So if they no longer have a contract, how is it legal for Flock to continue to use the allocated resources? Why not hit them with theft of service for continuing to draw power and use public infrastructure?
They will never change their behavior when there are no consequences for their actions.
> So if they no longer have a contract, how is it legal for Flock to continue to use the allocated resources?
They've even been caught putting them back up or re-enabling them in places where the contract has been canceled. How is that legal? I thought you had to be city-approved to install equipment like that. One would think that no contract = no approval?
Maybe they need to set up a "sting" operation at one of the disabled units and start makin' some arrests/fines for unapproved equipment installation/construction on public property? See if that changes some minds over at Flock about what they can and cannot get away with?
People need to see their lives improve materially within a reasonable period of time before they will trust politics again I would wager. I don't think people aren't voting due to apathy, they aren't voting because they don't trust the system.
You're describing Russia, not America. In America voter turnout is at record highs, people are protesting loud and visibly, and "Flock camera" is a cultural byword for oppressive dragnet surveillance.
I don't think people have connected the dots between Flock and Ring yet, but it's only a matter of time.
Yeah here in america everyone votes, citizens, immigrants, illegal immigrants, dead people, everyone. Thats why they just made it illegal to even show your ID when you vote in cali. Cant have some silly rules slowing down the most important process in the country. Hell if you really care about the country youll go and vote at every single polling location, its literally not even possible to get caught since nobody checks IDs. If they bother to ask your name and check it against voter registration then just go on facebook and find the name of someone who lives in the area its not like they have any ID they can check. If that person already voted or comes in to vote later they will just assume it was a mixup and let them vote again.
I am not impressed by the destruction of easily replaced obsolete hardware. I will consider people as engaged when they start cutting down and smashing the corporate executives who force these bad ideas on us.
That is something i can really get behind, dont assasinate politicians thats a waste of time. You have to put the fear of god into these evil corporations. The ceo of flock should regularly wake up to find a guillotine sitting in his front yard. Same goes for all the c-suite bankers who walked away from 2008 with multi million dollar bonuses.
Those banks should have been nationalized or auctioned off and those executives should have gone to jail and had all their assets confiscated to help pay for the bailout.
Im not advocating the use of the guilotines yet mind you, its just a little reminder for now.
There is no single point, instead there’s a build up of actions just like you see in this case. I’m curious what else you’re waiting on. What evidence will be sufficient for you that, yes, citizens are engaged in civics?
Wasn't this basically Uber's model? They just ignored any local regulation they didn't like, even to the point of building a system to prevent government officials were trying to take Ubers so they couldn't get fined.
Flock gas real human officers who direct it and shareholders who profit from it (those groups overlap), it is not an inert object wielded by the State.
> They've even been caught putting them back up or re-enabling them in places where the contract has been canceled.
Where? I live in Denver, are there clandestine Flock folks running around in fake electrician outfits like a cheap imitation of the Town? we could use a little Situationist urban guerilla theater here, complete with the vacant commercial space repurposed for data centers
> Dayton, another city in Minnesota located just 10 miles north of Plymouth, has also paused its Flock program and disabled the two devices in the area. The Dayton police became aware that the company intended to replace these cameras and told Flock not to proceed with the work order. However, it moved forward with the replacement anyway despite being instructed otherwise.
I would hazard a guess that they hire local contractors through some shell company. Not because they're worried about it being traced back to them, just because they don't want the workers on their books. Much like all the Amazon-not-actually-Amazon delivery trucks and drivers.
Yep, there's pretty much only one rule that matters. You can do anything you want as long as it's to people below you socially. All other rules and laws come second to that one.
The article doesn't really tell us what the contract terms are, though. Just because the city voted to cancel the contract doesn't mean it ends immediately and Flock has to come remove all the cameras upon request. It's very likely the contract has a fixed term, and cancellation really just means they're not going to renew it at the end of the term. If that's the case, you can't charge them with crimes for using infrastructure that the contract permits them to use.
Still terrible that Flock isn't responding to them, and of course even if they intend to hold the city to the contract in terms of expecting to be paid for the full duration, they should still honor the request to shut off service.
If nothing else, this is a good example of why the contract terms for government vendors MUST be public records and NDAs of private companies on public officials for the purposes of sales should not be legally enforceable.
The first thing the city should do when cancelling is lock down the data so no jurisdictions have access to the data. Even if the cameras are still powered on and connected, any ongoing searches should not return any results from that jurisdiction.
> So if they no longer have a contract, how is it legal for Flock to continue to use the allocated resources? Why not hit them with theft of service for continuing to draw power and use public infrastructure?
Well we don't know what was in this contract was that they had with Flock in the first place, but usually a contract termination like this would have some requirement to give a reasonable notice to allow Flock to disconnect cameras etc, and a week probably isn't reasonable notice.
flock cameras aren't powered from the power grid, they have their own solar panels and batteries (which is what allows them to be deployed to quickly and widely) so I presume the article just meant unplugging those.
That's what confuses me too. If they aren't making money any longer, they're basically saying "fuck you" to their own target customers?
What's the aim? ~~Bribing~~ Lobbying someone else in the government with the data they are gathering anyways in the hopes of cementing this?
So what this is telling me is if I don't like the way the government or public services is doing something, I should just plow ahead without any care and just force it and then be immune because I said so?
The local government isn't their only customer. They also have contracts with the federal government who wants piggyback access to as many cameras as they can.
Perhaps their real customer isn't the City of East Bumfuck, Minnesota, but the FBI or ICE or NSA. Though even in that case it seems a bit inept: they need some buyin from the locals to get their cameras installed in the next small town.
The Flock search system is supposedly limited so the city/police employee has to choose the permissions (eg. Which other jurisdictions will search results show up for).
If a city wants to exempt ICE, they can. However, if the city has a rogue officer who accesses the Flock search, they can forward the results to their ICE/DHS boyfriend (the claims of a recent firing and lawsuit).
Supposedly is pulling extreme weight. Can't remember the source but I remember reading a case where the city council thought there was one data agreement and Flock implementing broad sharing across all government agencies.
The data can still be sold to other municipalities. That’s kind of the problem here, handling this as anything other than a privacy violation, because anything else allows them to just lease private land to install them, then sell the data to whoever wants it. But the US has been anti privacy for a while now.
I suspected that Flock cameras also notified repossesses, but a quick Google search suggests that police contracts don't, but that private property Flock installs (like shopping malls) do/can.
Maybe it's a shitty "you didn't actually cancel until you called us and sat through our upsell speeches for hours" kinda dark pattern.
even if they were totally off-grid, are there any other municipal functions you can use rent-free to put up private infrastructure of your own without pay?
tl;dr : there is a cost associated to allowing a random company to cement down a galvanized steel pole somewhere in town; for installation, removal, and liability.
Some are. Usually on a campaign of "law and order", which makes Flock cameras an easy sell to their voting base. Because they let you keep an eye on the sort of people who are likely to be criminals. You know. Those people.
They themselves generally don't mind the invasion of privacy, at least not until it catches them specifically. In general they are much, much more afraid of the "crime wave" than of the police. (A crime wave which never seems to diminish, despite more and more policing and punishment. And which is contradicted by crime statistics.)
The absence of cameras necessitates much more a reliance on "those people" profiling style policing than their presence.
Do people feel the same way about speeding cameras?
I find the backlash against ALPRs wildly disproportionate. It earnestly saddens me that our political focus has flowed to these issues, datacenters, college sports rules, etc. while we remain incapable of confronting far more consequential structural problems, like an inability to tax and redistribute wealth.
I feel the same way about speeding cameras. As I found they impede the flow of traffic.
Ultimately this is due to the fact that the systems are used to generate revenue from citizens trying to live from day to day. Speed cameras don't really impact the wealthy the way they do the working class. Same goes for video surveillance.
So why should we the people give up our right to privacy for some fake sense of safety and huge bill
The law and order people are nuts. On a local thread complaining about our township budget it was pointed out that we spend 45% of tax revenue on policing and that if we want real cuts, some has to come from there.
And a repeated response from a certain kind of person was "Well, if we're spending 45% on policing, we must need it right..."
Your comment reminds me of a post I read on a popular police forum about J Edgar Hoover (the infamous Director of the FBI for half a century). He created a professionalized police / intelligence force, but he also abused the rights of many citizens and elected political officials with that force. Supposedly he even used it to blackmail some of the Congressmen who were legally obligated to oversee his department.
And the comments in that post were a Rorschach test of where the commenter fell on how "necessary" the abuses of the FBI were.
It's important to understand that the FBI's power was very asymmetric.
J Edna Hoover could assign a team to gather kompromat on a person and to surveil them or harass them.
A Congressperson has no equivalent ability to threaten the Director of the FBI. At best, they could spread a rumor, but a rumor doesn't catch fire when journalists / editors had too high of ethics to repeat unverified rumors.
Right, but if you ask J Edgar Hoover supporters, MLK was an adulterer and a Socialist / Communist agitating the American populace (during a time when mass protests and riots were spreading like wildfire). The thing is, there is some truth in those claims.
Also, American society in the 1960s was not nearly as supportive of MLK Jr when he was alive as much as they are now that he was martyred. You and I are looking back and projecting our modern values on people who were still largely racist in a time when racism was both a de facto and de jure truth.
That is to say that lots of America would likely have supported the effect of the blackmail letter, if not the method itself. It was a different time. The frequent threat of the USSR, encroaching Communism, and the specter of nuclear war was suffocating and the "Law and Order" marketing of Nixon and J Edgar Hoover were appealing to many people, even if they suppressed the freedoms of many.
We did change the laws and provide more de jure rights since the 1960s.
I think there's lots of conflation of the more traditional definition of "racism" with the contemporary definition, which is not a direct correlation to the older one. The older one was a descriptor of the attributes of an individual's beliefs whereas the contemporary is a descriptor of the societal system / incentives.
Companies with deep pockets aren't throwing advertising dollars at Nick Fuentes or Kanye West when they are deep in their racist mania arc. It is no longer socially acceptable to be associated with what used to be common, the societal norm, and legally enforced.
We have come a long way, but we still have a long way to go.
I will, however, completely agree that the time of Nixon's presidency is remarkably similar to Trump's terms.
Im enjoying watching HBO's The WhiteHouse Plumbers and CNN's Ticky Dick. There are soooo many references thick rhyme with Trump's rhetoric, actions, and policies.
This right here. If we're going to oust this anti-American Flock and its less prominent "competitors", then we need the police to realize they're not a friend, but rather a foe. Extra work arresting motorists with frivolous warrants from neighboring towns, civil suits for violating rights where the police are left holding the bag, spending budget that could instead be spent on actual policing, defiant disobedience when they're asked to take the cameras down or make changes, making your city more likely to be a flashpoint for federal action, etc.
The problem is many departments profit off being able to pull people over for bs reasons so they can try and catch them for other crimes. False positives gives them additional reasons to pull people over and find drugs or probation violations which is the bread and butter of many police department's and court's funding.
I think this is sensationalised - it looks like they only waited about a week after cancellation before they started unplugging them.
But I can't find any easy information on the contract they had with Flock, but it could well take a week for Flock to be able to respond properly after working out what to do with lawyers etc. The article says that the account management team had been in touch... so... I think this is just a PR piece for the police chief to look 'hard'.
You have to show harm to have a case. If you were the victim of a wrongful stop, that's harm. But if your license plate was just recorded and nothing else, I'm skeptical that would give you standing in small claims court. Certainly there's other legal avenues against Flock though.
And the real answer that needs to be done is a charge PER FLOCK DEVICE of criminal trespass, per day.
And the charge needs to be applied via RICO to all the C levels and the board of directors.
This doesn't abrogate the paid contract. But you trespass the owners of said hardware after being formally notified for removal.
A counter-example: how well received would it be if I made a solar/camera/battery/cell device that was called "PigSty" and only tracked police vehicles? How would the city/county/state go after me for those devices?
The under discussed thing with ALPR cameras is how when municipalities dont approve funding for flock contracts on the basis of budget constraints, police departments will suddenly get mysterious one million dollar grants from the federal government to use them.
Flock will also operate free of charge and are more than willing to take promisary notes and install them without ever getting payment while budgets are debated. Because once they're up they know they'll just get the grants approved, and its much harder to take them down.
Flock seems way more like a government program larping as a private company. Its kind of hard to approach congress for multi billion dollar budget as the NSA/CIA/FBI for Orwellian domestic spy programs, so intelligence finds a nice tech bro to be the face of it and bankroll the startup with private capital, and then funnel money to them through less discretionary programs like grants for public saftey and local law enforcement.
Call me a conspiracy head but this is clearly a psuedo private company.
I have trouble understanding why anyone would even want to be associated with a company that displayed such low ethics, repeatedly. Never mind doing business with them.
CEO... sure that beach vacation will still be nice after they've collected their golden parachute while company goes up in flames. But anyone else?
I wonder if the Flock contracts allow for the removal of equipment? The camera installation is generally incidental to the services provided. The contract might allow for the permanent installation while cancelation just terminates services provided.
Flock is turning into a textbook case of what “toxic brand” means. Municipalities are fleeing for the hills over Flock. Increasingly no official wants to be associated with or seen to be supporting the brand in any way. The only points to be scored with constituents now is firing Flock.
What a nonsense news article, perfectly aligned to titillate the impotent rage of redditor type persons - and unfortunately hackers.
Contract ended in September and the company hasn't yet collected their equipment. Oh, what an amazing modern battlefield between everybody I don't like and everybody I like.
> but it failed to respond even after a week
Read that sentence again and think about it. Are you being propagandized?
I once had to wait for 3 years for an ice cream vendor to come take back their freezers, and 5 years for the beer vendor to come take their fridges. These kind of things aren't exactly priority.
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[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 31.7 ms ] threadThey will never change their behavior when there are no consequences for their actions.
They've even been caught putting them back up or re-enabling them in places where the contract has been canceled. How is that legal? I thought you had to be city-approved to install equipment like that. One would think that no contract = no approval?
Maybe they need to set up a "sting" operation at one of the disabled units and start makin' some arrests/fines for unapproved equipment installation/construction on public property? See if that changes some minds over at Flock about what they can and cannot get away with?
I don't think people have connected the dots between Flock and Ring yet, but it's only a matter of time.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c52e9vnege7eo
I'm sure there's more but not enough for sure.
> They've even been caught putting them back up or re-enabling them in places where the contract has been canceled.
Those banks should have been nationalized or auctioned off and those executives should have gone to jail and had all their assets confiscated to help pay for the bailout.
Im not advocating the use of the guilotines yet mind you, its just a little reminder for now.
Town meetings are happening right now, people are already engaged. If you want to see the pressure raise, you should go to your local one.
Where? I live in Denver, are there clandestine Flock folks running around in fake electrician outfits like a cheap imitation of the Town? we could use a little Situationist urban guerilla theater here, complete with the vacant commercial space repurposed for data centers
> Dayton, another city in Minnesota located just 10 miles north of Plymouth, has also paused its Flock program and disabled the two devices in the area. The Dayton police became aware that the company intended to replace these cameras and told Flock not to proceed with the work order. However, it moved forward with the replacement anyway despite being instructed otherwise.
but doing a little legwork it looks like Flock has done that in Evanston and Cambridge. rollin' in hot with the Fall River Five
The billonaires suffered no laws, Holmes did, who was a nobody except for very briefly holding a few of others' billions.
Still terrible that Flock isn't responding to them, and of course even if they intend to hold the city to the contract in terms of expecting to be paid for the full duration, they should still honor the request to shut off service.
The first thing the city should do when cancelling is lock down the data so no jurisdictions have access to the data. Even if the cameras are still powered on and connected, any ongoing searches should not return any results from that jurisdiction.
Well we don't know what was in this contract was that they had with Flock in the first place, but usually a contract termination like this would have some requirement to give a reasonable notice to allow Flock to disconnect cameras etc, and a week probably isn't reasonable notice.
What's the aim? ~~Bribing~~ Lobbying someone else in the government with the data they are gathering anyways in the hopes of cementing this?
So what this is telling me is if I don't like the way the government or public services is doing something, I should just plow ahead without any care and just force it and then be immune because I said so?
If a city wants to exempt ICE, they can. However, if the city has a rogue officer who accesses the Flock search, they can forward the results to their ICE/DHS boyfriend (the claims of a recent firing and lawsuit).
Maybe it's a shitty "you didn't actually cancel until you called us and sat through our upsell speeches for hours" kinda dark pattern.
Not an alpr apologist but aren't they almost always solar with lithium storage?
tl;dr : there is a cost associated to allowing a random company to cement down a galvanized steel pole somewhere in town; for installation, removal, and liability.
They themselves generally don't mind the invasion of privacy, at least not until it catches them specifically. In general they are much, much more afraid of the "crime wave" than of the police. (A crime wave which never seems to diminish, despite more and more policing and punishment. And which is contradicted by crime statistics.)
Do people feel the same way about speeding cameras?
I find the backlash against ALPRs wildly disproportionate. It earnestly saddens me that our political focus has flowed to these issues, datacenters, college sports rules, etc. while we remain incapable of confronting far more consequential structural problems, like an inability to tax and redistribute wealth.
Ultimately this is due to the fact that the systems are used to generate revenue from citizens trying to live from day to day. Speed cameras don't really impact the wealthy the way they do the working class. Same goes for video surveillance.
So why should we the people give up our right to privacy for some fake sense of safety and huge bill
And a repeated response from a certain kind of person was "Well, if we're spending 45% on policing, we must need it right..."
And the comments in that post were a Rorschach test of where the commenter fell on how "necessary" the abuses of the FBI were.
J Edna Hoover could assign a team to gather kompromat on a person and to surveil them or harass them.
A Congressperson has no equivalent ability to threaten the Director of the FBI. At best, they could spread a rumor, but a rumor doesn't catch fire when journalists / editors had too high of ethics to repeat unverified rumors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI%E2%80%93King_letter
Also, American society in the 1960s was not nearly as supportive of MLK Jr when he was alive as much as they are now that he was martyred. You and I are looking back and projecting our modern values on people who were still largely racist in a time when racism was both a de facto and de jure truth.
That is to say that lots of America would likely have supported the effect of the blackmail letter, if not the method itself. It was a different time. The frequent threat of the USSR, encroaching Communism, and the specter of nuclear war was suffocating and the "Law and Order" marketing of Nixon and J Edgar Hoover were appealing to many people, even if they suppressed the freedoms of many.
We did change the laws and provide more de jure rights since the 1960s.
I think there's lots of conflation of the more traditional definition of "racism" with the contemporary definition, which is not a direct correlation to the older one. The older one was a descriptor of the attributes of an individual's beliefs whereas the contemporary is a descriptor of the societal system / incentives.
Companies with deep pockets aren't throwing advertising dollars at Nick Fuentes or Kanye West when they are deep in their racist mania arc. It is no longer socially acceptable to be associated with what used to be common, the societal norm, and legally enforced.
We have come a long way, but we still have a long way to go.
Im enjoying watching HBO's The WhiteHouse Plumbers and CNN's Ticky Dick. There are soooo many references thick rhyme with Trump's rhetoric, actions, and policies.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/26/politics/jd-vance-richard-nix...
There are non-destructive ways to disable them (covering them with a garbage bag, for one), but I'm also fully in favor of the destructive ways.
But I can't find any easy information on the contract they had with Flock, but it could well take a week for Flock to be able to respond properly after working out what to do with lawyers etc. The article says that the account management team had been in touch... so... I think this is just a PR piece for the police chief to look 'hard'.
Maybe the California privacy law??
And the charge needs to be applied via RICO to all the C levels and the board of directors.
This doesn't abrogate the paid contract. But you trespass the owners of said hardware after being formally notified for removal.
A counter-example: how well received would it be if I made a solar/camera/battery/cell device that was called "PigSty" and only tracked police vehicles? How would the city/county/state go after me for those devices?
https://web.archive.org/web/20220524000533/https://popehat.c...
Flock will also operate free of charge and are more than willing to take promisary notes and install them without ever getting payment while budgets are debated. Because once they're up they know they'll just get the grants approved, and its much harder to take them down.
Flock seems way more like a government program larping as a private company. Its kind of hard to approach congress for multi billion dollar budget as the NSA/CIA/FBI for Orwellian domestic spy programs, so intelligence finds a nice tech bro to be the face of it and bankroll the startup with private capital, and then funnel money to them through less discretionary programs like grants for public saftey and local law enforcement.
Call me a conspiracy head but this is clearly a psuedo private company.
CEO... sure that beach vacation will still be nice after they've collected their golden parachute while company goes up in flames. But anyone else?
Why do we let narcissists run so much of our world?
Flock's shareholders and board of directors don't pay their executives to be humanitarian moralists. Same for OpenAI, Disney, Apple, et. al.
Contract ended in September and the company hasn't yet collected their equipment. Oh, what an amazing modern battlefield between everybody I don't like and everybody I like.
> but it failed to respond even after a week
Read that sentence again and think about it. Are you being propagandized?
I once had to wait for 3 years for an ice cream vendor to come take back their freezers, and 5 years for the beer vendor to come take their fridges. These kind of things aren't exactly priority.