I think using technology to capture alleged criminals is a good thing.
Regardless, even if the technology was used currently purely for good, when you’re “pro surveillance” you’re actually arguing it will always be used for good, even in some hypothetical future with hypothetical politics. That’s a very hard sell.
People don't appreciate the actual argument against surveillance. It's not that it's bad, or evil. It's that it's fundamentally infrastructure which will be used against innocent people.
We have seen surveillance employed to the maximum degree in every totalitarian society which has ever existed. If we're going based purely off the track record, it doesn't look good. Ultimately it's all risk analysis.
Is preventing, like, a car theft or something worth the risk of Nazi Germany x10? Probably not I'd say. And you might say, well, that's hyperbolic. But given a long enough timescale, I don't think it is. I mean, imagine how many more Jews could have been killed had Hitler had access to Flock. And yes, Hitler was an anomaly. But anomalies happen if you wait long enough. We'd have to be foolish to think there won't be a second Hitler. Not that we even need one - we're already seeing citizens crushed under the surveillance apparatus in the US. Today. Right now. With our "just a little bit" authoritarian government.
Yes, we need laws to help stop this. Ideally, those laws should entirely destroy Flock's business model and lead to its bankruptcy.
The issue is not whether cameras are useful for law enforcement. The issue is how that camera information is managed and overseen. What Flock is doing would fit right in in a cartoon authoritarian state, but it doesn't belong in the real world.
I watched them happily train officers from Agencies on doing things they were not allowed to do by law, that Flock knew they weren't.
That "Chinese wall" of separation is nowhere near as concrete as you like to act.
Flock might not set the laws, but when the Flock CEO says he would prefer you to be collateral damage on his company's mission for "a world without crime, thanks to Flock" than dare risk someone not get caught for a crime or alleged crime, via Flock, then sorry, they absolutely are participating in things, and complaints against them are entirely appropriately targeted.