Not really, graffiti artists often think that taggers are annoying (they are low effort and frequently tag over murals). Those who see it as art try to distinguish graffiti from vandalism.
Artists often start as taggers so it’s not exactly a clean separation. It’s a similar relationship as the one between “real” hackers and skids.
It's counter-culture and I'm here for it. I had a fun convo with my daughter about why rail cars are so frequently tagged. More fascinating are the hidden pieces in tunnels and the like, where only few people will ever see it.
There probably was very little street crime, graffiti, and vandalism in the German Democratic Republic and in the USSR. And there very likely is little street crime in North Korea.
If the benefits can be had at too high a price, that doesn't make the price worth paying.
One person’s graffiti and vandalism is another persons freedom of artistic expression. Like how music magically turns into “noise” when someone buys an apartment next to a lively gig venue.
There's very little of those things in most places.
It would be nice if there were less, but that change shouldn't come at a significant cost.
As an example, the FBI has data on $10-20 billion in property crimes per year in the US. Wow, that's a lot. Of course, there's probably $5-$10 trillion dollars of personal property.
Also a country with regular human rights violations, virtually no political, ideological, press, assembly, worker or economical freedom, heavy censorship, etc.
I was surprised to learn that many countries have what amounts to a flock equivalent. UK for instance has a National ANPR Service w 12k fixed cameras and 90-100m plates read a day. They also store it much longer.
Never understood why the outrage of flock in particular is so big online.
> Never understood why the outrage of flock in particular is so big online.
A big reason is because there's virtually no oversight, and it's managed by a single private corporation nationwide. Neither of those things are true in the UK case.
You should really educate yourself on things like this. They matter, and by your apathy and ignorance you're helping sleepwalk your country into a dystopia.
Putting aside how disproportionately noisy some activist types are, it probably has to do with Americans having practically no trust in one another, corporations in particular, and their government by extension. At the same time, Americans tend to value some positive forms of liberty - like the ability to say and do what you want in one moment - far more than other forms of liberty - like the ability for all people to feel safe enough to be able to do the things they want.
I’m an American living in Japan, I’ve always felt a great sense of liberty because of how safe it is here; I can live a lifestyle that would get me robbed pretty much immediately in the USA. While crime rates have always been relatively low here; part of that is because Japan got tough on crime around the turn of the century, and one part of that was pervasive rollout of automated license scanners used for reconstructing vehicle movement, like Flock. I suspect that Japanese people didn’t accept this because they don’t care about privacy - they absolutely do - but instead because they have a healthy enough social context to be able to consider the tradeoffs, and a government responsive enough to design around those tradeoffs; rather than immediately flying into a rage and vandalizing their cities like some angry Americans are doing now.
The same thing plays out for other things that would pretty clearly be a good thing, like having a real secure national ID instead of relying on social security numbers for identity verification (terrible). Can’t do it, people (as well as criminals) value the liberty of being difficult to trace far more than the liberty of not being defrauded regularly, or having a civil service that is able to do basic functions like authenticating you for benefits efficiently. Sigh…
In the US flock is routinely used by law enforcement personnel to stalk exes and for other abuses. Are police in those other countries equally untrustworthy?
To me, that’s a problem of oversight, audit trails, consequences, and the relationship of police with their communities; not of Flock itself. And based on what I’m reading, they are reacting - criminal case IDs will be required to do searches and automated monitoring of misuse will be mandatory by default soon. So the anger against Flock itself seems misplaced.
Multiple things can be true at the same time... do you think the seller doesn't want a closely surveilled world with no exits?
Besides, money keeps businesses in the economy afloat, it's an artificial good with (more or less) constant value. Money's a systematic means to an end and rarely an end goal, its purpose is the transportation of value, and not the communication of value.
I love this analogy. It’s hardly a crime to kick my lawnmower until it starts to come apart. Vandalism at best. If you want to entirely dehumanize these people, at least go all the way.
That was a reference to a Bryan Cantril speech, and it's more about the lawnmower's ability to gravely harm your person without having any intent or feeling beyond doing what a lawnmower does.
There are buyers who want drugs for recreational reasons, murders for emotional reasons, or spy cams on hotel rooms for business reasons. But those are simply 3 instances where existent demand doesn't mean we should be allowing any offer to exist.
I'd personally agree to put Flock-levels of civil vigilance in the same bag.
This is the drug-dealer justification -- "if I don't [sell drugs|provide mass surveillance at an unprecedented scale|crush these kittens] someone else will"
Great let’s install a bunch of cameras in and around your house and live stream it on the web 24/7. You can be a great first case study. You have nothing to hide right, so you should have no issues with this.
This is a hot take, the problem is that powerful tools like surveillance are easily (and inevitably by humans) abused to suppress what shouldn't be crimes, including expressions; and even when they don't, the potential to (including retroactively going through stored logs in the future) causes a "chilling effect" that increases anti-social behavior.
If people want to surveil the inside of their own homes and businesses that's fine. I think some public areas should be surveilled and others private, with indicators, so if people want to be watched for their own safety when they go outside they can, but if they want to avoid tracking they can go through unmonitored areas. Those will fix your latter and former concern respectively. More centralized surveillance won't help much more but certainly lead to harm (as Flock has, already, by mistakenly accusing people with similar faces for crimes across the country, and letting corrupt cops stalk their spouses).
It could also help foreign adversaries. I have 0 confidence that Flock hasn’t already been compromised given the current security environment and the value of the data that they have.
It’s a tradeoff between privacy/freedom from government overreach and solving these crimes. This is fine as long as you and the government agree on exactly what constitutes bad behavior. Does the current regime in the US give you hope that those two will stay aligned for long? Any technology you introduce that can be abused will be abused.
> The benefits of a mass surveilled world are enormous - epidemiology is gonna rock in 20 years.
If you suggest mass surveillance as a "solution" to the next pandemic (I might be wrong on this and maybe I've misread your comment) I'm afraid that the world won't just stand still and face it. The recent pandemic has proven it, we're not all Australia/China.
I agree this is double plus good fellow citizen. Only bad persons who want to do bad things and Eastasia supporters would not want to have their activities tracked at all times, why would anyone want to allow bad things to happen when we could all be under the watchful care of big brother at all times. After all these measures are necessary to defeat Eurasia!
1. There is a huge difference between my neighbors accidentally seeing me leaving my place, vs an anonymous person 7 months later, being able to statistically analyze when I leave my place in the morning, and when I return in the evening, even getting a list of the places I stayed over night on the days where I did not return in the evening.
2. see above
3. The downsides are enormous as well - Want to know who went to that protest last night? Query your local palantir console. Who met with your former wive within the last 2 weeks? Flock will give you answers.
4. The problem is scale (in the number of people who can observe me, the time frame I can be observed over and the length of time over which that information is available)
I cannot reply to everyone but still want to defend the above post (apart from a patronising tone so apologises for that)
The most common response here is “but in the future some other government could do X”. And yes. This was also a major reason for opposition to the orignal “Peelers” in 1800s - a civilian police force. The police today are able to commit many egregious violations but they are mostly held back by laws, and social expectations. It’s not perfect but it beats police in non democratic countries by a mile.
“ Who met with your former wive within the last 2 weeks?”
Yes that’s something we have seen police officer and politicians doing - it’s almost always illegal then and should continue to be so.
I think this is about trust in institutions- it’s a problem.
We need sensible laws, a social acceptability of privacy violations just below corrupt cops. The scale is great but so is ability to monitor who monitors us.
> 3. The benefits of a mass surveilled world are enormous
And the downsides are disastrous. If you live in a free, open, inclusive and tolerant state, the surveillance might matter little to you. When that starts slipping, you need the privacy, and the secrecy to fight what comes next.
We can't have this safely. It's been proven time and time again that they people with access to these systems are not all to be trusted. The systems will be abused and people will be hurt. I'm all for cameras and so on in isolated areas of high likelihood of crime, but not as a means to tracking everyone, just in case.
Profoundly patronizing tone here, telling folks that they need help thinking about why something as personal as the human right to privacy ought to be written off.
No, my neighbors do not know everything I’m doing. We have doors and windows and we quite like it that way. We choose what to share. Same in public, same in any reasonable situation.
Losing the ability to choose what we share with the world is a deeply frightening development and makes for a world that many of us, justifiably, do not want to live in.
You can choose to expose your private life if you want, but don’t pat my head and tell me it’s good for me.
2. But not permanently recorded and stored, searchable and logged for anyone to go back in time. Also, not potentially incorrectly stored and mislabeled as you instead of someone else doing something bad. This is happening.
3. I like the benefits of our current world. I guess those aren't real or considered?
4. I never thought "my life was secret". Cops are using this to stalk ex-partners, harass citizens that raise complaints, and arrest people on false information. No one has shown these cameras directly cause a decrease in crime, and the scant few anecdotal pieces of evidence where they do individual good versus "social good" (wild way to spin this given Flock wants this for the good of all society), do not outweigh the harms, costs, abuses, and loss of privacy.
I have no idea how imposing a permanent surveillance society on everyone-everywhere-all the time at all relates to the proverb raised.
The only way I could come up with a connection is what you wanted to say, but politely, is "shut up, worry about your own damn small little problems in life. The bigger problems? Us VCs have billions to make on".
Which, yea. That makes sense. It is why VCs don't want us talking about it. They stand to make billions, while the rest of us need to count our pennies, because they aren't giving us anything else.
Did I misread that?
(Flock isn't the only one doing this. So is Axon, of Taser fame. They are arguably worse. They come into towns where Flock was removed and just install Axon cameras. Their history is nasty).
> At some basic level treat it like HIPPA or medical data
HIPPA is an extremely very poor model for this sort of thing. It's just this side of worthless in terms of maintaining medical privacy. It's actually very difficult to maintain the privacy of your medical data in the US.
I've been very pleased to see the reaction to Flock in the US. I was talking to a younger guy, very normal kid who keeps his nose clean, studying criminal justice in his junior year at college. I jokingly mentioned to him that maybe he could bring some anti-surveillance awareness to whatever law enforcement agency he goes to work for and he said, very seriously, "oh yeah, definitely. I've only gotten two cameras so far but I want to get at least five." It turns out that he and his friends all follow an app that marks the location of Flock cameras and there's a whole youth culture around knocking them down.
I wonder if we can win that battle as a society over the decades. A "traditional" human-only surveillance state is bad enough, but with LLMs involved it's just a nightmare. It would be extremely cheap to now have full automated surveillance over cameras, phone lines, etc. "Computer, send me a scored list of any dissident violations conducted on any channel under surveillance in District 14 over the past two weeks. Cut off their credit cards and send a notice to appear in Civilian Oversight Court".
Those battles are only ever won over decades. The problem is that technology has vastly outpaced our ability to regulate and respond to it, and the system meant to provide checks and balances has been vastly corrupted.
Look at the recent Meta settlement. Society in general has known that Facebook and social media as imagined by the tech industry as an algorithmic targeting platform is largely harmful, but instead of holding them to account the US allowed them to settle with some small fines (18B is a lot, but only 10% of the gains they made from settling the case).
Now, Meta will make changes again, and then violate the rules and expectations while claiming cover from following the rules and it will take another decade of investigations, complaints and negotiation before there is an improvement.
Where were those activists when it was already clear what these companies are doing, but before the famous ad? I am not trying to be nasty, if one wants to be outraged about something bad happening, its 24/7 job and then some more.
Whack-a-mole with problems is fine, but better to unplug the machine or something similarly drastic if you want to see some sort of permanent improvement and general direction change.
Behavior you describe is some sort of well meant extremism (isn't all of it well meant from certain perspective?). Not something you easily win masses with, just add polarization into society. Clear win would be flock simply going bankrupt since their revenue becomes close to 0 consistently.
> I've been very pleased to see the reaction to Flock in the US.
I've been involved in civil liberties for over three decades. I was a member of the EFF and ACLU when I could afford it, and follower of the early cypherpunks. Like a lot of EFF members, I was advocating against the Patriot Act a d the methods used to pass it after 9/11.
But this feels different. The fact that there is large support feom the left behind this makes me very cautious.
The examples of police stalking is another thing that adds up to something fishy.
I'm very glad that dangerous stalking by those with authority and power is being addressed and dealt with. But I have to wonder if the true people with power aren't using this to create laws tailored to them around future citizen surveillance methods.
I had a possible opportunity to work in a really interesting space with wildlife management and sensor networks, including cameras. It would have been a dream, because it was an awesome space to bring educational material to families about the world around them. Interactive embedded sensors and media integration thst let them learn about nature.
I didn't take that position because of healthcare and medical issues. Bit as a kid who grew up exploring science museums, I would have loved to have given back to the community. I am heartbroken for the result.
But with Flock and the crackdown on cameras, the company is also directly in the path of the legislative and public consciousness shift.
I know whatever they build will keep up with their focus on customer safety, humane wildlife management and public safety. But there's now going to be extra focus on protecting the public from employees of the firm. It shifts the narrative.
It takes focus away from just educating the public. But I guess there are other large companies who can do a better job just focusing on education and inspiration.
It makes me sad. I don't expect those new people against Flock to understand. I'm personally happy about the focus on privacy. But it's not just privacy and education now. The early cypherpunk view has been subtly co-opted.
Are you trying to conflate wildlife tracking and monitoring with this police state dragnet? If so that's a wild take. I'm pretty sure modern wildlife tracking practices are not what's at stake here.
Honestly, most the flock cameras are installed on a fence post that is easily vandalized. This movement will be matched by sturdier construction and the resistance will likely sigh, get bored, and move onto something else.
Probably, I'm not aware of that but it's visibly not enclosed. Seems like it could be hardened quite easily. But even then, I suppose an agitator could just paint the camera every day. I don't think that type of vandalism is inspiring and people would give up. They want to unleash some fury and if they can't physically destruct the thing then they'll get complacent in their means
Do you have any idea what it would mean for society if people routinely resolved political disagreements by destroying each other's property? I think celebrating that kind of behavior is deeply wrong.
It's pretty clear to be that governments shouldn't be able to 'subcontract' their way out of the limits placed on them via the constitution.
Thankfully the supreme court seems to agree here in two ways:
1) Just because a third party (Google in Chatrie case but Flock here) collects the data and the government requests it from them, doesn't mean that that isn't a 'search' which requires a warrant ("obtaining someone's cell-phone location history from Google constitutes a Fourth Amendment search.")
2) Delegating "searches" to a private party isn't permitted if they are acting as an "instrument or agent of the Government" (Skinner v. Railway Labor Executives’ Association (1989) - also cited in Chatrie).
In the Google case, users have a private relationship with Google where they elect to let Google track them and retain their information... but when the Police ask for that information it's a 'search' and requires a specific warrant.
In the Flock case the entire REASON the cameras are there is the the government (Police or local municipality) has contracted Flock to surveil the public. Asking flock for the whereabouts of a specific person seems like it should likewise require a warrant. That's inherently different than a crime being reported and then going to dig up a video from the area from Flock - which is different than seeing someone in that video and asking Flock to find every time they've been captured by any Flock camera anywhere... that would seem to be a 'search' and would require a warrant (which in this scenario would probably be easy to get).
There is not generally an expectation of privacy in public. Things in public can be recorded without consent. Filming a car on a street and giving that video to the government is not the same as me giving private information to a third party, and then them giving it to the government such as Carpenter v United states covers.
>There is not generally an expectation of privacy in public.
And that's the problem, because if there isn't an expectation of privacy, and we record everything that's "in public", we land in a dystopic hellscape.
The problem is really that "privacy" vs. "public" isn't a binary choice. Yes, I expect people to see me in public if they happen to walk by. That's quite different from every movement being recorded and made searchable. Most privacy laws don't really account for that being possible.
Likewise being recorded on a cctv camera which sits on a vhs for a few weeks and then is consulted when a crime has occurred is very different to being recorded on a camera and being immediately processed, analysed, and information kept forever, including “person X arrived at time Y accompanied by person Z”
Cool we should maybe change those laws then, these definitions of privacy came about in a world where there weren't cameras on everyones face and front porch.
The US government, the 4th reich cannot be trusted with these tools, especially law their enforcement.
Yes, there is an expectation in the history of free society that the government is not proactively observing every person on every block, asking for ID, and following them down the streets, then documenting that and correlating it with other people's activities and making it accessible to law enforcement personnel without a warrant across the country.
I retch when people say there is no expectation of privacy in public as some naive defense of the panopticon.
The language doesn't really cover things correctly.
You don't expect privacy in public in the sense that you might bump into other people that know who you are.
That doesn't automatically mean that you expect walking into a public area means a system will start investigating you and seeing if you match with crimes.
Assuming everyone in public is a suspect and continually investigating them, is a big change in how society works.
>Assuming everyone in public is a suspect and continually investigating them, is a big change in how society works.
Well that's not exactly how it would work.
Everyone is tracked, but only certain people are watched. That added to the fact that any nation with a sufficiently complex legal system has no law abiding residents. You've always broken some law, somewhere.
So it would be more like:
>[Pick any person from] everyone in public [and the system has the capacity to list the reasons why that person] is a [criminal]
These systems aren't perfect recognition oracles - there are lots of errors, especially as you scale up the technology. At the end of the day, it's a probabilistic identification correlated to a stream with a mix of of reported or suspected crimes. Your framing completely misses the reality. I'd argue that the OP's language is a much better fit.
It's the same with all of these issues; the frog always gets boiled. In the same way the people who drafted the Constitution/Bill of Rights couldn't have imagined AR-15s, they could never have imagined a (practical) surveillance network capable of tracking people (historically and in real-time) in the way Flock, Axon and these other shady fucks do.
Flock goes far beyond that, they allow the government to retroactively string together a person's history of movement. Prior cases establish that continuous and retrospective tracking like that violates a reasonable expectation of privacy and requires a warrant.
The third-party doctrine is a United States legal doctrine that holds that people who voluntarily give information to third parties, such as banks and phone companies, generally have "no reasonable expectation of privacy" in that information. This precedent, established in Supreme Court cases in the 1970s, allows the U.S. government to obtain information from third parties without a legal warrant and without otherwise complying with the Fourth Amendment prohibition against search and seizure without probable cause and a judicial search warrant.
"
Under current case law (Carpenter and recently affirmed in Chatrie) it will definitely be a search, IMO it is just when the sensors become dense enough according to the court (absent states do not make regulation themselves to require a warrant for historical data).
Prompting a system to give a history of a person’s movements (even if they’re movements “in public”) is not something that has any historical analogy. The law has slapped down the “it’s in public” argument in cases like this, see eg Baltimore’s ubiquitous aerial surveillance (they put a wide-angle lense on a surveillance plane and recorded everything, so they could rewind and search anyone’s locations.)
> There is not generally an expectation of privacy in public.
Which is entirely different from an expectation of a general lack of practical privacy in public.
They are not even close to the same thing.
The willingness to kneel to others baffles me. Loss of practical privacy is loss of power - to somebody(s). It may not seem so for one person. But when it is true for everyone, the system will adapt to using that power.
Throw in AI and data integration. This is clearly a B.A.D. idea.
Without any real privacy laws, Americans should not have the expectation of privacy in private spaces either. Your search history, real time location, biometric data, consumer habits etc. are all for sale to anyone who wants it.
Rehnquist anticipated but unfortunately did not prevent the abuse of the third party doctrine back in 1983.
“Respondent does not actually quarrel with this analysis, though he expresses the generalized view that the result of the holding sought by the government would be that "twenty-four hour surveillance of any citizen of this country will be possible, without judicial knowledge or supervision." But the fact is that the "reality hardly suggests abuse," If such dragnet-type law enforcement practices as respondent envisions should eventually occur, there will be time enough then to determine whether different constitutional principles may be applicable.”
— United States v. Knotts, 460 U.S. 276, 284 (1983)
In human terms, frequency, impact, and scale matter. If my little dog puts a few ounces of pee in some random person's front yard, it's seen as a micro-infraction at best. Vs. Flock's ideal is more like a factory farm just up the hill, with ever-leaking urine retention ponds.
All that means is that the ends (and not the means) are the determining factor.
A private company can have plenty of legitimate reasons to film in public spaces, and to incidentally film people.
Flock's ends are to explicitly track people, and to use that data to accuse them of criminal activity. Those are the ends that the 4th amendment is written to explicit protect us from that, and not exclusively from governments, either.
> The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
While I'd generally agree that Apple is the better of the two on the privacy side it's still a false choice because you pretty much have to pick one as a regular person as things currently stand.
It becomes harder over time to function in society without a smart phone (I know this because I barely use mine and it usually lives at home but my partner runs her life off hers).
The fact that most people in the western world have two terrible companies to choose between in order to have normal life conveniences is outrageous. (Here in Europe we actually have no choices that operate under our laws!)
We need laws mandating open and interoperable interfaces and standards for all the things a modern life takes for granted: public transit, banking, digital ID, etc.
Once that's in place, we can start talking about what people are "choosing". Because currently our "choice" is at best between a rock and a hard place (or as we say in my native tongue: between plague and cholera).
Well, nowadays, Google location history is stored on-device. Google Maps sends your position to their servers, both for geocoding and to power their traffic estimation. Even when location history was in the cloud, you could turn it off. It even asked when you opened Maps for the first time. Most people chose the default blue button to leave it on. You could also just turn off location on your phone entirely when you didn't want Google to know where you were.
The tricky bit is the cell tower location. That cannot be disabled unless you go into Airplane mode or turn your phone off. Broad location (which tower are you associated with) is needed for the network to route your calls, while precise location is used for E911.
In this particular case (i believe) the user actively turned on the feature which saves your entire location history and journeys on Google's servers so that you can go back and review later. It was opt-in.
Google has since redesigned this feature so that the history lives on the phone itself, not on their servers (removing the possibility for police officers to request this information from google - search warrant or not).
Were pretending we can still have a socratic discussion about this with any consequence.
There will be numerous unevidenced accusations about fraud this midterms. It will blanket the internet and air waves.
Despite republicans being incredibly nervous about trumps chances these midterms, republicans will win the house and the senate. Trump will reaffirm a supermajority, and policies he decreed will only be expanded.
Emboldened, tariffs will continue and expand. The Iran war will continue and expand. Flock cameras will continue and expand.
The supreme court will acquisence slowly piece by piece to ever more draconian constitutional violations.
I could probably be convinced that some sort of panopticon license plate reader network could be a net positive for society IF it had the necessary and demonstrably infallible audit and oversight systems - especially with respect to the 4th amendment in the United States (i.e. search warrants).
But honestly, law enforcement is the least of my concerns because the industrial surveillance complex has shown time and again that the commercial entities are the ones with the never ending thirst for squeezing ever more profit from every person they can. To me, the far more insidious problem is what happens when Flock needs to keep showing growth? What's to stop them Flock from selling data to any and all comers?
The possibilities are literally endless:
* Perfect price discrimination. Parking garages, stores, car washes, fast food places perfectly adjusting price based on what you can afford (based on where you've been).
* Car insurance shadow telematics. You don't want a GPS-tracker installed on your ODB? Fine. They'll still know where you drive and how fast.
* Clinic-visit based healthcare inference. "Looks like this guy has been going to a cancer clinic. NO HIRE."
* "Where has your spouse been?"
In an age where your TV is spying on you and your fucking refrigerator is showing you ads, do you really think Flock doesn't already have thousands of ideas on how to monetize commercial surveillance data in the post law enforcement phase?
It exists to give an information asymmetry enabling a maximally extractive market at the cost of inefficiency.
It's the sort of thing that could only exist beneficially in some sort of communist system where deal with crime in some sort of fair way and where access to the information on these networks was regulated and equally available and the non crime information could be used to instead feed a command economy.
It may surprise many that we don't live in that world.
Elison and Oracle are a big threat, they have an obsession with holding as much data as possible, for every single US citizen they can get their hands on, and it is no coincidence they not only sell electoral targeting demographic data, but also are trying to install dystopian level servers under the whitehouse.
>. To me, the far more insidious problem is what happens when Flock needs to keep showing growth?
>The possibilities are literally endless:
Zero chance of any of those examples happening when they already have contractual relationships with municipalities they can leverage. They can simply just extend their services to civil enforcement. Follow the concrete trucks and the contractor vans and everything else around with the cameras and drones and then fine everyone for everything. "You were seen wheeling a water heater out of Home Depot. You got a permit for that". "It sure looks like you bought a lot of Henny last time you were in tax free NH, are you sure none of that wound up in your brother's restaurant."
There's already screenshots of "Your 80k registered truck was seen on a road not open to this traffic with no corresponding overweight permit, pay up" mail violations floating around (I have not vetted them).
And unlike price discrimination, the useful idiots will cheer, because the victims will have on paper broken the rules and can be construed as <checks list of buzzwords> "scofflaws", "antisocial" and "not paying their fair share" even if they have done nothing morally wrong.
In their defense, Flock didn't start off quite this way. They were initially offering a product geared to HOAs and private entities to help with simple violations and things like that. At some point they stumbled on this loophole of allowing LEO's to sidestep restrictions on collecting and storing this kind of data, and then it took off. They were well past the YC investment at that point.
(and just to be clear, at this point I think that Flock has turned into an anti-Constitutional threat to US Citizens and should be wholesale banned and put out of business).
I agree with your conclusion, but this is an odd defense of Flock. HOAs are objectively evil but they mostly stick to petty evil. But that is the story of technology over the past 20 years. Mark Zuckerberg was a rather ordinary ugly incel who wanted to gossip about and stalk women at Harvard (petty evil) but he had no idea, in 2004, what Facebook would become. These devices are built by petty malefactors at first, but somehow, the world ends up with another Palantir.
To be clear, I was defending YC's investment in them, not Flock at their early stages. If you have spoken to Garrett in the early days you would have heard a much different vision than today.
> I didn’t believe it at first, because I’ve always considered YC, in spite of its flaws, to be politically astute.
YC's current CEO is Garry Tan, who has a lot of ties to effective accelerationism and the dark enlightenment movement (The Curtis Yarvin/network state/cuckoo for cocoa puffs far-right tech broligarch movement that wants to end all democratic oversight of tech companies).
So, yeah, not only is Flock a YC company, but YC's current CEO produces a lot of propaganda for them. For example, this:
...which is perhaps the most obviously Claude-generated AI slop content I have seen (and since the internet is becoming a firehose of this shit, I've seen quite a lot). Like somehow every fucking sentence in it is peak claude-slop.
Flock will be a big curriculum that tarnishes YC. Already under YC videos, comments are related to the Flock scandal. Denizen will want to make it a pain for YC until they fix their ethical problem.
You are of course correct, the issue with this reason and legality based arguments ignore the issue and fact that the capability is the real problem, not whether some local deputy can stalk someone. It’s something I’ve argued with several legal advocacy and rights groups, this is not the time to compromise and rely on case law.
I wish people could see that the very reason and way in which flock popped up almost immediately simultaneously all across the country is because it ids actually a domestic spying matrix, not a policing tool. It is a hostile, domestic and foreign enemy capability; not just some misguided mistake.
As long as the capability exists, it is “vulnerable” to back door access by foreign “intelligence services” that are just pass throughs to the CIA/FBI in this case through the “five eyes”+.
It may be illegal and unconstitutional to do domestic surveillance, which is still done under various “fingers-crossed and therefore the Constitution does not apply” enemy fabrications like national security laws/letters that are not even public, even if they are of course checked and approved by Judge Trust me Bro; but nothing stops, e.g., the various illegitimate American departments and agencies from asking the Australians, British, Canadians, Israelis, etc. if they happen to have any information about who you have met with over the last 5 years, or your country asking if you, foreign civil rights advocate, have met with anyone in America that might be helping spread civil rights in their country in exchange for some other NS deal with tweet another devil.
I wish we had a legitimate government that could actually be trusted with something like a verified, bullet proof Flock camera system that can only be accessed in a verifiable and auditable manner to actually prevent and solve things like abductions and drug/human trafficking and identify lost elderly; but wet love in a society dominated by devils that make deals with murderers, violate the Constitution constantly and consistently, carve out exceptions where none exist or are permitted, and are pedophiles devious criminals of every order and magnitude. I know all these things for a fact in addition to the fact that flock is not the first or the only method/network of mass surveillance that is already fully deployed around the country and world, and gaslighting, narcissistic lies are used to placate people and bribe them with shiny things and “convenience” to be ok with it.
People thought the future would look like some draconian and dystopian 1984, but in reality it is actually the Matrix or even the Minority Report, only far more hidden and with far more Soma.
The point being is that there cannot be any compromise at all, because as I will adapt what was said about the topic, “he who trades basic freedom for false security is guaranteed to receive neither.”
> In the Google case, users have a private relationship with Google where they elect to let Google track them and retain their information... but when the Police ask for that information it's a 'search' and requires a specific warrant.
Bigcorp has a tendency to treat "anonymized" data as if it were up for grabs. The moment they strip the obvious PII from a data stream, they consider it anonymized, and they can do whatever they want with it. They "value" your privacy--that anonymized data is gold. Of course, such data is such high value and they don't "sell it to third parties", so they technically uphold their pages-long EULA, should they ever be charged in court.
But the nature of a lot of high value information, like fine-grained location and telemetry data, just cannot be effectively anonymized. I mean, how do you think they get real-time traffic information? It's "anonymized" GPS location / speed data from Android phones. And it is from the location services layer, not from Google maps.
The other thing that's going on is that Flock is essentially an always-on "dragnet."
A "dragnet" is when you set up police checkpoints everywhere and essentially put entire cities under watch to find a fugitive. This happened in Boston after the bombings.
"Dragnets" are illegal except in extreme circumstances (like a bombing).
Flock is a "dragnet on demand." You have a digital dragnet in place not just in one city but potentially in every city, and with a single search can pull the results of the dragnet on anyone for any reason.
Recently was driving in the middle of nowhere in Texas.. And I saw a few flock cameras watching both ways in highways there too. So it is not just cities, states are implicated too.
I don’t live in Texas but I thought they ran checkpoints like that near the border already? I was told to avoid the most southern zones when I drove cross country years ago.
The Constitution does not prohibit government (or anyone for that matter) from recording people in public spaces. ALPRs have been in widespread use since the 90s, I am continuously puzzled where people get the idea that this is new technology.
A checkpoint is a type of military installation. Specifically an installation with the purpose of monitoring and controlling traffic traveling through the checkpoint.
A check point is a point where people or things are checked. It could be military or civilian. It could be permanent or temporary. It could be 1 person and a vehicle parked in a road. This would not be a military installation to most people. Or dictionaries. Or laws.
And the point remains, regardless of semantic quibbling: a checkpoint is probably the least surprising place to encounter surveillance. Arguably, it's the whole point of a checkpoint to surveil, "checking" in your terminology, who's passing through.
ALPRs weren't connected to companies which call their detractors "terrorists" and which collect photographs into searchable databases that have advanced AI features. The general public has also witnessed the rise of military-style policing and unaccountable violence from law enforcement, so that contributes to the negative sentiment.
They weren't connected to nationwide databases which automatically record, store, and aggregate individuals' movements. Not constitutionally equivalent.
They haven't yet because a case hasn't made its way to the SC. But Chatrie and Carpenter deal with this exact subject matter and both establish that aggregating and searching past data is a (fourth amendment) search.
They’re all over the rural South. Public opinion seems to be increasingly changing that, but a lot of them are installed by entities with little accountability.
No. It is not and to claim otherwise is hyperbole. The key difference is police stopping and/or questioning people en masse without reasonable suspicion is in fact illegal unless under extreme circumstances. Simply noting everyone’s license plate is wholly legal, and more importantly for this conversation, is drastically less intrusive and qualitatively different from a so-called dragnet. You don’t get to just conflate the two scenarios to better fit your personal preferences of what is or is not legal.
Dragnets have been constrained on both fourth and fifth amendment grounds. It's not merely the inconvenience of being stopped and questioned that makes a dragnet illegal, it is also an illegal search.
The difference is that your example involves physically stopping and searching people. This is not the case with Flock, which records images in public.
The government does not and never did require any warrant or justification to record people in public spaces. Not just the government, but normal people too: you can whip out four phone and start recording people in public any time you want.
The Supreme Court has set precedence that video recordings of public spaces fall under the plain view doctrine: police don't need a warrant or probable cause to record things in public view.
The government does need a warrant to surveil me, though, and multiple court cases have found that using an intermediate third party doesn't absolve the government from adhering to the fourth amendment.
There's nothing stopping you from setting up a webcam pointed out your window. If you want to set up your own public-facing ALPR cameras, there's nothing stopping you.
Can I put cameras up on every street corner and on every traffic light? Doesn't answer my question anyways. I'm asking if the government via a third party can have this ability, would you have any objection to the entirety of the public from having this data and camera access? I'm assuming not since the people who advocate for this technology see nothing wrong with it.
If you do have a problem with public access to these cameras and tracking software, then it would be hypocritical.
Flock is a retroactive dragnet on demand. Whenever you want to, you can go back in time and put a digital dragnet in an area of your choosing in order to identify someone you now know you want to find.
I think there's a reason that they've pushed to get these things up all over the country in a very short amount of time. I feel like the more entrenched they are the less likely the Supreme Court is really going to find against them and tear up the business model, regardless of whether it would be logically consistent or not.
> It's pretty clear to be that governments shouldn't be able to 'subcontract' their way out of the limits placed on them via the constitution
At least in the US, they can't. This is already the law.
But what so many people don't understand is that the government does not and never did require a warrant or some other permission to film people in public. Flock isn't allowing the government to bypass limits placed them by the Constitution. Privacy laws, for the most part, protect what people do in private.
One thing the Flock debate had revealed is how many people simply assume everything they don't like is unconstitutional.
> In the Flock case the entire REASON the cameras are there is the the government (Police or local municipality) has contracted Flock to surveil the public
Do we know this for fact? Surely, the police are they're biggest consumers, but do they sell access to the APIs to anyone else?
At the very least they need to make public accessible all data collected about all employees and owners of Flock, and everyone in government agencies that contract with Flock. This means we can see all photos and videos of these people, every trip they make, etc. All searchable with AI, with no audit trail (just like it is for government agencies).
You seem to be missing a basic fact about how the world works: there are two classes of people, those who make the rules, and those who are expected to follow the rules. These classes are largely disjoint.
“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition …There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
There is indeed a Frank Wilhoit you're thinking of (died in 2010, active in political science and a professor at Drake University)
The Frank Wilhoit quoted in parent is just some random dude who posted a pithy comment on a blog post. so good news, you can engage with the quote without any Kissinger or CIA baggage.
I’ll get on board with mass surveillance just as soon as every single elected and unelected leader, business executive, politician, celebrity, oligarch, Capitalist, all board members, all C-Suites, and every single VC has a live, uninterrupted, 24/7 publicly-accessible feed of their lives as they live by example and demonstrate the benefits of such a regime.
Which is to say I will never, ever be on board with mass surveillance, because those in or of power are conveniently left out of its dragnet.
Linked cameras everywhere all the time has been coming for a while. Cheap hardware, connectivity, and analysis means who pays is not only not limited to governments and big companies but is barely even relevant. The remaining question is what if any rules there will be.
I find palantir and flock are more obsessed with rules on data. The seriously insidious companies tend to be international and change names every year or so. The idea that you could get that flock CE to bend the rules for the feds are basically 0. Some random middle eastern country, the issue is trusting them .
The political left has really decided to go nuclear over Flock, but I'm not understanding the fundamental principle from which this view arises. Libertarian sorts don't like it either -- but that's entirely consistent with their entire existence. Is this a broad-based phenomenon on the left, or are sections perfectly fine with it? Some of the other comments here seem to endorse full on 1984-style surveillance, so perhaps this is just a libertarian-left-leaning Silicon Valley strain of leftism that's in revolt against Flock? While possible I don't traditionally see outfits like New Yorker falling in that category. When the worldview is very permissive of broad state power and often admiring of Europe, which has itself been struggling to fight off legislation weakening encryption, it's hard to make sense of this.
I'd be curious to see if Mamdani or someone similar employing Flock or an equivalent would yield the same firestorm; if not, then it's not a principled stand against surveillance, rather just another form of political warfare. Perhaps Antifa wants to not be tracked in certain locales, is less concerned in other politically favorable locales because they know they won't be prosecuted anyway?
It's almost as if people can have a variety of opinions, and support institutions and states they don't agree with in every dimension. 'The left' is a wildly broad church, comparing 'the new yorker' with say 'the socialist workers party' adds more heat than light. Similarly 'Europe' is a very big and populous place, as is the subset of it that's in the EU. Most EU citizens very much oppose attacks on encryption, the digital millennium copyright act etc. Those are pieces of legislation pushed by the European Commission - a body that is not democratically elected.
Your line about capitalised 'Antifa' suggest an unserious lack of familiarity with left-wing groups and causes.
I'm not sure that it's just the "left" and it certainly isn't just "antifa" that's against it. It seems like you're more interested in branding anyone who disagrees as a leftist terrorist though. I see mass survellience and tracking as fundamentally anti-American and those who support it are morally equivalent to the CCP, Stasi, KGB, North Korea, etc.
What's interesting is watching the "small government" right wing types who freak out over things like covid monitoring, vaccine requrements, or simple things like the government being aware who owns firearms, suddenly flip and embrace big brother. I'd guess those types won't care until the political pendulum swings and then they'll be doing their armed protests against big government again.
In Texas the political right has just canceled some contracts with Flock.
One after only half the contract was up.
Looks like that was based on experience, there could very well be a lot more freedom & privacy-loving enthusiasts on both the left & right in Texas than average.
As a non american, can someone explain the Flock story from a US perspective (ideally a reasonably centrist one)? .. i keep seeing them in the news here on HN .. apparently ~178 results in the past month . and it seems to get a disproportionate amount of front page coverage
Here's my understanding (please someone correct me if I'm wrong). Flock sells license plate reading cameras. Lots of cities and states bought these and no one noticed.
Then there were some expose pieces about how the data is routinely used by police to do things like track people's everyday whereabouts (which should require a warrant). There were also a variety of other issues:
- They misidentified someone's license plate consistently, leading to him being harassed by the police.
- There were big security vulnerabilities which meant people could live stream the video from some the cameras and access some of the data.
- They have been used by police officers to stalk people for romantic/sexual reasons.
- They are being used to enforce a lot of laws that people think are unjust (abortion bans, immigration laws, etc.).
I'm not centrist, but I think I can give a reasonably fair account. I was among the first to organize against Flock (YC S17).
Flock was accepted into YCombinator's Spring 2017 batch. Prior to YC, Flock CEO Garrett Langley had had a couple of fair-to-middling business successes and was looking for his next opportunity, which included better toilets. The story goes that he got the idea for Flock after a local police interaction where he happened to have helpful video footage. [1]
Flock quietly expanded into HOAs and neighborhood associations [2], and by 2020 had begun developing partnerships with police departments across the country and fusion centers [1], which are regional clearinghouses of data from multiple sources assembled together for law enforcement purposes.
By 2025, Flock had managed to grow to 80,000 cameras operational across the country. In June of that year, 404 Media, an independent journalistic outfit comprised in part from former Vice journalists, broke a story about Flock being used in the investigation of a woman who had self-administered an abortion in the state of Texas [3]. Flock quickly released a statement trying to "clarify" the situation, but everyone involved was lying through their teeth [4].
Up to this point, Flock had spread across the country in a pretty clever way: they built direct partnerships with police departments through sites and resources they commonly used, like https://www.police1.com/, and by hiring former police officers for sales positions. Police departments were coached to consider Flock an "ALPR" (which it very arguably isn't), which would make it not "new" technology under most local police technology procurement processes, which meant that police departments could purchase it without city council or other local agency review. To make the purchases, Flock helped to connect police departments with public money in the form of grants. For example, funds might be available for programs meant to reduce "organized retail theft", and Flock would say, "well, we qualify!", and then police departments would not use the systems to investigate organized retail theft. [5]
Throughout the Summer of 2025, people started asking questions about these weird cameras popping up everywhere, and 404 Media managed to produce one widely-shared article after another about Flock [6]. Other media outfits started to pick it up, and stories getting national attention included law enforcement officers using Flock to stalk former romantic partners or love interests or anyone else they wanted to (because Flock was built without any controls in place to prevent that kind of abuse; Langley himself repeatedly said it wasn't their job to do); Flock sharing direct access to data with federal agencies; Flock lying about the direct access that federal agencies had; then federal agencies using Flock's data-sharing capabilities to easily get around the really thin limitations that were put on that after reporting about it; Flock being used to surveil protestors; and on and on and on.
Essentially, Flock became a textbook case study for every single abuse of state surveillance power you can imagine.
Garrett Langley attempted to navigate all of this by absolving Flock of any responsibility, denying any wrongdoing, outright lying in some cases, and referring to people running crowd-sourced maps of Flock installations as "terrorists" -- which, many months later, he would get around to walking back. A little bit.
Some groups were able to legally acquire some devices and found that they had really, really poor security generally, and also that they had capabilities that weren't being advertised to the public. The prime example of this is that Flock would coach police departments to tell the public that Flock was "just an ALPR" and "only captured pictures of license plates", but meanwhile the software on the devic...
Welcome to the thunder dome. YC is not our friends, they just host what (was) a niche forum where early tech peeps could have mostly civil conversations. It’s become increasingly hostile in moderation and sharp political opinions, that a lot of the joy here has fumbled out. (sorry mod team..I know you deal with a lot and traffic/spam keeps growing).
To be less cynical, I think it would require editing to original submission. I also see why editing the “bad press” company submissions could have undesirable optics. So, maybe the mods just choose to be a bit more laissez faire than normal and lets the community self moderate the related posts. Probably within some reason in the comment section, but they allow us all to be quite critical in ways that could easily be considered against the HN guidelines and they’re not squashing it either. I think that is perhaps the best stance for them to take honestly.
Whenever someone says things like this without at least addressing the "who watches the watchers" problem, I know they're being disingenuous. It's such an obvious problem that if you have no answer, the hidden answer must be "I believe that myself and my cronies will be the watchers" or perhaps the naive and delusional "we will find morally incorruptible magic people to be the watchers."
AI isn't an answer because that really means whoever is running, training, and prompting the AI.
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[ 0.18 ms ] story [ 62.7 ms ] threadArtists often start as taggers so it’s not exactly a clean separation. It’s a similar relationship as the one between “real” hackers and skids.
and a lot of human rights violations
If the benefits can be had at too high a price, that doesn't make the price worth paying.
It would be nice if there were less, but that change shouldn't come at a significant cost.
As an example, the FBI has data on $10-20 billion in property crimes per year in the US. Wow, that's a lot. Of course, there's probably $5-$10 trillion dollars of personal property.
if they have it, everyone does.
or are you just making things up
Never understood why the outrage of flock in particular is so big online.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-anpr-ser...
It's one of the most dystopian western countries when it comes to that, not sure I'd use it as an example
> Britain rated worst in Europe for protecting privacy
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2007/dec/31/uk.eu
> 'UK surveillance is worse than 1984' says UN privacy chief
https://www.wired.com/story/uk-digital-surveillance-joseph-c...
A big reason is because there's virtually no oversight, and it's managed by a single private corporation nationwide. Neither of those things are true in the UK case.
You should really educate yourself on things like this. They matter, and by your apathy and ignorance you're helping sleepwalk your country into a dystopia.
I’m an American living in Japan, I’ve always felt a great sense of liberty because of how safe it is here; I can live a lifestyle that would get me robbed pretty much immediately in the USA. While crime rates have always been relatively low here; part of that is because Japan got tough on crime around the turn of the century, and one part of that was pervasive rollout of automated license scanners used for reconstructing vehicle movement, like Flock. I suspect that Japanese people didn’t accept this because they don’t care about privacy - they absolutely do - but instead because they have a healthy enough social context to be able to consider the tradeoffs, and a government responsive enough to design around those tradeoffs; rather than immediately flying into a rage and vandalizing their cities like some angry Americans are doing now.
The same thing plays out for other things that would pretty clearly be a good thing, like having a real secure national ID instead of relying on social security numbers for identity verification (terrible). Can’t do it, people (as well as criminals) value the liberty of being difficult to trace far more than the liberty of not being defrauded regularly, or having a civil service that is able to do basic functions like authenticating you for benefits efficiently. Sigh…
https://archive.is/vaCkJ
Besides, money keeps businesses in the economy afloat, it's an artificial good with (more or less) constant value. Money's a systematic means to an end and rarely an end goal, its purpose is the transportation of value, and not the communication of value.
I don't think they care beyond being rich. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower
I love this analogy. It’s hardly a crime to kick my lawnmower until it starts to come apart. Vandalism at best. If you want to entirely dehumanize these people, at least go all the way.
HN mods are complicit and are shaping the narrative here.
PG, Garry Tan, Dan Gackle, Tom Howard, Aaron Epstein, Jared Friedman, and all YC staff are enemies of the people
I'd personally agree to put Flock-levels of civil vigilance in the same bag.
I'd rather have the cameras than have family members die to drugged up drivers, or robbers get away with their crimes.
If people want to surveil the inside of their own homes and businesses that's fine. I think some public areas should be surveilled and others private, with indicators, so if people want to be watched for their own safety when they go outside they can, but if they want to avoid tracking they can go through unmonitored areas. Those will fix your latter and former concern respectively. More centralized surveillance won't help much more but certainly lead to harm (as Flock has, already, by mistakenly accusing people with similar faces for crimes across the country, and letting corrupt cops stalk their spouses).
https://www.wbrc.com/2026/09/04/moody-bessemer-police-credit...
https://www.fox13news.com/news/flock-cameras-help-find-kidna...
And who desides what that is? Because right now, in the US, Trump and ICE appear to have strong opinions on that.
There's been a lot of stalking enabled by Flock cameras.
Anyway the fat lazy fucks hate work. And before dragnet surveillance they had to do work to solve crimes.
If you suggest mass surveillance as a "solution" to the next pandemic (I might be wrong on this and maybe I've misread your comment) I'm afraid that the world won't just stand still and face it. The recent pandemic has proven it, we're not all Australia/China.
Stay strong big brother is watching!
2. see above
3. The downsides are enormous as well - Want to know who went to that protest last night? Query your local palantir console. Who met with your former wive within the last 2 weeks? Flock will give you answers.
4. The problem is scale (in the number of people who can observe me, the time frame I can be observed over and the length of time over which that information is available)
The most common response here is “but in the future some other government could do X”. And yes. This was also a major reason for opposition to the orignal “Peelers” in 1800s - a civilian police force. The police today are able to commit many egregious violations but they are mostly held back by laws, and social expectations. It’s not perfect but it beats police in non democratic countries by a mile.
“ Who met with your former wive within the last 2 weeks?” Yes that’s something we have seen police officer and politicians doing - it’s almost always illegal then and should continue to be so.
I think this is about trust in institutions- it’s a problem.
We need sensible laws, a social acceptability of privacy violations just below corrupt cops. The scale is great but so is ability to monitor who monitors us.
And the downsides are disastrous. If you live in a free, open, inclusive and tolerant state, the surveillance might matter little to you. When that starts slipping, you need the privacy, and the secrecy to fight what comes next.
We can't have this safely. It's been proven time and time again that they people with access to these systems are not all to be trusted. The systems will be abused and people will be hurt. I'm all for cameras and so on in isolated areas of high likelihood of crime, but not as a means to tracking everyone, just in case.
No, my neighbors do not know everything I’m doing. We have doors and windows and we quite like it that way. We choose what to share. Same in public, same in any reasonable situation.
Losing the ability to choose what we share with the world is a deeply frightening development and makes for a world that many of us, justifiably, do not want to live in.
You can choose to expose your private life if you want, but don’t pat my head and tell me it’s good for me.
2. But not permanently recorded and stored, searchable and logged for anyone to go back in time. Also, not potentially incorrectly stored and mislabeled as you instead of someone else doing something bad. This is happening.
3. I like the benefits of our current world. I guess those aren't real or considered?
4. I never thought "my life was secret". Cops are using this to stalk ex-partners, harass citizens that raise complaints, and arrest people on false information. No one has shown these cameras directly cause a decrease in crime, and the scant few anecdotal pieces of evidence where they do individual good versus "social good" (wild way to spin this given Flock wants this for the good of all society), do not outweigh the harms, costs, abuses, and loss of privacy.
I have no idea how imposing a permanent surveillance society on everyone-everywhere-all the time at all relates to the proverb raised.
The only way I could come up with a connection is what you wanted to say, but politely, is "shut up, worry about your own damn small little problems in life. The bigger problems? Us VCs have billions to make on".
Which, yea. That makes sense. It is why VCs don't want us talking about it. They stand to make billions, while the rest of us need to count our pennies, because they aren't giving us anything else.
Did I misread that?
(Flock isn't the only one doing this. So is Axon, of Taser fame. They are arguably worse. They come into towns where Flock was removed and just install Axon cameras. Their history is nasty).
The benefits of a mass surveilled world are absolutely not enormous. Like, what the actual fuck?
HIPPA is an extremely very poor model for this sort of thing. It's just this side of worthless in terms of maintaining medical privacy. It's actually very difficult to maintain the privacy of your medical data in the US.
Incredible.
I wonder if we can win that battle as a society over the decades. A "traditional" human-only surveillance state is bad enough, but with LLMs involved it's just a nightmare. It would be extremely cheap to now have full automated surveillance over cameras, phone lines, etc. "Computer, send me a scored list of any dissident violations conducted on any channel under surveillance in District 14 over the past two weeks. Cut off their credit cards and send a notice to appear in Civilian Oversight Court".
Look at the recent Meta settlement. Society in general has known that Facebook and social media as imagined by the tech industry as an algorithmic targeting platform is largely harmful, but instead of holding them to account the US allowed them to settle with some small fines (18B is a lot, but only 10% of the gains they made from settling the case).
Now, Meta will make changes again, and then violate the rules and expectations while claiming cover from following the rules and it will take another decade of investigations, complaints and negotiation before there is an improvement.
Where were those activists when it was already clear what these companies are doing, but before the famous ad? I am not trying to be nasty, if one wants to be outraged about something bad happening, its 24/7 job and then some more.
Whack-a-mole with problems is fine, but better to unplug the machine or something similarly drastic if you want to see some sort of permanent improvement and general direction change.
Behavior you describe is some sort of well meant extremism (isn't all of it well meant from certain perspective?). Not something you easily win masses with, just add polarization into society. Clear win would be flock simply going bankrupt since their revenue becomes close to 0 consistently.
I've been involved in civil liberties for over three decades. I was a member of the EFF and ACLU when I could afford it, and follower of the early cypherpunks. Like a lot of EFF members, I was advocating against the Patriot Act a d the methods used to pass it after 9/11.
But this feels different. The fact that there is large support feom the left behind this makes me very cautious.
The examples of police stalking is another thing that adds up to something fishy.
I'm very glad that dangerous stalking by those with authority and power is being addressed and dealt with. But I have to wonder if the true people with power aren't using this to create laws tailored to them around future citizen surveillance methods.
I had a possible opportunity to work in a really interesting space with wildlife management and sensor networks, including cameras. It would have been a dream, because it was an awesome space to bring educational material to families about the world around them. Interactive embedded sensors and media integration thst let them learn about nature.
I didn't take that position because of healthcare and medical issues. Bit as a kid who grew up exploring science museums, I would have loved to have given back to the community. I am heartbroken for the result.
But with Flock and the crackdown on cameras, the company is also directly in the path of the legislative and public consciousness shift.
I know whatever they build will keep up with their focus on customer safety, humane wildlife management and public safety. But there's now going to be extra focus on protecting the public from employees of the firm. It shifts the narrative.
It takes focus away from just educating the public. But I guess there are other large companies who can do a better job just focusing on education and inspiration.
It makes me sad. I don't expect those new people against Flock to understand. I'm personally happy about the focus on privacy. But it's not just privacy and education now. The early cypherpunk view has been subtly co-opted.
Why does that make you cautious?
I do like the spirit of it all though.
https://urban-privacy.com/pages/anti-surveillance-clothing
fock flock
Thankfully the supreme court seems to agree here in two ways:
1) Just because a third party (Google in Chatrie case but Flock here) collects the data and the government requests it from them, doesn't mean that that isn't a 'search' which requires a warrant ("obtaining someone's cell-phone location history from Google constitutes a Fourth Amendment search.")
2) Delegating "searches" to a private party isn't permitted if they are acting as an "instrument or agent of the Government" (Skinner v. Railway Labor Executives’ Association (1989) - also cited in Chatrie).
In the Google case, users have a private relationship with Google where they elect to let Google track them and retain their information... but when the Police ask for that information it's a 'search' and requires a specific warrant.
In the Flock case the entire REASON the cameras are there is the the government (Police or local municipality) has contracted Flock to surveil the public. Asking flock for the whereabouts of a specific person seems like it should likewise require a warrant. That's inherently different than a crime being reported and then going to dig up a video from the area from Flock - which is different than seeing someone in that video and asking Flock to find every time they've been captured by any Flock camera anywhere... that would seem to be a 'search' and would require a warrant (which in this scenario would probably be easy to get).
Primary example:
U.S. government officials pressuring social-media platforms through intermediaries to suppress constitutionally protected speech.
I'm sure we're a golden statue or private jet away from the supreme court having a change of heart there.
And that's the problem, because if there isn't an expectation of privacy, and we record everything that's "in public", we land in a dystopic hellscape.
The problem is really that "privacy" vs. "public" isn't a binary choice. Yes, I expect people to see me in public if they happen to walk by. That's quite different from every movement being recorded and made searchable. Most privacy laws don't really account for that being possible.
It’s a question of scale and ability.
The US government, the 4th reich cannot be trusted with these tools, especially law their enforcement.
I retch when people say there is no expectation of privacy in public as some naive defense of the panopticon.
You don't expect privacy in public in the sense that you might bump into other people that know who you are.
That doesn't automatically mean that you expect walking into a public area means a system will start investigating you and seeing if you match with crimes.
Assuming everyone in public is a suspect and continually investigating them, is a big change in how society works.
Well that's not exactly how it would work.
Everyone is tracked, but only certain people are watched. That added to the fact that any nation with a sufficiently complex legal system has no law abiding residents. You've always broken some law, somewhere.
So it would be more like:
>[Pick any person from] everyone in public [and the system has the capacity to list the reasons why that person] is a [criminal]
The "only certain people are watched" hinges on pinky swears, winks, and nods. IMO it's a distinction without a difference.
Surely we can agree the point of this technology is to change the level of privacy one should reasonably expect in public?
This is _not_ universal. Many jurisdictions take a different view on this.
The third-party doctrine is a United States legal doctrine that holds that people who voluntarily give information to third parties, such as banks and phone companies, generally have "no reasonable expectation of privacy" in that information. This precedent, established in Supreme Court cases in the 1970s, allows the U.S. government to obtain information from third parties without a legal warrant and without otherwise complying with the Fourth Amendment prohibition against search and seizure without probable cause and a judicial search warrant. "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine
Under current case law (Carpenter and recently affirmed in Chatrie) it will definitely be a search, IMO it is just when the sensors become dense enough according to the court (absent states do not make regulation themselves to require a warrant for historical data).
Which is entirely different from an expectation of a general lack of practical privacy in public.
They are not even close to the same thing.
The willingness to kneel to others baffles me. Loss of practical privacy is loss of power - to somebody(s). It may not seem so for one person. But when it is true for everyone, the system will adapt to using that power.
Throw in AI and data integration. This is clearly a B.A.D. idea.
“Respondent does not actually quarrel with this analysis, though he expresses the generalized view that the result of the holding sought by the government would be that "twenty-four hour surveillance of any citizen of this country will be possible, without judicial knowledge or supervision." But the fact is that the "reality hardly suggests abuse," If such dragnet-type law enforcement practices as respondent envisions should eventually occur, there will be time enough then to determine whether different constitutional principles may be applicable.” — United States v. Knotts, 460 U.S. 276, 284 (1983)
https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/460/276
A private company can have plenty of legitimate reasons to film in public spaces, and to incidentally film people.
Flock's ends are to explicitly track people, and to use that data to accuse them of criminal activity. Those are the ends that the 4th amendment is written to explicit protect us from that, and not exclusively from governments, either.
> The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
I don't think this is going to work out like you think it will...
Elect to is a bit strong here. Acquiesce to, maybe, or perhaps suffer to.
It becomes harder over time to function in society without a smart phone (I know this because I barely use mine and it usually lives at home but my partner runs her life off hers).
We need laws mandating open and interoperable interfaces and standards for all the things a modern life takes for granted: public transit, banking, digital ID, etc.
Once that's in place, we can start talking about what people are "choosing". Because currently our "choice" is at best between a rock and a hard place (or as we say in my native tongue: between plague and cholera).
The tricky bit is the cell tower location. That cannot be disabled unless you go into Airplane mode or turn your phone off. Broad location (which tower are you associated with) is needed for the network to route your calls, while precise location is used for E911.
Google has since redesigned this feature so that the history lives on the phone itself, not on their servers (removing the possibility for police officers to request this information from google - search warrant or not).
There will be numerous unevidenced accusations about fraud this midterms. It will blanket the internet and air waves.
Despite republicans being incredibly nervous about trumps chances these midterms, republicans will win the house and the senate. Trump will reaffirm a supermajority, and policies he decreed will only be expanded.
Emboldened, tariffs will continue and expand. The Iran war will continue and expand. Flock cameras will continue and expand.
The supreme court will acquisence slowly piece by piece to ever more draconian constitutional violations.
This is only the beginning.
It doesn't seem slow to me.
But honestly, law enforcement is the least of my concerns because the industrial surveillance complex has shown time and again that the commercial entities are the ones with the never ending thirst for squeezing ever more profit from every person they can. To me, the far more insidious problem is what happens when Flock needs to keep showing growth? What's to stop them Flock from selling data to any and all comers?
The possibilities are literally endless:
In an age where your TV is spying on you and your fucking refrigerator is showing you ads, do you really think Flock doesn't already have thousands of ideas on how to monetize commercial surveillance data in the post law enforcement phase?To me, this was always the armored gauntlet underneath the velvet glove of any private entity with strong technical locks, Apple included.
The best you can reliably say about any private entity is that they're treating their users well at the moment.
Ultimately, profit always trumps user alignment.
One a company goes public though, or has significant external input (VC etc), things start on the slippery slope.
It's the sort of thing that could only exist beneficially in some sort of communist system where deal with crime in some sort of fair way and where access to the information on these networks was regulated and equally available and the non crime information could be used to instead feed a command economy.
It may surprise many that we don't live in that world.
>The possibilities are literally endless:
Zero chance of any of those examples happening when they already have contractual relationships with municipalities they can leverage. They can simply just extend their services to civil enforcement. Follow the concrete trucks and the contractor vans and everything else around with the cameras and drones and then fine everyone for everything. "You were seen wheeling a water heater out of Home Depot. You got a permit for that". "It sure looks like you bought a lot of Henny last time you were in tax free NH, are you sure none of that wound up in your brother's restaurant."
There's already screenshots of "Your 80k registered truck was seen on a road not open to this traffic with no corresponding overweight permit, pay up" mail violations floating around (I have not vetted them).
And unlike price discrimination, the useful idiots will cheer, because the victims will have on paper broken the rules and can be construed as <checks list of buzzwords> "scofflaws", "antisocial" and "not paying their fair share" even if they have done nothing morally wrong.
This is being done by investors for ads.
Somr govts are cutting deals, those that aren’t are banning them.
Never trust HN articles or high karma accts
(and just to be clear, at this point I think that Flock has turned into an anti-Constitutional threat to US Citizens and should be wholesale banned and put out of business).
YC's current CEO is Garry Tan, who has a lot of ties to effective accelerationism and the dark enlightenment movement (The Curtis Yarvin/network state/cuckoo for cocoa puffs far-right tech broligarch movement that wants to end all democratic oversight of tech companies).
So, yeah, not only is Flock a YC company, but YC's current CEO produces a lot of propaganda for them. For example, this:
https://garryslist.org/posts/flock-found-more-stolen-cars-th...
...which is perhaps the most obviously Claude-generated AI slop content I have seen (and since the internet is becoming a firehose of this shit, I've seen quite a lot). Like somehow every fucking sentence in it is peak claude-slop.
I wish people could see that the very reason and way in which flock popped up almost immediately simultaneously all across the country is because it ids actually a domestic spying matrix, not a policing tool. It is a hostile, domestic and foreign enemy capability; not just some misguided mistake.
As long as the capability exists, it is “vulnerable” to back door access by foreign “intelligence services” that are just pass throughs to the CIA/FBI in this case through the “five eyes”+.
It may be illegal and unconstitutional to do domestic surveillance, which is still done under various “fingers-crossed and therefore the Constitution does not apply” enemy fabrications like national security laws/letters that are not even public, even if they are of course checked and approved by Judge Trust me Bro; but nothing stops, e.g., the various illegitimate American departments and agencies from asking the Australians, British, Canadians, Israelis, etc. if they happen to have any information about who you have met with over the last 5 years, or your country asking if you, foreign civil rights advocate, have met with anyone in America that might be helping spread civil rights in their country in exchange for some other NS deal with tweet another devil.
I wish we had a legitimate government that could actually be trusted with something like a verified, bullet proof Flock camera system that can only be accessed in a verifiable and auditable manner to actually prevent and solve things like abductions and drug/human trafficking and identify lost elderly; but wet love in a society dominated by devils that make deals with murderers, violate the Constitution constantly and consistently, carve out exceptions where none exist or are permitted, and are pedophiles devious criminals of every order and magnitude. I know all these things for a fact in addition to the fact that flock is not the first or the only method/network of mass surveillance that is already fully deployed around the country and world, and gaslighting, narcissistic lies are used to placate people and bribe them with shiny things and “convenience” to be ok with it.
People thought the future would look like some draconian and dystopian 1984, but in reality it is actually the Matrix or even the Minority Report, only far more hidden and with far more Soma.
The point being is that there cannot be any compromise at all, because as I will adapt what was said about the topic, “he who trades basic freedom for false security is guaranteed to receive neither.”
Bigcorp has a tendency to treat "anonymized" data as if it were up for grabs. The moment they strip the obvious PII from a data stream, they consider it anonymized, and they can do whatever they want with it. They "value" your privacy--that anonymized data is gold. Of course, such data is such high value and they don't "sell it to third parties", so they technically uphold their pages-long EULA, should they ever be charged in court.
But the nature of a lot of high value information, like fine-grained location and telemetry data, just cannot be effectively anonymized. I mean, how do you think they get real-time traffic information? It's "anonymized" GPS location / speed data from Android phones. And it is from the location services layer, not from Google maps.
A "dragnet" is when you set up police checkpoints everywhere and essentially put entire cities under watch to find a fugitive. This happened in Boston after the bombings.
"Dragnets" are illegal except in extreme circumstances (like a bombing).
Flock is a "dragnet on demand." You have a digital dragnet in place not just in one city but potentially in every city, and with a single search can pull the results of the dragnet on anyone for any reason.
- FISA courts, re: 4th Amendment
The government does not and never did require any warrant or justification to record people in public spaces. Not just the government, but normal people too: you can whip out four phone and start recording people in public any time you want.
If not, why not?
If you do have a problem with public access to these cameras and tracking software, then it would be hypocritical.
Created it.
At least in the US, they can't. This is already the law.
But what so many people don't understand is that the government does not and never did require a warrant or some other permission to film people in public. Flock isn't allowing the government to bypass limits placed them by the Constitution. Privacy laws, for the most part, protect what people do in private.
One thing the Flock debate had revealed is how many people simply assume everything they don't like is unconstitutional.
Do we know this for fact? Surely, the police are they're biggest consumers, but do they sell access to the APIs to anyone else?
— Frank Wilhoit
The Frank Wilhoit quoted in parent is just some random dude who posted a pithy comment on a blog post. so good news, you can engage with the quote without any Kissinger or CIA baggage.
All others will made to obey, if they don't? they will find things to punish you, literally
What are you going to do when people grab you out of your house and throw you outside?
Your kids will be in that “other” class you like to talk about and create so much
Which is to say I will never, ever be on board with mass surveillance, because those in or of power are conveniently left out of its dragnet.
- Larry Ellison
https://www.businessinsider.com/larry-ellison-ai-surveillanc...
Now, let's hope you agree with Larry Ellison's definition of what constitutes best behavior or they will soon be sending drones after you.
> "You just have a drone follow the car," Ellison said. "It's very simple in the age of autonomous drones."
”We don’t really turn it off… without a court order”
Do this to him and you'll likely be in deep trouble.
- Garry Tan
[1] https://xcancel.com/garrytan/status/1963310592615485955
They need to be able to track and depose of the rioting hordes without getting their hands dirty.
I'd be curious to see if Mamdani or someone similar employing Flock or an equivalent would yield the same firestorm; if not, then it's not a principled stand against surveillance, rather just another form of political warfare. Perhaps Antifa wants to not be tracked in certain locales, is less concerned in other politically favorable locales because they know they won't be prosecuted anyway?
Your line about capitalised 'Antifa' suggest an unserious lack of familiarity with left-wing groups and causes.
What's interesting is watching the "small government" right wing types who freak out over things like covid monitoring, vaccine requrements, or simple things like the government being aware who owns firearms, suddenly flip and embrace big brother. I'd guess those types won't care until the political pendulum swings and then they'll be doing their armed protests against big government again.
One after only half the contract was up.
Looks like that was based on experience, there could very well be a lot more freedom & privacy-loving enthusiasts on both the left & right in Texas than average.
not my dowvote btw
YC invests in Flock.
They’ve worked together over the last 10+ years while lying on HN about “the government” being behind it.
Be mad at that by itself. No need for a left/right saga.
Narrow down your real political enemy and define them by name, and lose the mythology.
Then there were some expose pieces about how the data is routinely used by police to do things like track people's everyday whereabouts (which should require a warrant). There were also a variety of other issues:
- They misidentified someone's license plate consistently, leading to him being harassed by the police.
- There were big security vulnerabilities which meant people could live stream the video from some the cameras and access some of the data.
- They have been used by police officers to stalk people for romantic/sexual reasons.
- They are being used to enforce a lot of laws that people think are unjust (abortion bans, immigration laws, etc.).
Flock was accepted into YCombinator's Spring 2017 batch. Prior to YC, Flock CEO Garrett Langley had had a couple of fair-to-middling business successes and was looking for his next opportunity, which included better toilets. The story goes that he got the idea for Flock after a local police interaction where he happened to have helpful video footage. [1]
Flock quietly expanded into HOAs and neighborhood associations [2], and by 2020 had begun developing partnerships with police departments across the country and fusion centers [1], which are regional clearinghouses of data from multiple sources assembled together for law enforcement purposes.
By 2025, Flock had managed to grow to 80,000 cameras operational across the country. In June of that year, 404 Media, an independent journalistic outfit comprised in part from former Vice journalists, broke a story about Flock being used in the investigation of a woman who had self-administered an abortion in the state of Texas [3]. Flock quickly released a statement trying to "clarify" the situation, but everyone involved was lying through their teeth [4].
Up to this point, Flock had spread across the country in a pretty clever way: they built direct partnerships with police departments through sites and resources they commonly used, like https://www.police1.com/, and by hiring former police officers for sales positions. Police departments were coached to consider Flock an "ALPR" (which it very arguably isn't), which would make it not "new" technology under most local police technology procurement processes, which meant that police departments could purchase it without city council or other local agency review. To make the purchases, Flock helped to connect police departments with public money in the form of grants. For example, funds might be available for programs meant to reduce "organized retail theft", and Flock would say, "well, we qualify!", and then police departments would not use the systems to investigate organized retail theft. [5]
Throughout the Summer of 2025, people started asking questions about these weird cameras popping up everywhere, and 404 Media managed to produce one widely-shared article after another about Flock [6]. Other media outfits started to pick it up, and stories getting national attention included law enforcement officers using Flock to stalk former romantic partners or love interests or anyone else they wanted to (because Flock was built without any controls in place to prevent that kind of abuse; Langley himself repeatedly said it wasn't their job to do); Flock sharing direct access to data with federal agencies; Flock lying about the direct access that federal agencies had; then federal agencies using Flock's data-sharing capabilities to easily get around the really thin limitations that were put on that after reporting about it; Flock being used to surveil protestors; and on and on and on.
Essentially, Flock became a textbook case study for every single abuse of state surveillance power you can imagine.
Garrett Langley attempted to navigate all of this by absolving Flock of any responsibility, denying any wrongdoing, outright lying in some cases, and referring to people running crowd-sourced maps of Flock installations as "terrorists" -- which, many months later, he would get around to walking back. A little bit.
Some groups were able to legally acquire some devices and found that they had really, really poor security generally, and also that they had capabilities that weren't being advertised to the public. The prime example of this is that Flock would coach police departments to tell the public that Flock was "just an ALPR" and "only captured pictures of license plates", but meanwhile the software on the devic...
There is no “government” it’s companies - lobbying exists.
The cameras are for ads.
HN is complicit in this propaganda.
I'm genuinely taken aback by that.
On strict sites like these, everyone runs sock puppet accounts and throwaways directly in response to the moderation.
A site with nothing like that would have far fewer accounts and engagement.
Ah ha!
in either case, it really leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
YC is your villain.
Local governments are banning them, and/or cutting deals with investors
AI isn't an answer because that really means whoever is running, training, and prompting the AI.