications world, people often say trust is built in drops, and lost in buckets.
>Indeed, the broad backlash against Flock has grown so strong that the surveillance company last week announced mandatory new audit controls and lower default data retention periods for US users.
I'm a bit disappointed that they didn't call out how much bullshit was in that statement. They are just changing the default settings for new customers. That's it. All the deployed cameras remain the same, and new customers can just toggle those settings off of the defaults. It is so obvious that they were attempting to get credit for doing nothing, and reporters should call that out.
Vote with money, and spread the info about this cancer far and wide so everybody else votes with money. Its not a minor technical issue, the whole concept of how they operate their devices is amoral and/or unlawful in many parts of the world.
Thats the only stick with carrot these companies follow, rest is just empty PR not worth anyone's time.
I was wondering the other day, while reading about a woman thrown in jail based on a false report form Flock... How can Flock be fully insulated from the consequences of making thousands of false reports to the police? People can go to prison for less.
The same way my neighbors are insulated from consequences when they make an outright false complaint: they claim that they believed the information was true.
Exaggeration does not improve dialogue.
People go to prison for providing incorrect data without malicious intent? Are you sure? Anyway, working under contract with the police is not the same as calling in a report. Even if you wish it were.
I would like to live in a world where Flock is liable for providing unreliable insights to law enforcement, who then use it to infringe upon civil liberties.
If they’re not liable in specific circumstances, then at least they’re liable on aggregate for false claims of reliability.
Lots of forensic science is dubious, if not quackery. At least in court as the accused you can challenge such evidence with expert testimony. The uncharitable interpretation of your comment is that it would be just fine and dandy if citizens had no redress against Flock and law enforcement due to poor insights.
There is such thing as criminal negligence. Not saying that's what happened here, but people do sometimes go to prison for being uniquely bad at their jobs.
>How can Flock be fully insulated from the consequences of making thousands of false reports to the police? People can go to prison for less.
Bad shit has always been tolerated when done in furtherance of the state's goals.
It would be interesting to me who you identify as “the state” in America in 2026, especially given the bureaucratic and executive upheaval of the past two years, and the newly-formed relationships between corporations and government agencies.
Much of this is local police, who are semantically "the state" even if they are nominally decentralized.
The implication of “local” in “local police” is that the demand for flock has grown organically without a centralized strategy.
I wouldn’t discount the role of the law enforcement industry, with prior greatest hits including Street Cop Conference, Bulletproof Warrior, Killology, etc.
Imagine all the scumminess and questionable ethics of pharmaceutical reps, but instead of a medical treatment, its ways to infringe on your civil liberties.
> Nearby Grand Chute canceled its Flock deal in early June, switching to a competing product from Axon. Grand Chute Police Chief David Maas told Fox 11 News that the Axon system “benefits the community in multiple ways and also respects resident privacy in a way that feels more comfortable, quite honestly.”
They're just trading one problem for another
> Perhaps it’s the local summer diet of deep-fried cheese curds, corn on the cob, and Spotted Cow, but Wisconsin residents have been feeling pretty dyspeptic about Flock’s automated license plate cameras.
Or... perhaps it's because Wisconsin is a hotbed of progressive politics? Especially in the Madison area.
Wisconsin is a "purple" state, but that's somewhat misleading, because the people aren't generally "centrist". Rather, the state is deeply divided between left wing and right wing, as evidenced by Wisconsin's polar opposite Senators Tammy Baldwin and Ron Johnson.
It’s not as uninteresting as you imply. There’s also a strong union-blue presence (also seen on the south side of Chicago), where there are swaths of blue collar union workers who vote blue due to financial progressivism rather than social progressivism. You’ll find pockets of people who have no problem pulling out racial slurs but also voted for Kamala.
There’s also what I call the “Janesville conservative”, or people who likely worked or know someone who worked for Scott Walker and/or Paul Ryan. Their politics are much more conservative coastal elite / country club rather rural / pastoral.
> It’s not as uninteresting as you imply.
Uninteresting?
> There’s also a strong union-blue presence
The largest number of union members in Wisconsin may be government workers. (Incidentally, the outgoing Governor was originally a public school teacher.)
> people who likely worked or know someone who worked for Scott Walker and/or Paul Ryan.
What do you mean by "worked for"? If you meant that literally, it wouldn't be an electorally significant number of people.
WRT "uninteresting", this phrasing I found reductive to the rather interesting political dynamics in Wisconsin:
> Wisconsin is a "purple" state, but that's somewhat misleading, because the people aren't generally "centrist". Rather, the state is deeply divided between left wing and right wing, as evidenced by Wisconsin's polar opposite Senators Tammy Baldwin and Ron Johnson.
WRT union-blue presence, I'm speaking from a position of firsthand experience: friends and family who are union-blue and not public sector workers. Paper mill workers and railroaders, specifically.
WRT "worked for", you'll notice my full phrasing included "or know someone who worked for". Janesville is not a sprawling metropolis and most people know most people. Paul Ryan and Scott Walker have deep connections with the south-central part of the state, which has a thick flavor of coastal / country club elite that is not found elsewhere in Wisconsin. Ryan and Walker's success in Wisconsin is interesting given how much they were not rural yokels and would stick out like a sore thumb in most taverns north of the conifer line. Ron Johnson was part of that same anti-Obama political wave, but he's maintained his presence by embracing MAGA in a way that Ryan and Walker never did.
>Or... perhaps it's because Wisconsin is a hotbed of progressive politics? Especially in the Madison area.
Ah, yes, Wisconsin. Famously more progressive than the bordering states of Michigan, Minnesota and Illinois (I'll give you Iowa).
Attitudes on surveillance follow economics more than anything else.
> Ah, yes, Wisconsin. Famously more progressive than the bordering states of Michigan, Minnesota and Illinois
Wisconsin actually is famously progressive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisconsin_Progressive_Party
"Milwaukee is a city where socialists have found success to a greater extent than any other U.S. city" https://uwm.edu/lib-collections/mke-socialism/
https://www.politico.com/2024-election/results/wisconsin/
Do you believe that this somehow contradicts my point? You show an election result with a very small margin, less than 1%. I said in my original comment that Wisconsin is a purple state, "deeply divided between left wing and right wing, as evidenced by Wisconsin's polar opposite Senators Tammy Baldwin and Ron Johnson."
Wisconsin is a hotbed of progressive politics. It's also a hotbed of regressive politics. Nowadays the urban/rural difference tends to be very stark.
What do you mean by "hotbed", then? Do you just mean, "there exists a party with that alignment?" What state is not a "hotbed of progressive politics" by this interpretation?
> What do you mean by "hotbed", then? Do you just mean, "there exists a party with that alignment?"
No, I mean very active and influential, achieving real, significant political results. The submitted article is about how they've achieved results, not only fighting Flock but winning and getting rid of Flock.
My links about the history of Wisconsin progressivism show that they were winning elections.
>The submitted article is about how they've achieved results
"They" meaning just Wisconsinites. The only political point I can find with a quick skim of the article is
>“There are well-documented concerns about how this company operates and uses its technology to violate people’s Fourth Amendment rights [against unreasonable searches],”
which is not what I would call a progressive political stance. If anything, it's conservative in the literal sense, of maintaining existing political institutions in their present state. It'd be more progressive (again, in the literal sense) to want to embrace more unrestricted surveillance.
I think you're missing the point. A "stance" is passive. I'm talking about activism, grassroots organizing, protests, political action. That's why I called it a "hotbed". A stance must be pushed forcefully to overturn the status quo.
> It'd be more progressive (again, in the literal sense) to want to embrace more unrestricted surveillance.
> which is not what I would call a progressive political stance. If anything, it's conservative in the literal sense, of maintaining existing political institutions in their present state. It'd be more progressive (again, in the literal sense) to want to embrace more unrestricted surveillance.
1) The word "progressive" has multiple meanings. Your overly "literal" interpretation is not particularly useful in the political context.
2) The Flock cameras were already in place, so getting them removed is "progressive" even under your odd interpretation. But I don't even want to argue semantics. That seems like a silly argument to me.
Just because one side calls themselves Progressive, doesn't make the other side regressive.
How many right wingers will be left now support for Trump is crumbling?
More than enough to give the next one who isn't a deranged madman their full support
All of them I'd reckon. I don't imagine they'll suddenly become liberals, they'll just follow the next leader in the cult of personality.
Right vs left wing is a silly idea. What does my position on health care have to do with my position on defense? Now consider the above question, but substitution any two of the thousands of different things the government does. At best the two are a loose alignment, but there is no unity.
Support for Trump is not crumbling. His base still supports him. What is crumbling is the alliance of "right wing" people who never really liked/supported Trump, but were willing to accept him for the alliance. This is enough to turn the next election, but the "right wing" (again, whatever that is...) is still there and mostly hasn't change positions.
>What does my position on health care have to do with my position on defense?
Plenty if you're in charge of allocating finite resources. Look up "guns vs butter"
You so completely lost my point that I can't even figure out how you got to your reply from mine (after reading both again), much less how to get you back on track. I know I'm not the best writer, but I didn't think I'm that bad.
I'm only responding at all in hopes that someone can help me understand the confusion and perhaps explain things in a way you can understand.
However unpopular Trump is he still has a double digit lead over how unpopular the Democratic Party is.
I remember similar things said 6 months before the 2024 election