the problem is that usage of this system with enforcement is not law. Police Departments opt-in and are the ones responsible for whether or not individuals are charged, fired, or simply disciplined, and they also choose whether or not to disclose this to the public. and the other problem is that it's not just Flock - other companies are stepping in like Axon and Motorola and are essentially eating the cake that is Flock's recent public infamy [0]
and law enforcement skirting of accountability is essentially a legalized thing now under legal mechanisms like qualified immunity. not to mention the boy's club that are police unions - my FIL is a former sergeant and has many stories of how he was blackballed by his union because he wouldn't cover for bad cops to the extent that they were pursuing taking away his pension and insurance coverage until just a few years ago
Qualified immunity gets thrown around a lot, but it's not iron clad. Cops can still be prosecuted for behavior that is a constitutional violation and outside the scope of what a normal cop would consider reasonable.
The real reason cops face no accountability is 2 fold.
1. Prosecutors refuse to prosecute cops because they need a working relationship with the department.
2. Police unions make any sort of accountability nearly impossible to enforce as they stop all tracking of misdeeds. (As you touch on).
"Defund the police" was an unpopular slogan but it's what we should actually do. We should stop paying this criminal organization and instead do a different public policing structure. Ideally you don't have the same people responding to a domestic dispute as you have responding to a robbery. As it currently stands, police departments are where the government goes to violate civil rights.
Qualified immunity concerns civil liability. Prosecution is about criminal liability.
Civil liability is helpful because tax payers do care about $$$ (if judgements/settlements are starting to eat major part of budget the people will start to care on how to lower those costs) and victims are not limited by what prosecutors are ready to do. The QI is especially problematic because it has essentially become "did someone prosecute cops about this before" because that's effectively the only way to establish precedence that allows you to get across the QI-line in future for sufficiently similar conduct. And like you said, prosecutors are often unwilling to prosecute cops.
Civilly you can still overcome QI without prosecution, but it's indeed a lot harder to do.
Regardless, IMO, criminal prosecution is the thing that's truly lacking. It's not as if there aren't criminal codes around government officials violating constitutional rights, there are [1]. It's just that they go mostly unenforced.
This cop should be in jail on 700 counts of violating the 4th amendment.
Yes and the burden of proof standard is typically lower in a civil case than it is in a criminal proceeding. So a prosecutor may very legitimately not bring a criminal case if they feel they can't meet the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard, but the same evidence brought in civil court could very well win the day. So the civil suit path could still be a deterrent to bad behavior if not so severely throttled.
Cops can still be prosecuted for behavior that is a constitutional violation
IANAL, but that's not quite my understanding... The victim has to prove that the police violated a clearly established right via a previous case, which puts many cases in a sort of chicken-egg situation. "We've never found a cop guilty of peeping on Flock, thus we can't find this cop guilty." (guilty in the civil sense, QI doesn't apply to criminal charges)
Like, it's true that QI is a lot harder to overcome if there's no prosecution. However, you don't need to have prosecution to overcome it. The "Qualified" part of "Qualified Immunity" is based on a reasonableness standard. IE "Would another cop in this cops shoes do the same".
And the answer in this case of the flock stocking is clearly "No, it's unreasonable to think a cop would think stalking their ex is part of their police duties."
What's a lot trickier to deal with is cops physically harming or killing people. That's what QI really protects as it's always easy for cops to "fear for their lives" over acorns falling and such.
> Cops can still be prosecuted for behavior that is a constitutional violation and outside the scope of what a normal cop would consider reasonable.
[edit: I didn't correctly read the comment I was replying to, which was talking about prosecutions, not civil suits. But I do believe that qualified immunity is still largely an issue with Flock, so I'm not retracting the comment entirely.]
So long as there is already an established legal precedent for the rather specific circumstances at stake, then yes, that's true. But that has to be demonstrated in pre-trial motions because the default is qualified immunity is grounds for dismissal of the case prior to any judgement on the facts absent such a clear cut applicability of precedence. Sure, you could appeal the dismissals... but that's quite a barrier and burden just to get to having a case heard let alone then having to try the case in question.
Consider this quote from the 9th District Court of Appeals' opinion on a qualified immunity appeal:
"The panel held that at the time of the incident, there was
no clearly established law holding that officers violate the
Fourth or Fourteenth Amendment when they steal property
seized pursuant to a warrant. For that reason, the City
Officers were entitled to qualified immunity. The panel
reasoned that although the decision in Brewster v. Beck,
859 F.3d 1194 (9th Cir. 2017) was instructive on the
question of whether the theft of property covered by the
terms of a search warrant, and seized pursuant to the warrant,
violates the Fourth Amendment, Brewster’s facts varied in
legally significant ways from those in this case. Moreover,
the panel noted that the City Officers seized Appellants’
property in 2013, prior to the Brewster decision in 2017. The
panel held that although the City Officers ought to have
recognized that the alleged theft was morally wrong, they did
not have clear notice that it violated the Fourth Amendment.
The panel further held that the Fourth Circuit’s unpublished
decision in Mom’s Inc. v. Willman, 109 F. App’x 629, 636–
37 (4th Cir. 2004)—the only case law that the time of the
incident holding that the theft of property pursuant to a
warrant violates the Fourth Amendment—did not put the
“constitutional question beyond debate.”"
> Ideally you don't have the same people responding to a domestic dispute as you have responding to a robbery.
In Belgium, this was the system until 2001. The system was overhauled to the regular single police force after the largest protests in the country's history.
What goes wrong is that these 2 are essentially in competition, and ended up actively obstructing each other.
> We should stop paying this criminal organization
Arguably much of the issue is that it's not a singular organization. It's 18,000 separate law-enforcement organizations. The police in the rest of the wealthy Anglosphere have their own issues, but American policing seems uniquely bad in comparison to them, before even getting on to lethal force.
I think this has much to do with the history of policing in the US which originated in the South as re-enslavement patrols and in the North as strikebreakers [0]. these institutions were built to be oppressive towards a population that was heterogeneous. this is unlike the ethnic homogeneity in Europe
with the recent waves of immigration into EU states, you're now also seeing some of the same tactics in use by those 'better' policing institutions (eg France's prison population [1]) plus the rise of reactionary, far-right political parties [2]
my guess is that these are just the natural outcomes from us organizing ourselves as nation states ruled by ethnic and economic elites. carve up borders along sociocultural lines like shared language, religion, and phenotypes and you will always have a ruling majority (at least in the beginning). any changes to that status quo means someone has to relinquish power and some people will do everything, even deliberately antisocial, societally harmful things to preserve that hold [3]
until we move past this kind of organization, I don't see any other possible outcome. given the mass migrations that will occur due to climate change, I expect we'll reach a breaking point within a century and the only path forward that isn't regressive will need to be revolutionary rather than evolutionary
I started watching the Snowden (2016) movie the other day, and got to the point about explanation of XKEYSCORE. The whole time I was thinking “how quaint, that this was such a shockingly abusive system at the time”. We’ve crossed the threshold long ago. We’re so far gone that it’s just taken for granted that we’re always being watched, everywhere. I stopped watching the film because it was really bumming me out. There’s nothing we can do about it and it’s so very sad.
Nothing about the Snowden revelations presented such an easy target. There was no obvious action against it for juries to nullify. If there were companies whose bottom lines we could target, it's not clear which companies they were.
we use communication systems. we can for example encrypt our comms. interestingly, most messaging platforms become owners of 'our identity' and the friend mesh. if we start decentralizing the idea of identity and friend mesh, and it becomes privately managed, and not externally managed, perhaps we can hop from messaging system to messaging system with more ease, and if so, perhaps we can become more free as a society. losing the equivalent of a 'facebook' account should be a minor inconvenience, not a tragic event. we should encourage people we communicate with, to become more aware and more deeply conscious of privacy, encryption, identity, and to have some healthy distrust for the potential abuses of the state.
> Flock very recently rolled out a system that tracks usage and flags possible abuses
I asked one of my nurse friends if they can see gory (figurative or literal) medical details for anyone who has been in their hospital or parent medical system. She said that in Epic, access is logged and audited so it would become a problem if you were just searching for local celebrities. Just as a warrant canary is a good thing to have as an early commit in your social network, "who saw what and when" is a feature that needs to exist early in any tool for authority figures.
If you look up a family member or coworker (without medical necessity) an automated process will flag that and you may be fired or face other disciplinary action.
I worked at an e-commerce clothing store in 2011 that made it abundantly clear you would get your ass handed to you if you went poking around in customer records you had no business looking at for curiosity's sake. I currently work with an online game where I will get asked difficult questions if I can't justify why I'm looking at the in-game actions a player took without clear justification, and we have barely any PII on most players beyond IP address.
It would seem reasonable to squarely blame Flock for not absolutely centering this feature.
I came from an email marketing company where this was not the case. celebrity accounts were accessible to everyone down to the level of first-line support which eventually resulted in someone getting fired because they were able to add a self-promo into a large account's public communique. it took years before basic access controls were implemented and even then that was only because we were acquired and our parent company was very unhappy with our current state
which isn't to say that Flock isn't at fault - they very much are and they made it simple for cops to stalk people at will and with very little visibility until recently. pair it with a very nominal reason to investigate, say, community organizing and it becomes (or, really, has already become) a way to stifle dissent [0]
Flock chose not to implement the system with safeguards in the first place though. A more competent camera company would have started with it, and said no one is allowed to snoop on their ex's, with the force of law making it a fireable offense. Hence the whipping. If there was no such abuse of the system, we'd be hearing positive stories about how it recovered stolen cars, kidnapped children, and stopped crime. Which becomes harder to fight because some people will willingly choose to give up liberty for safety.
It's possible the next company will be similarly incompetent, but after having Flock tarred and feathered, they'll probably do a better job of it.
There should really be platform bans for abuses like this. If Flock is aware it’s being abused against its own policies and the legal system they should be liable if they continue to let that person abuse the system, even if they get fired from one PD and given a job and a Flock login at another
Flock will not disable features that are illegal to use in a state when selling to an agency in that state. It's "not their problem". They will offer training on said features to said agency if they ask, because again, "not our problem".
They knowingly facilitate the nudge nudge wink wink.
their competitors are Clearview and Motorola, neither of which are what you would call unimpeachable from a corporate ethics standpoint [0] [1] [2] [3] [4]
companies will only do better if their clientele wants it. if the police don't want accountability processes then that's just tech debt for a future roadmap some other team will handle
Right… by “There should be” I meant there should be federal legislation on these kinds of tools and actual enforcement. Flock’s not going to do anything that could hurt their bottom line without being forced to.
Piling on. My friend worked for a Midwestern city, maintaining the water and sewer systems. Once, while in the field, 2 dudes ran across the street, one chasing the other, both in plain clothes. The chaser had a gun and was shooting indiscriminately. One bullet hit my friend's work truck, missing him by inches. He had to submit a report because of the bullet holes in his truck. His report said the chaser did the shooting, not the person being chased. He had no idea the chaser was an undercover cop. His report (about the truck) contradicted the police report of the event regarding who did the shooting. The next day at work my friend was told to resubmit his report, and to identify the person being chased as the shooter. He said no, because it wasn't true. He was then told there was a call from the police union to the head of his department, saying that if the report wasn't changed, the police would no longer support his department (police are often needed to help secure an area where repairs are being done). My friend was told if he didn't change his report, he would be fired and his pension would be in jeopardy. He ended up cashing out his pension and quitting. The police know how to protect their own.
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess this is the police department that was placed under federal supervision.
Good on him for cashing out.
For anyone else: if you run across something like this, collect what evidence you can without endangering yourself, if you can legally and safely record some conversations do so, and then call the FBI hotline, possibly from a friend's phone if you suspect the police might be monitoring your call log.
The FBI (well, in normal times...) does not fuck around when it comes to serious color of law violations like this. They're also very happy to get reports of local small town incidents where a town or county police department, judges, town leaders, etc are acting like they have a fiefdom.
And what do you do when you find them? Unless there are adequate consequences (and no, a paid vacation or getting “fired” and moving to the next town over don’t count) the abuses aren’t going to stop.
I think the public outrage about Flock is well-deserved but – moving slightly off-topic – I wish it weren't the only privacy- and data harvesting-related issue the media are reporting about.
(Context: I'm currently looking into renewing my US visa. I've been to the US many times before both for shorter and longer periods of time and on many different visa – so far without any problems whatsoever.)
The Trump administration recently made it mandatory for all visa applicants to disclose any social media accounts (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, Reddit, LinkedIn, …) they have had in the last five years (EDIT: whether still existent or deleted). [0]
I'm scared shitless and don't know what to do. (Not visiting the US is not an option, unfortunately.) I don't think I have ever posted anything controversial or of relevance through any of my social media accounts but I just don't want anyone in the world to have that kind of data about me, particularly my private messages. Who says that once they know all my social media accounts, CBP officers won't start checking my messages whenever I cross the border in the future? Who says they won't abuse that access at some point?
Look, I am aware CBP officers can already search your phone without a warrant, and three-letter agencies probably get first-class access to all social networks, anyway, but consciously handing over your data as part of the application process is… a different level.
Where's the outrage here? I know non-citizens basically don't enjoy any rights whatsoever at US borders, so I've long given up on hoping someone would fight this in court but still… where are the public campaigns, the diplomatic notes & retaliation?
[0]: In fact, they require social media profiles to be made public for the duration of the application, apparently so that the State Department can access and review the accounts. (Which would be funny since we all know what the NSA can do – if it didn't also open up the social media accounts to crawlers and stalkers…)
Yes, invasive background checks like this are scary. Biometrics collection becoming normalized as well.
I encourage you to delete or suspend your accounts, and therefore legally list no accounts.
Maintaining a largely un-used social under your legal name with some cute photos of your pets which you can cite if need be is also a strategy many have used.
> I encourage you to delete or suspend your accounts, and therefore legally list no accounts.
I should have clarified: They also require you to list deleted accounts.
> Maintaining a largely un-used social under your legal name with some cute photos of your pets which you can cite if need be is also a strategy many have used.
It's hostile and assessments will be ideologically driven, but it's also a visa application. If I ask for that type of information for you to be able attend my summer camp or to come to my party, that's really my prerogative. You're asking to be a guest.
Americans are having a problem where they are guaranteed a certain set of rights as citizens, and guaranteed a certain process by which it is determined that those rights apply or whether they were applied. Those things are being routinely violated. Having any visitors at all (unless part of a treaty) is optional.
America colonized a lot of the world's dreams, but that doesn't obligate America to help you live them. We should want to, but we can't even protect ourselves. Americans are being harassed at the border. If we can't even get into our own country without unreasonable searches and seizures, there's no "outrage" left for the sake of other countries' elites. Most Americans can't afford to travel.
> America colonized a lot of the world's dreams, but that doesn't obligate America to help you live them.
I never said that. And I also don't have any intentions whatsoever to relocate to the US to live the "American dream" or any other dream. I'm pretty fine where I am. Except that the visa situation is a nightmare and my circumstances are not so simple that I could just decide to cancel my, say, summer vacation in the US. Heck, even if you're just transiting in the US, without leaving the international terminal, and not even planning on entering the country, you already need a visa.
The only thing I'm asking for is that I be treated as a human being, with the same inalienable human rights (at least on paper) as everywhere else in the western world.
It makes no sense that front line patrol officers would have access to those cameras. They're not detectives, and that much access should have flagged him to high heaven.
The last few weeks I've been hearing a lot about flock cameras (?) even though I never heard of them before. Is this some mid term election strategy/divisive plot? I'm not in us.
It seems to be an issue that people care about on both sides of the political divide.
I am an outlier in that I like them because they help catch kidnappers and help police be able to return stolen cars in time for the victim to make it to work in the morning, with no obligation to press charges.
I haven't seen evidence of anyone else like me online or in real life.
Popular influencers have talked about them more recently. I think it also coincides with the zeitgeist of "oh yeah my local politics are important and affect my life"
People are being awakened to that reality by the proliferation of data center projects where their local leaders green light projects that people feel will negatively impact their community.
I believe most anti-Flock folks are making a strategic error by focusing attention on these abuses. It allows them to merely roll out improvements that prevent this type of thing, while ignoring the more fundamental privacy issues at stake with the intended uses.
I don't understand how Flock can possibly be legal. Unlicensed, warrantless, mass surveillance is not legal. Surveilling before the warrant is not a reasonable work around for the legal threshold, neither is using a third party. In a fair universe, this company would be eradicated by legal challenge.
I’d like to see HIPAA-style audit log and review for surveillance products like Flock. An aspect of log reviews that I don’t have direct info about is contextual access alerts—the gist of it is that whatever record you access is evaluated for things like patients who live in your neighborhood, or are related to you and it pings the compliance office.
Clearly Flock etc are keeping pretty good access records or these stories couldn’t get written. What is missing is PD compliance offices proactively addressing inappropriate accesss. In addition to access monitoring, another aspect of HIPAA is that a patient can find out who has accessed their record. It makes sense that a tremendously powerful data collection would have similar rules of the road.
news like this is only coming out because Flock very recently rolled out a system that tracks usage and flags possible abuses: https://www.wsbtv.com/news/trending/flock-updates-safeguards...
the problem is that usage of this system with enforcement is not law. Police Departments opt-in and are the ones responsible for whether or not individuals are charged, fired, or simply disciplined, and they also choose whether or not to disclose this to the public. and the other problem is that it's not just Flock - other companies are stepping in like Axon and Motorola and are essentially eating the cake that is Flock's recent public infamy [0]
and law enforcement skirting of accountability is essentially a legalized thing now under legal mechanisms like qualified immunity. not to mention the boy's club that are police unions - my FIL is a former sergeant and has many stories of how he was blackballed by his union because he wouldn't cover for bad cops to the extent that they were pursuing taking away his pension and insurance coverage until just a few years ago
[0] https://www.atlasofsurveillance.org/search?location=&technol...
> qualified immunity
Qualified immunity gets thrown around a lot, but it's not iron clad. Cops can still be prosecuted for behavior that is a constitutional violation and outside the scope of what a normal cop would consider reasonable.
The real reason cops face no accountability is 2 fold.
1. Prosecutors refuse to prosecute cops because they need a working relationship with the department.
2. Police unions make any sort of accountability nearly impossible to enforce as they stop all tracking of misdeeds. (As you touch on).
"Defund the police" was an unpopular slogan but it's what we should actually do. We should stop paying this criminal organization and instead do a different public policing structure. Ideally you don't have the same people responding to a domestic dispute as you have responding to a robbery. As it currently stands, police departments are where the government goes to violate civil rights.
Qualified immunity concerns civil liability. Prosecution is about criminal liability.
Civil liability is helpful because tax payers do care about $$$ (if judgements/settlements are starting to eat major part of budget the people will start to care on how to lower those costs) and victims are not limited by what prosecutors are ready to do. The QI is especially problematic because it has essentially become "did someone prosecute cops about this before" because that's effectively the only way to establish precedence that allows you to get across the QI-line in future for sufficiently similar conduct. And like you said, prosecutors are often unwilling to prosecute cops.
Civilly you can still overcome QI without prosecution, but it's indeed a lot harder to do.
Regardless, IMO, criminal prosecution is the thing that's truly lacking. It's not as if there aren't criminal codes around government officials violating constitutional rights, there are [1]. It's just that they go mostly unenforced.
This cop should be in jail on 700 counts of violating the 4th amendment.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/crt/deprivation-rights-under-color-l...
Yes and the burden of proof standard is typically lower in a civil case than it is in a criminal proceeding. So a prosecutor may very legitimately not bring a criminal case if they feel they can't meet the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard, but the same evidence brought in civil court could very well win the day. So the civil suit path could still be a deterrent to bad behavior if not so severely throttled.
Cops can still be prosecuted for behavior that is a constitutional violation
IANAL, but that's not quite my understanding... The victim has to prove that the police violated a clearly established right via a previous case, which puts many cases in a sort of chicken-egg situation. "We've never found a cop guilty of peeping on Flock, thus we can't find this cop guilty." (guilty in the civil sense, QI doesn't apply to criminal charges)
This is a misunderstanding of QI.
Like, it's true that QI is a lot harder to overcome if there's no prosecution. However, you don't need to have prosecution to overcome it. The "Qualified" part of "Qualified Immunity" is based on a reasonableness standard. IE "Would another cop in this cops shoes do the same".
And the answer in this case of the flock stocking is clearly "No, it's unreasonable to think a cop would think stalking their ex is part of their police duties."
What's a lot trickier to deal with is cops physically harming or killing people. That's what QI really protects as it's always easy for cops to "fear for their lives" over acorns falling and such.
> Cops can still be prosecuted for behavior that is a constitutional violation and outside the scope of what a normal cop would consider reasonable.
[edit: I didn't correctly read the comment I was replying to, which was talking about prosecutions, not civil suits. But I do believe that qualified immunity is still largely an issue with Flock, so I'm not retracting the comment entirely.]
So long as there is already an established legal precedent for the rather specific circumstances at stake, then yes, that's true. But that has to be demonstrated in pre-trial motions because the default is qualified immunity is grounds for dismissal of the case prior to any judgement on the facts absent such a clear cut applicability of precedence. Sure, you could appeal the dismissals... but that's quite a barrier and burden just to get to having a case heard let alone then having to try the case in question.
Consider this quote from the 9th District Court of Appeals' opinion on a qualified immunity appeal:
"The panel held that at the time of the incident, there was no clearly established law holding that officers violate the Fourth or Fourteenth Amendment when they steal property seized pursuant to a warrant. For that reason, the City Officers were entitled to qualified immunity. The panel reasoned that although the decision in Brewster v. Beck, 859 F.3d 1194 (9th Cir. 2017) was instructive on the question of whether the theft of property covered by the terms of a search warrant, and seized pursuant to the warrant, violates the Fourth Amendment, Brewster’s facts varied in legally significant ways from those in this case. Moreover, the panel noted that the City Officers seized Appellants’ property in 2013, prior to the Brewster decision in 2017. The panel held that although the City Officers ought to have recognized that the alleged theft was morally wrong, they did not have clear notice that it violated the Fourth Amendment. The panel further held that the Fourth Circuit’s unpublished decision in Mom’s Inc. v. Willman, 109 F. App’x 629, 636– 37 (4th Cir. 2004)—the only case law that the time of the incident holding that the theft of property pursuant to a warrant violates the Fourth Amendment—did not put the “constitutional question beyond debate.”"
https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2019/09/04/1...
Given that Flock cameras and the associated search technologies raise novel legal circumstances, qualified immunity is a real concern here.
> Ideally you don't have the same people responding to a domestic dispute as you have responding to a robbery.
In Belgium, this was the system until 2001. The system was overhauled to the regular single police force after the largest protests in the country's history.
What goes wrong is that these 2 are essentially in competition, and ended up actively obstructing each other.
> We should stop paying this criminal organization
Arguably much of the issue is that it's not a singular organization. It's 18,000 separate law-enforcement organizations. The police in the rest of the wealthy Anglosphere have their own issues, but American policing seems uniquely bad in comparison to them, before even getting on to lethal force.
I think this has much to do with the history of policing in the US which originated in the South as re-enslavement patrols and in the North as strikebreakers [0]. these institutions were built to be oppressive towards a population that was heterogeneous. this is unlike the ethnic homogeneity in Europe
with the recent waves of immigration into EU states, you're now also seeing some of the same tactics in use by those 'better' policing institutions (eg France's prison population [1]) plus the rise of reactionary, far-right political parties [2]
my guess is that these are just the natural outcomes from us organizing ourselves as nation states ruled by ethnic and economic elites. carve up borders along sociocultural lines like shared language, religion, and phenotypes and you will always have a ruling majority (at least in the beginning). any changes to that status quo means someone has to relinquish power and some people will do everything, even deliberately antisocial, societally harmful things to preserve that hold [3]
until we move past this kind of organization, I don't see any other possible outcome. given the mass migrations that will occur due to climate change, I expect we'll reach a breaking point within a century and the only path forward that isn't regressive will need to be revolutionary rather than evolutionary
[0] https://sandratrappen.com/2018/11/18/private-police-forces-t...
[1] https://www.antoniocasella.eu/nume/France_prison_MUSLIM_2008...
[2] https://www.dw.com/en/far-right-populists-eu-germany-afd/a-7...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy
I started watching the Snowden (2016) movie the other day, and got to the point about explanation of XKEYSCORE. The whole time I was thinking “how quaint, that this was such a shockingly abusive system at the time”. We’ve crossed the threshold long ago. We’re so far gone that it’s just taken for granted that we’re always being watched, everywhere. I stopped watching the film because it was really bumming me out. There’s nothing we can do about it and it’s so very sad.
It is sad, but there is not nothing we can do about it.
You can use juggalo face paint.
https://consequence.net/2019/07/juggalo-makeup-facial-recogn...
Flock cameras can be easily defeated with a long stick. They're a terrible technology.
I don’t think that’s going to get us very far.
As a society we either loudly reject this or we tacitly accept it
If Snowden wasn’t enough to cause heads to roll with a generation outrage then flock is small beans in comparison and we are stuck with it
Nothing about the Snowden revelations presented such an easy target. There was no obvious action against it for juries to nullify. If there were companies whose bottom lines we could target, it's not clear which companies they were.
This feels different.
Not with that attitude! The best way to complain is to build things
we use communication systems. we can for example encrypt our comms. interestingly, most messaging platforms become owners of 'our identity' and the friend mesh. if we start decentralizing the idea of identity and friend mesh, and it becomes privately managed, and not externally managed, perhaps we can hop from messaging system to messaging system with more ease, and if so, perhaps we can become more free as a society. losing the equivalent of a 'facebook' account should be a minor inconvenience, not a tragic event. we should encourage people we communicate with, to become more aware and more deeply conscious of privacy, encryption, identity, and to have some healthy distrust for the potential abuses of the state.
> Flock very recently rolled out a system that tracks usage and flags possible abuses
I asked one of my nurse friends if they can see gory (figurative or literal) medical details for anyone who has been in their hospital or parent medical system. She said that in Epic, access is logged and audited so it would become a problem if you were just searching for local celebrities. Just as a warrant canary is a good thing to have as an early commit in your social network, "who saw what and when" is a feature that needs to exist early in any tool for authority figures.
If you look up a family member or coworker (without medical necessity) an automated process will flag that and you may be fired or face other disciplinary action.
Of course this is due to HIPPA - no such law exists to nuke bad cops from orbit for similar misuse.
I worked at an e-commerce clothing store in 2011 that made it abundantly clear you would get your ass handed to you if you went poking around in customer records you had no business looking at for curiosity's sake. I currently work with an online game where I will get asked difficult questions if I can't justify why I'm looking at the in-game actions a player took without clear justification, and we have barely any PII on most players beyond IP address.
It would seem reasonable to squarely blame Flock for not absolutely centering this feature.
I came from an email marketing company where this was not the case. celebrity accounts were accessible to everyone down to the level of first-line support which eventually resulted in someone getting fired because they were able to add a self-promo into a large account's public communique. it took years before basic access controls were implemented and even then that was only because we were acquired and our parent company was very unhappy with our current state
which isn't to say that Flock isn't at fault - they very much are and they made it simple for cops to stalk people at will and with very little visibility until recently. pair it with a very nominal reason to investigate, say, community organizing and it becomes (or, really, has already become) a way to stifle dissent [0]
[0] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/inte...
Yeah, nurses got fired for looking up Michael Jackson is an industry story. Meta and Google employees getting fired for similar things is another one.
Yeah - I agree. I'm not sure the problem is Flock (because it will just be replaced with another camera system eventually).
That police officers just don't get successfully prosecuted for this because of qualified immunity: that should be the big takeaway here.
Flock is just the whipping boy of the hour.
Flock chose not to implement the system with safeguards in the first place though. A more competent camera company would have started with it, and said no one is allowed to snoop on their ex's, with the force of law making it a fireable offense. Hence the whipping. If there was no such abuse of the system, we'd be hearing positive stories about how it recovered stolen cars, kidnapped children, and stopped crime. Which becomes harder to fight because some people will willingly choose to give up liberty for safety.
It's possible the next company will be similarly incompetent, but after having Flock tarred and feathered, they'll probably do a better job of it.
There should really be platform bans for abuses like this. If Flock is aware it’s being abused against its own policies and the legal system they should be liable if they continue to let that person abuse the system, even if they get fired from one PD and given a job and a Flock login at another
Flock will not disable features that are illegal to use in a state when selling to an agency in that state. It's "not their problem". They will offer training on said features to said agency if they ask, because again, "not our problem".
They knowingly facilitate the nudge nudge wink wink.
their competitors are Clearview and Motorola, neither of which are what you would call unimpeachable from a corporate ethics standpoint [0] [1] [2] [3] [4]
companies will only do better if their clientele wants it. if the police don't want accountability processes then that's just tech debt for a future roadmap some other team will handle
[0] https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/society-equity/clearv...
[1] https://www.edpb.europa.eu/news/dutch-supervisory-authority-...
[2] https://www.aclu.org/cases/aclu-v-clearview-ai
[3] https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/motorola...
[4] https://classactionu.org/our-news/motorola-solutions-faces-p...
Right… by “There should be” I meant there should be federal legislation on these kinds of tools and actual enforcement. Flock’s not going to do anything that could hurt their bottom line without being forced to.
Piling on. My friend worked for a Midwestern city, maintaining the water and sewer systems. Once, while in the field, 2 dudes ran across the street, one chasing the other, both in plain clothes. The chaser had a gun and was shooting indiscriminately. One bullet hit my friend's work truck, missing him by inches. He had to submit a report because of the bullet holes in his truck. His report said the chaser did the shooting, not the person being chased. He had no idea the chaser was an undercover cop. His report (about the truck) contradicted the police report of the event regarding who did the shooting. The next day at work my friend was told to resubmit his report, and to identify the person being chased as the shooter. He said no, because it wasn't true. He was then told there was a call from the police union to the head of his department, saying that if the report wasn't changed, the police would no longer support his department (police are often needed to help secure an area where repairs are being done). My friend was told if he didn't change his report, he would be fired and his pension would be in jeopardy. He ended up cashing out his pension and quitting. The police know how to protect their own.
Was your friend part of a union as well? If so, did they offer any protection at all?
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess this is the police department that was placed under federal supervision.
Good on him for cashing out.
For anyone else: if you run across something like this, collect what evidence you can without endangering yourself, if you can legally and safely record some conversations do so, and then call the FBI hotline, possibly from a friend's phone if you suspect the police might be monitoring your call log.
The FBI (well, in normal times...) does not fuck around when it comes to serious color of law violations like this. They're also very happy to get reports of local small town incidents where a town or county police department, judges, town leaders, etc are acting like they have a fiefdom.
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> inb4 I have nothing to hide
Every damn time you have an invasive system it gets abused this way. Every damn time.
seems like flock is a great honeypot to find bad cops
And what do you do when you find them? Unless there are adequate consequences (and no, a paid vacation or getting “fired” and moving to the next town over don’t count) the abuses aren’t going to stop.
And schools must be great honeypots to find mass shooters too, huh. It’s not a honeypot if it’s real data
It's baffling to me how they can get away with such evident naming!
I think the public outrage about Flock is well-deserved but – moving slightly off-topic – I wish it weren't the only privacy- and data harvesting-related issue the media are reporting about.
(Context: I'm currently looking into renewing my US visa. I've been to the US many times before both for shorter and longer periods of time and on many different visa – so far without any problems whatsoever.)
The Trump administration recently made it mandatory for all visa applicants to disclose any social media accounts (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, Reddit, LinkedIn, …) they have had in the last five years (EDIT: whether still existent or deleted). [0]
I'm scared shitless and don't know what to do. (Not visiting the US is not an option, unfortunately.) I don't think I have ever posted anything controversial or of relevance through any of my social media accounts but I just don't want anyone in the world to have that kind of data about me, particularly my private messages. Who says that once they know all my social media accounts, CBP officers won't start checking my messages whenever I cross the border in the future? Who says they won't abuse that access at some point?
Look, I am aware CBP officers can already search your phone without a warrant, and three-letter agencies probably get first-class access to all social networks, anyway, but consciously handing over your data as part of the application process is… a different level.
Where's the outrage here? I know non-citizens basically don't enjoy any rights whatsoever at US borders, so I've long given up on hoping someone would fight this in court but still… where are the public campaigns, the diplomatic notes & retaliation?
[0]: In fact, they require social media profiles to be made public for the duration of the application, apparently so that the State Department can access and review the accounts. (Which would be funny since we all know what the NSA can do – if it didn't also open up the social media accounts to crawlers and stalkers…)
Yes, invasive background checks like this are scary. Biometrics collection becoming normalized as well.
I encourage you to delete or suspend your accounts, and therefore legally list no accounts.
Maintaining a largely un-used social under your legal name with some cute photos of your pets which you can cite if need be is also a strategy many have used.
> I encourage you to delete or suspend your accounts, and therefore legally list no accounts.
I should have clarified: They also require you to list deleted accounts.
> Maintaining a largely un-used social under your legal name with some cute photos of your pets which you can cite if need be is also a strategy many have used.
People that have successfully gotten a visa?
Anecdotally, yes.
It's hostile and assessments will be ideologically driven, but it's also a visa application. If I ask for that type of information for you to be able attend my summer camp or to come to my party, that's really my prerogative. You're asking to be a guest.
Americans are having a problem where they are guaranteed a certain set of rights as citizens, and guaranteed a certain process by which it is determined that those rights apply or whether they were applied. Those things are being routinely violated. Having any visitors at all (unless part of a treaty) is optional.
America colonized a lot of the world's dreams, but that doesn't obligate America to help you live them. We should want to, but we can't even protect ourselves. Americans are being harassed at the border. If we can't even get into our own country without unreasonable searches and seizures, there's no "outrage" left for the sake of other countries' elites. Most Americans can't afford to travel.
There's many a story/legend/fairy tale about what happens to people who violate the sacred traditions of hospitality.
Zeus Xenios didn't just punish badly behaved guests!
For some reason the gods haven't come down off Mount Olympus to punish our transgressions ... yet.
But Neither the USA nor the EU are covering themselves in much glory at the moment.
> America colonized a lot of the world's dreams, but that doesn't obligate America to help you live them.
I never said that. And I also don't have any intentions whatsoever to relocate to the US to live the "American dream" or any other dream. I'm pretty fine where I am. Except that the visa situation is a nightmare and my circumstances are not so simple that I could just decide to cancel my, say, summer vacation in the US. Heck, even if you're just transiting in the US, without leaving the international terminal, and not even planning on entering the country, you already need a visa.
The only thing I'm asking for is that I be treated as a human being, with the same inalienable human rights (at least on paper) as everywhere else in the western world.
It makes no sense that front line patrol officers would have access to those cameras. They're not detectives, and that much access should have flagged him to high heaven.
If not for creeper cops to creep, what is it for?
The last few weeks I've been hearing a lot about flock cameras (?) even though I never heard of them before. Is this some mid term election strategy/divisive plot? I'm not in us.
It seems to be an issue that people care about on both sides of the political divide.
I am an outlier in that I like them because they help catch kidnappers and help police be able to return stolen cars in time for the victim to make it to work in the morning, with no obligation to press charges.
I haven't seen evidence of anyone else like me online or in real life.
Sorry, saving one kid does not warrant living in a panopticon.
Some say it's being pushed by investors of Axon, its biggest competitor. I'm not sure I buy it though, the rage translates across brands too easily.
Popular influencers have talked about them more recently. I think it also coincides with the zeitgeist of "oh yeah my local politics are important and affect my life"
People are being awakened to that reality by the proliferation of data center projects where their local leaders green light projects that people feel will negatively impact their community.
They are rapidly expanding the network. The outrage you're seeing is proportional to that growth.
I believe most anti-Flock folks are making a strategic error by focusing attention on these abuses. It allows them to merely roll out improvements that prevent this type of thing, while ignoring the more fundamental privacy issues at stake with the intended uses.
I don't understand how Flock can possibly be legal. Unlicensed, warrantless, mass surveillance is not legal. Surveilling before the warrant is not a reasonable work around for the legal threshold, neither is using a third party. In a fair universe, this company would be eradicated by legal challenge.
As I’ve said before, if a person did to me what Flock does, I could have them arrested for stalking.
It doesn’t matter their intentions, such pernicious tracking itself is stalking.
So, why don’t we treat this corporation like the “person” such corporations claim to be in so many other contexts?
I’d like to see HIPAA-style audit log and review for surveillance products like Flock. An aspect of log reviews that I don’t have direct info about is contextual access alerts—the gist of it is that whatever record you access is evaluated for things like patients who live in your neighborhood, or are related to you and it pings the compliance office.
Clearly Flock etc are keeping pretty good access records or these stories couldn’t get written. What is missing is PD compliance offices proactively addressing inappropriate accesss. In addition to access monitoring, another aspect of HIPAA is that a patient can find out who has accessed their record. It makes sense that a tremendously powerful data collection would have similar rules of the road.
If ever there was a corporation that deserved the death penatly, it's Flock.
Worse even than Palantir?
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