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I know this is preaching to the choir but from the article on the person holding the skimmer
> Police can also use the cameras to surveil protestors and stalk ex-lovers—or strangers they find attractive.
I didn't believe police actually did this until a roommate's new classmate told me her story. She has recently moved in to the neighborhood (an HOA at that). She was walking her dog one evening when a police officer who also lives in the HOA greeted her by her full legal name which she swears she never uses anywhere so the only way someone would know it was if they looked her up. She was just a roommate at this new place so her name wouldn't be in any HOA papers.
The police (or any law enforcement) really should not have access to any kind of dragnet surveillance.
They won't use technology to find our lost/stolen phones but they want even more surveillance for what?
A little searching will find you all sorts of such hits, like an officer tracking her domestic partner [0], an officer stalking someone after meeting on a TV set* [1], another officer tracking his ex partner [2], another officer tracking his mistress [3]. This is just a random sample.
* Note this scenario was not with Flock, which is important: there's more than one player in this space. Kill Flock and others might roll in; something broader is needed like, oh, I don't know, constitutional protections or something.
[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/atlanta/news/police-supervisor-accus...
[1] https://www.404media.co/footage-shows-cop-stalking-woman-he-...
[2] https://www.404media.co/cops-keep-getting-arrested-for-using...
This is quite distressing to hear. It's not the United States I know or even grew up in. What went wrong and how can we try to fix it?
Police are, in the most generous light, just as fallible and likely to abuse power as the rest of us.
You can loosely define power as “Effect minus repercussion”.
Massive effects like the nuclear football have massive repercussions like the end of civilization, so we tend to view them with a degree of balance. MAD has worked on this principle for decades pretty effectively. Even a tiny bit of Effect, with zero Repercussion, leads to unjust abuse, such as the diplomatic immunity issues in New York City.
Nearly everything we have given the police has huge Effect, mostly by necessity, but more every day with tools like flock and the stripping of our rights. Endless military hardware, etc.
Simultaneously we have ALSO been shrinking the repercussions for police. for decades. When sued the taxpayers pay for their defense. When they lose the lawsuits, the taxpayers pay the plaintiffs out and the police very very rarely face prison. Often times they can keep working in another department. They have extra protections nobody else has so they are less likely to lose those cases in the first place. There is next to ZERO oversight of all the tools we give them, to prevent the lawsuits. Federal police can remain anonymous when they commit obvious homicide or executions, apparently.
We are very close to an effectively infinite power situation because there are next to zero repercussions. Even IF cops had no firearms, no armored vehicles, no flock, no palantir. They could still bust the door down to their ex girlfriend’s place and beat up their new boyfriend for any kind of flimsy excuse. Because what are you going to do about it? Sue them? You’re just offering them a free vacation.
We were hearing during the Snowden era about the abuse of NSA systems like XKeyscore and others through what was termed jokingly LOVEINT. Anything that's built will get abused in some way - sometimes its even best not to build such databases at all.
Here's CNN discussing NSA analyst abuse from 13 years ago:
https://www.cnn.com/2013/09/27/politics/nsa-snooping/
Here's an article from 10 years ago discussing the police doing it:
https://apnews.com/general-news-699236946e3140659fff8a2362e1...
This is 10 years old, but in 2016 the Associated Press did a massive public records request for police departments across the country. Between 2013-2015, they found over 600 cases where the police department actually did an internal investigation, found this kind of misuse, didn't cover it up, and handed over the records. About half of those cases resulted in a firing, suspension, or resignation.
This is clearly an undercount, and I'm sure it's only gotten worse since 2016.
https://apnews.com/general-news-699236946e3140659fff8a2362e1...
My only question is why you didn’t believe police could/would do this in the first place? My default perspective is that this is exactly what law-enforcement and other government officials would use this technology to do, especially if there are no guardrails or laws preventing them from abusing it.
I kinda expect the s/w engineer who wrote this would create an audit log. i.e. police-id, licence-place-id.
Well that's the way I would write it.
If something can be abused, especially with little to no accountability, it will be abused.
I was with you up until the very last line. Why do people imagine that the police are in the business of property retrieval? Once your stuff is stolen in almost all cases it's long LONG gone! Cars are sent to be broken down for parts, tools are sold to fences and so on. The typical thief isn't some mastermind who carefully holds on to what they stole, they rush to their nearest fence or dealer to trade it for what they need.
Police are there to report a crime and add that to area stats, and if the issue is more than a lone junkie then it eventually gets to a detective in whatever the local version of Robbery is.
"They didn't get my stuff back" isn't a realistic criticism, and it detracts from the many other points that are.
This scene from The Big Lebowski is how all cops treat personal property theft cases (They got us working in shifts!): https://youtu.be/N0rOe59wKAc
Save your time and don’t get laughed at behind your back. By all means, report your stolen car but anything smaller than that is a waste of your time and the cops time since they do not care at all.
With a few exceptions, like mob run baggage theft rings at big airports, criminals are not very smart and have pretty poor opsec. Solution rates could be a lot better than they are.
>They won't use technology to find our lost/stolen phones
Our local sheriff’s department used Apple’s FindMy to search for my parent’s iPad that had been stolen from their car during a smash and grab. In this case, he found it in the possession of a couple that had found it tossed on the side of the street after the thief had stripped it for cash and credit cards, but it saved them the hassle and cost of having to buy a new one.
Anyways, there’s nothing stopping PDs from searching for stolen electronics. Maybe you should talk to your local city council and ask why yours don’t?
Why don't they instead push for making abuses of law enforcement access illegal? That way we can both catch criminals and missing people along with avoiding abuse.
Well known pattern: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT
The Flock CEO Garret Langley called people that didn't want his unsecure surveillance state in their own communities "terrorists". A term that has a very loose meaning but is always used to invoke state violence. So he wants to create a strong police state and violence against regular people for money aka he's a fascist.
(but HN will flag me for "name-calling" a person promoting and creating violent state oppression)
It's way worse than that. It runs full stack top to bottom. Your local municipal clerk is using that shit to look up the Applebees manager that told them to shove it.
Check out the new Netflix doc, A Toxic Love Story. US Marshall at the center of it all (no spoiler).
That’s the sad part. There was a nationwide trend to ignore misdemeanor theft so much so that now there is a new baseline and most police have taken this to heart and don’t even pretend to put an effort into misdemeanor theft -yes, I know many or perhaps most departments are understaffed but still. It’s irritating.
I do find it very funny how over the past couple of decades US has been talking about how awful Chinese government is wrt surveillance, but now doing exactly the same but through private industry contracts instead. I hold a semi-middle ground view to CCTVs/plate readers, and understand how it can deliver improved QoL to most citizens. But a bit weird how a core American "surveillance = big no no" belief was thrown out in a few years. Another proof of people just say things, but when it comes to action, you can just do stuff.
Sorry for a negative comment, but it's just an interesting observation from an outsider.
> But a bit weird how a core American "surveillance = big no no" belief was thrown out in a few years.
I can't speak for China since I'm not as familiar with that culture, but as for the US, the culture has not changed, as you can see by protest campaigns like this and many similar types of protests (e.g. public destruction of Flock cameras). The culture in the US was founded on minimal government interference based on those trying to escape persecution elsewhere at that time, and that thread is still baked into many facets of US politics.
What has changed is the state. Surveillance has been growing constantly, to much of the disapproval of those who live in the US (e.g. Edward Snowden's revelations were very damning and the revealed surveillance was very much protested against, and likewise after the Cambridge Analytica leaks). But it's a bit of boiling frog syndrome for those experiencing it: the state can grow more controlling of our lives slow enough not to be perceptible, or to spin surveillance under manipulative politics, which is for example what led to bipartisan support of the Patriot Act. This makes it difficult to stop. Technology is especially a double edged sword for making this worse.
I would guess if you really put it up to the people many wouldn't be a fan of this sort of broad warrantless surveillance (or at least want more controls or limits on it). Good luck finding a candidate that matches this and your other values in one of the two political parties you have a choice between. Also good luck effecting any political change in whatever gerrymandered district you are in. I think the US government with a more actually representative democracy would look very different.
I learned about this site from the 404 media article: https://www.404media.co/casa-grande-arizona-flock-city-counc...
An excerpt:
> “I've spent the last several months talking to people all over Casa Grande, and one thing keeps coming up: Safety. So, today I'm excited to announce a new company called Shepherd Safety,” he said. “Our mission is simple. Keep government officials and their families safe.” It would be no different than how the city monitors its citizens using Flock cameras, he said; he planned to launch satellites that would use AI to monitor “where government officials go, where they stop, who they meet with, and when they return home.”
It was satire, but drove the point home well.
Why, what a fantastic idea! Maybe a certain trillionaire would be interested...
"Politicians will be exempted from chat control"
I am right up the road from Casa Grande. I run a youtube channel with 30k subs and have recently gotten VERY INTERESTED in investigating Flock/Deflock. I had no idea the cameras were everywhere.
I'll reach out anywhere on the site but feel free to get in touch here as well. I want to interview the creator and broadcast the situation in Casa Grande.
edit: emailed the address on the site. Anyone else on the east valley working on similar efforts should give me a nudge in the comments.
Happy to report we're in touch :)
This is like sending a letter to Satan asking him to please stop being a nuisance.
Yea, I am thoroughly unconvinced that protesting and asking nicely is really a way to implement political change. The people implementing these things and making these deals are sitting on their yachts and mansion balconies, sipping their martinis, and looking down at us little people with raised eyebrows, not caring in the slightest what we say. They are going to keep doing what they are doing, they're going to keep getting elected, they're going to keep getting appointed to their corporate boards, and they look at the protesters as just loud annoyances--if they even look at them at all.
Well made website IMO. Gets to the point with plenty of easy-to-understand evidence and calls to action.
Feels like every other site that AI generates. Hard to tell what the creators believe and what is just probabilistically generated.
This sort of hyper-local protest is the way to go. Nobody wants to be surveilled.
Still hyper-local but much more efficient than one retiree holding a sign in front of one camera! Kudos to all doing it nondestructively.
Speak for yourself. I don't mind this type of surveillance personally.
I do actually
I’m familiar with cities that conduct time-bounded surges of policing in reaction to specific outbreaks of criminality.
When inter-faction violence in a neighborhood escalates to the level of a murder, for example, they surge for a couple weeks. Massively increased visible patrol presence—cops on every corner—portable light towers attached to generators, to provide near-daylight-level illumination on the sidewalks and streets... a conspicuous level of “eyes on the street” that discourages retaliation and responds to residents’ heightened fear in the immediate aftermath. While at the same time being obviously temporary—not permanent measures that signal the neighborhood as structurally crime-ridden.
It’s a “fly the flag at half mast for a bit” kind of signal, not “this neighborhood is full of criminals and deserves the corresponding built environment.”
I wonder if something in that spirit might be a reasonable long-term equilibrium for things like Flock. Garbage bags over the camera poles for ordinary times, almost as a point of civic pride that the place we’ve built and maintained is safe enough not to need to use them. Pull the garbage bags off if there’s a problem—spate of auto thefts, high-profile crime, fugitive on the loose—but we demand an explanation when that happens and a concrete end point where they go back on.
It's okay to enable mass surveillance to fight crime that's already decreasing?
The optimal amount of crime is not zero.
> Their own patent describes something bigger: video analysis that can identify people, assign traits, and make real-world activity searchable.
That’s not news, and I did mention that months ago in here
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46226795
I watched few videos where the police by mistake mentioned how they tracked the cars even with no plate numbers on them.
I wonder how many of the people that defend Flock, Google, Facebook " etc, also are the ones that "denounce" Huaweii for spying for the Chinese government.
Our city doesn’t have them. Except there’s one in the main hospital parking lot. This reminds me to finish up that letter I meant to send to them asking how they square that with the fact any cop in Texas can peek at people coming in and out of the maternity ward in New Hampshire, given Ken Paxton a call and try to jam up someone for looking like they terminated a pregnancy.
Coincidentally I was just watching this video and felt it was a pretty decent way to communicate this to old boomer city councils. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6oKX1w7k5w
Great video thanks. That guy is well spoken. Always find occasional really great speakers at these meetings.
Alan McLintock comes to mind:
This video is what led to the 404 media article I shared above.
Get your reps to pass a law.