Who do you expect to charge the woman with a crime: the local prosecutors who are basically cop-adjacent, Georgia's attorney general who supports the lawless ICE, or a federal prosecutor working under the Trump administration?
I mean, maybe you'd like to do something about it via a civil lawsuit, at which point you ought to acquaint yourself with something called "qualified immunity."
Police regularly slaughter those they swore to "protect and serve" and since they have qualified immunity nothing can ever happen to them. The purpose of a system is what it does.
I guess the way I'd put it is that we've been increasingly allowing and not punishing privacy breaches and government/authorities overstepping and after 20+ years of boiling the frog the latest, most extreme variant has pretty much pushed it over the edge of dystopian.
So it's not all Trump, but his administration has definitely pushed the lack of accountability to new heights and combining it with the new wave of surveillance tech with limited oversight or legislation it's all just become ingrained with nobody to fight it.
Most of the federal government predates the current administration. They really do want to follow the law. It's their job, not an ideology.
ICE is the President's personal force, screened for their loyalty to him. They have no interest in the law. The rest of the government doesn't like them any better than you do.
Its funny how nobody was making this argument when it was Obama ignoring international law to launch drone strikes on weddings and 18 yr old American citizens.
Ohh, your right! I forgot that the torture Obama was overseeing in Guantanamo was allowed by the constitution! He never violated anybody's rights, or broke any national laws!
Like I said, people only cry foul when its not 'their guy' disregarding the law and constitution. America has always been like this, and its only getting worse as both sides become more neurotic.
I know leftists were criticizing Obama for drone strikes. If the Republicans weren't criticizing Obama for murdering civilians, it's because they agreed with it. They attacked him on pretty much everything else, after all.
I also do not understand how this doesn't break stuff like CFAA.
If I worked at a company and gave my work login credentials to a friend and that friend used it to access my work's network then I'm pretty sure I'd go to jail.
Wonder how many low level Lowes or Home Depot asset protection employees would also happily hand their credentials over for nationwide search access, too.
Explain to me where in the Constitution it has a carve out for creating an incentive for a private company to gather and collate that data, and then using tax dollars to pay for it.
Home Depot was also one of the major backers of Cop City, sitting on the Atlanta Police Foundation [0] and pushing through a wholly undemocratic construction of a training facility [1] that resulted in the razing of the fourth largest remaining greenspace [2] in Atlanta so the cops could practice their swatting techniques.
I’m less surprised that such things are happening (much worse has been happening for over 20 years) than by the fact that many people seem to genuinely believe that voting, protesting, or calling some representative is going to get us out of this.
I think a generous interpretation of this comment is that voting, writing reps, and protesting (likely the permitted kind) are somewhat ineffectual at the level of policy change especially if the goal is federal-level change.
Even at the state level, you're still reined in by the fact that America operates on the slave economy logic that land represents people which results in rural communities that have a few hundred in population with the same table stakes as a rep in a million+ constituent district.
The end result is that effective organizing has to be hyperlocal - this means showing up to county/municipal council meetings, sitting on neighborhood planning groups, broadening awareness in your community via doorknocking and public events.
Some kinds of protesting, especially of the kind that seems pervasive with groups like No Kings and 50501, are effectively self-neutering. The vast majority of those protests are permitted with police escorts. It's superficially similar to protests of the past - people show up, they wave signs, they chant. But at it's heart, its not. The point of a protest is disruption - economic disruption, traffic blocking, etc - because that buys you leverage with the local government when you can say 'I can shut down your arteries at any time so meet me halfway with our demands.' Asking your local government liaison for permission to say mean things about a federal official does nothing except give them a chance for easy points with the crowd.
Is this any different, legally, than sharing your Netflix login etc?
Because the data is purchased, most jurisdictions don't require a warrant. The only legal issue I can see currently is that Flock lost revenue from having another subscriber.
A lot of downvotes for this comment but I think it's an interesting question and shouldn't be downvoted.
It's easy to argue (as lot of people have in this thread) that there is a huge moral difference between sharing access to a streaming service and sharing access to a mass surveillance tool.
But was any criminal law broken? Is it just a violation of Flock's ToS and the biggest consequence is the police department losing access for violating the contract?
It's an important question, because if there isn't really any legal consequences for any of the parties involved then it's worth understanding that and, hopefully, addressing!
If we interpret OP's question in good faith, I don't think they are implying that it should be legal, just asking if it is.
I think the annoying part is that it is clearly illegal under most understandings of the Fourth Amendment but because our legal processes are so byzantine and stuffed full of moldering corpses of prescriptivism past, it's unlikely we'll see any legal recourse here.
The additionally annoying aspect about the question is that this is something privacy advocates have been going on about for years. Ever since I started following the EFF in 2012, they've been warning about the rise in private sector mass surveillance and how it would lead to government CCTV. And now here we are, with Ring doorbells sharing data with LEOs and Flock everywhere.
So to hear 'is this illegal' says to me, at minimum, that a dearth of basic internet sleuthing has been done about this issue and the question was posed out of a complete lack of curiosity.
I don’t think anyone is implying that it not being illegal would make it ok.
It doesn’t seem like any criminal charges being brought in this case. So sure, an argument could be made that this violates the 4th amendment, but under the current application of the law this seems legal. Which means all and ICE agent needs to get access to flock data is a friend with access. Surely trying to understand that isn’t lazy or justifying anything?
I've heard bad faith 'if it's legal, it's fine' quite a few too many times to see it as anything except either intellectual laziness or simple bad faith. This is a rhetoric that always seems to pop up whenever anybody advocates for the ethical practice.
I also think it's a pointless exercise to understand the legality of it. Unless you're an actual civil rights attorney, a legislator, or some kind of judge, you, me, and everyone else here has effectively zero power over how the law is interpreted. We can debate all we want but it's a dance in the ivory tower, removed from realworld consequence.
The only real way to push against these forces is to join up with a community organization local to you, volunteer groups that often struggle with basic tech setup and resource tracking. Folks from HN could be a huge boon to the movement if they simply had the initiative to get involved.
There is a certain degree of irony in entirely misrepresenting my point by asserting it's somehow "bad faith."
I don't think it's fair to say that trying to understand if something is legal is a "dance in the ivory tower." Isn't a pretty important part in enacting change understand WHAT needs to change?
My point is this: Flock does not provide access to ICE, if using another person's login is a legal loophole around this then it needs to be specifically addressed and closed.
In no way am I justifying mass surveillance by arguing "if it's legal, it's fine."
I can't really follow. You say "I think the annoying part is that it is clearly illegal under most understandings of the Fourth Amendment," but at the same time say "I also think it's a pointless exercise to understand the legality of it."
I get the feeling the question being asked a bit leading, since you've been pretty hostile to me so far. I don't have a great answer, civil engagement and supporting politicians that also think it should be illegal for private companies to create gigantic mass surveillance dragnets?
The question is - how would you individually contribute to the movement of limiting mass surveillance? In the same way that we can all comment on a play made at a sports game, the actual effect of our commentary is nil except here the stakes are real and much higher.
I'm not being hostile and you're reading a lot of intent here for my frustration at apathetic armchair quarterbacking that I didn't direct at you.
I think I answered that question, note I didn't say "comment online" as a solution.
I guess I don't know who else it's directed at. I think it's important to understand the legality of our law enforcement's actions. I don't think that's an especially controversial take.
So your answer was "civil engagement and supporting politicians that also think it should be illegal"? Has that worked in the past on this issue? I asked that previously. What about in a post-Citizen's United world? How much an effect does your personal political speech have?
Not even a group, but just as an individual I was able to change a law enforcement practice. A local police force was posting misinformation about a new law that was going into effect and stated they planned to charge people with an M3 vs what the law says was a summary offense. I contacted the county DA and the local police pulled the misinformation and hopefully avoided incorrectly (maliciously) charging people.
So one district judge vs a myriad of circuit and Supreme Court judges. Typically ehen you have a lower level judge making a decision that goes against higher level decisions it's considered an error.
In this case, the customer utilizing the data without authorization also is known for killing Americans, and the data facilitates stalking their victims and their families.
We should be advocating for more accountability from the government and its representatives, not less.
dystopia
/dɪs'toʊpiə/
noun
A vision of a future that is a corrupted (usually beyond recognition) utopian society.
A miserable, dysfunctional state or society that has a very poor standard of living.
(medicine) Anatomical tissue that is not found in its usual place.
Neither dys- nor -topia relates to time. One can apply dystopia in the long time ago in a distant galaxy setup, in some future, in some alternative dimension, or in present time.
Eu- is a classic antonym morph for dys-, yes, and though rendered as u- is less usual it's still the same morpheme that one find in euphoria or euphony.
Both are classically used to name fiction places, starting with Thomas More eponymous book.
That said, neither eu- nor dys- are related to chronology or imaginative consideration on themselves, only about how desirable or awful the prefixed root is assessed to be in the judged situation.
It's almost never like that. Usually some team collaborates with some other team and sets something up with approval from departments A, B, and C with director X signing off. There's rarely one person you can point to. Also, wait a year and all those As, Bs, Cs, and Xs have switched to different roles or don't exist.
People understand that. I think Flock needs to be dismantled but I'm also a bit shocked (as much as one can be these days) that the login procedures are just a username and password from anywhere. Netflix has stronger access controls.
The dichotomy of our current age. On one hand, all knowing super thinking machines are just around the corner. Meanwhile, this. Almost seems like a feature and not a bug.
Is crazy that production databases at places I've worked are often harder to access than this. So much stuff they do with Flock access I would be fired for if I tried it with even vaguely sensitive customer data.
What's crazier is that it's basic username/password auth. That's a METEORIC security risk. Something like Flock should just be OAuth access tokens (no refreshers). Shoot, something like Flock shouldn't even _have_ its own auth provider.
In Chatrie v. United States (June 2026) the SCOTUS ruled that individuals maintain a reasonable expectation of privacy in their digital location history and that geofence warrants constitute a search under the 4th Amendment. It's only a matter of time until a similar case involving Flock comes before them and they rule that a search of the Flock database constitutes a search under the 4th Amendment and that every single search requires a specific warrant.
I think there have been a positive number of cases gone in favor of digital privacy recently. This being one of them. It’s unfortunate, but it’ll just take time for these manners to go through the courts.
I’m quite naive regarding the details of the legal system, wonder why we can’t expedite certain cases when a SCOTUS precedent has been established, or some form of expedited legal notice. We shouldn’t have to wait for a perfect case of a flock violation, then wait for someone to be brave enough to spend the money (or if pro bono just their time/reputation) to file a case and go through the system for the next x years
It's hope that Chatrie v. US automatically implies Flock searches require a warrant, but this is definitely not guaranteed - SCOTUS could easily go either way on this. For example, in his concurrence with the decision, Gorsuch relied on property rights, namely that Chatrie's agreement with Google regarding location history made this a warrant-required search. Obviously that doesn't apply in Flock's case.
SCOTUS has held for a long time that people don't have an expectation of privacy when visible in public. Digital recording and powerful search features certainly change the calculus on that, but there is a fundamental difference between a location tracked by a cellphone you purchased and own vs. just driving around where anyone can read your license plate.
> There is a fundamental difference between a location tracked by a cellphone you purchased and own vs. just driving around where anyone can read your license plate
I heavily disagree with the sentiment that modern 'ALPRs' are the same as following around an individual in public. No police officer, sheriff, state trooper, etc. is able to follow an individual across the entire country and catalog their every move 24/7. They have jurisdictions they're allowed to operate in. Additionally, the level of tracking these cameras provide (via their accompanying software) is nearly on par with placing a GPS tracker on a vehicle (which requires a warrant btw), and they're tracking every vehicle that passes, not just vehicles involved in a crime. Our travel history is protected by the 4th amendment because of the intimate details it can reveal about an individual's life. That is ultimately why Chatrie v. US was decided, not because of the specific technology utilized. It's the same case for Carpenter v. US and US v. Jones; both of which were instrumental in deciding the outcome of Chatrie.
I encourage people to go read the opinions of the justices that decided these cases. For example Justice Kegan had this to say in Chatrie v. US [1]:
> The Court began its analysis by reviewing what it had said about a different way of tracking “physical location and movements”: the use of a GPS device to monitor a vehicle. In United States v. Jones, five Justices had agreed that such tracking counts as a Fourth Amendment search because “individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the whole of their physical movements.” That made sense, the Carpenter Court thought, even though the movements occurred in public. Prior to the digital age, pursuing a suspect “for any extended period of time was difficult and costly and therefore rarely undertaken.” As a result, “society’s expectation has been that law enforcement agents and others would not—and indeed, in the main, simply could not—secretly monitor and catalogue every single movement of an individual’s car.” A new technology should not transform what individuals had reasonably thought they could withhold from the Government.
FWIW, I totally agree with you, that's why I wrote "Digital recording and powerful search features certainly change the calculus".
But my point was just that it's absolutely not a fait accompli given the current makeup of SCOTUS. Gorsuch' rationale doesn't fit within Kagan's at all and is wholly dependent on the private relationship between Google and the consumer, so that brings it to 5-4, and I could easily see Roberts or Kavanagh (who voted with the majority in Chatrie) finding enough differences between the circumstances in Chatrie compared to Flock to change their vote.
Every time law enforcement is given surveillance tools the same thing happens, the people with legal and approved access will abuse it.
Politicians are completely naive in their understand how people works, if it's abused, the system isn't locked down enough or that one person circumvented the procedure. They completely fail to understand that there exists people to whom you cannot grant access and screening people in advance probably impossible. Some cop checks all the boxes, gets access to databases, then their partner leaves them and they are now no longer safe to grant access.
I don't understand why it's hard to grasp that surveillance tools are dangerous and rather using them to protect others, law enforcement will use these tools to do bad things. It's as if that we assume that cops are better people and follow rules better. Even in countries that actually train their police force this isn't remotely true.
The US might be different, I doubt it, but society is getting increasingly SAFE, there is less and less need to these tools.
It’s such a shame that media (social and traditional) really plays up loss aversion. My local news is basically fear mongering. My local social media page is filled with people who have nothing better to do with their time than complain about all of the negative stuff happening in this town. They take every isolated incident and project it as some major pattern. It’s really sad.
My local news just did a whole special program on high profile plane issues/crashes. Modern ones, like over the last few years. I saw an ad for it yesterday I was just so grossed out by the flagrant fear mongering. Pieces like that have real world consequences.
They aren’t doing hard hitting journalism exposing negligence, they are making people terrified of planes. They’re stressing people out about something that is not reasonably within their control AND it’s not a real risk for us all. The numbers don’t support scaring people over this.
To some extend I'd argue that even true crime shows are complicit. Hour long "documentaries" about obscure murders 40 years in a place you're not entirely sure exists. The streaming services just keeps digging deeper and deeper for anything that could lure in viewers, covering crimes that you wouldn't have known of 20 years ago.
This is a great point, and one that really isn't played up because it doesn't fit the whole profit-from-attention narrative that literally every media surface seems to be following.
It almost seems as if law enforcement 'need' these additional tools to keep them busy; find new, more trivial crime that's been hiding behind no one reporting it or being hurt by it.
Maybe if law enforcement resources could be applied to more corporate crime, that'd keep em busy till the cows come home.
not really, it's about having less dumb cops and having more specialists roles. Spending less money on weapons of war and more on training and education.
I don't expect many people to be okay with justice being enforce by the average citizen.
People will always have conflicts from time to time, the only question is whether we let them deal with it themselves or have an authority with a uniform and a badge who is supposed to be trustworthy enough to handle it.
> whether we let them deal with it themselves or have an authority with a uniform and a badge who is supposed to be trustworthy enough to handle it
a trial by jury is the closest thing i think to a compromise between those two, where someones societal peers decide whether there even is a conflict and then who is "guilty"
a trustworthy person is needed to haul the relevant parties to the quorum and then deal with punishments, though with cell phones and cameras everywhere these days...
Agreed, I do appreciate the concept of a jury of your peers though I think we've gone down the wrong path as they're implemented today.
The courts have done a great job demonizing jury nullification, for example. In my opinion that's a feature not a bug, it gives the public a say over what laws they agree with enforcing.
I've also seen far too many examples of cases that seem blatantly unproven but forced through because of a combination of poor defence council and politically hot topics that the DA seems to want under their belt.
There's a whole host of laws that people break daily. Even a book about it "3 felonies a day".
Most of those 'crimes' shouldnt be. And thats what parts of the jury nullification movements are all about; judging the law BEFORE judging the person.
Also the more data captured about every human, the more criminality can be found, especially in things that shouldnt have ever been criminal. And having higher "bust" numbers and proof of evil criminality element (regular humans doing normal things that are criminalized by the elite) then allows them to write bigger checks for more pervasive surveillance.
Its the classic long tail, and exponential cost increases for of a logarithmic decay of detection.
Our society could restart with a good review of all laws. And those laws with nobody else harmed should be scrapped.
>what happens when society solves its issues and theres no need to 'keep them busy' :(
Look at the engineering and surveying firms over the past 50yr. Cops will likely see something like that. Like they'll get written into all sorts of laws and processes despite the scope of the "value" they provide being narrower than ever.
It'll turn into a low effort make-work job. Like Realtors(TM) with extra steps to justify their existence.
Like no amount of 1080p Ring footage of your door getting kicked in will suffice, the insurance company will not believe your house has been broken into until a certified license holding cop shows up and signs it.
He knew it would be stupid to post that tweet. He had actually said to himself, as he thumbed-up the "send" gesture, "It's probably stupid to post this tweet." But he'd done it anyway. He was mad, he needed to vent. The internet would know just how, his joining in with a cacophony of other angry voices. He hadn't given his own concern a second thought at the time, though, nor of the 8chan brigade that immediately descended from the cyber-ether to light up his n-list with death threats, hate speech, his address (or, at least the fake one he spoofed), his phone number (ditto). That was normal. The people who wrote these things were typically hundreds of miles away, where the conservative half of the country had anaphased years earlier. There were, of course, always the stories of young black men, reckless online, being dragged out of their homes, never seen again. But in a world ruled by informed probabilistic behavior, an educated adult worried little about things with a 1/10000th chance of killing you.
But then he'd gotten the email. The one on his personal account. The account his parents had set up for him as a child, that was only used for official business, that he was to guard more closely than an SSN (after all, it was worth more). The email that included his real address, his real phone number. And suddenly, he didn't feel safe in his apartment anymore. So he'd stayed home from work, begun packing clothes, batteries, replacement s-cells, food; backed up and wiped his home storage, just to be safe. That took too long. It was another thing he shouldn't have done.
At 6:45 pm, a knock sounded on the door, and a gruff voice announced, "POLICE, OPEN UP," and his heart froze in his chest. This was how it always started. It was a callback to when there WERE police: before the public lost confidence in law enforcement; before their rights to weapons, their unofficial immunity in the courtroom, all of that, was stripped, deemed too dangerous in the hands of an institution rife with corruption and abuse; before departments around the nation, unable or unwilling to face a reality where they had to use amiable coercion rather than cruel force to maintain order, disbanded en masse; before the people, true to the American spirit of ingenuity, turned to technology and dogged practice to self-police their own communities.
That had been the good news. Ubiquitous personal surveillance, accountability to one's neighbors, and a nationalized forensics service that provided unbiased expertise when necessary had lowered crime to previously unimaginable levels (after a brief rise, during which many activities previously deemed crimes were recognized as the treatable social dysfunction that they were). The bad news was that many of America's men in blue were unprepared for the realities of unemployment, being unemployable, pariah-hood. So some - a fractional minority, to be sure, but enough - fell back on what they knew, the core traditions ensconced and enshrined in police practice from the days when departments had first formed, as slave-catchers and Ku Klux Klan offshoots, security for the wealthy or for sundown town residents: they ganged up and started killing n*ggers and poor people.
(Originally written in 2015, a few months after the Ferguson protests and shortly after Freddie Gray was murdered.)
Indeed, in my experience all these tools do is offset policing to "easy" crimes and the harder problems continually get ignored. It's largely been accepted in my city, for example, that traffic enforcement no longer happens.
Law enforcement largely exists in the US to protect Corporate crime. Has done since it's beginnings as an institution, finding roots in the south in slave patrols, and roots in the north in protecting private property.
The cops are not now nor have they ever been an institution to protect the people, they are there to protect the Peace. What's the Peace? Largely seems to be whatever makes the rich people happy.
This seems like a pretty abstract claim to me. What does "protect the people" mean vs "whatever makes the rich people happy"? There are laws on the books which the police enforce.
Now, I agree that the police are not your friends, and they are incentivized to find crimes when there may not really be any at times, but I disagree with the notion that they are simply the lapdogs of the wealthy. In fact, it seems like in a lot of places in California it's the law-abiding, wealthier citizens that are hassled most by the police for minor infractions, because they know they can actually extract revenue from them.
You work at a retail store. You take $100 from the till. They have you on camera. Management calls cops, and has you arrested for misdemeanor theft. You spend night in jail.
You work in retail store. You log in at 9am. And your manager was told to cut payroll and edits your (and 9 other peoples) timecards to the tune of $1000. You catch this. Management refuses to correct it and/or punish the manager. Nobody is arrested. You're told this is a civil issue.
Wage theft is larger than all other theft combined, but treated as a civil, not criminal matter. I wonder why.
You secured your expensive road bike ($2000) cause its your primary transportation. You put a gps tag on it, so if its ever stolen, you can make the appropriate report and retrieval. The lock was cut, and the bike taken. Its at a nearby house. You report it. Cops wont take report and wont get the stolen property. You even have definite proof. They dont care, and they dont have to.
Target (retailer) has a policy to let people steal from them, and to do facial recognition until a thief surpasses the statutory felony limit (usually $1000). THEY send a report to the police, which isnt ignored, and the police go do the corporates' dirty work and arrest the alleged perpetrator.
During the 1980's there was well known pushes (by Biden etm) to criminalize cocaine severely. But the cocaine they punished wasnt the white powder. That was used predominantly by executives. Instead, the heavy criminalization focused on crack cocaine, which was used predominantly by the lower (poor, black) people. Punishments were upwards of 10x disparity against the poor classes.
The misattributed quote "If the penalty for a crime is a fine, then that law only exists for the lower class" (to Final Fantasy Tactics, not true attribution), is something we see all the time.
Anthropic - mass for-profit copyright fraud against the public? Fine.
All insurance - if you lie? Insurance fraud. If they lie, get rekt and die or something.
Banks - guilty of mass laundering and made $50B? Oh, $2B fine. $48B profit. If a human did that, theyd go to jail for decades.
These disparities exist everywhere in "law". Law only defends elite, wealthy, donor class, and well known monied local elites. It almost never defends the average wronged citizen.
Almost every middle/lower class ill disappears if you eliminate wage theft and close the tax loopholes that wealthy people take advantage of. They're massive distortions of the economic machinery, and no one should be surprised that things don't make sense even when circumstances are "normal".
I have this conversation with neighbors almost weekly, and I’ve had a bunch of them just say that I’m wrong with no real evidence or, and this is verbatim, “it doesn’t feel safer.”
This conversation is usually about how no one lets their kids play outside unsupervised anymore, but it applies to police as well. In Georgia they had to pass a law telling police they couldn’t arrest parents who let their kids go outside by themselves. The inciting incident literally had a police officer lecturing a mother about how many sickos are out there and then putting her in cuffs because her 10-year-old was a mile away by himself. Even since then, DFCS has been caught bullying parents into signing an agreement saying they were negligent and agreeing to a restrictive safety plan because they let their kid go to a nearby playground by themself.
It is insane and depressing about how people willingly restrict their lives and their kids lives because of the mistaken belief that the world isn’t as safe as it was when they were a kid. Not only that, but if you let your kids play outside without you, then you risk your neighbors calling the police on you and having to deal with whatever bs comes from that.
I have feeling that how safe you feel is correlates strongly to your media diet, and weakly to your surroundings. I'd be curious to see what studies have been done.
I heard about this story somewhere and couldn’t really believe it. I also thought that the US/German comparison videos about the fact we Germans let our kids go to school alone etc are a bit over the top.
Seems no.
But to be fair. Also in Germany things around security have changed. Where it was normal in my youth that my parents had actually no clue where I was while I was roaming the streets of Berlin (Courtesy to a Berlin wide public transport ticket I got for school). Today that doesn’t fly anymore. Kids have phones and get tracked every step. It’s the more controlled level of freedom.
Another connected anecdote that left me puzzled at the time: I spend some days in D.C last year (right before the National Guard got deployed) and wanted to do a short run from the Hotel. It was already going dark and I didn’t check for the weather and asked at the desk if it was ok outside to run. The answer was “yes it’s pretty safe around here.”
See my mind never made the connection that something harmful would be out there waiting for me.
I think it's only safer since we're doing less. We're more immobile; sitting on our phones, TVs, iPads. We order stuff online instead of going to the store. There's also less adventure without immediate reconciliation. We can corroborate if what we're doing out-and-about is correct from a simple google search anywhere, which reduces person-to-person interaction.
The issue is overpopulation. In an underpopulated area neighbors tend to be neighbors, in an overpopulated one they tend to call police on your noisy kids to take you down a peg.
> This conversation is usually about how no one lets their kids play outside unsupervised anymore,
Those two show overall fear is higher, not that reasonable fear is higher.
There's so much in current society that sells fear, that I'm not surprised. FOMO for the next Musk stock promotion. Stalkers, scammers, pedophiles. Burglar alarms being sold with a subscription at 70% profit margins (Verisure here in Sweden.) I recently calculated that I'd pay about $300k-600k in fees for every actual burglary where I live. The insurance deductible is way way lower than that, and I doubt they'd actually change the outcome. Incidentally, insurance companies care about water and fire damage, not burglary. But the scary marketing video with masked men in your garage sells well...
Of course, insurance is a a whole other chapter on selling fear. Sometimes warranted, mostly not. The Freetrailer app, used to book and pay for trailers, defaults to me paying for a deductibility reduction. With a big fat warning if I remove that, that if something happens, I might be liable for up to $700!
Not to mention the economy is always just one bad quarter away from a 1929 crash.
I blame media (new and old) for the fearmongering that sells my attention on low probability outcomes.
The internet has enabled essentially instant communication between any two or more parties anywhere on the planet.
The next 1929 is going to happen faster than the last one, with less warning, and the impact will be more widespread.
Or ...
We'll all see it coming ahead of time, behave perfectly rationally, and avoid the crisis entirely.
Based on how we handled 9/11, and spent 20 years and $20 trillion to get 1 guy, im preparing for the former, not the later, because most people are not rational in the face of a crisis.
> The next 1929 is going to happen faster than the last one
For sure, and for reasons we can't imagine today.
I sometimes think about nuclear accidents. It seems very unlikely that we've already seen the worst accident that will ever be. Same goes for so many technologies less than 100 years old. Safety standards need to go up in parity with the scaling up to keep MTBF in check. Given what I've seen of human greed, I hold only partial hope that'll happen as energy demands increase. Hopefully batteries, wind, solar and regulatory oversight are enough.
This is so depressing; my parents in the late 60’s/early 70’s would be serving a life sentence for negligence according to current standards, given how utterly (but basically harmlessly) feral we were back in the day.
A friend of mine had the cops called on her by a neighbor because her kids were playing in the front yard and she wasn't out there with them.
I don't know what world people here live in, but I am not expecting kids in a front yard in the middle of the day in a quiet neighborhood on a dead end road to be snatched up.
Could it happen? Sure. Should we force our kids to live under fear that it will happen as soon as a parent isn't watching them? Absolutely not.
IANAL but the warrant part of this will probably not be what will get them. Unauthorized access for the husband and conspiring on the part of the wife seems like the logical path.
As a general policy, every policy and system should be designed with the worst possible user in mind.
- German address registers with religious affiliation were a good idea until the Nazis came to power.
- Pegasus spyware was developed and sold to governments to fight terrorism and serious crime — until it was used to spy on journalists, human rights activists and political opponents, including in authoritarian states.
- Rwandan identity cards listed ethnicity for administrative purposes — until militias used them to identify and execute Tutsis at roadblocks during the 1994 genocide.
Bottom line: Even if you trust the current administration (do you?), are you sure you want 5o give that power to all future ones?
There was a time in the US I really thought we were different. I genuinely didn’t fear our government. I didn’t think the types of people that did such atrocities existed in numbers and that they’d immediately be removed once it was determined they snuck into office.
Now I fully believe it can happen here and that those people are in office now and that a non-trivial percentage of the US public would be Ok with those atrocities happening in the US.
We have really turned into the opening act of a terrible dystopian movie.
<< The US might be different, I doubt it, but society is getting increasingly SAFE, there is less and less need for these tools.
Oh man, I have to assume you live in a nice little enclave and are reading old statistical reports. I have the misfortune of sometimes having to travel into the city. I can assure you, it is not getting safer. In fact, just last week I saw first sign of Chicago turning into Philly.
This chart is up to 2024. If you look up 2025 and 2026 data for the US you will see that it has continued to decline YoY.
Judging by your comment I assume that you have personally witnessed some criminality recently and are drawing conclusions about the entire US, if so I’m sorry you had to endure that, but that doesn’t mean that your conclusions apply to the general trend in the US as the GP was referring to.
Sure, sure, just a major metropolitan area in the midwest and not a barometer for anything at all. One would think that either stats are misleading or my population sample is wrong.
But I have no need to convince anyone. It is just weird to me that I need to explain the obvious.
:D Friend, allow me to make light of this conversation for the benefit of all.
I am sure that you are familiar with an expression of being hit by lightning indicating some relatively low chance of an event[1]. Now, imagine walking around with a rather conductive flagpole everywhere you go, do you think you would up or lower your odds ( edit: for a lightning to strike ).
Maybe it is true that I don't discuss statistics the way you do. After all, I merely apply them to real life.
But then again, I don't walk around during thunderstorm waiting to be struck.
In other words, you are wrong. Individual actions affecting chance are very much relevant to discussion about statistics.
Exactly my thought. It is so naive to think that this is not going better than planned. Imagine having dozens, if not hundreds of crimes, and still get away of all of them because you got a new job.
> Politicians are completely naive in their understand how people works, if it's abused, the system isn't locked down enough or that one person circumvented the procedure.
That's being charitable. Complicit is far more likely, any system like that plays to benefit of the ruling party as you can use it to suppress the people that would vote you out.
We live in a world where a guy had complete access to the entire CIA then NSA's illegal infrastructure. And did walk away with all the documents. Not like anyone cares to protect citizen.
> The US might be different, I doubt it, but society is getting increasingly SAFE, there is less and less need for these tools.
Crime rates could be going up, that still wouldn't justify broad, warrantless spying on the public. We have rights and they aren't conditional on crime rates.
I wouldn't offer bad policing and bad prosecution the benefit of "shouldn't." They can attempt to enforce the way they want, our rights still supersede crime rates and fear.
LEOs being a certain type of people is a big part of the problem. Compare to corporate IT, who have huge surveillance powers within their companies, but virtually none of them use it beyond their actual job duties.
I suspect it's human nature, earlier today I was reading about how some hospital staff had been fired [in the UK] for looking up details of patients they shouldn't have been involved with.
They should have known better, but despite constant training people just seem unable to help themselves.
Hospital staff have a certain reputation too. I've even heard nursing career being described as the female counterpart of police career, in that both of them attract the exact same type of person for the exact same reason (having people's lives in their hands). Can't say from my own experience if it's true or not, but I heard it often enough that I'm not terribly surprised.
Have you considered the possibility that the politicians know this, and also don’t care?
I think you’re misunderstanding that they think are part of the populace. They do not. They do not think they’re at your level. That’s why they got in the politics. That’s why they’ve been successful at it.
Go spend some time around with police higher ups if you don’t think that they also believe that they’re a class of nobility.
The constitution bars titles of nobility, so to achieve the status of nobility, you print the title you want on a business card, and attend group meetings once a week, where your perceived status and nobility are reinforced by an institutional echo chamber that will dispose of you in a heartbeat to save itself.
> Politicians are completely naive in their understand how people works, if it's abused, the system isn't locked down enough or that one person circumvented the procedure. They completely fail to understand that there exists people to whom you cannot grant access and screening people in advance probably impossible. Some cop checks all the boxes, gets access to databases, then their partner leaves them and they are now no longer safe to grant access.
I don’t think it’s naïveté. I think it’s an acceptable byproduct to them. It’s collateral damage in their war on ??? crime? insecurity? or in their lobby kickbacks.
Good point. A lot of politicians are in fact in favor of (or at least indifferent towards) increased state surveillance for the sake of asserting the state’s power over the working public.
Politicians want a strong law enforcement that protects the status quo of an upper class who has impunity regarding the law to the point where they can host a sex trafficking ring on a private island.
Working people used to have vandalism and sabotage as a tactic when the state and capital wrought the working public this way, but with the modern surveillance state this tactic has been completely neutralized. This is the world that politicians want.
You don’t need to wonder what they are thinking. The Palantir CEO put out a manifesto that spells it out pretty explicitly. He literally says, in plain English, more surveillance on the underclass, less scrutiny on the owning class. This is the prevailing ideology among those in power.
Time after time I feel like this is the Luddite path.
Law enforcement can already do incredibly privacy-invading things, and we’re ok with it. House searches (with a warrant), arrests (with probable cause), etc. It’s tightly controlled and can’t be used on a whim.
I feel technology should absolutely be a part of policing, and also tightly controlled, just as these other powers are.
You're assuming that politicians aren't aligned with mass surveillance of the populous to the point that they don't care whether allowing it to be in the hands of those that will abuse it is granted.
> Interim Maj. Max Nowinsky sustained the allegation and recommended an eight-hour suspension
Lots of explanations here for wanting to go easy on her. Is the same logic applied for the many victims of a police department? If it's preferential treatment then maybe Interim Maj. Max Nowinsky should also be kicked to the curb.
> Tyler Harpe, a federal ICE agent
Federal ICE agent Tyler Harpe, may you enjoy your new found fame.
@Americans who laugh at China and Russia thinking you're still better off in freedom and rights: That is exactly how you look like to the rest of the world.
I'm not completely opposed to 'camera, cell, solar, battery on a pole'. Its pretty low tech honestly... But there absolutely be a minimum standard of search warrant approval in front of a judge before using it. AND it should be a criminal offense to use it without a search warrant.
However there's this whole problem of "illegal for government to do it but whitewashing through for profit company to do illegal thing".
Anything that can be abused through collusion in a wide scale scenario will eventually happen.
This is not a contingent issue, it’s a fundamental integrated flaw of any system that put general totalitarian spy as an aimed outcome. Whatever the way it’s green-washed over safety tradeoffs won’t change this obvious fact.
Unfortunately the darker reason is that the authorities / ruling class know that they don't need the public to accept these things. Americans will allow basically any abuse.
Now I'm not saying the Americans should look to France for inspiration, ...
I think "the authorities" don't care and that they seem to be able to force these systems on folks anyhow, and that the if->then syllogism you propose doesn't work.
The people committing these kinds of crimes don't seem to understand them as crimes and believe they will not and should not be punished. Further, the people who those folks report to seem to feel the same way.
I see them as crimes.
I am, however, ambivalent about what punishment should look like because the entirety of the carcerial system in the US (and the so-called immigration systesm) are so rotten to their cores that I just give up on them. It doesn't matter -what- I think because, as this kind of event shows, we do not in fact live in a system that represents me in any meaningful sense.
That's bad, and and it's not local to me. After all "those who make peaceful change impossible..." and such.
But I don't agree that they won't get the politically orthodox folks in the US to accept these systems; they seem to already have accepted them.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, the abuse is tangential to the fact that "the system working as intended" is designed to comprehensively and cheaply subjugate us all to the whims of whoever or whatever has the ear of government at any particular minute.
If you wave a magic wand and fix the abuse you will not fix the very nature and purpose of these systems. 1984 would not magically become acceptable if cops couldn't stalk their girlfriend or creds could not be shared among agencies off the books.
A large enough to be a problem subset of the people decrying abuse fancy themselves an armchair central planner (the more self aware ones fancy themselves armchair despots). In the back of their mind they're thinking "if only we got rid of the abuse then the public would buy into this Orwellian system then I could get the government enforce my pet policies with an iron fist and get minimal pushback". Beware of these people. They are the true evil. They all seek to take a bite out of your day to day freedom and it doesn't take all that many of them getting their way before there is nothing left. The politicians feeling emboldened to sign contracts with Flock or any other surveillance vendor only feel emboldened to do so due to the existence and frequency of these people.
Abuse or not these systems are rotten and incompatible on a fundamental level with a free society.
> the abuse is tangential to the fact that "the system working as intended" is designed to comprehensively and cheaply subjugate us all to the whims of whoever or whatever has the ear of government at any particular minute.
I'm reminded of a "hah hah, only serious" joke/slang popularized by EverQuest players: Broken as intended.
This used to be called "running a date" by law enforcement when checking up on some pretty face. That abuse is part of what led to the Driver's Privacy Protection Act. When I worked for my state's motor vehicle agency, there were training videos about what was and wasn't allowed. It won't happen under this administration, but ALPR systems should be legislated as covered by DPPA.
There are probably systems that even if they should exist (debatable for some), they should do so only in secured facilities that the government worker must badge into physically to access.
This would at least reduce some of the avenues for abuse.
And ICE in turn guns down US citizens, as is already documented.
This is literally a repeat, with modification, of Europe in the
1930s. It is not 1:1 comparable, also in part because the US
justice system, even if undermined by orange scumbag loyalists,
works to some extent still. I am not saying all of it works, but
on youtube you can often listen to discussions by several judges
discussing issues at hand. I forgot which one it was, but it was
linked in "Audit the Audit", and the judges there asked very good,
and very objective questions. In the end they denied a cop immunity
by default, based on very logical arguments they made. I was quite
surprised when I listened to that. It also means that the Trump
oligarch team is not able to kill all of the US justice system,
even though they placed their agents into it already.
Ironic that defending "justice" makes them to break several laws.
It is almost like they are always on the verge of not respecting the laws anyway until they are the ones controlling the laws.
What could possibly go wrong?
233 comments
[ 0.32 ms ] story [ 11.0 ms ] threadAnd while federal crimes are legal now, couldn't it be against state law too?
Who do you expect to charge the woman with a crime: the local prosecutors who are basically cop-adjacent, Georgia's attorney general who supports the lawless ICE, or a federal prosecutor working under the Trump administration?
I mean, maybe you'd like to do something about it via a civil lawsuit, at which point you ought to acquaint yourself with something called "qualified immunity."
Living in a police state is fun, right?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%BChrerprinzip
So it's not all Trump, but his administration has definitely pushed the lack of accountability to new heights and combining it with the new wave of surveillance tech with limited oversight or legislation it's all just become ingrained with nobody to fight it.
ICE is the President's personal force, screened for their loyalty to him. They have no interest in the law. The rest of the government doesn't like them any better than you do.
The president has always ignored the law.
Like I said, people only cry foul when its not 'their guy' disregarding the law and constitution. America has always been like this, and its only getting worse as both sides become more neurotic.
If I worked at a company and gave my work login credentials to a friend and that friend used it to access my work's network then I'm pretty sure I'd go to jail.
And just about everyone in the position to prosecute them actively wants this, so this is just another example of laundering the blame.
Assuming that’s true, why wouldn’t he have his own flock account to do his searches?
Local & state agencies can affirmatively choose to opt-in to sharing with ICE/HSI, except in California and Virginia where it is banned.
Last two visits, some guy named "Victor" shadowed me, and made it a point to call me by my first name twice.
I spent as little money at Home Depot as possible now.
[0] https://roughdraftatlanta.com/2023/06/30/atlanta-police-arre...
[1] https://truthout.org/articles/despite-116000-signatures-atla...
[2] https://insideclimatenews.org/news/08032023/atlanta-cop-city...
We spend most of our money at ACE or just order directly from manufacturers online.
Town canceled their contracts, the stock went down.
Two measurable metrics
Even at the state level, you're still reined in by the fact that America operates on the slave economy logic that land represents people which results in rural communities that have a few hundred in population with the same table stakes as a rep in a million+ constituent district.
The end result is that effective organizing has to be hyperlocal - this means showing up to county/municipal council meetings, sitting on neighborhood planning groups, broadening awareness in your community via doorknocking and public events.
Some kinds of protesting, especially of the kind that seems pervasive with groups like No Kings and 50501, are effectively self-neutering. The vast majority of those protests are permitted with police escorts. It's superficially similar to protests of the past - people show up, they wave signs, they chant. But at it's heart, its not. The point of a protest is disruption - economic disruption, traffic blocking, etc - because that buys you leverage with the local government when you can say 'I can shut down your arteries at any time so meet me halfway with our demands.' Asking your local government liaison for permission to say mean things about a federal official does nothing except give them a chance for easy points with the crowd.
Because the data is purchased, most jurisdictions don't require a warrant. The only legal issue I can see currently is that Flock lost revenue from having another subscriber.
It's easy to argue (as lot of people have in this thread) that there is a huge moral difference between sharing access to a streaming service and sharing access to a mass surveillance tool.
But was any criminal law broken? Is it just a violation of Flock's ToS and the biggest consequence is the police department losing access for violating the contract?
It's an important question, because if there isn't really any legal consequences for any of the parties involved then it's worth understanding that and, hopefully, addressing!
If we interpret OP's question in good faith, I don't think they are implying that it should be legal, just asking if it is.
The additionally annoying aspect about the question is that this is something privacy advocates have been going on about for years. Ever since I started following the EFF in 2012, they've been warning about the rise in private sector mass surveillance and how it would lead to government CCTV. And now here we are, with Ring doorbells sharing data with LEOs and Flock everywhere.
So to hear 'is this illegal' says to me, at minimum, that a dearth of basic internet sleuthing has been done about this issue and the question was posed out of a complete lack of curiosity.
It doesn’t seem like any criminal charges being brought in this case. So sure, an argument could be made that this violates the 4th amendment, but under the current application of the law this seems legal. Which means all and ICE agent needs to get access to flock data is a friend with access. Surely trying to understand that isn’t lazy or justifying anything?
I also think it's a pointless exercise to understand the legality of it. Unless you're an actual civil rights attorney, a legislator, or some kind of judge, you, me, and everyone else here has effectively zero power over how the law is interpreted. We can debate all we want but it's a dance in the ivory tower, removed from realworld consequence.
The only real way to push against these forces is to join up with a community organization local to you, volunteer groups that often struggle with basic tech setup and resource tracking. Folks from HN could be a huge boon to the movement if they simply had the initiative to get involved.
I don't think it's fair to say that trying to understand if something is legal is a "dance in the ivory tower." Isn't a pretty important part in enacting change understand WHAT needs to change?
My point is this: Flock does not provide access to ICE, if using another person's login is a legal loophole around this then it needs to be specifically addressed and closed.
In no way am I justifying mass surveillance by arguing "if it's legal, it's fine."
I get the feeling the question being asked a bit leading, since you've been pretty hostile to me so far. I don't have a great answer, civil engagement and supporting politicians that also think it should be illegal for private companies to create gigantic mass surveillance dragnets?
I'm not being hostile and you're reading a lot of intent here for my frustration at apathetic armchair quarterbacking that I didn't direct at you.
I guess I don't know who else it's directed at. I think it's important to understand the legality of our law enforcement's actions. I don't think that's an especially controversial take.
https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/dekalb-county/statue-john-l...
https://atlanta.capitalbnews.org/atlanta-communities-fight-d...
And these are just the movements I've personally been involved with. There's plenty of other examples rarely covered by mass media.
Source?
I think the legal understanding are different than the colloquial one you are thinking of.
We should be advocating for more accountability from the government and its representatives, not less.
dystopia /dɪs'toʊpiə/ noun A vision of a future that is a corrupted (usually beyond recognition) utopian society. A miserable, dysfunctional state or society that has a very poor standard of living. (medicine) Anatomical tissue that is not found in its usual place.
Neither dys- nor -topia relates to time. One can apply dystopia in the long time ago in a distant galaxy setup, in some future, in some alternative dimension, or in present time.
Thanks. I'll be here all week.
Both are classically used to name fiction places, starting with Thomas More eponymous book.
That said, neither eu- nor dys- are related to chronology or imaginative consideration on themselves, only about how desirable or awful the prefixed root is assessed to be in the judged situation.
[reality] It's just the police, beating us with better batons, same as it ever was.
I’m quite naive regarding the details of the legal system, wonder why we can’t expedite certain cases when a SCOTUS precedent has been established, or some form of expedited legal notice. We shouldn’t have to wait for a perfect case of a flock violation, then wait for someone to be brave enough to spend the money (or if pro bono just their time/reputation) to file a case and go through the system for the next x years
SCOTUS has held for a long time that people don't have an expectation of privacy when visible in public. Digital recording and powerful search features certainly change the calculus on that, but there is a fundamental difference between a location tracked by a cellphone you purchased and own vs. just driving around where anyone can read your license plate.
I heavily disagree with the sentiment that modern 'ALPRs' are the same as following around an individual in public. No police officer, sheriff, state trooper, etc. is able to follow an individual across the entire country and catalog their every move 24/7. They have jurisdictions they're allowed to operate in. Additionally, the level of tracking these cameras provide (via their accompanying software) is nearly on par with placing a GPS tracker on a vehicle (which requires a warrant btw), and they're tracking every vehicle that passes, not just vehicles involved in a crime. Our travel history is protected by the 4th amendment because of the intimate details it can reveal about an individual's life. That is ultimately why Chatrie v. US was decided, not because of the specific technology utilized. It's the same case for Carpenter v. US and US v. Jones; both of which were instrumental in deciding the outcome of Chatrie.
I encourage people to go read the opinions of the justices that decided these cases. For example Justice Kegan had this to say in Chatrie v. US [1]:
> The Court began its analysis by reviewing what it had said about a different way of tracking “physical location and movements”: the use of a GPS device to monitor a vehicle. In United States v. Jones, five Justices had agreed that such tracking counts as a Fourth Amendment search because “individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the whole of their physical movements.” That made sense, the Carpenter Court thought, even though the movements occurred in public. Prior to the digital age, pursuing a suspect “for any extended period of time was difficult and costly and therefore rarely undertaken.” As a result, “society’s expectation has been that law enforcement agents and others would not—and indeed, in the main, simply could not—secretly monitor and catalogue every single movement of an individual’s car.” A new technology should not transform what individuals had reasonably thought they could withhold from the Government.
[1] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25-112_0am4.pdf
But my point was just that it's absolutely not a fait accompli given the current makeup of SCOTUS. Gorsuch' rationale doesn't fit within Kagan's at all and is wholly dependent on the private relationship between Google and the consumer, so that brings it to 5-4, and I could easily see Roberts or Kavanagh (who voted with the majority in Chatrie) finding enough differences between the circumstances in Chatrie compared to Flock to change their vote.
Politicians are completely naive in their understand how people works, if it's abused, the system isn't locked down enough or that one person circumvented the procedure. They completely fail to understand that there exists people to whom you cannot grant access and screening people in advance probably impossible. Some cop checks all the boxes, gets access to databases, then their partner leaves them and they are now no longer safe to grant access.
I don't understand why it's hard to grasp that surveillance tools are dangerous and rather using them to protect others, law enforcement will use these tools to do bad things. It's as if that we assume that cops are better people and follow rules better. Even in countries that actually train their police force this isn't remotely true.
The US might be different, I doubt it, but society is getting increasingly SAFE, there is less and less need to these tools.
It’s such a shame that media (social and traditional) really plays up loss aversion. My local news is basically fear mongering. My local social media page is filled with people who have nothing better to do with their time than complain about all of the negative stuff happening in this town. They take every isolated incident and project it as some major pattern. It’s really sad.
They aren’t doing hard hitting journalism exposing negligence, they are making people terrified of planes. They’re stressing people out about something that is not reasonably within their control AND it’s not a real risk for us all. The numbers don’t support scaring people over this.
Fear keeps people from starting their own company, so they'll return to work on Monday.
See it for what it is. Another system of control.
"Disturbed - The Vengeful One (Official Music Video) [4K UPGRADE]"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nW-IPrzM1g
This is a great point, and one that really isn't played up because it doesn't fit the whole profit-from-attention narrative that literally every media surface seems to be following.
It almost seems as if law enforcement 'need' these additional tools to keep them busy; find new, more trivial crime that's been hiding behind no one reporting it or being hurt by it.
Maybe if law enforcement resources could be applied to more corporate crime, that'd keep em busy till the cows come home.
what happens when society solves its issues and theres no need to 'keep them busy' :(
People will always have conflicts from time to time, the only question is whether we let them deal with it themselves or have an authority with a uniform and a badge who is supposed to be trustworthy enough to handle it.
a trial by jury is the closest thing i think to a compromise between those two, where someones societal peers decide whether there even is a conflict and then who is "guilty"
a trustworthy person is needed to haul the relevant parties to the quorum and then deal with punishments, though with cell phones and cameras everywhere these days...
The courts have done a great job demonizing jury nullification, for example. In my opinion that's a feature not a bug, it gives the public a say over what laws they agree with enforcing.
I've also seen far too many examples of cases that seem blatantly unproven but forced through because of a combination of poor defence council and politically hot topics that the DA seems to want under their belt.
Most of those 'crimes' shouldnt be. And thats what parts of the jury nullification movements are all about; judging the law BEFORE judging the person.
Also the more data captured about every human, the more criminality can be found, especially in things that shouldnt have ever been criminal. And having higher "bust" numbers and proof of evil criminality element (regular humans doing normal things that are criminalized by the elite) then allows them to write bigger checks for more pervasive surveillance.
Its the classic long tail, and exponential cost increases for of a logarithmic decay of detection.
Our society could restart with a good review of all laws. And those laws with nobody else harmed should be scrapped.
Look at the engineering and surveying firms over the past 50yr. Cops will likely see something like that. Like they'll get written into all sorts of laws and processes despite the scope of the "value" they provide being narrower than ever.
It'll turn into a low effort make-work job. Like Realtors(TM) with extra steps to justify their existence.
Like no amount of 1080p Ring footage of your door getting kicked in will suffice, the insurance company will not believe your house has been broken into until a certified license holding cop shows up and signs it.
ah, the movie Brazil :)
The cops are not now nor have they ever been an institution to protect the people, they are there to protect the Peace. What's the Peace? Largely seems to be whatever makes the rich people happy.
Now, I agree that the police are not your friends, and they are incentivized to find crimes when there may not really be any at times, but I disagree with the notion that they are simply the lapdogs of the wealthy. In fact, it seems like in a lot of places in California it's the law-abiding, wealthier citizens that are hassled most by the police for minor infractions, because they know they can actually extract revenue from them.
You work at a retail store. You take $100 from the till. They have you on camera. Management calls cops, and has you arrested for misdemeanor theft. You spend night in jail.
You work in retail store. You log in at 9am. And your manager was told to cut payroll and edits your (and 9 other peoples) timecards to the tune of $1000. You catch this. Management refuses to correct it and/or punish the manager. Nobody is arrested. You're told this is a civil issue.
Wage theft is larger than all other theft combined, but treated as a civil, not criminal matter. I wonder why.
https://www.tcworkerscenter.org/2018/09/wage-theft-vs-other-...
You secured your expensive road bike ($2000) cause its your primary transportation. You put a gps tag on it, so if its ever stolen, you can make the appropriate report and retrieval. The lock was cut, and the bike taken. Its at a nearby house. You report it. Cops wont take report and wont get the stolen property. You even have definite proof. They dont care, and they dont have to.
Target (retailer) has a policy to let people steal from them, and to do facial recognition until a thief surpasses the statutory felony limit (usually $1000). THEY send a report to the police, which isnt ignored, and the police go do the corporates' dirty work and arrest the alleged perpetrator.
During the 1980's there was well known pushes (by Biden etm) to criminalize cocaine severely. But the cocaine they punished wasnt the white powder. That was used predominantly by executives. Instead, the heavy criminalization focused on crack cocaine, which was used predominantly by the lower (poor, black) people. Punishments were upwards of 10x disparity against the poor classes.
The misattributed quote "If the penalty for a crime is a fine, then that law only exists for the lower class" (to Final Fantasy Tactics, not true attribution), is something we see all the time.
Anthropic - mass for-profit copyright fraud against the public? Fine.
All insurance - if you lie? Insurance fraud. If they lie, get rekt and die or something.
Banks - guilty of mass laundering and made $50B? Oh, $2B fine. $48B profit. If a human did that, theyd go to jail for decades.
These disparities exist everywhere in "law". Law only defends elite, wealthy, donor class, and well known monied local elites. It almost never defends the average wronged citizen.
The police protect "property owners" and "property rights."
And this is why the homeless remain homeless.
No matter where they stand, its someone elses property, and they have little to no rights.
You can't feed yourself if you are forced to keep walking.
This conversation is usually about how no one lets their kids play outside unsupervised anymore, but it applies to police as well. In Georgia they had to pass a law telling police they couldn’t arrest parents who let their kids go outside by themselves. The inciting incident literally had a police officer lecturing a mother about how many sickos are out there and then putting her in cuffs because her 10-year-old was a mile away by himself. Even since then, DFCS has been caught bullying parents into signing an agreement saying they were negligent and agreeing to a restrictive safety plan because they let their kid go to a nearby playground by themself.
It is insane and depressing about how people willingly restrict their lives and their kids lives because of the mistaken belief that the world isn’t as safe as it was when they were a kid. Not only that, but if you let your kids play outside without you, then you risk your neighbors calling the police on you and having to deal with whatever bs comes from that.
People who aren't afraid don't tend to vote Republican. Therefore, there's big money to be made selling fear.
At in part due to media fear mongering and lying 24/7? Fear, lies, doubts, hatred, division... all of this gets clicks, gets the ad dollars.
It's actually about restrictive zoning preventing sufficiently dense housing and high quality public transit.
> This conversation is usually about how no one lets their kids play outside unsupervised anymore,
Those two show overall fear is higher, not that reasonable fear is higher.
There's so much in current society that sells fear, that I'm not surprised. FOMO for the next Musk stock promotion. Stalkers, scammers, pedophiles. Burglar alarms being sold with a subscription at 70% profit margins (Verisure here in Sweden.) I recently calculated that I'd pay about $300k-600k in fees for every actual burglary where I live. The insurance deductible is way way lower than that, and I doubt they'd actually change the outcome. Incidentally, insurance companies care about water and fire damage, not burglary. But the scary marketing video with masked men in your garage sells well...
Of course, insurance is a a whole other chapter on selling fear. Sometimes warranted, mostly not. The Freetrailer app, used to book and pay for trailers, defaults to me paying for a deductibility reduction. With a big fat warning if I remove that, that if something happens, I might be liable for up to $700!
Not to mention the economy is always just one bad quarter away from a 1929 crash.
I blame media (new and old) for the fearmongering that sells my attention on low probability outcomes.
Money is a form of communication.
The internet has enabled essentially instant communication between any two or more parties anywhere on the planet.
The next 1929 is going to happen faster than the last one, with less warning, and the impact will be more widespread.
Or ...
We'll all see it coming ahead of time, behave perfectly rationally, and avoid the crisis entirely.
Based on how we handled 9/11, and spent 20 years and $20 trillion to get 1 guy, im preparing for the former, not the later, because most people are not rational in the face of a crisis.
For sure, and for reasons we can't imagine today.
I sometimes think about nuclear accidents. It seems very unlikely that we've already seen the worst accident that will ever be. Same goes for so many technologies less than 100 years old. Safety standards need to go up in parity with the scaling up to keep MTBF in check. Given what I've seen of human greed, I hold only partial hope that'll happen as energy demands increase. Hopefully batteries, wind, solar and regulatory oversight are enough.
I don't know what world people here live in, but I am not expecting kids in a front yard in the middle of the day in a quiet neighborhood on a dead end road to be snatched up.
Could it happen? Sure. Should we force our kids to live under fear that it will happen as soon as a parent isn't watching them? Absolutely not.
Easy fix: Minesweeper and Solitaire should be mandatory on every police computer.
- German address registers with religious affiliation were a good idea until the Nazis came to power.
- Pegasus spyware was developed and sold to governments to fight terrorism and serious crime — until it was used to spy on journalists, human rights activists and political opponents, including in authoritarian states.
- Rwandan identity cards listed ethnicity for administrative purposes — until militias used them to identify and execute Tutsis at roadblocks during the 1994 genocide.
Bottom line: Even if you trust the current administration (do you?), are you sure you want 5o give that power to all future ones?
Now I fully believe it can happen here and that those people are in office now and that a non-trivial percentage of the US public would be Ok with those atrocities happening in the US.
We have really turned into the opening act of a terrible dystopian movie.
"The police officer is your friend."
What else did we do immediately ? We learned to pledge our allegience.
5 year olds .... pledging allegience to an ideology they can't possibly comprehend.
It was always right there in front of us.
Oh man, I have to assume you live in a nice little enclave and are reading old statistical reports. I have the misfortune of sometimes having to travel into the city. I can assure you, it is not getting safer. In fact, just last week I saw first sign of Chicago turning into Philly.
This chart is up to 2024. If you look up 2025 and 2026 data for the US you will see that it has continued to decline YoY.
Judging by your comment I assume that you have personally witnessed some criminality recently and are drawing conclusions about the entire US, if so I’m sorry you had to endure that, but that doesn’t mean that your conclusions apply to the general trend in the US as the GP was referring to.
But I have no need to convince anyone. It is just weird to me that I need to explain the obvious.
I am sure that you are familiar with an expression of being hit by lightning indicating some relatively low chance of an event[1]. Now, imagine walking around with a rather conductive flagpole everywhere you go, do you think you would up or lower your odds ( edit: for a lightning to strike ).
Maybe it is true that I don't discuss statistics the way you do. After all, I merely apply them to real life.
But then again, I don't walk around during thunderstorm waiting to be struck.
In other words, you are wrong. Individual actions affecting chance are very much relevant to discussion about statistics.
[1]https://www.cdc.gov/lightning/data-research/index.html
The real revelation comes when you realize this is not true.
That's being charitable. Complicit is far more likely, any system like that plays to benefit of the ruling party as you can use it to suppress the people that would vote you out.
Crime rates could be going up, that still wouldn't justify broad, warrantless spying on the public. We have rights and they aren't conditional on crime rates.
They should have known better, but despite constant training people just seem unable to help themselves.
I think you’re misunderstanding that they think are part of the populace. They do not. They do not think they’re at your level. That’s why they got in the politics. That’s why they’ve been successful at it.
Go spend some time around with police higher ups if you don’t think that they also believe that they’re a class of nobility.
The constitution bars titles of nobility, so to achieve the status of nobility, you print the title you want on a business card, and attend group meetings once a week, where your perceived status and nobility are reinforced by an institutional echo chamber that will dispose of you in a heartbeat to save itself.
I don’t think it’s naïveté. I think it’s an acceptable byproduct to them. It’s collateral damage in their war on ??? crime? insecurity? or in their lobby kickbacks.
Politicians want a strong law enforcement that protects the status quo of an upper class who has impunity regarding the law to the point where they can host a sex trafficking ring on a private island.
Working people used to have vandalism and sabotage as a tactic when the state and capital wrought the working public this way, but with the modern surveillance state this tactic has been completely neutralized. This is the world that politicians want.
Law enforcement can already do incredibly privacy-invading things, and we’re ok with it. House searches (with a warrant), arrests (with probable cause), etc. It’s tightly controlled and can’t be used on a whim.
I feel technology should absolutely be a part of policing, and also tightly controlled, just as these other powers are.
"Bad cop, take the day off".
Thats the one thing no politician is-- they are succesful because they understand people very well.
They just dont care.
Lots of explanations here for wanting to go easy on her. Is the same logic applied for the many victims of a police department? If it's preferential treatment then maybe Interim Maj. Max Nowinsky should also be kicked to the curb.
> Tyler Harpe, a federal ICE agent
Federal ICE agent Tyler Harpe, may you enjoy your new found fame.
I'm not completely opposed to 'camera, cell, solar, battery on a pole'. Its pretty low tech honestly... But there absolutely be a minimum standard of search warrant approval in front of a judge before using it. AND it should be a criminal offense to use it without a search warrant.
However there's this whole problem of "illegal for government to do it but whitewashing through for profit company to do illegal thing".
This is not a contingent issue, it’s a fundamental integrated flaw of any system that put general totalitarian spy as an aimed outcome. Whatever the way it’s green-washed over safety tradeoffs won’t change this obvious fact.
If the authorities want people to accept systems like Flock etc. then they need to severely punish abuse like this.
Now I'm not saying the Americans should look to France for inspiration, ...
I think "the authorities" don't care and that they seem to be able to force these systems on folks anyhow, and that the if->then syllogism you propose doesn't work.
The people committing these kinds of crimes don't seem to understand them as crimes and believe they will not and should not be punished. Further, the people who those folks report to seem to feel the same way.
I see them as crimes.
I am, however, ambivalent about what punishment should look like because the entirety of the carcerial system in the US (and the so-called immigration systesm) are so rotten to their cores that I just give up on them. It doesn't matter -what- I think because, as this kind of event shows, we do not in fact live in a system that represents me in any meaningful sense.
That's bad, and and it's not local to me. After all "those who make peaceful change impossible..." and such.
But I don't agree that they won't get the politically orthodox folks in the US to accept these systems; they seem to already have accepted them.
If you wave a magic wand and fix the abuse you will not fix the very nature and purpose of these systems. 1984 would not magically become acceptable if cops couldn't stalk their girlfriend or creds could not be shared among agencies off the books.
A large enough to be a problem subset of the people decrying abuse fancy themselves an armchair central planner (the more self aware ones fancy themselves armchair despots). In the back of their mind they're thinking "if only we got rid of the abuse then the public would buy into this Orwellian system then I could get the government enforce my pet policies with an iron fist and get minimal pushback". Beware of these people. They are the true evil. They all seek to take a bite out of your day to day freedom and it doesn't take all that many of them getting their way before there is nothing left. The politicians feeling emboldened to sign contracts with Flock or any other surveillance vendor only feel emboldened to do so due to the existence and frequency of these people.
Abuse or not these systems are rotten and incompatible on a fundamental level with a free society.
I'm reminded of a "hah hah, only serious" joke/slang popularized by EverQuest players: Broken as intended.
https://wiki.c2.com/?HaHaOnlySerious
> if cops couldn't stalk their girlfriend
This used to be called "running a date" by law enforcement when checking up on some pretty face. That abuse is part of what led to the Driver's Privacy Protection Act. When I worked for my state's motor vehicle agency, there were training videos about what was and wasn't allowed. It won't happen under this administration, but ALPR systems should be legislated as covered by DPPA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driver%27s_Privacy_Protection_...
This would at least reduce some of the avenues for abuse.
https://gizmodo.com/cop-fired-for-letting-her-ice-agent-husb...
This is literally a repeat, with modification, of Europe in the 1930s. It is not 1:1 comparable, also in part because the US justice system, even if undermined by orange scumbag loyalists, works to some extent still. I am not saying all of it works, but on youtube you can often listen to discussions by several judges discussing issues at hand. I forgot which one it was, but it was linked in "Audit the Audit", and the judges there asked very good, and very objective questions. In the end they denied a cop immunity by default, based on very logical arguments they made. I was quite surprised when I listened to that. It also means that the Trump oligarch team is not able to kill all of the US justice system, even though they placed their agents into it already.
They are allowed to lie to you.
They are allowed to fabricate a false reality for you.
The moment you do the same to them, you are a criminal.
Divide and conquer. It's not new, and it still works.
The police have seen "The Matrix."
Flock is the console, you are Neo, and they are Agent Smith.