In my opinion, there was never any doubt that there would be over-policing. Rather, people doubt that they would belong to the over-policed parties. I hear similar arguments about NSF funding from my relatives: "yes, funding has been illegally cut, but it will not be cut for the people I know, only for the 'bad' researchers."
There wasn't for anyone who paid attention. That "logic of surveillance" article a few years ago got it 100% correct: surveillance is immediately used against those who object to its use.
There was an audit trail for improper access using the technology and a lawsuit. How is this "lack of accountability" and "lack of public oversight"? Here are the 100 instances:
1. It's lack of accountability because nobody involved seems to have been fired or even disciplined.
2. It's lack of public oversight because an attorney filing a complaint about an unlawful arrest noticing a suspicious photograph from a month after the incident and then compelling the police to turn over evidence isn't oversight.
Accountability would have started with the officer, who knew very shortly after arresting the victim that the arrest was unlawful, being placed on leave almost immediately. But since it progressed to this point, accountability would look like literally any administrative action being taken whatsoever once the improper use was discovered.
Public oversight would have looked like that audit trail actually being read internally to determine whether there was a legitimate use for the searches in the first place. An audit trail that never gets looked at unless you're getting subpoenaed isn't "oversight".
Are you aware of any current country or any country throughout history that has granted the government powers like this and hasn't been abused? I think you're mistaken to blame lack of accountability and lack of public oversight. I think it's simply not possible.
To some extent, the U.K. They’ve had flock-style cameras for years, and while there is of course police abuse there’s far greater accountability. Brits are more comfortable with the idea of police having those powers - but of course that’s partly to do with the fact their police don’t have guns, so are generally less terrifying.
UK police officers are not routinely armed, but there armed response units, and under certain circumstances in e.g. railway stations and airports you will see pairs of officers walking about with machine guns on a regular basis.
Accountability: misuse of cctv or bodycam footage can lead to disciplinary action of various kinds including being sacked.
The next step would be blunt "fuck you and your constitutions and amendments, we're in charge here, we own the guns (both police and army), the media, the businesses, and we won't go away peacefully regardless of your elections". It is already happening here in Serbia which used to be a civilized country.
It would be a different matter if certain measures were taken to secure it better. The cameras should not send any data to private parties. Access to their data should only be granted by a court order. Such court orders should be a matter of public record with no need for a FOIA request. No data should be retained longer than 7 days without a court order. Data provided as part of a court order should not be used for any purpose beyond that court order without another court order.
Of course, sensible policy like this won't happen. Better to cut them all down.
I have gotten in arguments about these Flock cameras, because people will use the "if you're not doing anything wrong you got nothing to worry about" defense.
Basically the entire point of the fourth Amendment (and sort of the Bill of Right as a whole) seems to be based on the assumption that we cannot trust the government to not abuse its power, so we purposefully limit its power. At least that's the impression I got, IANAL disclaimer I guess.
If we cannot safely assume that every cop is above-board, which we obviously cannot, then it's trivial to come up with cases of "if you got nothing to hide you got nothing to fear" defense. A bad cop could use Flock to stalk an ex-girlfriend. A bad cop could find some unsavory-but-not-illegal behavior from a politician (e.g. visiting a porn shop) and blackmail them. A bad cop could, as demonstrated by this article, simply use a Flock camera to harass someone they don't like.
I didn't think this was a controversial opinion, but I do see a lot of Flock/mass-surveillance defenders so I guess it is.
>because people will use the "if you're not doing anything wrong you got nothing to worry about" defense.
The cop using the cameras to stalk his ex girlfriend really should have put an end to such argument. No, survellillance via an unregulated, private company that any "law environment" can access on a whim was never going to end well.
Hopefully they remove cops who abuse their powers. While I agree that victims require compensation, ultimately these payouts only hurt the taxpayers who have to cover for these cops who at worst just move to another town to do it again.
Was just reading into this and it’s infuriating. He was recording another person’s traffic stop in a parking lot. Once the stop was done, he walks to his car. The same officer goes to his car and “pulls him over.” The vet says that you can’t pull someone over in a private parking lot, that’s not a legal stop. Doesn’t matter, he’s arrested and car towed.
He’s kept in jail for 5 hrs before being released for it not being a legal stop just like the vet said. Then that officer tracked him thru flock over 100 times for some personal vendetta.
This is disgusting, and I continue to argue that we should not excuse Flock Safety for this kind of misbehavior. They created the tech and marketed it to police departments without providing good protections against this kind of thing. Making something cheap and automatic changes how people use it. If this cop had to tail the guy around himself, maybe he wouldn't have done it.
But the far worse problem IMO is that this cop is dirty, corrupt, untrustworthy, and should be punished for stalking this man, and yet he surely will not be. Worst case, he might catch some administrative sanction or maybe be fired - he won't go to jail like he should for this misbehavior.
If you have 1 dirty cop and 100 who ignore his bad behavior, you actually have 101 dirty cops. We need a way to deal with this in our society without resorting to the absolutes of "defund the police" or "back the blue".
> Then that officer tracked him thru flock over 100 times for some personal vendetta.
That's not quite accurate according to the article. It was actually worse: There were over 100 searches and some of them were done by officer in question, but some were done by other officers. This was due to lieutenant's order in connection with Jones' citizen complaint. So it wasn't just one officer abusing the system.
Generally those who support the police in general (especially those with the thin blue line American flag displayed somewhere) espouse support for veterans. The clash of a veteran operating legally with police operating illegally helps foster cognitive dissonance and disentangle these two institutions in their mind.
In other words these types of articles are helpful for causing those individuals to confront the issues in their belief structure.
I use them this way all the time with my parents, as they continue to insist that I (a retired Navy vet) should mindlessly support the police. They are not interested in the LONG history of those two populations clashing.
I understand what you’re saying, buy I think it’s dangerous. People will reconcile it with their beliefs by saying that the police shouldn’t treat veterans that way (and maybe argue that the police didn’t know it was a veteran, and that information like that should be more readily available to the police), but it’s fine if they treat other people that way.
There are no "good apples" the article itself shows that other "apples" were helping him illegaly surveil. The "good apples" thought it was a good idea to give every apple access to a problematic system.
There are no good apples if there's a rotten in the bunch, we need public oversight of the only people that are allowed to enact violence on behalf of the state.
But we decided as a country long long long ago that we wouldn't abet abuse, unwarranted search and seizure, and would treat people as innocent until proven guilty even if that meant elevated crime was the price to pay for that
Absolutely. First let's install an extreme surveillance state and give them full police power unlimited by the Constitution. Then, later, if we have any regrets, no problem. Just take the system to court and restore democracy.
Don't remove freedom from society - Be kind to people and give them equal opportunities to make sure they use their freedom for good. Prosecute bad apples with actual police work and don't let them ruin a good thing.
In practice, the odds overwhelmingly favor abuse. And even if the "proper and lawful" version was somehow achieved, it would require constant maintenance, security, and expensive oversight that would also be at risk of degenerating back into abuse.
You don't need a special speedy system. A regular warrant is just fine. A warrant in this case would never have been granted because there was no suspicion of wrongdoing. There's already processes for expedited search warrants outside of business hours, the problem is that warrants are simply never required to use these services.
> Surely access to footage can be gated behind some sort of expedited digital court warrant?
These are police-owned cameras filming public areas. A better solution would be to require court approval to buy and vote these cameras, or where they can be pointed.
If you think judges who are unaccountable and regularly abuse their powers are a solution for oversight of surveillance, I have a bridge to sell you. (I don’t have a bridge.)
Maybe have something on the plate that prevents reading from certain angles? There was a ticket dismissed in Quebec a few years ago for an "unreadable plate" because the car had a bike rack hiding the plate but the ticket had the plate number on it so it was not unreadable
We need an actual democracy(not rich people's puppets). In this country almost 75% of voting population are against the war in Iran and yet most of congress supports that war.
I know if you douse these cameras with flammable liquids they burn up pretty well. I’m in support of the same for the people pushing these Flock cameras. Because if you’ve elevated yourself above the rest of us, well then we don’t need you anymore. Tie whomever voted for these cameras to the mast and light them the fuck up.
Flock is the most successful and well-known company doing this, however they’re not the only one. We need to be really careful to push back against the use of this technology as a whole and not fixate only on Flock. My town doesn’t use Flock, it uses another company’s tech…it’s no better! Don’t give the politicians an out.
I think Flock could be very useful to track actual criminals. However, any queries to the system must require a warrant and publicly available track record.
It would be even easier to track criminals if we required all people* in the country to wear always on devices with GPS, always on cameras, always recording audio that are illegal to disable or turn off.
But that would be OK as long as a warrant was required to access it, right?
* - All people unable to pay the government to disable the device.
They can live in gated communities, travel by chauffeured cars owned by contracted businesses multiple LLCs deep, fly in private airports on private jets, or just go live on a yacht in international waters.
1. Policing is yet another example of Baumol’s effect[1]; sectors where automation lags become expensive
2. Policing can be automated effectively, including via Flock:
> Hunters Point rapper Dreamllife Rizzy described how police tech has made it more difficult to get away with bipping and other crimes.
“Crime in San Francisco, period, that shit over with, brother,” the rapper said. “They got drones, hella shit.” He described how Flock cameras clock the plates on a stolen car and send an alert to police stations, which send drones to follow the vehicle.[2]
3. Policing, like major surgery, ambitious construction, military invasions, and other high-consequence endeavors, is not immune to perfidy, incompetence, or other human weaknesses.
4. Argument by implicit synecdoche (here is an example of an abuse, therefore the general behavior is abusive) is ubiquitous and invalid; you need to actually collect wide evidence and weigh major tradeoffs. How does Flock affect total crime rates? Total abuse rates? That only matters if you think that we should be open to the possibility that widespread use of Flock cameras might be good.
5. WRT privacy and policing-the-police in particular, there is a small but highly vocal community of libertarians whose perspective is sharp, detailed, and not reflective of broader society’s perspective except in motte-and-bailey form, and who will never be persuaded by evidence because for them what matters are the principles (n.b.: this observation is not per se a criticism — sometimes principles should trump evidence around tradeoffs).
6. HN’s 10^5 (?) active commenters include 10^4(?) members of that libertarian vanguard
7. Everyone has heard all the libertarian and contra-libertarian arguments going back decades; no one is learning from yet another go-round
A way to think of the Baumol effect in more local terms:
High-productivity organizations have increased revenue and reduced expenses, almost by definition. These profits can be "spent" in various ways like charging customers less, paying workers more, paying investors more, and blue-sky research. (I'm remembering the early days of Google here.) Or it could fund various forms of corruption.
Paying employees more helps drive up local wages. Also, wealthier people want higher-end services and are price-insensitive, so they're inevitably going to be charged more. They'll bid more for houses and pay more to eat in fancier restaurants.
People discount the "trickle-down" effect but everyone notices when the cost of living goes up because there are a lot of rich people around who will pay more.
How can we find more information about when we can refuse police requests as is mentioned here? It seems like the public needs to know about when we can legally do this.
"Shayhorn's supervisor informed him shortly after the arrest that he'd, in fact, illegally stopped Jones, and he therefore could not compel Jones to produce his identification"
Really only three or four things you ought to say during a stop
“( Name and address, or license registration and insurance if in a vehicle)” -required by law pretty much everywhere.
“I’m exercising my right to silence. I will not answer questions without a lawyer”
“I do not consent to any searches”
“Am I being detained, or am I free to go”- say this one anytime you think the officer might be done with the reason he stopped you, because it “starts a clock” of unlawful extension
Pick whichever one makes the most sense at any given moment. Don’t say anything else. If the officer says you are free to go, leave.
As for what you can refuse, you really can’t during the stop. You have to fight in court. LISTEN CAREFULLY to the words of the officer and do not respond to QUESTIONS, only ORDERS. They are trained to ask you to do things that might be unlawful if they were orders, like can you step out of the car for me please, can you follow my flashlight for me, can you roll down your window all the way. If you are unclear, ask “are you ordering me, officer?”
If any part of the stop was unlawful your defense attorney can iron that out later in court (and if so, typically everything occurring after the unlawful gets thrown out)
If you want to go a step further and be polite etc, know that many police won’t give you brownie points for it, but if they ask you questions like “where are you coming from” or “where are you going” or “who are/were you with” redirect your answers only to plainly obvious facts about YOURSELF ONLY and the PRESENT time, e.g. “I am out for a drive officer”
Caveat: IANAL, this is not legal advice
Source: SWIM has extensive experience in this area
When people believe they are being watched they act differently. Essentially you are coercing them. People need a reasonable sense of privacy to be able to act freely so, to me, this means that privacy is a central requirement of freedom.
There are legitimate reasons for some ability to conduct surveillance, but without a cost any surveillance method becomes mass surveillance. That cost must be human, it must scale in human time, or it turns into mass surveillance since without a human cost all it takes is one person and one button to watch one or a hundred thousand people.
Technologies like flock have no human scaling cost. They run 24/7/365 and make surveilling one person or hundreds of thousands of people as easy as pushing a button. There is no human scaling cost to them. That means that all it takes to abuse a massive portion of the population is one person and one action. The probability of abuse, abuse which harms a population as a whole, therefore approaches 100% no matter how 'good' the controls are on it. All mass surveillance technologies have this fundamental flaw. The consequence of that abuse is that people, rightfully, will believe that they are being watched, legitimately or not, 24/7/365. The harm here is clear. A society that is under mass surveillance is a society that is having its basic freedoms continuously attacked.
Mass surveillance, surveillance without a direct human cost that scales with the level of surveillance, is not compatible with any definition of 'freedom'. Or, to sum all this up, every argument about how a system like this could be made better to limit harm is a red herring because technologies like Flock have a fundamental flaw that is incompatible with any definition of a free society.
If only there was a more general way to find the lying sneaking power tripping police officers. Flock is turning out to be quite useful for society, in this one very specific way. Data to watch the watchmen.
Cops love Flock. I'm subscribed to some of the local police department accounts in social networks, and Facebook shows me more of those across the country, and I see a lot of posts like “a serious crime happened, we tracked the car using the Flock license place reader and the suspect is now in custody”.
I think it's true that Flock indeed helps with the actual policing, no doubt about that. But it also seems like police departments across the country really try to promote the view that Flock is a good technology that helps safety, because some cities ultimately voted to disable Flock [1], and I'm sure police are just mad about this and don't want this to happen.
I can't wait until this finally reaches the Supreme court and they hopefully decide that those cameras are unconstitutional.
Should we also have separate posts for every individual case when camera helped catch someone? What's the point of continuously posting what amounts to single anecdotes without any statistical context? Should we ban every technology and shut down any government program that has small amount, but rage-bait-able form of, abuse?
> "Shayhorn's supervisor informed him shortly after the arrest that he'd, in fact, illegally stopped Jones, and he therefore could not compel Jones to produce his identification"
Can we get Shayhorn’s supervisor a medal? Perhaps a parade in their honor? Usually corruption or coerced corruption is so bad in any precinct that this type of proper behavior is shocking. Surprised they didn’t all conspire to put a drop gun on Jones.
what surprises me is that flock has not started a commercial service, where you can have the system surveillance anybody for a daily fee and have it compile a need report for you.
Use cases: stalk woman, collect evidence against your enemies, collect dirt for blackmail, etc. Maybe flock is already offering this, but only for the Enterprise customers and 0.1% ....
It once struck me that there are way to many laws with hardcoded values. Just like in programming those values reflect situations that aren't nesasarily true anymore.
For spying on public we should have laws that scale with trust and accountability. Law enforcement can then chose to persecute their own or lose some public support and lose access to some systems. You can have a point system with different regions having different levels of access. Sometimes it might be as easy as to call the next district to ask if they can look something up. This is both humiliating and adds a layer of accountability. The office in good standing shouldn't be all that willing to stick their neck out for a shady outfit.
It's just a crude example. If enough people don't trust you with public cameras you shouldn't have access to them but the moment they do trust you you should.
Similarly you can adjust salaries to performance. If people are really doing a wonderful job it is worth rewarding them.
If your coworkers is generating some unusual amount of complaints you can talk with them. I certainly wouldn't be willing to put up with loss of tools and a pay cut because they can't behave.
78 comments
[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 93.0 ms ] threadI personally blame the lack of accountability that police have in the US and the lack of public oversight into how departments operate.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wied.11...
2. It's lack of public oversight because an attorney filing a complaint about an unlawful arrest noticing a suspicious photograph from a month after the incident and then compelling the police to turn over evidence isn't oversight.
Accountability would have started with the officer, who knew very shortly after arresting the victim that the arrest was unlawful, being placed on leave almost immediately. But since it progressed to this point, accountability would look like literally any administrative action being taken whatsoever once the improper use was discovered.
Public oversight would have looked like that audit trail actually being read internally to determine whether there was a legitimate use for the searches in the first place. An audit trail that never gets looked at unless you're getting subpoenaed isn't "oversight".
Accountability: misuse of cctv or bodycam footage can lead to disciplinary action of various kinds including being sacked.
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/police-misconduct-e...
The accountability system is 'under review' (we do this a lot);
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/end-to-end-review...
It isn't unicorns and rainbows by any means;
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-66809642
Of course, sensible policy like this won't happen. Better to cut them all down.
Basically the entire point of the fourth Amendment (and sort of the Bill of Right as a whole) seems to be based on the assumption that we cannot trust the government to not abuse its power, so we purposefully limit its power. At least that's the impression I got, IANAL disclaimer I guess.
If we cannot safely assume that every cop is above-board, which we obviously cannot, then it's trivial to come up with cases of "if you got nothing to hide you got nothing to fear" defense. A bad cop could use Flock to stalk an ex-girlfriend. A bad cop could find some unsavory-but-not-illegal behavior from a politician (e.g. visiting a porn shop) and blackmail them. A bad cop could, as demonstrated by this article, simply use a Flock camera to harass someone they don't like.
I didn't think this was a controversial opinion, but I do see a lot of Flock/mass-surveillance defenders so I guess it is.
Remind them that whether they're doing something wrong or not is not their call. That sometimes shows signs of sinking in.
The cop using the cameras to stalk his ex girlfriend really should have put an end to such argument. No, survellillance via an unregulated, private company that any "law environment" can access on a whim was never going to end well.
Strawman. I have never heard of one single ingenuous person that believed these would only be used appropriately.
The main issue is that our government has too much power as to be unstoppable.
He’s kept in jail for 5 hrs before being released for it not being a legal stop just like the vet said. Then that officer tracked him thru flock over 100 times for some personal vendetta.
But the far worse problem IMO is that this cop is dirty, corrupt, untrustworthy, and should be punished for stalking this man, and yet he surely will not be. Worst case, he might catch some administrative sanction or maybe be fired - he won't go to jail like he should for this misbehavior.
If you have 1 dirty cop and 100 who ignore his bad behavior, you actually have 101 dirty cops. We need a way to deal with this in our society without resorting to the absolutes of "defund the police" or "back the blue".
That's not quite accurate according to the article. It was actually worse: There were over 100 searches and some of them were done by officer in question, but some were done by other officers. This was due to lieutenant's order in connection with Jones' citizen complaint. So it wasn't just one officer abusing the system.
Generally those who support the police in general (especially those with the thin blue line American flag displayed somewhere) espouse support for veterans. The clash of a veteran operating legally with police operating illegally helps foster cognitive dissonance and disentangle these two institutions in their mind.
In other words these types of articles are helpful for causing those individuals to confront the issues in their belief structure.
I use them this way all the time with my parents, as they continue to insist that I (a retired Navy vet) should mindlessly support the police. They are not interested in the LONG history of those two populations clashing.
Four different places, four different children rescued by use of Flock cameras.
https://kfdm.com/news/local/flock-camera-teamwork-credited-w...
https://www.foxcarolina.com/2026/07/31/kidnapped-mother-son-...
https://www.whsv.com/2026/08/01/deputy-uses-flock-cameras-fi...
https://abc3340.com/news/local/moody-police-say-flock-camera...
Want to track latest on what flock cameras did? https://flockstopscrime.com
There are no "good apples" the article itself shows that other "apples" were helping him illegaly surveil. The "good apples" thought it was a good idea to give every apple access to a problematic system.
There are no good apples if there's a rotten in the bunch, we need public oversight of the only people that are allowed to enact violence on behalf of the state.
Want to track what people are doing all the time? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyeurism#Treatment
I always think of that scene in Minority Report where 3 judges are conferenced in live when a “vision” arrived.
Because if used properly and lawfully these cameras can be useful to keep people safe. Including from the cops.
These are police-owned cameras filming public areas. A better solution would be to require court approval to buy and vote these cameras, or where they can be pointed.
what systems could be changed or created to prevent abuse of power?
there are many people who want to use surveillance to deter and catch criminals
surveillance also helps combat certain abuses of power, like cops shooting black people
we should build an accountability system to balance against additional state power and surveillance. defense in depth. the best of both worlds?
See also: https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2019/06/06/web-of-knowledge/
But that would be OK as long as a warrant was required to access it, right?
* - All people unable to pay the government to disable the device.
They can live in gated communities, travel by chauffeured cars owned by contracted businesses multiple LLCs deep, fly in private airports on private jets, or just go live on a yacht in international waters.
That people defend this is shocking. Absolutely zero foresight.
1. Policing is yet another example of Baumol’s effect[1]; sectors where automation lags become expensive
2. Policing can be automated effectively, including via Flock:
> Hunters Point rapper Dreamllife Rizzy described how police tech has made it more difficult to get away with bipping and other crimes. “Crime in San Francisco, period, that shit over with, brother,” the rapper said. “They got drones, hella shit.” He described how Flock cameras clock the plates on a stolen car and send an alert to police stations, which send drones to follow the vehicle.[2]
3. Policing, like major surgery, ambitious construction, military invasions, and other high-consequence endeavors, is not immune to perfidy, incompetence, or other human weaknesses.
4. Argument by implicit synecdoche (here is an example of an abuse, therefore the general behavior is abusive) is ubiquitous and invalid; you need to actually collect wide evidence and weigh major tradeoffs. How does Flock affect total crime rates? Total abuse rates? That only matters if you think that we should be open to the possibility that widespread use of Flock cameras might be good.
5. WRT privacy and policing-the-police in particular, there is a small but highly vocal community of libertarians whose perspective is sharp, detailed, and not reflective of broader society’s perspective except in motte-and-bailey form, and who will never be persuaded by evidence because for them what matters are the principles (n.b.: this observation is not per se a criticism — sometimes principles should trump evidence around tradeoffs).
6. HN’s 10^5 (?) active commenters include 10^4(?) members of that libertarian vanguard
7. Everyone has heard all the libertarian and contra-libertarian arguments going back decades; no one is learning from yet another go-round
[1] https://acjsissons.medium.com/the-baumol-effect-not-a-diseas...
[2] https://sfstandard.com/2026/08/13/rest-peace-bip-city/?utm_s...
High-productivity organizations have increased revenue and reduced expenses, almost by definition. These profits can be "spent" in various ways like charging customers less, paying workers more, paying investors more, and blue-sky research. (I'm remembering the early days of Google here.) Or it could fund various forms of corruption.
Paying employees more helps drive up local wages. Also, wealthier people want higher-end services and are price-insensitive, so they're inevitably going to be charged more. They'll bid more for houses and pay more to eat in fancier restaurants.
People discount the "trickle-down" effect but everyone notices when the cost of living goes up because there are a lot of rich people around who will pay more.
People are generally massively uninformed if not misinformed. People have not heard real arguments or data for most issues in general.
“( Name and address, or license registration and insurance if in a vehicle)” -required by law pretty much everywhere.
“I’m exercising my right to silence. I will not answer questions without a lawyer”
“I do not consent to any searches”
“Am I being detained, or am I free to go”- say this one anytime you think the officer might be done with the reason he stopped you, because it “starts a clock” of unlawful extension
Pick whichever one makes the most sense at any given moment. Don’t say anything else. If the officer says you are free to go, leave.
As for what you can refuse, you really can’t during the stop. You have to fight in court. LISTEN CAREFULLY to the words of the officer and do not respond to QUESTIONS, only ORDERS. They are trained to ask you to do things that might be unlawful if they were orders, like can you step out of the car for me please, can you follow my flashlight for me, can you roll down your window all the way. If you are unclear, ask “are you ordering me, officer?”
If any part of the stop was unlawful your defense attorney can iron that out later in court (and if so, typically everything occurring after the unlawful gets thrown out)
If you want to go a step further and be polite etc, know that many police won’t give you brownie points for it, but if they ask you questions like “where are you coming from” or “where are you going” or “who are/were you with” redirect your answers only to plainly obvious facts about YOURSELF ONLY and the PRESENT time, e.g. “I am out for a drive officer”
Caveat: IANAL, this is not legal advice
Source: SWIM has extensive experience in this area
There are legitimate reasons for some ability to conduct surveillance, but without a cost any surveillance method becomes mass surveillance. That cost must be human, it must scale in human time, or it turns into mass surveillance since without a human cost all it takes is one person and one button to watch one or a hundred thousand people.
Technologies like flock have no human scaling cost. They run 24/7/365 and make surveilling one person or hundreds of thousands of people as easy as pushing a button. There is no human scaling cost to them. That means that all it takes to abuse a massive portion of the population is one person and one action. The probability of abuse, abuse which harms a population as a whole, therefore approaches 100% no matter how 'good' the controls are on it. All mass surveillance technologies have this fundamental flaw. The consequence of that abuse is that people, rightfully, will believe that they are being watched, legitimately or not, 24/7/365. The harm here is clear. A society that is under mass surveillance is a society that is having its basic freedoms continuously attacked.
Mass surveillance, surveillance without a direct human cost that scales with the level of surveillance, is not compatible with any definition of 'freedom'. Or, to sum all this up, every argument about how a system like this could be made better to limit harm is a red herring because technologies like Flock have a fundamental flaw that is incompatible with any definition of a free society.
I think it's true that Flock indeed helps with the actual policing, no doubt about that. But it also seems like police departments across the country really try to promote the view that Flock is a good technology that helps safety, because some cities ultimately voted to disable Flock [1], and I'm sure police are just mad about this and don't want this to happen.
I can't wait until this finally reaches the Supreme court and they hopefully decide that those cameras are unconstitutional.
[1]: just a local example: https://www.mountainview.gov/Home/Components/News/News/1211/...
Can we get Shayhorn’s supervisor a medal? Perhaps a parade in their honor? Usually corruption or coerced corruption is so bad in any precinct that this type of proper behavior is shocking. Surprised they didn’t all conspire to put a drop gun on Jones.
what surprises me is that flock has not started a commercial service, where you can have the system surveillance anybody for a daily fee and have it compile a need report for you.
Use cases: stalk woman, collect evidence against your enemies, collect dirt for blackmail, etc. Maybe flock is already offering this, but only for the Enterprise customers and 0.1% ....
Who will watch the watchmen?
For spying on public we should have laws that scale with trust and accountability. Law enforcement can then chose to persecute their own or lose some public support and lose access to some systems. You can have a point system with different regions having different levels of access. Sometimes it might be as easy as to call the next district to ask if they can look something up. This is both humiliating and adds a layer of accountability. The office in good standing shouldn't be all that willing to stick their neck out for a shady outfit.
It's just a crude example. If enough people don't trust you with public cameras you shouldn't have access to them but the moment they do trust you you should.
Similarly you can adjust salaries to performance. If people are really doing a wonderful job it is worth rewarding them.
If your coworkers is generating some unusual amount of complaints you can talk with them. I certainly wouldn't be willing to put up with loss of tools and a pay cut because they can't behave.