Americans are destroying Flock surveillance cameras
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
- Flock decision-makers and customers holding ethics as a priority, and not taking the actions they are due to sense of duty, community, morals etc
- Peer pressure resulting in ostracization of Flock execs and decision makers until they stop the unethical behavior
- Governments using legislation and law enforcement to prevent the cameras being used in the way they are
What has worried me for years is that Americans would not resort to this level. That things are just too comfortable at home to take that brave step into the firing lines of being on the right side of justice but the wrong side of the law.
I'm relieved to see more and more Americans causing necessary trouble. I still think that overall, Americans are deeply underreacting to the times. But that only goes as far as to be my opinion. I can't speak for them and I'm not their current king.
Starvation isn't avoidable and you can't ride it out. There isn't any chance that starving to death could be less severe than getting a bad flu. Nobody can avoid not eating for an extended period of time. If there is not enough food, it will affect everyone directly.
Herman Cain denied COVID's severity right up until it killed him, and them even after he died, his team was still tweeting that "looks like COVID isn't as bad as the mainstream media made it out to be." When I saw that people were literally willing to die to "own the libs", I knew shared reality was toast.
We're in a K-Shaped Economy right now and half the folks will deny there is any K and insist everything is amazing.
I don't know about the american revolution, but that's wrong for the french revolution. I'll link to french wikipédia pages since they are far better on the subject. https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89tats_g%C3%A9n%C3%A9raux_... Here we can see the first National Assembly was half nobility and clergy. The third estate was the other half.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiers_%C3%A9tat > Par ailleurs, les députés du tiers état aux états généraux représentaient essentiellement la bourgeoisie[2].
Which indicate that the majority of the third estate representative were bourgeois.
Well one of those is already on the fast tracking to happening (economy stalling).
Unfortunately, I don't have much faith that people will turn against the administration during any kind of major depression/food scarcity. I foresee people turning against each other for survival instead.
These are no longer impossibles.
- Alfred Henry Lewis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proclamation_of_Rebellion
Interestingly y'all Americans pay much more tax now than you did to England back in the day. Turns out King George was right, and it was just about changing who the tax was paid to.
Much of what makes America unique is tied to this essentially once in a generation event that will never happen again on this planet, a contingent confluence of Earth's parallel geographic and biological evolution... it's fairly easy to rebel or become a superpower when other powers have to contend with peer conflicts right on their borders. A break with England was inevitable why take orders from people an ocean away in the age of sail?
The degree to which legislation in the US is bought by big companies and rarely reflects democratic desires we may be in another "no taxation without representation" era.
To quote a well-known study on the topic: “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”
(Gilens & Page, Perspectives in Politics)
Frankly, Obama _tried_ to close Guantanamo Bay. He significantly shrunk the population of inmates, but it was ultimately Congress, and the courts that prevented the closure
Obama spent a huge amount of time and political capital trying to clean up Bush's messes.
Obama and Biden both led to meaningful policy improvements and they were far more stable than the current admin.
I remember being horrified the first time I heard this was legal in the USA.
How can the US citizens accept such a brutal denying of good governance is beyond me.
Though I wouldn't be surprised if the idea goes back to Roman times.
On the broader topic, I'm not sure that just voting is the way that we'll get out of this mess, but I think a large part of the problem is how our focus on wider, national issues has eroded the interest in the local. So people seem to be most disenfranchised from the level of politics where they can actually have the most influence, both by voting and direct action (protests, calls, etc).
It also represents an opportunity for upstarts. If you want to get into local politics, this is a single issue that will unit voters and bring them in.
We had a city councilperson elected on the sole issue of replacing the purple street lights. She won decisively and her entire campaign was literally signs everywhere promising to fix the purple streetlights. (yes, they were fixed).
The single biggest improvement to American society would be to implement multi-member districts for legislature, OR to implement STAR voting - any kind of system that promotes the existence of more parties, more political candidates, to break the two party cycle.
Far too many people fail to vote or research candidates due to how shitty our democracy is. Far too few candidates exist as a blend of values, and we are stuck with "every liberal policy" vs. "every conservative policy".
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To that end, it seems the cities that are banning Flock for proper privacy reasons are all in liberal states and cities. Conservative/moderate areas seem a lot less engaged on the topic. "That's just how it goes, of course government is going to tread on us, what can be done about it".
I'm entirely unsurprised if the majority of places taking a stand against flock cameras are liberal. From what I've seen conservatives tend to fetishize police and punishment. There's a lot of boot-licking going on for a group of people who posture as being rebels and anti-government, but I think there's also an assumption that only (or mainly) "others" will be targeted and punished. To the extent that it's true, I sure wouldn't expect it to stay that way.
It’s all just identity politics. I will say that Trump has proven the exception to this rule, enacting a whole lot of policy that circumvents the law and has real effects. (And is likely mostly unconstitutional if actually put to the test)
So while locally, voting can be powerful, it’s mostly bread and circuses at the federal level since regulatory capture is bipartisan.
It really bothers me that so few people in the modern West understand just how lucky they are. If you didn't have the control you already have over your government, you'd be fighting for it.
Every time I hear this I cringe, whether this subject or any other. The people did vote and this is what they got - not necessarily what they specifically voted for. Different people hold things in different importance. Flock security cameras (or similar) generally don't even get noticed by the people voting on taxes, guns, abortions, etc.
But also if a small portion of Americans disparately plan to do stuff like sabotage surveillance camera, it's still newsworthy.
Politics is like water boiling - it’s just going to be little bubbles at first but all of a sudden it will start to really rumble.
They'll stop once the police (or ICE, more likely) start dishing out horrific punishments for it.
The people, or even states, could escalate in response. The worst case is escalating to violence; ICE isn’t trained, equipped, or numerous to deal with deploying into a violently hostile area. The army could, but then we’re in full blown civil war.
A more realistic middle ground is that it pushes people or states into nonviolent non-compliance by eg refusing to pay federal taxes. Frankly if California and New York alone stopped paying federal taxes the system would probably crumble.
It first dawned on me when i visited NYC some 30 years ago. I stepped over some arbitrary yellow line I wasn't supposed to - the uniformed cop that noticed that went from 0 to 100 in 0.1 second and behaved as if I just pulled a gun. Zero time to reflect and assume I might have made a legitimate mistake. Since then I've visited U.S. >150 times, and in my experience it was always thus in the U.S. - the law enforcement is on hair trigger and the populace has seemingly grown used to it and considers this behaviour normal. Geez.
(Go live in any northern european country for comparison. Any interaction with law enforcement is almost certainly going to be pleasant, cordial, and uniformed police typically does not rely on threats of violance for authority).
The UK looks at the use of cameras and feels threatened for its Nanny State title. We Yanks have laughed at that name while the water around us slowly came to a boil.
Some cities and/or states have banned the use of cameras at stop lights to issue tickets. Not really sure what caused that to happen, except the cynic in me thinks some politician received a ticket in the mail from one of the cameras.
To put things in perspective, the whole humankind, as in 99.99% of population, is utterly underreacting.
When it hurts the billionaires, they will tell their politicians to invoke the 25th.
It's the only way, we've lost our democracy, but we still have economic power.
Also under these conditions of food distribution and transportation being actively disrupted, why would anyone be at school? Huge numbers of American schools are unsafe and unpleasant places for kids to be in ordinary times, and a massive disruption to ordinary life is not going to make that situation any better.
the next sentence after they mention "necessary trouble" is literally:
"But that only goes as far as to be my opinion."
they are just stating their opinion.
everyone decides when the time for "necessary trouble" is individually, based on their accumulated experience, opinion, etc. no arbiter required, just a critical mass of people with aligning opinions.
American society was created for the benefit of straight white Christian men alone. Every right held by any other group, every ounce of political power, every bit of basic human dignity, has had to be taken by force of "necessary trouble." There is no "arbiter." How could there be? An arbiter presupposes an objective moral ideal and a just society, neither of which we have. In the end, America can only be trusted to live up to its principles at the point of a gun.
The combination of ubiquitous scanners, poor data controls on commercially owned date, and law enforcement access without proper warrants compounds to a situation that for many rational people would fail the test of being fair play under the Fourth Amendment. For similar reasons, for example, it has been held by the Supreme Court that installing a GPS tracker on a vehicle and monitoring it long-term without a warrant is a 4A violation (US v Jones). Similar cases have held that warrants are needed for cellphone location tracking.
So far, however, courts have not held Flock to the same standard -- or have at least held that Flock's data does not rise to the same standard.
I personally think this is a mistake and is a first-order reason we have this problem, and would prefer the matter to stop there rather than rely on ethics. (Relying on ethics brought us pollution in rivers, PFAS and Perc in the ground, and so on.)
Given the state of politics and the recent behavior of the Supreme Court, however, I would not hold my breath for this to change soon.
Yearly reminder to read:
https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/kurz-the-discourse-of-vol...
Having lived or spent time in a lot of 3rd world shitholes, including a civil war, I've only really felt freedom in places with lawless lack of government, never places with 'rule of law' -- that always gets twisted for the elite.
Of course the same happens in lawless regions, but power is fractured enough, there is a limit on power they can wield against the populace, as the opposing factions ultimately are a check on any one side oppressing the population to leave. They can't man machine guns at all the 'borders' and ultimately corruption becomes cheap enough that it is accessible to the common person which arguably provides more power to the common man than representative democracy does.
I think this element of factions in competition was part of the original genius of the '50' states with the very minimal federal government. But the consolidation of federal power and loss of the teeth of the 10th amendment and expansion of various clauses in the constitution means there is now no escape and very few remaining checks.
Living under a tyrant at least tends to provide predictability and stability of a sort. The kind of violence that exists in a lawless society tends not to exist. State sanctioned violence, sure, but that's more often than not targeted.
Basically, given the choice of Somalia or North Korea, there will be a diversity of opinions as to which someone prefers. I'm not saying I prefer one to the other, just that "Somalia" is not an objectively correct choice.
It's actually not lawless, it just uses a decentralized (polycentric) legal system that is poorly understood by westerners. They've had better outcomes under this system than under democratic government of FGS, which led to all or nothing tribalism influences coming into office.
A government that can't do anything to police unions is also the government living in fear of the governed. A government that can't rein in (say) PG&E is also a government living in fear of the governed. When political representatives are shot by a right-wing anti-abortion terrorist that is also (and perhaps even more viscerally so) a government living in fear of the governed. And I'm certainly not 100% okay with this.
How can you look at the current state of affair and say this with a straight face... It's a mafia, they're all millionaires, they're all friends, thay all go to the same schools, they all work for the government and instantly bounce to lobby for the private sector, they all use their insider knowledge to profit, &c. Only someone who went through the American education system can believe the US is anywhere close to what you described, it's a farce
In fact the capital criminals in this matter are the people violating and betraying that supreme law; the politicians, sheriffs, city councils, and even the YC funders behind Flock, etc.
It is in fact not even just violating the supreme law, but though that betrayal, it is in fact also treason.
https://journals.law.unc.edu/ncjolt/blogs/under-surveillance...
If you tell people this will help stop crime and that's it, everyone and their mama is gonna say yes.
If you tell people the truth, that police don't really care to look at the data and this surveillance is going to be used to target innocent people for unrelated "crimes" on the taxpayers dollar, then everyone would say no.
This is also why 99% of surveys are broken. You can get people to agree to literally anything if you just lie a little. After all, Adolf Hitler got elected by promising to fix the German economy and, in a way, he did.
I don't know what "surveys" have to do with this. Voters voted on it; it was a campaign issue in our trustee election.
Murder is implied in the Epstein files with an email about burying girls on the property.
Eating sounds like an unhelpful exaggeration, unless I missed a major news story.
There's a bunch of mentions of "jerky" in the files, some people have taken it to mean eating people.
If you are a taxpayer in a local jurisdiction with Flock cameras and you want them removed, show up to every single meeting and maximize use of public comment time.
Local government is a place individuals can actually be extremely effective but also almost nobody ever actually does.
Some might think it is somehow a Fourth Amendment violation, but I'm pretty sure it has already been ruled on enough times now that there is no expectation of privacy on government-owned roads, except for what's inside your car.
Similarly if there is a law that says the government can't build cameras everywhere to track you 24/7 without a warrant then post facto get a warrant to justify the prior tracking. Many people believe there is a breakdown in the rule of law when The government can pay someone else who has built cameras everywhere to track you 24/7 without a warrant then post facto get a warrant to justify the prior tracking.
Society is like a pressure cooker, with built-in safety release valves to prevent the pressure from getting too high. If your solution to the safety release is to block off the valves, with authoritarian surveillance, draconian laws, and lack of justice for the elites committing crimes, it just moves it somewhere else. Block off too many, and it explodes.
- JFK
You are simply imposing your own views on others. Just because you disagree with Flock doesn't give you the right to destroy license plate readers that my tax dollars paid for. Who appointed you king?
And civil disobedience is basically necessary to have a functioning society long term.
And I don't think respecting the law still matters when the lawmakers are so evil.
I applaud the people destroying these cameras. It's not violence against people, it's just property.
More people need to understand that the system is working as designed, and the elimination of peaceful, incremental reform based on popular demand, along with mass manipulation of human emotions through media and advertising, means that this sort of resistance is the sole outcome left before devolving into naked sectarian violence.
Say what you will, but the anti-Flock camera smashers are at least doing something beyond wishcasting from a philosophical armchair in comment sections or social media threads.
Sorry, try again!
Doesn't breakdown in rule of law happened when a corporation (surely) bribed local officials to install insecure surveillance devices with zero concern for the community living near them?
It really comes down to whether you consider an individual’s right to privacy more important than your state’s security. Neither is really a perfect options in this case, but having the Flock camera means some part of your property is under the panopticon of local law enforcement that could arrest you (loss of privacy).
Going with chinese tech, you are probably more private in regards to your own government, but you’re probably having some negative effect on state security based on the marginal benefit of CCP surveillance/ potential malware in your network.
The dichotomy is false. People could have cameras which report to no one, but that’s less useful for all governments involved.
If enough people can be convinced that those cameras are somehow helping Trump, you’ll find a lot of people in here and Reddit saying “yes”, I’ll imagine. Before this we had people vandalizing Teslas because of Elon.
All this shit flows downhill from Citizens United.
That was the wellspring of all this shit.
Wait until the governance fails to the point data centers start getting burned down
[1] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/record-low-crime-rates-are-...
I don't like all this surveillance stuff, but Flock is just the tip of the iceberg and "direct action" against Flock is just as likely to backfire as it is to lead to changes. More importantly, once you give folks moral license to do this stuff it's hard to contain the scope of their activity.
Everything you said is true, but I suspect, also irrelevant, because options short of vigilante justice aren't going to be seen by the public as viable for much longer (if they're even seen so now). America's social contract is breaking, and existing institutions make it clear, daily, that they will strengthen that trend rather than reverse it. And as JFK said, 'Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.' That doesn't make the violence laudable, or even desirable. It is simply inevitable without seemingly impossible positive change from an establishment that is hostile to such.
You don't want to give people "moral license" to do this broadly, but we've hit a point where there are no options available that don't have downsides. Stated another way: Taking no action can also be unethical.
I believe in surveillance, but Flock is just the tip of the iceberg and rolling out mass public surveillance is just as likely to backfire as it is to lead to changes. More importantly, once you give folks moral license to do this stuff it’s hard to contain the scope of their activity.
the threat has to be credible, which is where things like this, and luigi are quite valuable
This is absolutely the right thing to do.
Remove and smash the cellular modem in your car while you are at it.
This was in regards to: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2025/01/...
I don't have facebook, X, or tiktok installed on my phone.
https://darkanswers.com/how-your-location-is-sold-to-adverti...
It seems incongruous to me that people are willing to recognize the benefits that these tools provide law enforcement at solving crimes but when it comes to Flock cameras somehow things are totally different. They're just cameras with really good software, and law enforcement likes them because it makes their jobs easier.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide-area_motion_imagery
I strongly recommend not breaking the law until you've fully considered the omniscient demigod threat model. You never know who is watching and what their capabilities might be.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARGUS-IS
https://www.extremetech.com/defense/146909-darpa-shows-off-1...
Tech deployed to distant lands will eventually be turned on the empire's own.
Like it or not, we're all stuck on the same boat. Normalizing the abuse and mistreatment of some parts of the world means normalizing it for everyone.
You can scream up and down about how building such things is a horrible idea because it can one day be used for evil, and folks will either yawn or call you paranoid or worse.
Then the thing actually gets (very lightly) abused/used for something folks don't like and omg it's an emergency no one could have ever predicted! And oh look - it's often times far too late to do a damn thing about it other than surface level 'fixes' that are nothing of the sort.
It gets very frustrating living in such a society, but it might simply be the way humans are wired. If it's not in your face and actively a major problem to you in the moment, it's simply not a concern.
The way to avoid masked gestapo thugs is to ensure that not even your preferred leaders are able to create them.
2. What you mentioned sucks. But it's hard to get the public to care about things that don't directly affect them and their day to day lives. My wife somehow browses the internet without an ad blocker even though I've told her that they track you and are basically malware, but knowing that doesn't change her browsing habits or make her even want to use an ad blocker, even if the ads are hostile to her experience.
3. Once the ICE thing came to light, suddenly people were like, wait, they can use this information to deport us or kill us? That's not OK.
Until recently very few people could articulate the real risk this tech posed, now you can literally see it play out (depending where you live)
They weren't being used to build concentration camps before.
1. They didn't know about it. It's only recently that there have been popular youtube videos on the topic. Critical mass can take time.
2. Before "the whole ice thing" there wasn't a team of masked brownshirts terrorising communities and using all available technology they could access in order to undertake said terrorising. That these cameras are part of that available technology, the timing ain't weird at all. In fact, it was pretty predictable.
But, yes, should have been up in arms beforehand, but likely the knowledge and visceral demonstration of the effects were not known. Visceral demonstration does pretty heavy lifting.
Well who could've seen that coming.
Figure out how to put an LCD in front of many of the ALPR cameras and play a slideshow of car images of license plates that exist almost exclusively in different geolocations. Make the Flock data so noisy that it becomes useless.
[0] https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=video+r...
> Why can't any random company request to put up a camera on a random power pole?
Not owning the pole is usually the show stopper
This is the sort of thing that should be put to a city referendum.
There's more of us then there are of them - so their wealth can't protect them from everything. They can and do buy privacy so there must be something worth protecting that the masses can expose using their same methods.
I wonder how resistant the cameras are to strong handheld lasers. I suppose they could harden them against some common wavelengths with filters, but that'd affect the image clarity in normal use.
Most of his work was dealing with and accounting for reflections that left the machine. If you have a prism that’s sending 95% of the light where you want it to go, when it’s a multi watt laser you can’t just let that 5% go wherever it wants. You will blind someone. So his job was getting black bodies in all the right spots to absorb the lost light.
His safety goggles looked like even more expensive Oakleys of that era and they were (much more expensive).
How can one know what is dangerous for the eyes or not? Years ago I got an "IR illuminator" (from aliexpress, probably) that I wanted to use with my raspberrypi NoIR camera, for fun. Say filming myself during the night to see how much I move while sleeping, or making my own wildlife camera trap.
But I was scared that it could be dangerous and never used it (I tested it in an empty room, but that was it).
Is there a safe way for a hobbyist to get an IR illuminator and be sure that I won't make somebody blind with it?
I assume you're concerned about reflections from the camera lens or housing? In my mind, the archetypal camera is mounted on a nice tall pole, silhouetted against open sky, and painted matte black.
> watt class lasers
Surely those would be excessive for someone attacking the sensor, unless they want to remotely sear some graffiti by burning away paint.
This is a nerd fantasy thing, but it's a really bad idea. It's hard to hit a tiny lens from a distance and it only takes one slip of the hand to shine it straight into traffic or someone walking down the sidewalk.
https://www.cehrp.org/dissection-of-flock-safety-camera/
https://www.arducam.com/product/arducam-ov5647-noir-camera-b...
It just depends on if you're on the up portion of the K or the down stick. The larger picture might show an increase but if you split the data apart one leg is actually declining while the other is growing.
They disagree on the authority, not the methods, and help the two institutional parties cooperate to destroy civil liberties by accusing their counterparts of abusing ("weaponizing") civil rights to commit crimes, spy for foreign governments, and/or abuse children.
If you don't believe me, just look at the CCP. It already happened there.
https://www.arducam.com/arducam-ov5647-standard-raspberry-pi...
If you want a fancy one with a lens and an IR cut filter it'll run you a grand total of $35:
https://www.arducam.com/arducam-ov5647-noir-camera-board-w-m...
Sure, the extra stuff like LTE modem, battery, solar panels, casing, etc, costs a whole lot more money, but these things clearly are built cheap. The optics and imaging sensor is a joke compared to real, proper cameras.
Nest: video was recovered from 'residual data located in backend systems' even though there was no active subscription.
Ring: employees accessing people's videos.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/05/...
I am an American and I am doing something about it. Co-founded a company that manufactures privacy-centric, on-prem video monitoring devices. No cloud.
> We are committed to protecting human privacy and mitigating bias in policing with the development of best-in-class technology rooted in ethical design, which unites civilians and public servants in pursuit of a safer, more equitable society.
And that's one of the reasons we made it architecturally impossible for someone to access the data externally. The user decides how and where to send the data.
Additionally, that you draw the line at sharing that juicy data with law enforcement. I mean sure, yeah, but even before that, sharing essentially all your movement data with some company because...?
https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2020/02/technologis...
what good is their platform if it is easily defeated by a guy with a ladder and a hammer?
I assume their primary use case is combating organized retail theft rings, as companies like Target spend a great deal on this problem (to include famously having their own accredited crime lab).
Cameras on the street is another matter altogether. Should not be allowed unless the citizens of the town vote to allow it.
Why is no one in democratic countries complaining about mass surveillance?
And I mean real cameras (not license plate readers) recording 24/7?
I'm talking about UK, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, etc.
LPRs are absolutely mass surveillance when used without proper legal restraints
the legal restraints are the big difference between regular police, who operate without very specific boundaries to protect individual rights -- and ICE, who can do whatever they want with impunity. That's what separates "police" from "Gestapo".
so, yeah, the stakes are different now. and if the "blue party" was the one pulling this shit I'd be just as mad
Police states are like autoimmune diseases under the hygiene hypothesis. They'll keep ramping up their sensitivity until they're attacking everything, even when it's benign.
There obviously isn't a future without crime. This is just a tool to make it easier for police to do their job and deter criminals somewhat, but that is probably marginal.
There will always be kidnappings, there will always be property damage. Having technology available to make it easier to solve those crimes seems obvious to me.
There are other ways to sacrifice your privacy for a sense of safety that doesn't impose your 'understanding of right and wrong' on the entire public.
"Could I be making wrong assumptions? No I'm a hacker, it must be everyone else who is wrong."
The amount of damage these cameras have caused is totally disproportional to whatever meager benefit they may have wrought. These are antisocial machines.
edit: I live in Dallas so, although we sometimes hear gunshots when the Cowboys score a touchdown, i'm not in an active war zone.
Edit: And I don’t even know how to have good faith conversations about this topic in these spaces, because the hive mind has decided that anything but absolute outrage is untenable. I’m getting downvoted for sharing my opinion.
I can drive down highways in most cities in the USA without my license plate being read (Flock isn't on highways). Also Flock as integrated mostly just records license plates. It's not recording video 24/7.