It seems like a statement to the prosperity of the American ideals of freedom that they are being removed both by local activism and illegal means. Along with the general sentiment on social media. It's genuinely insane the power social media has on earth. It's attributed to the revolution in Nepal, major protests in India, and there were a bunch more in other countries[1].
We as humans have been brainwashed with the nothing to hide fallacy. It's good to see it dismantled once we see mass surveillance in practice.
[1] Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Kenya, Morocco, Madagascar, Peru, and Bulgaria from a Brave overview (can't say I researched any of these).
Prompt: other countries that had uprisings like the Nepal 2025 one
Some kind of Flock@home volunteer surveillance network that tracks politicians, records LEO interactions (including those involving masked unaccountable agents), and provides the only accountability that the public has left.
Is this really better though? First-party community maintenance is more direct, cheaper, and doesn't rely on fragile central authorities (granted, it _does_ rely on a difficult pattern of community discussion and collaboration to satisfy tribal consensus, etc).
I'm broadly OK with cameras being in public, but I have much more trust in direct action than I do in elected "officials".
On medium time-scales, it seems to me that a great solution will be to have community-maintained cameras kinda all over the commons, but such that the camera eye can be accessed publicly (ie, removing the information asymmetry which gives the undesirable actors (police, etc) greater view than the actual community participants).
I'm genuinely asking since I'm a bit out of touch with this latest controversy, but how are they any different than a dash cam, doorbell camera, or my alley camera, for example such that they deserve special consideration?
With automated license plate readers, they can simply collect everything with a reasonably affordable network of cameras, then query the database when they want to find a particular pattern of activity. The police have already detained people for frequent border-crossing between marijuana-legal and illegal states. This gets exacerbated by granularity and extensiveness - imagine an anti-choice state pointing cameras at every maternity care parking lot in the state and tracking who visits them for cross-referencing with visits to pro-choice states.
And with the existence of parallel construction, there's no reasonable way short of dismantling the ALPR system to avoid abuse against the citizenry.
I'm not sure I'm on board with the efficiency argument but those are always interesting ones.
Like, all a warrant requirement does is make it so that the police have to talk to a judge before making the searched data part of the evidence against you. It would do nothing to stop the police from fabricating some other pretext to lawfully stop and investigate you - say, parking a police cruiser at the border into the state and whenever the ALPR in that car hits a list of vehicles, stop them for going 0.1 MPH over the limit and the officer says they smell weed.
Is that because the government has access to the database? Aside from that I'm not really sure what the difference is between Flock in this case and something like a doorbell camera.
Maybe I should've been more direct. In your view, what is the appropriate usage for camera devices in public spaces?
A flock camera is connected to every other flock camera, ever, period. It’d be bad enough if a whole town were tracking the movements of all of their citizens constantly and storing that data forever to be searchable without a warrant (because of the extremely obvious flashing abuse vector that has been shown to be taken advantage of multiple times- give the old google a search for police officers stalking exes and their partners via flock, or flock employee spying on children’s gymnastics gym)
BUT, it’s not even just that! You can track people everywhere that there are flock cameras if you are a part of the flock network! So you can stalk people everywhere in the country with 0 oversight. It is an insanely massive privacy issue.
It’s universal persisted tracking of literally everyone’s movements 24/7 everywhere there is a flock camera, persisted presumably forever, and currently accessible to an extremely large amount of people without any authorization or judicial check required. (Many would go to comment on the police demographic being unstable and/or uniquely situated to abuse this, but arguments about that may or may not be moot to you depending on your opinion of the police)
I feel like it’s plainly clear that any doorbell camera does not do that. Even if most doorbell cams are cloud enabled, I’d imagine it’s significantly harder to subpoena a doorbell company for “every camera you have on exactly this street that could’ve done this thing”, and infinitely more so to force them to give you all of their data history and continue to do so forever. Flock just does that as their business.
Doorbell cameras are also not particularly capable of tracking you on every major travel route you take, as they’re primarily on, well, residential doors. Maybe some businesses have them? But they certainly aren’t able to resolve every license plate that travels through a segment of highway. Not to mention that they just don’t do that at present at all anyways, even in the places they’re installed- they just record motion, and sometimes use AI to point out “a car drove by” or “a person walked up to the door.” Not “license plate XYZ1234 drove through highway 12 at 8:34 pm”.
I feel like your statement just kinda ignores all of this and is saying “well yeah, but besides all the mass movement tracking and data storage and correlation, it’s basically like a doorbell camera because they both record people/cars and store them somehow, right?”
Which, I mean yeah I guess? But the “besides” part is kind of entirely the massive problem.
[1] well, not yet.
That doesn't seem clear to me at all. It may not be one interconnected network but if a crime occurs say, at 100 Main Street the police can see doorbell cameras, identify the model, and ask the home owner for the tape and if necessary get a warrant. It's certainly not as easy to obtain the data but it's certainly possible to achieve the same goal.
Look, I'm not trying to defend Flock here or anything, just trying to understand what the specific concern is whether that is hyper-efficient tracking, a privacy violation, a constitutional violation, or maybe even something different altogether.
https://www.newsweek.com/flock-camera-police-arrests-1226378...
Edit: To be more clear, the issue courts have considered is warrantless searches of ALPR databases (and whether that evidence should be excluded), not whether it’s constitutional to put up cameras.
See: https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-applauds-important-...
See: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25-112_0am4.pdf
"What is so wrong with having your house burn down? It's just a chemical process that happens all the time."
There is a big difference in a cop seeing you go by, checking a list, and coming after you than scanning every license plate, bumper sticker, etc. and putting in a database for every cop in the country.
My rule of thumb is that if it's technically possible, someone, somewhere is doing it.
Right after expressing complete acceptance of living in a surveillance state.
I'm not sure about your argument about giving up freedom for security. One of the quotes that has become embedded in American social consciousness is Ben Franklin's "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety".
Is that why prisons so safe and free of crime? How is that life? Electronic mass surveillance is how old, the late 90s?
Yes, let's ban all mass surveillance. I know where that gets you, the 70s or 80s when the height of technology was localized tape CCTV in a handful of places. Did everyone die and everything burn down? How can anyone with a straight face be this hysterical when most people currently alive grew up without any surveillance
> Is that why prisons so safe and free of crime?
Surveilled prisons are safer than non-surveilled ones. Compare a technology forward prison with a prison in a third world country if you want an example.
Are all these deployed cameras actually solving crimes? What are the numbers? Aren't there already a bunch of other ways to track cars, like onstar sim chips?
Always-on survellience is always abused. It's already abused by US police officers. tracking their x-wives for example, the new boyfriends, etc. And there's room for much worse. Many of us grew up hearing about things that totalitarian communist governments were doing. The East German's would have loved to have such technologies.
New capabilities are being rolled out by flock- facial recognition and bluetooth tracking, for example.
This seems to be another example of the government contracting with private companies to do things that would be illegal for the government to do themselves.
Historically stuff like this ends up being abused by the establishment. facial recognition in Hong Kong. Protesters dissappeared. Stingray phone tracking in Portland. Protesters picked up by black SUVs. Freezing bank accounts in Ottawa. ICE deporting people without due process. Just keeps getting worse.
Think of all the modern niceties we enjoy that protesters earned. Will protesters of the future stand a chance when everyone is tracked all the time?
We can make up plenty of scenarios where it's dangerous, but even without those, can we not just... not like something? To use the common analogy, my neighbor staring at me through the window all the time wouldn't be dangerous. But it's weird, it's uncomfortable. Can we just not do it? I want to be able to drive places without my movements being logged. Clearly many millions of people agree, given the backlash against Flock. This isn't some essential technology, we got along just fine without it.
I would also like it if people would wake up to their phones tracking them, etc, and demand that laws be passed to deal with that. But this is a good start!
It's easy to work people up about anything involving monitoring, their brains immediately shut down and think emotionally about the subject. But not all forms of monitoring are equivalent, and some of it is useful and has net-benefit.
People in former communist countries and other oppressive places often have a different attitude about such things. They learned the hard way.
Now, imagine expressing those opinions destroys the first.
Before you jump in with a rebuttal, any comment you reply with here must include your full name and address, otherwise, you admit to being a bot and therefore worthless.
That's the concern.
This is just false equivalence, and this false equivalence is why people are immediately so defensive of anyone who suggest Flock is a good idea in principle.
As for the 'full name and address', also not relevant, Flock is not obtaining either of these details.
Also what's to say you aren't counter-protesting?
I mean functionally, given cell phones and ring doorbells we're already in a surveillance state.