Politicians are completely naive in their understand how people works, if it's abused, the system isn't locked down enough or that one person circumvented the procedure. They completely fail to understand that there exists people to whom you cannot grant access and screening people in advance probably impossible. Some cop checks all the boxes, gets access to databases, then their partner leaves them and they are now no longer safe to grant access.
I don't understand why it's hard to grasp that surveillance tools are dangerous and rather using them to protect others, law enforcement will use these tools to do bad things. It's as if that we assume that cops are better people and follow rules better. Even in countries that actually train their police force this isn't remotely true.
The US might be different, I doubt it, but society is getting increasingly SAFE, there is less and less need for these tools.
It’s such a shame that media (social and traditional) really plays up loss aversion. My local news is basically fear mongering. My local social media page is filled with people who have nothing better to do with their time than complain about all of the negative stuff happening in this town. They take every isolated incident and project it as some major pattern. It’s really sad.
Some are, others aren't. They just accept it willingly.
Just as in the Purge movies politicians are exempt ;-)
The idea that a movie could get so many basic things so badly wrong, that it could float a scenario that made zero sense, but still gain such cultural traction was one of the first times I felt old. It's speaking to a youth with crazy and new ideas. They're ready to make their own grand and terrible mistakes, which a future youth will one day hate them for.
I will never understand the reason of mentioning works of fictions to make a real life point
They understand exactly how people work. You are naive for thinking that they aren't aware of this. Their entire job is essentially a popularity contest in which they promise you things, that they almost never deliver on.
Honestly I think the majority aren't smart enough to do the cost benefit analysis of these system, so they just ignore the warning.
Simple method is IP whitelisting, easy in some ways painful to keep updated. Vpn is another easy option. But then you can have client side certs, hardware tokens, and endpoint security mechanisms which are probably more robust. Either way, it's not a weird unique thing, it's pretty ubiquitous :)
This is why if you're building a product, please give SSO for free (see sso.tax) - you shift responsibility, requirements and posture to the tenant's IdP.
It is intentional and deliberate price discrimination to charge enterprises more. One example: why do you think enterprises don't just stack consumer/teams Codex or Claude subs with significant subsidies; given that all enterprise seats are API/PAYG now? SSO/IdP + ability to opt out of training globally
Assuming that’s true, why wouldn’t he have his own flock account to do his searches?
[reality] It's just the police, beating us with better batons, same as it ever was.
If the authorities want people to accept systems like Flock etc. then they need to severely punish abuse like this.
I’m quite naive regarding the details of the legal system, wonder why we can’t expedite certain cases when a SCOTUS precedent has been established, or some form of expedited legal notice. We shouldn’t have to wait for a perfect case of a flock violation, then wait for someone to be brave enough to spend the money (or if pro bono just their time/reputation) to file a case and go through the system for the next x years
And while federal crimes are legal now, couldn't it be against state law too?
Who do you expect to charge the woman with a crime: the local prosecutors who are basically cop-adjacent, Georgia's attorney general who supports the lawless ICE, or a federal prosecutor working under the Trump administration?
I mean, maybe you'd like to do something about it via a civil lawsuit, at which point you ought to acquaint yourself with something called "qualified immunity."
Living in a police state is fun, right?
If I worked at a company and gave my work login credentials to a friend and that friend used it to access my work's network then I'm pretty sure I'd go to jail.
ICE is the President's personal force, screened for their loyalty to him. They have no interest in the law. The rest of the government doesn't like them any better than you do.
So it's not all Trump, but his administration has definitely pushed the lack of accountability to new heights and combining it with the new wave of surveillance tech with limited oversight or legislation it's all just become ingrained with nobody to fight it.
Last two visits, some guy named "Victor" shadowed me, and made it a point to call me by my first name twice.
I spend as little money at Home Depot as possible now.
The flock system is being abused by every organization across the entire country, because thats where peoples heads are at today.
2 out of 3 adults in the US are not considered "psychologically mature" by psychologists.
Nation of adult children + spying and tracking technology ... of course its being abused. The only question is how much, and Flock isn't going to tell us the truth of it, ever, because they dont track abuse, they track victims.
We are the victims of Flock.
Home Depot and Lowes are the 2 largest US home store ( construction materials, appliances, etc ) retail chains in the US.
They have Flock cameras installed on mobile trailers, parked in their parking lots. The cameras track your vehicle as you are parking, and issue alerts for anyone that has been flagged in the database.
In my case, I have classmates from school, who have friends at the local county EMS operations center, who are using the system to stalk me.
Just 3 days ago, I tried to have a quiet conversation with my girlfriend at a little park, in a small neighborhood. Less than 10 minutes after arriving, a car with 4 or 5 people showed up, positioned themselves within ear shot, and then began making fun of us in order to prevent us from thinking and discussing issues clearly. This event by itself seems innocent and random, except, it happens like clockwork, in multiple locations, and its an established pattern in my life, making it decidedly non-random. The "actors" think of it as street theatre, the police think of it as "policing", and what you get as the target is pure psychological hell.
When a victim begins to try and explain verbally what is happening to them, they relive the trauma of the events that have been "staged" and people assume the victim is mentally unstable. It is the same strategy as kicking a dog in the head repeatedly, until it becomes an agry mad dog, and then putting it down because it was dangerous. Create the problem, then appear to solve it.
What may have started out as a joke now has them guilty of human trafficking, so they have adopted a strategy of "running me out of town" via harrassment.
They know if they emotionally destablise people, they will voluntarily leave or self destruct via drugs, stress, acting out, etc.
This is what "community policing" now means.
There are any number of videos on youtube of people having meltdowns, claiming they are being 'gangstalked', etc. and they seem very disturbed. This is why this works. They disturb you, then dismiss any allegations as you being disturbed.
Watch the movie "Closetland" for how psychological abuse works.
That sucks though.
You can tell that something has happened to them, but its ephemeral, because its psychological, and what do all of us do when we don't understand someone ?
We dismiss them.
My "former classmates" due to some grudge, are using their friends in power, to abuse me. The two classmates spearheading it, know everyone who is anyone in this county, because one was the President of a womens organization, and the other has been a bartender downtown for 20 years.
I'm being harassed by the digital good ole boy network. This behavior isn't new, its just morphed into a sci fi dystopia.
And you blame the "adults of America" that supposedly are "psychologically inmature", which to me looks like an absurd and unsubstantiated claim
The Flock system has these risks built into it, no matter what its proponents claim. A person with one too many beers in them, in any downtown area, in any city, in any country, could say something to offend the wrong person. A person with access to Flock, who happens to be a police officer, who then stalks them.
Your reality is composed of what you have observed, what you have experienced, and what people tell you is real, and people tell 9 lies a day.
Your reality, some part of it, is not what you think. If you place a person in a reality that you control, and then execute a "rug pull" where you drop the veil and reveal a different reality, it causes stress, and stress kills after enough of it.
It's alright if you can't accept that this is happening to other people, but you are doing so because the idea scares you, and its not happening to you, so you reject it, and that is why it works.
Its the new digital Jim Crowe era, and US history is repleat with stories of people whos rights have been abused by others.
They use the licence plate hotlist internally to track when "organized retail crime(tm)" shows up and get pings when "thieves" come back to the store.
Thus, any Lowes/HD asset protection employee/manager can log into Flock, and see all of the ones "owned" by their corporation (which is nationwide, and installed well beyond the confines of the store property, often covering entire shopping plazas or parks where they're located). They won't be able to see outside of those bounds, but that's still a SUPER powerful tool if you consider ~1700 Lowes and 2000 Home Depots in the US alone.
And of course, combined with "small town" mentality and "backing the blue", of course someone with a modicum of power (the mall cop AP employee) will LARP up and want to whack out with ICE/the local PD and be happy to help them if it means getting a challenge coin!
This is not a contingent issue, it’s a fundamental integrated flaw of any system that put general totalitarian spy as an aimed outcome. Whatever the way it’s green-washed over safety tradeoffs won’t change this obvious fact.
I'm not completely opposed to 'camera, cell, solar, battery on a pole'. Its pretty low tech honestly... But there absolutely be a minimum standard of search warrant approval in front of a judge before using it. AND it should be a criminal offense to use it without a search warrant.
However there's this whole problem of "illegal for government to do it but whitewashing through for profit company to do illegal thing".
Lots of explanations here for wanting to go easy on her. Is the same logic applied for the many victims of a police department? If it's preferential treatment then maybe Interim Maj. Max Nowinsky should also be kicked to the curb.
> Tyler Harpe, a federal ICE agent
Federal ICE agent Tyler Harpe, may you enjoy your new found fame.
Doesn't mean I don't think that protest and outrage over surveillance aren't good things, just that these things require constant vigilance or else we're stuck with them. Personally, what I see happening is a further bifurcation of American life, where we see communities opposed to constant surveillance contrasted with those that embrace the panopticon.
Look, I get it, we're clearly in the backsliding zone right now, but midterms are here.
Town canceled their contracts, the stock went down.
Two measurable metrics
Which is not to say that voting can't be extremely effective, if organized at suitable scales over time. Trump wasn't re-elected because all the swing voters who'd replaced him with Biden in '20 were overjoyed with how Joe and his Dem's had handled things.
I was pointing out that the former is virtually meaningless, but the latter tends to be decisive.
Yes, mass surveillance is a huge problem. But most of the time, most of the voters do not behave as if they meaningfully care about most of the aspects of mass surveillance. That's pretty much the same rule as for the Pentagon buying $5,000 screwdrivers, and bizarre loopholes appearing in the tax code to benefit a few billionaires who are extremely "generous" to their good friends in Congress. Both R's and D's may loudly denounce those practices - but they know that actually fighting against them, where it counts, will not be good for their political careers.
If you wave a magic wand and fix the abuse you will not fix the very nature and purpose of these systems. 1984 would not magically become acceptable if cops couldn't stalk their girlfriend or creds could not be shared among agencies off the books.
A large enough to be a problem subset of the people decrying abuse fancy themselves an armchair central planner (the more self aware ones fancy themselves armchair despots). In the back of their mind they're thinking "if only we got rid of the abuse then the public would buy into this Orwellian system then I could get the government enforce my pet policies with an iron fist and get minimal pushback". Beware of these people. They are the true evil. They all seek to take a bite out of your day to day freedom and it doesn't take all that many of them getting their way before there is nothing left. The politicians feeling emboldened to sign contracts with Flock or any other surveillance vendor only feel emboldened to do so due to the existence and frequency of these people.
Abuse or not these systems are rotten and incompatible on a fundamental level with a free society.
Because the data is purchased, most jurisdictions don't require a warrant. The only legal issue I can see currently is that Flock lost revenue from having another subscriber.
I am not a lawyer, just curious.
It's easy to argue (as lot of people have in this thread) that there is a huge moral difference between sharing access to a streaming service and sharing access to a mass surveillance tool.
But was any criminal law broken? Is it just a violation of Flock's ToS and the biggest consequence is the police department losing access for violating the contract?
It's an important question, because if there isn't really any legal consequences for any of the parties involved then it's worth understanding that and, hopefully, addressing!
If we interpret OP's question in good faith, I don't think they are implying that it should be legal, just asking if it is.
But even if it were legal, this only shows the core problem:
That data should not be available to anyone at all.
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In any case, these Netflix and LLM subscription comparisons are utterly beside the point, the equation is hilariously different when it’s a surveillance tool used by the state violence monopoly that we’re talking about. The standard should be absurdly higher than "no big deal, everyone shares their Netflix".