All it takes is a tiny drone with a stick attached, and at the end of that stick is a tiny sponge soaked with tempera paint. Drone goes 'boop' on the camera lens, and the entire system is disabled until an expensive technician drives out with a ladder and cleans the lens at non-trivial expense.
A handful of enterprising activists could blind all the flock cameras in a region in a day or two, and without destroying them, which makes it less of an overtly criminal act.
Obviously not advocating this, just pointing out that flock is very vulnerable to this very simple attack from activists.
You want to evoke the people and not the state.
One or two cameras getting bashed is basically a fart in the wind for flock, and I'd argue that it doesn't actually move the needle in any direction as far as public opinion goes. Those who dislike them don't need further convincing, those who support them are not going to have their opinion changed by property destruction (it might make them support surveillance more, in fact).
But hey, it's provocative I guess.
On the other hand flock losing their entire fleet is an existential problem for them, and for all the customers they're charging for the use of that fleet. Their BoD will want answers about why the officers of the company are harming shareholders with the way they're operating the business. Cities that have contracts with them may have grounds to terminate them, etc etc.
They eventually had to equip pretty much every speed camera with a speed camera camera, usually on a much higher pole to make vandalism more difficult.
/s - but it wouldn't surprise me at the rate things are going.
Just wait until you find out that paintball guns are considered firearms are require licensing in the aforementioned region.
You can use them under the direct supervision of the licensed owner, but it's still quite restrictive. If you were to take one and shoot at cameras on the street it would vandalism plus firearms offences, most of which start at inversion of innocence, massive fines and move pretty quickly into prison time.
Roads that are narrow in places where a lower speed is desirable.
Heavy taxation on vehicles with more mass and lower visibility.
Actual licensing standards other than driving down a couple of city streets and parking.
More crossings, with lights or bridges, instead of long four-lane arterial roads with nowhere to safely cross.
Realistically that’s going to attract a lot of negative attention.
Someone who has the wherewithal to jerry rig a paintball gun to a drone is someone scary. Plus, any officer who witnesses such a drone is almost certainly going to misidentify the paintball gun as an actual gun. I can imagine the operator would be charged with several felonies.
Must less recoil too.
On the list of "laws you don't want to screw with", National Firearms Act violations are high on my list. Regardless of whether something is or isn't a violation, I'm certainly not interested in paying expensive lawyers to argue they're not.
Or even better yet, get arrested halfway to trying to dip your drone into paint on a sidewalk?
Just throw a rock at the stupid thing.
Because advocating things which are moral/ethical but illegal is often against the TOS :(
We need laws which are explicitly based on moral principles. Barring that, we should at least have laws which treat sufficiently large platforms as utilities and forbid them from performing censorship without due process.
No, that would likely end in a RICO or terrorism case if it continued. Just because the cameras aren't destroyed doesn't mean CorpGov won't want to teach a lesson.
Americans don’t care enough
Too busy enjoying S&P500 near 7,000 and US$84,000/year median household income
I (EDIT: hate) Flock Safety cameras. If someone did this in my town, I’d want them arrested.
They’re muddying the moral clarity of the anti-Flock messaging, the ultimate goal in any protest. And if they’re willing to damage that property, I’m not convinced they understand why they shouldn’t damage other property. (More confidently, I’m not convinced others believe they can tell the difference.)
Flock Safety messages on security. Undermining that pitch is helpful. Underwriting it with random acts of performative chaos plays into their appeal.
> flock is very vulnerable to this very simple attack
We live in a free society, i.e. one with significant individual autonomy. We’re all always very vulnerable. That’s the social contract. (The fact that folks actually contemplating violent attacks tend to be idiots helps, too.)
Anyone can go that far. The question is if it’s smart. The answer is it’s not. Acting out one’s need for machismo on a good cause is just selfish.
If I were a Flock PR person, I’d be waiting for someone to pull a stunt like this. (Better: they shoot it.)
Was this a typo? If not, what does "haste" mean in this context? (I'm not messing with you; I'm genuinely wondering.)
If they do it right. If they don’t, it doesn’t. And between the action and the next rain, Flock Safety gets to message about vandalism.
Sometimes judges contribute as well.
Sure. US prosecutors are so lenient that the US is the capital of incarceration
The big incarceration states are most likely deep red states.
Decades of historical evidence to the contrary.
If you’d like to have an informed opinion, at least engage with the academic material. Otherwise you come off sounding naïve, insisting that complex problems have simple solutions.
Edit: maybe my ears are a bit sensitive, but I can’t help but hear a faint whistle in the wind, maybe only at a frequency a dog could hear. But no, surely not here in gentlemanly company.
Bothers me, but not enough to drive to city hall
Doesn’t even bother me enough to send an email quite frankly
- Andreessen Horowitz
- Greenoaks Capital
- Bedrock Capital
- Meritech Capital
- Matrix Partners
- Sands Capital
- Founders Fund
- Kleiner Perkins
- Tiger Global
- Y Combinator
I don't think we can pretend the definition of "public" didn't change, now that it means "something is likely recorded for all time and you have no control over where it goes and literally everyone in the world can see it."
So many people were sharing music ( depriving artists of their pay ) that it looked like a real problem. How could they possibly deter all those music takers?
It turns out they only needed to catch a few, and fine the living daylights out of them. A fine of $100,000 was sufficient to scare everybody back to honesty.
Its leaning that direction again, video streaming services are becoming a massive inconvenience, much like needing to buy a CD if you wanted 2 total songs off it. Doubt it will be as iconic of a moment in time as the limewire/napster era was, but who knows, im so bad at predicting the future i assumed nvidia was gonna be hard declining after the end of the crypto mining craze.
> sufficient to scare everybody back to honesty.
idk how you thought this would land here, but saying everybody was a rough choice of words.
Flock Safety must be under public evaluation. Tech companies tend to hide technical specs, calling them trade secrets. But most internet security standards are public. What should be private is the encryption key. The measure to protect development effort is patents, which are public in the registry.
If the cameras were installed and operated by the DHS or by the local PD, would that make you feel better? The data should not exist, or if it must, it shouldn't be accessible without court approval. The model you're proposing doesn't ensure that; in fact, it moves it closer to the parties most likely to misuse it.
There is a famous quote about this that needs to be updated for the modern age.
"I'd rather let ten fugitives go unsurveilled, than to surveil one innocent person."
Everybody wants murderers and rapists in jail, nobody wants to 24/7 share their location and upload their every thoughts to palantir and other companies operated by degenerates like Thiel
It's so funny though that the majority of all people are doing exactly this, 24/7.
There's no money to be made arresting criminals. Sure you get a few police contracts, and you need to show enough results to keep them.. but your moat is mostly how hard it is to even submit bids.
There's a lot more money to be made knowing that Accountant Mary's Lexis is looking kind of banged up and she could be sold on a new one.
The fact that Flock controls all of the cameras, all of the data and said data is easily accessible means police and the state have access to information that they should only get with a warrant. A business having a camera storing video data that's completely local isn't an issue. A business having a camera which is connected to every other business that has a camera is.