If you want to save yourself six minutes' of video, this is about https://alpr.watch/ and their new feature that can alert you by email if your local municipal officials are going to be discussing Flock in upcoming meetings, based on published meeting agendas.
Quiet red areas rolling over to Flock are what’s going to cause us all to lose in the end.
Another quiet little village in rural New York just signed on for 11 cameras, and it sounds like the county itself (2800 square miles(!)) is also playing around with them. The locals won’t raise the hard hitting questions - they’ll just roll over with the bullshit answers from Flock reps.
https://deflock.me/ deserves a mention for its crowdsourcing of ALPR camera data on https://openstreetmap.org and on the site. Recording even one camera may be the only notice a resident has that Flock and ALPRs are operating in their municipality.
Same author talked about adversarial license plates that trick these cameras with a sequence of black blocks, discussed here in original form [1]. He is interested in breaking both the plate detection (ideal) and character recognition (good). The examples are pretty cool looking.
The anti ALPR narrative is not based in reality. I for one support using tech to automatically flag when a stolen car is spotted. With the sky high cost of car insurance in CA, which disproportionately impacts low income drivers, you would think liberal legislators would be in favor of reducing one of the largest reasons insurance is expensive. Restricting tech used by police just means more LE time spent on easily automatable tasks, and forces LE to use their own judgement (which many would argue has bias). The ACLU and EFF are so discredited on tech issues. They simply support criminals. The ACLU is fighting DUI laws in CA right now for instance. SF is a hell-hole because of these crime loving activist groups.
I am not anti ALPR. They do have merits on flagging things like stolen vehicles and human trafficking. What I do dislike is a private company owning up the entire market share and has little to no obligation to behave.
Why can't cities hire good software developers to create custom solutions that are safe and secure rather than paying a startup thousands of dollars in taxpayer money. Austin City Council spent 1.2 MILLION dollars on just a handful of cameras. Texas already ruled that red-light cameras cannot issue tickets or citations so why are we allowing cameras to creep into the same space. It's just another tax on people
>The ACLU is fighting DUI laws in CA right now for instance. SF is a hell-hole because of these crime loving activist groups.
Not sure what you are referring to here but if you do find the news stories be sure to post the article and I will read the cases on PACER to see what its all about
> SF is a hell-hole because of these crime loving activist groups.
the cost per arrest in austin while these cameras were up was over $7000/arrest.
From an anti-crime perspective, spending $7000 on police salaries & having the police patrol high crime areas is a much more effective use of funds. It also doesn't violate the 4th amendment.
It feels like there’s a big vacuum of a federal level privacy judgement waiting to be filled. SCOTUS abhors a vacuum, though you could argue it’s already been filled in that the past two decades of rulings on cell phone records (phone=you) are directly applicable to photos of your car (car=you).
Maybe the argument against is that ALPR can’t constantly track you like cell towers can?
I wonder what would happen to these if you put a bunch of TV screens showing random faces at various camera locations. Essentially creating 10s of thousands of face scans per minute at each location until their database fills up and their facial recognition runs out of CPU cycles. Also maybe throw in some randomized license plate numbers and a TPMS transmitter to make it even worse. Nothing illegal, just putting some noise out there.
I am always on the fence with flock. I can absolutely see how it goes wrong and wish there was more oversight into the ability to track people. On the other hand I see these as a very effective way to assist local law enforcement who across the country are struggling with budgets.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 40.2 ms ] threadThe video also links you to a wiki with some nice counter-arguments to the standard pro-Flock arguments: https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Common_Questions,_Arguments,_%...
I went ahead and signed up; I live in a pretty dense part of the US, we'll see how many alerts I get in the next year.
Another quiet little village in rural New York just signed on for 11 cameras, and it sounds like the county itself (2800 square miles(!)) is also playing around with them. The locals won’t raise the hard hitting questions - they’ll just roll over with the bullshit answers from Flock reps.
https://northcountrynow.com/stories/village-of-massena-enter...
[1]: https://youtu.be/Pp9MwZkHiMQ?&t=1428
Thank you, Flock!
Why can't cities hire good software developers to create custom solutions that are safe and secure rather than paying a startup thousands of dollars in taxpayer money. Austin City Council spent 1.2 MILLION dollars on just a handful of cameras. Texas already ruled that red-light cameras cannot issue tickets or citations so why are we allowing cameras to creep into the same space. It's just another tax on people
>The ACLU is fighting DUI laws in CA right now for instance. SF is a hell-hole because of these crime loving activist groups.
Not sure what you are referring to here but if you do find the news stories be sure to post the article and I will read the cases on PACER to see what its all about
the cost per arrest in austin while these cameras were up was over $7000/arrest.
From an anti-crime perspective, spending $7000 on police salaries & having the police patrol high crime areas is a much more effective use of funds. It also doesn't violate the 4th amendment.
Maybe the argument against is that ALPR can’t constantly track you like cell towers can?