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.

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)

[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.

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.

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.

It would seem reasonable to squarely blame Flock for not absolutely centering this feature.

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.

They knowingly facilitate the nudge nudge wink wink.

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.

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?

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.