Ousted Savannah police officer gave ICE agent husband access to Flock system
wjcl.com
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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 for these tools.
Some are, others aren't. They just accept it willingly.
Just as in the Purge movies politicians are exempt ;-)
I will never understand the reason of mentioning works of fictions to make a real life point
The idea that a movie could get so many basic things so badly wrong, that it could float a scenario that made zero sense, but still gain such cultural traction was one of the first times I felt old. It's speaking to a youth with crazy and new ideas. They're ready to make their own grand and terrible mistakes, which a future youth will one day hate them for.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rally_%27round_the_flag_effect
> normal everyday people wouldn't want to be violent one day year
Rally round the flag accounts for "violence done by others against us" and not "random violence against ourselves" so I think it's completely meaningless in the case of this conversation.
With regard to human sacrifice, how much violence have you been involved in? Maybe a few fist fights in middle school or high school? Do you know anyone who has committed real violence? I'll bet you don't. It's exceedingly rare these days compared to historical norms. People might disagree on why its become so rare, but the general rarity is a fact. Even for areas with high violent crime, there is usually a small minority of violent re-offenders, rather than a large majority of people committing random violence.
Does years of domestic violence count? What about shootings I've witnessed but wasn't a part of? There's a school nearby and kids carry guns around here.
> Do you know anyone who has committed real violence?
I don't hang out with the violent types in the first place, so the question makes no sense.
No, I mean, per capita, how many people as compared to the number of people you know total, have perpetrated violence.
>I don't hang out with the violent types in the first place, so the question makes no sense.
But if violence were ubiquitous, you wouldn't be able to avoid it. I don't know any violent people either. My point is just that most people (per capita) do not commit violence most of the time. The idea that everyone's just chomping at the bit to perpetrate violence is at odds with reality.
The absolute majority just takes shelter and sits it out.
The unlucky people who can't but don't want to participate get slaughtered.
The crazy ones thrive
We should engineer a society immune to that.
Not Starship Troopers, though.
Alas, the Roberts court effectively ruled that it's not really a bribe if it falls short of the third party saying they want the government official to vote/rule a particular way for a particular price, the government official does as asked, and he/she sends the third party a written invoice for services rendered.
Even should that happen, I'm pretty sure Justice Thomas would find the larger offense is that the invoice failed to include sales tax.
Remember our Supreme Court's recent bribery scandal wasn't that a number of justices were accepting gifts but rather that they hasn't disclosed them properly. We're perfectly OK with third parties bribing the judges on our highest court so long as the judges fill out the correct paperwork.
They understand exactly how people work. You are naive for thinking that they aren't aware of this. Their entire job is essentially a popularity contest in which they promise you things, that they almost never deliver on.
Honestly I think the majority aren't smart enough to do the cost benefit analysis of these system, so they just ignore the warning.
You'd be shocked how many people cannot process basic hypotheticals. I've been in countless dialogues like this one:
- How would you feel now if you had not eaten breakfast?
- But I did eat breakfast.
As a computer programmer, I do not have english words to express how frustrating this can be at times.
What are you going to ask them next? What is heavier, 1 tonne of bricks or feathers? It's old-school boy humour. It doesn't prove anything other than the maturity level of the person asking it.
Also I severely doubt you did this, as it was a meme that was floating around online last year for about two weeks because some influencers popularised it.
I didn't literally ask people "How would you feel if you had not eaten breakfast?", but rather questions that naturally followed the conversation that at the same time were either hypotheticals, or some adjacent ideas that require similar shift of perspective. The "How would you feel if you had not eaten breakfast?" stands as a symbol of a general idea.
Your comment is prime example of grown-ass adults having reading comprehension of GPT-1, especially that you missed the word "like", which explicitly points that the following example isn't to be taken literally, but rather metaphorically.
I can already imagine you in a conversation going like:
- It hit me like a bolt from the blue!
- But a bolt from the blue did not hit you, did it?
I cannot believe I need to explain this shit to you.
Sure, of course, and I still don't believe you.
I had also considered the possibility that you would further lie about it and pivot your explanation when directly challenged. If you don't want people to think you are fabricating things, I suggest you don't reference a worn-out trend that was tiresome mere days after it first spread.
Even if I accepted that what you said is true (which I find very hard to believe), many people generally just don't like being asked hypotheticals because they think they are being tricked in an effort to embarrass them, so they often don't bother engaging further.
> Your comment is prime example of grown-ass adults having reading comprehension of GPT-1, especially that you missed the word "like", which explicitly points that the following example isn't to be taken literally, but rather metaphorically.
I didn't miss the word "like" at all. Putting "like" in a sentence isn't a get out of jail free card, especially when I recognise what I believe to be an obvious lie.
People were asking this stupid hypothetical on Discord/Reddit, etc., for what felt like several months last year. People when off the internet typically don't bother engaging in this behaviour. So I just don't believe you, even if the hypothetical was technically a bit different, e.g., "How would you feel if you lost your bag on the bus this morning?"
They don't care either way. They do whatever they think is popular to garner support. If it was popular to bring slavery back, they would advocate for that.
> Honestly I think the majority aren't smart enough to do the cost benefit analysis of these system, so they just ignore the warning.
I honestly wonder why many of you keep on giving these people the benefit of the doubt. Please don't quote Hanlon's razor at me. There's another side of it that often isn't discussed.
Nefarious individuals know (if they can't verbalise it) that most people will assume a mistake is made rather than malice and they will routinely use this to their advantage. Anyone that is in the political space, I automatically assume malice.
These people have us arguing about nonsense while they line their pockets.
Stop assuming that these people have your best interests at heart. Cynicism is warranted because their class has earned the (poor) reputation.
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]"
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 off on it.
ah, the movie Brazil :)
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 sundown towns: they ganged up and started killing n*ggers and poor people.
If they wanted to do something to increase feeling of safety, and justice, they'd crack down on bike theft.
2. Automated enforcement is generally in the form of fines, which habitual violators ignore.
3. Confiscating vehicles as an escalating consequence of automated enforcement is so unpopular no one will even suggest it.
I get that point 1 is extremely valid in a place like the US where everyone can have a gun.
Do other countries not enforce fines?
In the UK you can have your car confiscated on the spot if the automated number plate recognition in a patrol car flags you don't have insurance. Fines are enforced, but escalating that to non-payment of fines seems like something they could do (people might complain, but only the ones not paying their fines!)
- Suppose a vehicle chooses not to stop. What's the safest way to complete the stop? High-speed chases are dangerous. The eventual spike trap or pushing the tail end of the car or whatnot is dangerous. The fleeing person won't be in a sound state of mind for safe driving even if not followed. Toss in a little human error like forgetting to turn your lights and sirens on, and these are predictably extremely dangerous. Just under 1% end in a fatality.
- There's an elevated risk of wrecks, side-swipes, and whatnot by virtue of being on the side of the road, often in dangerous areas.
- Most assaults on police officers don't involve guns. There are something like 7-8k assaults on officers due to traffic stops annually, despite knowing they carry guns. A little over a hundred of those result in serious injury to the officer, most of which don't use guns in the process.
- Don't forget injury to the passengers. 100k/yr are injured by the police at a traffic stop. Again, that's usually without guns. And why wouldn't they be? The police have nearly a carte blanche, and they're being placed into an environment where they know they're at risk, with perceived risk being higher than actual risk.
You mention the UK, so how do they fare? They have 100x fewer traffic stops, so I'll scale up the numbers accordingly. In particular, that means they have 2.5x officers injured just from vehicles being rammed during stops than the US has assaults on officers in total. That's suggestive of gun violence not being the entire story regarding traffic stop safety.
Mind you, that's not quite apples to apples. The UK has 5x fewer people and 2-3x fewer miles driven per person per year, suggesting we're missing another factor of 5-10 when trying to figure out why the US has more traffic stops, and my first guess would be that the UK police have a selection bias toward more serious offenses, so the higher safety rates of the US police are at least in part due to pulling over a higher share of less violent individuals.
Nevertheless, it's not just gun violence. Traffic stops are dangerous elsewhere too. (not to be interpreted as a comment on gun policy, rather that it's annoying to see important conversations like consequences of traffic stop safety derailed by irrelevant nationalistic swipes and jabs)
Traffic stops should be used for traffic enforcement and treated as community policing, not as the main method of hoping to stumble on things the police should have resolved via actual police work and effort.
[0] https://policeepi.uic.edu/u-s-data-on-police-shootings-and-v...
If Northern Ireland was the size of Greenland back in the 80s, I'm sure traffic stops in the middle of nowhere would've been a bit hairy, too.
It seems like our federal system is an obstacle. I'm in Maryland and a huge fraction of our biggest habitual traffic violators somehow get Virginia license plates.
> Do other countries not enforce fines?
Where I live (Baltimore, MD) the 10 vehicles with the most unpaid speeding tickets owe $81,000 between them. So you can push 10k in unpaid fines and remain on the road somehow.
Policing shouldn't be done via traffic stops. Traffic stops should be done via traffic stops.
The rules and numbers are allowed to be what they are so long as mass tasteful/mild noncompliance is tolerated. The second you start robotically (electronic robots vs meat robots in uniform does not matter in this case) fining people for taking lefts on red arrows at 1am or exceeding the speed limit a bit in the base case you will see politicians pandering to voters by changing those rules such that the typical person can behave typically without any particular care to abide by them and generally not break them.
The problem with traffic enforcement is that the police want it to remain available as a pretext to stop anyone when they want to.
For example, the MUTCD recommends that speed limits typically be set to the 85th percentile traffic speed. One of the reasons for this is that speed differentials are very dangerous. Another is that you typically want laws to have at least a little bit of leeway between "thing law abiding people are expected to actually do" and "thing with government-imposed penalties", rather than having them separated by 0.
But US speed limits are regularly set 10-15 MPH below that speed, so that the majority of traffic is exceeding them. Because then the police have an excuse to pull over anyone they want to. This is also often used a source of fine revenue because as long as they don't do so much enforcement that people actually comply with the law, they can periodically park a patrol car on the side of the road and "efficiently" hand out one ticket after another.
Which is the problem with automated enforcement. If people were consistently fined then you would get compliance rather than widespread violations. At which point people might object more strongly to the speed limits not being set by the book. But regardless of which way that comes out, it causes you to lose the fine revenue and the pretext to stop anyone, since you stop having both of those if you do either of the things that results in most people being in compliance with the law.
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.
DeShaney v. Winnebago County Department of Social Services (1989) held that the Constitution generally does not require the government to protect people from harm inflicted by private individuals.
Town of Castle Rock v. Gonzales (2005), held that a woman did not have a constitutional entitlement to police enforcement of a restraining order.
You are forced to pay taxes for service that you may/may not actually receive.
You are forced to tell the truth to people who are allowed to tell you lies.
The system is designed to protect the system, and we are just passing through it while we are alive.
What’s the difference between a crime rate going down because people are getting older versus a crime rate going down?
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.
If a definite majority wants to do so, the system will change. Until then the oligarchs will keep playing one side againts the other, as can currently be seen with Trump amplifying the hate in the population, in order for his cronies to steal more money, start more wars and so forth. He will lose the upcoming elections but he will continue to worship theft and destruction.
- 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.
Maybe just a coincidence. I'm sure it is just a coincidence. For real
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.
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.
> In her appeal, Harpe said her husband was a certified federal law enforcement officer and that every search was conducted for law enforcement purposes.
> “The violation occurred because I gave my husband, who is a certified law enforcement officer with the Department of Homeland Security, access to my Flock account,” Harpe wrote. “Every search he conducted was for law enforcement use only and not for personal gain.”
There seems to be a subset of law enforcement officers who fundamentally don't understand privacy, checks and balances, and responsibility. They believe they should have unrestricted access to everyone else and that they are above us all.
Firing her was not excessive, it is the bare minimum. Officers should be held to a higher standard, not lower. She and her husband should be in a jail cell.
You can't make the same argument with financial systems by giving someone at a different bank access to your bank just because you're both "financial professionals", and that's arguably much less sensitive data.
Believe it was Lucius.
And because it was fiction, and we had suspended our disbelief to enjoy a vision of a different world with guys that are inherently trustworthy, and because there was a confirmed terrorist plot to commit mass murder that literally could only be thwarted with this move.
Don't conflate temporary acceptance of a premise with real-world values, that's like being the guy that responds to the trolley problem with "I would simply remove the one person from the track, saving everyone and refusing to engage with this conversation."
This is why two things should be mandatory for new officers: psychological examination and a mandatory law degree from a qualified institution. If you're enforcing the law, you need to actually know its contents and how it works. That would naturally limit the numbers and discourage people who haven't gotten over high school from using their job as a torment nexus.
"We can arrest you even though we're not really sure if you actually broke a law. You, on the other hand, are expected to know the law, and ignorance is not considered an excuse."
Not disagreeing but I can’t see how this would be practical. I think any college degree should be the absolute minimum though.
It's not. We just accept it as a default because it's easy to dismiss something obviously good (making sure police are mentally stable, law-aware, and held to a level of scrutiny commensurate to the job) because it may require effort.
Someone being handed a gun and told to go "keep people in line" should be held to an almost absurd standard before ever being let on the streets. That we don't already do this speaks volumes about the underdeveloped state of our civilization (despite our hubris to the contrary).
I get what you mean, but with how easy it is to get a gun (especially in red states), it is practical in the sense that it seems pretty easy to do and there’s no shortage.
But should we? I agree with you, absolutely fucking not.
Have you tried? I live in Tennessee (aggressively red) and own multiple firearms. Mandatory background checks and a mandatory 3-day wait [1] are the standard. Even online transfers from an FFL require submission of an ATF registration form.
Tangential, but it's not as easy as one would think. Also, there are a shocking number of posers down here. Stars and bars and "don't tread on me" but not a lot of commitment to "the mission." There are far more grown men driving lifted trucks with glow lights on them than serious threats.
[1] https://www.stateregstoday.com/politics/gun-control/firearm-...
Just in one of the super blue states. My buddy lives in Texas, he’s got a couple of guns and says is easy to get.
> There are far more grown men driving lifted trucks with glow lights on them than serious threats.
The problem is these guys join ICE or act like they are, and that’s a serious threat. If you brandish Stars and Stripes / Dont Tread on Me, even if you’re a poser I’m not going to take a risk of finding out. That in itself is powerful.
A large part of law enforcement training is specifically to instill and reinforce this belief. They are officers, you are civilians. You are not the same (in their eyes). They are the thin blue line keeping society from crumbling into anarchy (or socialism). Hell, when push comes to shove, they will close ranks and throw firefighters and paramedics under the bus (arrested on the scene of car accidents for insufficiently respecting the cops "authority"), ER staff (ER nurses arrested for refusing a warrantless blood draw when the cops are desperate to diffuse blame from their off-duty drunk fellow officer who blew a red light and fatally t-boned another car), and so on and so on.
In their eyes it goes like this:
Privacy:- why do you need it if you have nothing to hide?
Checks and balances:- you are the balance and I’m here to check you
Responsibility:- it is my responsibility to check you
I want to say I’m being sarcastic but I don’t know anymore. Arguably their motivation is to hunt and jail people, so it feels like “personal gain” on the fringes. No job is so far removed that it’s devoid of personal gain.
Maybe that last part was a smidge too radical.
This is why if you're building a product, please give SSO for free (see sso.tax) - you shift responsibility, requirements and posture to the tenant's IdP.
It is intentional and deliberate price discrimination to charge enterprises more. One example: why do you think enterprises don't just stack consumer/teams Codex or Claude subs with significant subsidies; given that all enterprise seats are API/PAYG now? SSO/IdP + ability to opt out of training globally
I think you’re overestimating the amount of enterprises that don’t have cloud computing.
Simple method is IP whitelisting, easy in some ways painful to keep updated. Vpn is another easy option. But then you can have client side certs, hardware tokens, and endpoint security mechanisms which are probably more robust. Either way, it's not a weird unique thing, it's pretty ubiquitous :)
Doing things, "correctly" is sort of no longer the place of software. The idea is to build solutions that are comprised of toothpicks and sticky tacky so you can force out whatever the alternative was and make money for the shareholders at the same time.
Authenticate with SSO > IDP checks for Device fingerprint > IDP Approves Login if Device is whitelisted
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.
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.
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.
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.
[reality] It's just the police, beating us with better batons, same as it ever was.
Last two visits, some guy named "Victor" shadowed me, and made it a point to call me by my first name twice.
I spend as little money at Home Depot as possible now.
The flock system is being abused by every organization across the entire country, because thats where peoples heads are at today.
2 out of 3 adults in the US are not considered "psychologically mature" by psychologists.
Nation of adult children + spying and tracking technology ... of course its being abused. The only question is how much, and Flock isn't going to tell us the truth of it, ever, because they dont track abuse, they track victims.
We are the victims of Flock.
They use the licence plate hotlist internally to track when "organized retail crime(tm)" shows up and get pings when "thieves" come back to the store.
Thus, any Lowes/HD asset protection employee/manager can log into Flock, and see all of the ones "owned" by their corporation (which is nationwide, and installed well beyond the confines of the store property, often covering entire shopping plazas or parks where they're located). They won't be able to see outside of those bounds, but that's still a SUPER powerful tool if you consider ~1700 Lowes and 2000 Home Depots in the US alone.
And of course, combined with "small town" mentality and "backing the blue", of course someone with a modicum of power (the mall cop AP employee) will LARP up and want to whack out with ICE/the local PD and be happy to help them if it means getting a challenge coin!
Home Depot and Lowes are the 2 largest US home store ( construction materials, appliances, etc ) retail chains in the US.
They have Flock cameras installed on mobile trailers, parked in their parking lots. The cameras track your vehicle as you are parking, and issue alerts for anyone that has been flagged in the database.
In my case, I have classmates from school, who have friends at the local county EMS operations center, who are using the system to stalk me.
Just 3 days ago, I tried to have a quiet conversation with my girlfriend at a little park, in a small neighborhood. Less than 10 minutes after arriving, a car with 4 or 5 people showed up, positioned themselves within ear shot, and then began making fun of us in order to prevent us from thinking and discussing issues clearly. This event by itself seems innocent and random, except, it happens like clockwork, in multiple locations, and its an established pattern in my life, making it decidedly non-random. The "actors" think of it as street theatre, the police think of it as "policing", and what you get as the target is pure psychological hell.
When a victim begins to try and explain verbally what is happening to them, they relive the trauma of the events that have been "staged" and people assume the victim is mentally unstable. It is the same strategy as kicking a dog in the head repeatedly, until it becomes an agry mad dog, and then putting it down because it was dangerous. Create the problem, then appear to solve it.
What may have started out as a joke now has them guilty of human trafficking, so they have adopted a strategy of "running me out of town" via harrassment.
They know if they emotionally destablise people, they will voluntarily leave or self destruct via drugs, stress, acting out, etc.
This is what "community policing" now means.
There are any number of videos on youtube of people having meltdowns, claiming they are being 'gangstalked', etc. and they seem very disturbed. This is why this works. They disturb you, then dismiss any allegations as you being disturbed.
Watch the movie "Closetland" for how psychological abuse works.
And you blame the "adults of America" that supposedly are "psychologically inmature", which to me looks like an absurd and unsubstantiated claim
The Flock system has these risks built into it, no matter what its proponents claim. A person with one too many beers in them, in any downtown area, in any city, in any country, could say something to offend the wrong person. A person with access to Flock, who happens to be a police officer, who then stalks them.
Your reality is composed of what you have observed, what you have experienced, and what people tell you is real, and people tell 9 lies a day.
Your reality, some part of it, is not what you think. If you place a person in a reality that you control, and then execute a "rug pull" where you drop the veil and reveal a different reality, it causes stress, and stress kills after enough of it.
It's alright if you can't accept that this is happening to other people, but you are doing so because the idea scares you, and its not happening to you, so you reject it, and that is why it works.
Its the new digital Jim Crowe era, and US history is repleat with stories of people whos rights have been abused by others.
For every black person who was denied a seat at a diner in the 50's, there were 10 white people who love the diner and get excellent service every time.
We share a planet, and a country, while our experiences, even in the exact same place, are different.
The wealthy are fine protectors of the status quo, because it serves them. The poor have problems with the status quo, because it doesn't serve them. Same set of rules, 2 different outcomes, for 2 different groups of people.
Lets say Im your former girlfriend from school, and I have a grudge against you for normal mistakes kids make when socializing in school, and I have access to the Flock system, either directly, or through someone I've known for a long time.
Lets also add, that I have $5 million dollars in the bank, from having been born into a family of privilege, and experienced success in my professional life.
Lets also add, that I'm an unstable malignant narcissist, or covert narcissist, who extracts joy from using power to make others suffer. This isn't a made up diagnosis, this is a real behavior pattern among people in power.
Now, you are doing everything "right." You would never even think of stalking, harrassing, attacking anyone. Just because you don't have these thoughts, doesn't mean that others don't have them. They do. But you dont have a social support network, and you live paycheck to paycheck.
I can destabilize your life in any number of ways with the Flock database, because I know every store you visit, every friend you visit, every park you visit, etc. and theres nothing you can do about it.
I can send my police officer friend, into a store that you visit, like Home Depot, that has flock, and have them tell the security guy at home depot to flag you for whatever reason I care to make up. The uniform provides all the authority, even when the conversation is complete bs. The home depot guy flags you. Now, everytime you walk into any home depot, some random stranger treats you like a repeat shoplifter. They follow you, they say odd things to you. The idea that you are a criminal is "projected" onto you, by their assumption.
I can hire actors using the gig economy websites, and send them to where you are going to be to act out a script, which will cause you to respond in a manner that prevents you from thinking clearly. They will mock your clothes, your hair, etc.
After enough of these "scripted scenes" you realize everyone treats you like a criminal, worthless, useless troublemaker, and not the educated, intelligent, caring professional you are. They projected a new identity onto you.
A person who is aware of what is happening to them, and sees it clearly, has a near 0 chance of explaining it to someone who hasn't experienced it themselves. They sound crazy, because they have been intentionally destablized using the same psychological warfare tactics that get used by the military during wars.
They also begin to behave differently, in order to avoid the stress. In the home depot example, they start parking where the flock camera wont tag the car. Anyone with them asks "why are we walking a mile" and the person says "The flock system is tracking me." A perfectly rational adaptation to the environment, gets perceived as paranoia, because the stress only exists in the targets perception.
This technique works especially well on people who are seeking validation of their own identity from others. If you know who you are, and you have cemented your own identity, it doesn't work the same.
Watch some of Sam Vaknin's videos on narcissism. You'll be amazed that these people exist and enjoy destroying others, and they tend to hold positions of power. Your pain is their pleasure.
My "former classmates" due to some grudge, are using their friends in power, to abuse me. The two classmates spearheading it, know everyone who is anyone in this county, because one was the President of a womens organization, and the other has been a bartender downtown for 20 years.
I'm being harassed by the digital good ole boy network. This behavior isn't new, its just morphed into a sci fi dystopia.
When wikipedia says its a delusion, the predators have free reign, because the victims will never be believed, because wikipedia said they were delusional.
It takes far less time, attention, and energy, to dismiss a claim like this than it does to prove it, so everyone dismisses it.
It's perfect, just like the matrix.
I'm also reminded of the Star Trek episode "I, Mudd" where they short circuit the robots brains with illogical statements that can't be resolved.
Same scenario.
You and I sit here, and make references to literary plots, to attempt to solve a problem.
Predators watch the same Star Trek episode, and say to themselves, "I'm going to start doing that to people."
That sucks though.
You can tell that something has happened to them, but its ephemeral, because its psychological, and what do all of us do when we don't understand someone ?
We dismiss them. We other them. We isolate them. We walk away.
Not as a group decision, but the outcome of our collective individual decisions.
Abuse someone long enough, psychologically, and if they are not educated and self-aware, their behavior becomes erratic and they lose all social support.
It's not unlike veterans of a war, who understand what each other went through, when the public doesn't.
Unfortunately, our society is really good about detecting people who are "acting weird" - and some people decide to harass or bully the weird ones. Feeling like you are being stalked makes it very difficult to act "normally" in all circumstances, which increases the odds on any subsequent outing that somebody will notice and act toward you in a way that's undesirable.
It still sucks, what is happening to these people. But it's not a coordinated malicious campaign against them in particular. It's like you say - the outcome of our collective individual decisions. For most of them, there never was any "targeting."
How did you reach this conclusion ?
> Unfortunately, our society is really good about detecting people who are "acting weird"
Yes, and I can cause you to act wierd, by projecting a false reality onto you.
Alot of what happened to me, happened in the bar my classmate worked at. We were "supposed to be working on music" together, but that was just his cover story. I would go to the bar where he works to talk to him about our project, and he would text his friends/actors to come and act out scripts with me, and in front of me. He controlled the narrative this way. Afterwards, I would reflect upon the events, and how I felt about it.
Just as one example, he had a woman pretend to be interested in me. Then, after investing time in talking to her, taking her to dinner, etc. she publicly humiliated me in the bar. The goal is emotional destablization.
Make you happy, pull the rug, make you sad.
One of the people in charge of county EMS operations aka camera monitoring, happens to be a female, and the bartender had her sit next to me and pretend to be interested in me as well on another occasion. I found her employment info later using google searches to connect the dots.
The terms for people who behave this way are "malignant narcissists" and the tactic is "intermitent reinforcement."
Sincerely, you should probably get back in touch with a medical professional you trust. Maybe I'm reading this situation all wrong, and you really do have dozens of unpaid "actors" spending their lives harassing you for no gain. But probably not.
Everyone has competition in life, except for you apparently.
Everyone experiences conflict in some form or another, except for you apparently.
Perhaps your appearance isn't what you make it out to be.
Also, you altered my statements to create yours. Thats the very tactic I've been explaining.
Nice try though.
"Mimetic Scapegoating, Then Mimetic Desire, Ends in Violence - Sam Vaknin"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42LTRQKkaEs
.. scarcity of objects creates a competitive environment. And since we imitate each other, we have this herd mentality of imitating each other in our desires. This inevitably, ineluctibly gives rise to competition which easily deteriorates and devolves into violence.
Society develops the scapegoat mechanism to redirect violence in ways that are less harmful to itself which in turn inspires the invention of religion to justify sacrifice is how the encyclopedia Britannica describes the situation.
Everyone gets to laugh at the sacrifice, except the sacrifice.
Comedy and tragedy are 2 sides of the same coin, and what determines if we laugh or cry, is our own personal proximity and role in the situation.
It's funny when Dick Van Dyke trips over the foot stool.
It hurts like hell when you do it.
The Jewish community was doing just as well as anyone else in the 20's. By the 30's, propaganda had convinced everyone they were the enemy. These people experienced "normal life" right up until someone decided to make them the enemy, via psychological warfare. They woke up one day with a train ticket to Auschwitz, for "work."
Many of them no doubt, were suspicious, but they were told they were 'crazy' and that 'the government wouldn't do that, the government is here to protect us.' The problem is, that government isn't a thing. Government is a group of people, and groups of people behave irrationally and violently all the time, while laughing and carrying on about how right they were to violently destroy their fellow man.
Go to a European soccer game. Just watch how the 2 sides act towards each other. The fans will attack each other, over their emotional investment in corporations that sell t-shirts.
Try convincing a religious person that God isn't real. They'll kill you to prove you wrong. The lack of evidence either way isn't a factor in their reasoning. The only thing that matters is their personal emotional investment in the idea.
As for me seeing a "medical professional" I'm going to have to schedule a consultation for myself and my girlfriend, because she's witnessed the "acting" as well, and the same bartender used these tactics to attack her brother, right after their father died. The bartender tried the same thing when my mother died. The day after she passed, I walked into the bar, and he started up a conversation saying "Noone gives a shit about some old lady dying." He wanted me to lose my shit and get angry, like my gf's brother did. I gave him no response, because I knew he was manipulating me.
When anyone can watch a youtube video on how to manipulate people, do you really think that noone is using the information to manipulate others ?
Wouldn't a "lifelong bartender" be interested in controlling and manipulating people ? Wouldn't he be an expert at it after 20 years of working in a bar ?
I'm a computer programmer. He knows this. He knows I've spent more hours interacting with computers than people, and he thought I would be an easy target. When you know the characters involved, the behavior patterns emerge.
If said bartender was a malignant narcissist, wouldnt the environment of a bar provide him with endless narcissistic supply ? He's a god in the bar. He can make anyones evening great, or he can text his friend to start a fight and get someone arrested. This is what narcissistic supply is.
"Every Manipulation Technique & How To Combat It Explained"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbkvBLyIAzo
We really need to stop thinking that predators don't walk amongst us, when all of history tells us it has always been the case.
They sell glasses of poison for people to drink.
It was only 120 years ago Congress had to pass a law specifically prohibiting bartenders from drugging people and selling them to boat captains.
How much have people changed in 120 years, behaviorially, at the core ?
Wouldn't the same selfish psychopaths, that sold people to boat captains, still be attracted to the same bar environment, even if their tactics of fleecing people have changed ?
I just happen to have gone to school with the guy. Lucky me.
I simply don't have the resources to fight this as hard as I would like, because it would consume all of the time I'm using merely to pay bills.
Predators don't attack the strongest animal. They attack the weakest.
That said, in the words of the great Tom Petty, "I won't back down."
The strategy that has worked so far for me, is to not internalize the nonsense. Just ignore it. Give it the attention it deserves, which is none.
[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.
Lots of explanations provided 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.
And 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?
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.
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.
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.
The old "if we don't do it, someone else will" doesn't apply if you're the only person evil enough to run Flock.
It's sad how the internet is getting worse by the day.
Why is that the case? Logged in from DE atm.
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.
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.
Doesn't mean I don't think that protest and outrage over surveillance aren't good things, just that these things require constant vigilance or else we're stuck with them. Personally, what I see happening is a further bifurcation of American life, where we see communities opposed to constant surveillance contrasted with those that embrace the panopticon.
Look, I get it, we're clearly in the backsliding zone right now, but midterms are here.
Which is not to say that voting can't be extremely effective, if organized at suitable scales over time. Trump wasn't re-elected because all the swing voters who'd replaced him with Biden in '20 were overjoyed with how Joe and his Dem's had handled things.
I was pointing out that the former is virtually meaningless, but the latter tends to be decisive.
Yes, mass surveillance is a huge problem. But most of the time, most of the voters do not behave as if they meaningfully care about most of the aspects of mass surveillance. That's pretty much the same rule as for the Pentagon buying $5,000 screwdrivers, and bizarre loopholes appearing in the tax code to benefit a few billionaires who are extremely "generous" to their good friends in Congress. Both R's and D's may loudly denounce those practices - but they know that actually fighting against them, where it counts, will not be good for their political careers.
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. You can write to your rep all you want but if Bubba from Farmtown, USA says trans people should be barred from youth sports [0] and he can get a dozen of his other buddies from the depopulated rural localities to co-sponsor it, it doesn't matter what your rep says or does.
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.
Specifically to that point against protesting, some forms of 'protest' that seem pervasive with groups like No Kings and 50501 are effectively self-neutered. The vast majority of those protests are permitted with police escorts.
On it's face, these 'protests' are similar to those of the past - people show up, they wave signs, they chant. But like a child imitating being a fighter pilot, it accomplishes nothing real. The point of a protest is disruption - economic disruption, traffic blocking, etc - because that disruption 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 or face millions in economic damage', you have an effective protest. This is how the Europeans do it between burning down their Supreme Courts to piling up tons of manure outside of Parliament - and that gets actual results.
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. Nothing changes, all that energy and labor that goes into organizing a safe protest dissipates, and the status quo remains fixed, even consolidated now that the already limited shared pool of movement labor has been siphoned off into a performative act.
[0] https://ltgov.georgia.gov/press-releases/2025-04-28/lt-gover...
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.
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In any case, these Netflix and LLM subscription comparisons are utterly beside the point, the equation is hilariously different when it’s a surveillance tool used by the state violence monopoly that we’re talking about. The standard should be absurdly higher than "no big deal, everyone shares their Netflix".
I am not a lawyer, just curious.
But even if it were legal, this only shows the core problem:
That data should not be available to anyone at all.
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 and self-driven exploration. Especially now with LLMs, research like this is vanishingly easy to do (as is the adversarial review of it, and the eventual dialectical synthesis). To not do so seems lazy, at best, and that's not addressing how the 'if it's not illegal, it's fine' thought-terminating cliche has been pervasively used to justify detention centers, military black sites, NSA wiretapping, police brutality, etc in a way that seems to universally be a bad faith practice.
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.