This breakdown in rule of law is unfortunate. Ideally, this would be handled by, in order of desirability:
- Flock decision-makers and customers holding ethics as a priority, and not taking the actions they are due to sense of duty, community, morals etc
- Peer pressure resulting in ostracization of Flock execs and decision makers until they stop the unethical behavior
- Governments using legislation and law enforcement to prevent the cameras being used in the way they are
Below this, is citizens breaking the law to address the situation, e.g. through this destruction. It is not ideal, but it is necessary when the higher-desirability options are not working.
> It is not ideal, but it is necessary when the higher-desirability options are not working.
What has worried me for years is that Americans would not resort to this level. That things are just too comfortable at home to take that brave step into the firing lines of being on the right side of justice but the wrong side of the law.
I'm relieved to see more and more Americans causing necessary trouble. I still think that overall, Americans are deeply underreacting to the times. But that only goes as far as to be my opinion. I can't speak for them and I'm not their current king.
You won't get to the kind of change you thought you would see until food runs low and the economy stalls. The American Revolution was rare in that it didn't need to happen. The Founders were just being giant assholes (j/k). While the French Revolution just a few decades later was more status quo. A lot of starvation and poverty just pushed the population over the edge.
I would have believed that before 2020, but after COVID, I fully believe that if the food ran out, half the country would say it's a fake hoax. People would be on their death beds actually starving, and deny it was happening with their last breath.
I disagree. You can escape a disease, even during a global pandemic. And not every person that got COVID was on a ventilator or even felt that bad. Seeing the death toll statistics and even the direct effects through a screen is not visceral for many folks.
Starvation isn't avoidable and you can't ride it out. There isn't any chance that starving to death could be less severe than getting a bad flu. Nobody can avoid not eating for an extended period of time. If there is not enough food, it will affect everyone directly.
I had the same reaction. I thought things were getting bad before COVID, but I thought that, generally, when push came to shove, sanity would prevail.
Herman Cain denied COVID's severity right up until it killed him, and them even after he died, his team was still tweeting that "looks like COVID isn't as bad as the mainstream media made it out to be." When I saw that people were literally willing to die to "own the libs", I knew shared reality was toast.
Could also say that over half the population finding such ridiculous mandates justifiable: lockdowns and demands that employers enforce vaccination compliance for all employees, ordoned non democratically by a senile; in a country with constitutional rights likely meant we would not see activists engaging in vandalism anytime soon.
> My comment is simply calling out the liberticide episode we attended rather quietly.
Intellectually dishonest polemics. The mandates were not "ridiculous", nor were they "ordoned non democratically by a senile" ... that doesn't even get the timeline right--Trump was President. As for whether he was senile ...
Interestingly y'all Americans pay much more tax now than you did to England back in the day. Turns out King George was right, and it was just about changing who the tax was paid to.
Not really a secret. The slogan was "No taxation without representation" not "no taxation."
The degree to which legislation in the US is bought by big companies and rarely reflects democratic desires we may be in another "no taxation without representation" era.
Well one of those is already on the fast tracking to happening (economy stalling).
Unfortunately, I don't have much faith that people will turn against the administration during any kind of major depression/food scarcity. I foresee people turning against each other for survival instead.
The American and French revolutions originated in the middle classes. The poor are often indifferent to politics because they're focused on survival. The middle classes, who own things they don't want to lose and have free time to aspire for more, are the ones who start revolutions. The poor only came in after being whipped up by the interested parties, and don't necessarily join the revolutionary side.
Just like how all we had to do to shut down Guantanamo Bay was vote for President Obama, right? So glad that that worked out. By and large, our institutions are not democratic, in that they are not responsive to 'popular opinion'; while there are certain arenas where, for one reason or another, the will of the majority does sway the day (e.g. the influence of scandals on individual elected officials), by and large most things are decided by non-democratic factors like business interests and large donors, and the media just works to get people on-side with whatever comes out of that.
To quote a well-known study on the topic: “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”
This is ahistoric. No-one ever said we had to "just vote for Obama" to close Guantanamo Bay.
Frankly, Obama _tried_ to close Guantanamo Bay. He significantly shrunk the population of inmates, but it was ultimately Congress, and the courts that prevented the closure
Obama spent a huge amount of time and political capital trying to clean up Bush's messes.
They were able to slow down the inevitable trajectory, they did nothing to reverse course. Doing anything different would be too "radical" for Obama or Biden.
Your voting system is shit. It results in a two party state. If one party fails to present a coherent offering and the other one is infiltrated by nut jobs then the system breaks down. After all, if it was such a good system, why didn’t you impose it on Germany and Japan when you won WW2? (This comment is politically neutral; who the incoherents and the nut jobs are are left to the reader’s discretion)
In many cases, the decision to install Flock cameras have been made by city councils and sheriffs' offices. So it very much depends on local candidates.
On the broader topic, I'm not sure that just voting is the way that we'll get out of this mess, but I think a large part of the problem is how our focus on wider, national issues has eroded the interest in the local. So people seem to be most disenfranchised from the level of politics where they can actually have the most influence, both by voting and direct action (protests, calls, etc).
The local government officials in charge of allowing these to be installed.
It also represents an opportunity for upstarts. If you want to get into local politics, this is a single issue that will unit voters and bring them in.
We had a city councilperson elected on the sole issue of replacing the purple street lights. She won decisively and her entire campaign was literally signs everywhere promising to fix the purple streetlights. (yes, they were fixed).
Badger your city council, work with like-minded residents in a way that can credibly threaten their re-elections, find and support privacy-conscious candidates who won't sign-onto Flock's agenda, create ads based on council meetings when councilors support surveillance in a way most voters will reject. Put their quotes on billboard with their picture, etc
Ok, you do all that work at home and manage to block flock in your area. It doesn’t matter because the next city over where you work installed them so you get tracked anyway.
Then 2 years later a new city council gets elected and they install flock cameras in your city too. You can never get rid of them because it already passed and nobody wants to relitigate the same thing every couple of years.
Our city voted out the cameras so the feds just installed flock cameras on every bit of federal property in and near town, plus they're at private places like hardware stores.
We turned over seats on our city council for the first time in decades and the new, "liberal" council members voted with the rest, unanimously, to install more Flock cameras.
Not sure if you are aware but we rarely directly get to vote on these things. You vote for a representative and hope they vote in a way that serves your interests. But now, we have omnibus bills. And it's 50/50 loaded with things we want and things we don't. The same bill that funds Pre-K will also have a section to fund a kitten shredding machine. But if you vote against it all voters will hear is how you don't want to fund education.
IIRC FDR pioneered the contemporary use of this to ram through progressive legislation, in particular social security by essentially packaging it up so the needy would get nothing in other programs if social security wasn't passed.
Though I wouldn't be surprised if the idea goes back to Roman times.
Seconded. Democracy is the only transcendental political system: you can have any ideology you want (so be careful or you'll be voting only once). To survive, it depends on civic spirit - i.e. participation. Democracy always collapses into authoritarianism eventually. Then (if you want it bad enough), you have to claw it back, slowly and painfully. All just as Plato foresaw.
It really bothers me that so few people in the modern West understand just how lucky they are. If you didn't have the control you already have over your government, you'd be fighting for it.
Unfortunately, studies undertaken by MIT over a decade ago show that when it comes to law writing and passing, voters have no statistically measurable input at the federal level. (Since citizens united)
It’s all just identity politics. I will say that Trump has proven the exception to this rule, enacting a whole lot of policy that circumvents the law and has real effects. (And is likely mostly unconstitutional if actually put to the test)
So while locally, voting can be powerful, it’s mostly bread and circuses at the federal level since regulatory capture is bipartisan.
Every time I hear this I cringe, whether this subject or any other. The people did vote and this is what they got - not necessarily what they specifically voted for. Different people hold things in different importance. Flock security cameras (or similar) generally don't even get noticed by the people voting on taxes, guns, abortions, etc.
Besides, establishment Democrats aren’t exactly for the common man, they’re just not as cartoonishly evil as the Republicans. Democrats would likely still be in favor of Flock cameras.
The age old tactic of vilification. It's easy to overlook all the nuances on all sides; it's a whole spectrum with plenty of overlap.
My hope in the US is that folks at least take the time to evaluate their options and/or candidates; voting a straight ticket just because someone calls themselves something can lead to undesirable outcomes.
Not to mention that most of the most upending, consequential changes and events in America were not only not voted on, but were wildly opposed by the populace, yet were imposed anyways and today, after decades of government “education”, people vigorously support and defend those tyrannical impositions.
The US is a semi-democracy, notably due to its hyper-polarized two party system that completely forbids (in the 2020s) any crossing of party lines for compromise.
The single biggest improvement to American society would be to implement multi-member districts for legislature, OR to implement STAR voting - any kind of system that promotes the existence of more parties, more political candidates, to break the two party cycle.
Far too many people fail to vote or research candidates due to how shitty our democracy is. Far too few candidates exist as a blend of values, and we are stuck with "every liberal policy" vs. "every conservative policy".
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To that end, it seems the cities that are banning Flock for proper privacy reasons are all in liberal states and cities. Conservative/moderate areas seem a lot less engaged on the topic. "That's just how it goes, of course government is going to tread on us, what can be done about it".
Voting doesn't work as well when there's billions of dollars being spent to influence the votes to make billionaires richer, while the working class that could vote against it is too busy working 3 part time jobs just to survive.
There is a lot of truth in this but I'm not convinced sortition is going to work either.
But what you could do is vote with a string attached and a penalty for being recalled that is going to make people think twice about running for office if their aim is to pull some kind of stunt. The 'you give me four years unconditionally' thing doesn't seem to work at all.
I've been mulling over a system where there's a legislative body composed of citizens picked through sortition and another legislative body that's elected like normal legislative bodies of today.
The twist on that body however is that voting is mandatory and ballots have a non of the above option on them. If a super majority (say 60-75%) vote none of the above the election is a do-over with all the people on the ballot being uneligable to run for that seat for say 5-10 years.
Nah thats a cheap excuse. Amorality of current gov was out there in plain sight, even before 2016 and definitely after. It was extremely hard for common folks to avoid it, some active acting would be required.
Then it boils down to morals, how flexible people are with them - this is weakness of character. Ability to ignore malevolent behavior if it suits me is more a ballpark of amoral sociopaths than good-hearted guy who simply doesn't have 2 hours a day to ponder philosophies of modern politics and regional historical details half around the globe. No amount of ads (which are so far trivial to avoid with reasonable lifestyle) change what a moral person considers moral.
And it couldn't have been easier this time, its not some left vs right view on things, just simple morality - lying, cheating, stealing, potential pedophilia, not hard to say of one is OK with that or not.
Sure I could eat a salad for 5$, but no I'll get a crappy burger for same amount because I like salty greasy stuff. Gee doctor why do I have bad heart, how could have I known? Must have been those evil mega corporations and their genius marketing.
I agree. The amount of cameras and tracking has gotten out of control. If America actually becomes an "authoritarian" country (seems almost likely) I imagine all these Flock pics with other data mining techniques will be used to send Communist Progressives to reeducation camp.
America is an authoritarian country for decades now.
It first dawned on me when i visited NYC some 30 years ago. I stepped over some arbitrary yellow line I wasn't supposed to - the uniformed cop that noticed that went from 0 to 100 in 0.1 second and behaved as if I just pulled a gun. Zero time to reflect and assume I might have made a legitimate mistake. Since then I've visited U.S. >150 times, and in my experience it was always thus in the U.S. - the law enforcement is on hair trigger and the populace has seemingly grown used to it and considers this behaviour normal. Geez.
(Go live in any northern european country for comparison. Any interaction with law enforcement is almost certainly going to be pleasant, cordial, and uniformed police typically does not rely on threats of violance for authority).
> The amount of cameras and tracking has gotten out of control.
The UK looks at the use of cameras and feels threatened for its Nanny State title. We Yanks have laughed at that name while the water around us slowly came to a boil.
Some cities and/or states have banned the use of cameras at stop lights to issue tickets. Not really sure what caused that to happen, except the cynic in me thinks some politician received a ticket in the mail from one of the cameras.
On the contrary I think Americans are reacting about the same as any other set of people would react. There are always going to be people who, as long as their personal lives are stable, they are not going to do anything to put that stability at risk. America is also huge enough that even if one part of the country is having a crisis, millions of fellow citizens will not hear of it or have any 2nd, 3rd or 4th hand connection to the matter.
But also if a small portion of Americans disparately plan to do stuff like sabotage surveillance camera, it's still newsworthy.
Let’s be clear though - it’s not that Americans are clinging to some deep stability that brings them comfort or relaxation, it’s that they’re on the edge already. The vast vast majority of people are barely able to afford the basics of life, while we’re bombarded with an ever more shameless wealthy elite’s privileges.
Politics is like water boiling - it’s just going to be little bubbles at first but all of a sudden it will start to really rumble.
Is that really the case? It seems to me that the vast majority in the US can fairly easily afford a fair bit of material luxury, mostly because material luxuries have become incredibly cheap (by historical standards).
The trouble is at least in the high population areas (AFAICT) a huge swath of "average" people seem to be stuck living life on a paycheck-to-paycheck basis, renting, no prospect of property ownership, minimal to zero retirement savings, no realistic way to afford children, etc. Not abnormal by historic or global standards but very abnormal when compared to the past ~150 years of US history.
General strike! Close the ports, close the airports, steal dozers and park them on railroad tracks, teachers on the streets in front of their schools to protect their students, blockade the grocery distribution centers, so that the shelves go bare, just stop everything, everywhere.
When it hurts the billionaires, they will tell their politicians to invoke the 25th.
It's the only way, we've lost our democracy, but we still have economic power.
While points 1 and 2 are indeed desirable, point 3 should be moot given we have a constitutional right to privacy and freedom from unreasonable search and seizures.
The combination of ubiquitous scanners, poor data controls on commercially owned date, and law enforcement access without proper warrants compounds to a situation that for many rational people would fail the test of being fair play under the Fourth Amendment. For similar reasons, for example, it has been held by the Supreme Court that installing a GPS tracker on a vehicle and monitoring it long-term without a warrant is a 4A violation (US v Jones). Similar cases have held that warrants are needed for cellphone location tracking.
So far, however, courts have not held Flock to the same standard -- or have at least held that Flock's data does not rise to the same standard.
I personally think this is a mistake and is a first-order reason we have this problem, and would prefer the matter to stop there rather than rely on ethics. (Relying on ethics brought us pollution in rivers, PFAS and Perc in the ground, and so on.)
Given the state of politics and the recent behavior of the Supreme Court, however, I would not hold my breath for this to change soon.
Having lived or spent time in a lot of 3rd world shitholes, including a civil war, I've only really felt freedom in places with lawless lack of government, never places with 'rule of law' -- that always gets twisted for the elite.
Of course the same happens in lawless regions, but power is fractured enough, there is a limit on power they can wield against the populace, as the opposing factions ultimately are a check on any one side oppressing the population to leave. They can't man machine guns at all the 'borders' and ultimately corruption becomes cheap enough that it is accessible to the common person which arguably provides more power to the common man than representative democracy does.
I think this element of factions in competition was part of the original genius of the '50' states with the very minimal federal government. But the consolidation of federal power and loss of the teeth of the 10th amendment and expansion of various clauses in the constitution means there is now no escape and very few remaining checks.
This is a personal preference and not some universal axiom.
Living under a tyrant at least tends to provide predictability and stability of a sort. The kind of violence that exists in a lawless society tends not to exist. State sanctioned violence, sure, but that's more often than not targeted.
Basically, given the choice of Somalia or North Korea, there will be a diversity of opinions as to which someone prefers. I'm not saying I prefer one to the other, just that "Somalia" is not an objectively correct choice.
As a note on Somalia: Somalia outside the state-like entities (Somaliland, Puntland, Al-Shaabab caliphate, and FGS / federally controlled somalia) is governed by xeer law.
It's actually not lawless, it just uses a decentralized (polycentric) legal system that is poorly understood by westerners. They've had better outcomes under this system than under democratic government of FGS, which led to all or nothing tribalism influences coming into office.
In a country like the US with a fairly democratic process at various levels of government, this just means that people with some strong opinions can subject the rest of the citizens to their desires. This is the universal veto on societal order. We can see that the desire for governments to "live in fear of the governed" usually rapidly disappears when people start destroying water lines and power lines. After all, 'the governed' and 'the government' are the same people just with different factions distributed in power.
A government that can't do anything to police unions is also the government living in fear of the governed. A government that can't rein in (say) PG&E is also a government living in fear of the governed. When political representatives are shot by a right-wing anti-abortion terrorist that is also (and perhaps even more viscerally so) a government living in fear of the governed. And I'm certainly not 100% okay with this.
The thing about that is the governments who most fear the governed are often extremely draconian. I actually do not think that it is constructive and it is precisely that fear that is driving things like voter suppression in the US.
All of this presumes that residents in municipalities with ALPRs don't want them used the way they are. That's not true! These things are broadly pretty popular among a broad set of residents.
You are unfortunately, for whatever your reasons you have, barking up the wrong tree. The people already made a law, the supreme law in fact, called the Constitution.
In fact the capital criminals in this matter are the people violating and betraying that supreme law; the politicians, sheriffs, city councils, and even the YC funders behind Flock, etc.
It is in fact not even just violating the supreme law, but though that betrayal, it is in fact also treason.
I was confused by the "barking up the wrong tree" opener because the parent commenter was not contradicting that line of thinking either. Though destroying property is not going to get anyone anywhere, that I can agree with if that's GP's point.
> It is not ideal, but it is necessary when the higher-desirability options are not working.
You are simply imposing your own views on others. Just because you disagree with Flock doesn't give you the right to destroy license plate readers that my tax dollars paid for. Who appointed you king?
Dan Carlin, on his Common Sense podcast several years ago, said something that really stuck with me (and he probably was paraphrasing it from someone else).
Society is like a pressure cooker, with built-in safety release valves to prevent the pressure from getting too high. If your solution to the safety release is to block off the valves, with authoritarian surveillance, draconian laws, and lack of justice for the elites committing crimes, it just moves it somewhere else. Block off too many, and it explodes.
I mean, that's excellent wishcasting, but the reality is that current economic incentives combined with a lack of social ("cancel culture" got cancelled because "uwu too mean"), regulatory ("uwu can't hurt Capital or the rich people won't make jobs no more"), and criminal ("uwu can't hold Capital accountable for their actions when they do crimes or people will lose jobs") accountability means that this was always going to be the outcome.
More people need to understand that the system is working as designed, and the elimination of peaceful, incremental reform based on popular demand, along with mass manipulation of human emotions through media and advertising, means that this sort of resistance is the sole outcome left before devolving into naked sectarian violence.
Say what you will, but the anti-Flock camera smashers are at least doing something beyond wishcasting from a philosophical armchair in comment sections or social media threads.
I view this breakdown in law similar to the marijuana situation. It’s kind of a villainous administration, green lighting villainous things. The law doesn’t hold water in this case. The people have to do something drastic to get that across.
We either have out of control govt or civil unrest and only people who don’t know what the latter looks like cheer it on. We’re screwed unless someone unlocks the economy. Right now it’s not happening.
Doesn't breakdown in rule of law happened when a corporation (surely) bribed local officials to install insecure surveillance devices with zero concern for the community living near them?
The real breakdown in the rule of law occurred when the US Supreme Court made the specious decision that amoral business entities (corporations) had the same rights in a democracy as citizens.
All this shit flows downhill from Citizens United.
Supreme Court decisions are not a deterministic process like you get with code. Justices twist and contradict precedents to suit their ideological goals all the time; these days they don't even try to hide it much. The Citizens United decision wasn't something that had to happen, it was a deliberate choice by conservatives.
How many homeowners install mystery-meat Chinese cameras on their houses that feed the data God knows where? Should their homes be vandalized too for their lack of concern for the community?
Beyond any discussion of “vigilante” / “criminal” destruction of cameras, there’s a clear difference between giving domestic corporations (who act hand in glove with your local government) access to cameras on your property vs. giving foreign corporations (working hand in glove with an adversary government) access to cameras on your property.
It really comes down to whether you consider an individual’s right to privacy more important than your state’s security. Neither is really a perfect options in this case, but having the Flock camera means some part of your property is under the panopticon of local law enforcement that could arrest you (loss of privacy).
Going with chinese tech, you are probably more private in regards to your own government, but you’re probably having some negative effect on state security based on the marginal benefit of CCP surveillance/ potential malware in your network.
The dichotomy is false. People could have cameras which report to no one, but that’s less useful for all governments involved.
ok so let's just put aside chinese companies! ring is an american company, should people's ring cameras be vandalized because ring might share their data with the american government?
I have not vandalized any Ring cameras, but I have paid to replace those installed by friends and family and have those replaced shredded as part of an electronics recycling waste stream. "Think globally, act locally" sort of thing.
i don't think the people destroying flock cameras are open to the idea of going through the legal process to replace them with alternatives that have better privacy, something (maybe the fact that they currently are vandalizing them) tells me that they are just interested in vandalizing them
Flock cameras are different, they take advantage of laws that have not kept pace with technology while being colocated and operated in public spaces, to where you are forced to live in a corporate surveillance state for Flock Group's enterprise value and potential shareholder returns. And so, destruction of the devices is all that is left available to them (if their jurisdiction opts to not remove them, as many have done [1]). Somewhat silly to blame humans who want privacy (arguably a human right [2]) just so the CEO of Flock can get wealthy (and YC can get liquidity) at IPO, no?
The human is doing what you would expect the human to do when faced with limited options in an operating environment that is not favorable to them. Crime has been trending down for some time [3], Flock cameras are a business driven on fear like Shotspotter, where the results are questionable at best and you're selling to the unsophisticated.
i've never found this type of "humans were left with no alternative" argument in defense of destruction of property convincing, some of the things that separates humans from other animals is the concept of private/public property, rule of law, etc, you know? there are alternatives, contrary to the alarmism found online the US is very far from actual dictatorships where people have close to 0 way of achieving change through the legal system, immediately jumping to violence without an imminent threat is something i'd expect from lower primates, not from homo sapiens.
You're free to your opinion. Property is just property, it is nothing special. Rule of law is highly dynamic and a shared delusion. Damaging or destruction of property is not violence, it is a property crime at best. In the scope of Flock, it is well documented as having been misused, illegally in many cases, by law enforcement and those with access to its systems [1] [2] [3].
> there are alternatives
This does not consistently appear to be the case in the US unfortunately.
> Damaging or destruction of property is not violence.
you wouldn't consider someone vandalizing your home or the infrastructure in your neighborhood to be violence? of course it is violence, an attack on the place i live (whether that's limited to just my home or to the larger community i live in) is an attack on me
is it not violence to, for example, burn down a business where people work in if you do it at a time where no one is around to get immediately hurt as a consequence? can i not call the financial damage caused both to the workers and the owners of that place violence?
> you wouldn't consider someone vandalizing your home or the infrastructure in your neighborhood to be violence?
Very obviously not. Words have meaning. You are misusing words to garner emotional support for your preferred political position.
Burning down anything (including a business) is arson. Not violence. It only becomes violence if people are present and at imminent risk of physical harm.
Financial damage is not violence. Speech is not violence. Please take your doublespeak back to reddit; it doesn't belong on HN.
how did you jump from property damage and arson to speech? non sequitur much? financial damage absolutely can be violence, you can ruin someone's life if you take away their job by burning down the place they work at and it could lead to something horrific like them taking their own lives or not being able to pay for their medication or not be able to pay for their child's education, etc as a direct consequence of your act of destroying that place. destroying infrastructure people rely on to stay healthy/safe/economically stable/etc should be considered by civilized people as a violent attack on them, you cannot pretend that disrupting someone's livelihood is not at all related to attacking their liberty and/or life
a case where you can argue speech can be violence would be a verbal threat to hurt or kill someone, but that has nothing to do with what we're talking about, i don't know why you're bringing up speech, are you trying to say that destroying these cameras is a form of expressing freedom of speech? (not accusing you of this btw, just genuinely curious what you meant by that)
I fail to see the equivalence between taking out a surveillance camera that is violating people's privacy with the other things that you list. Arguing like that is simply not going to work.
the person i replied to made a broad "destroying property is not violence" claim, the scope of the conversation is more than just that
also, i consider a security camera in a place i live to be security infrastructure, you should not be able to come into a place and do act like a vigilante imposing your view on what should and should not be recorded through force, if you have a problem with the way things work you should try to work within the law
again, this is what separates civilization from chaos
> you wouldn't consider someone vandalizing your home or the infrastructure in your neighborhood to be violence? of course it is violence, an attack on the place i live (whether that's limited to just my home or to the larger community i live in) is an attack on me
No, I file an insurance claim and move on with my life. It is just property, and almost all property can be trivially replaced. Your property is not you. It is just property. We simply see the world differently, that's all. Good luck to you.
oh of course, because insurance claim payments are instantaneous (just like the reconstruction work they'll have to do) and the people who work there can just go work somewhere else by just finding another job, right?
As long as they're not pointed at the street that should be fine. If they are pointed at the street then, depending on where you live, that may not be acceptable.
Well, not in the US since filming in public is (at least AFAIK) constitutionally protected. It's weird though, somehow two party consent for audio recording (even in public) seems to be accepted by the courts. Although it's entirely possible that I have a misunderstanding.
It is actually kind of hard to look this up: I get lots of search results about the right to record police being protected constitutionally. And the lack of an inherent right to privacy, when in public. But, this doesn’t seem to preclude a locality from creating a law that disallows recording of public locations, right? You may not have a constitutional right to safe air, but as far as I know states can pass their own environmental regulations…
> Should their homes be vandalized too for their lack of concern for the community?
If enough people can be convinced that those cameras are somehow helping Trump, you’ll find a lot of people in here and Reddit saying “yes”, I’ll imagine. Before this we had people vandalizing Teslas because of Elon.
What other social issues should be solved with vigilante justice?
I don't like all this surveillance stuff, but Flock is just the tip of the iceberg and "direct action" against Flock is just as likely to backfire as it is to lead to changes. More importantly, once you give folks moral license to do this stuff it's hard to contain the scope of their activity.
>What other social issues should be solved with vigilante justice?
Everything you said is true, but I suspect, also irrelevant, because options short of vigilante justice aren't going to be seen by the public as viable for much longer (if they're even seen so now). America's social contract is breaking, and existing institutions make it clear, daily, that they will strengthen that trend rather than reverse it. And as JFK said, 'Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.' That doesn't make the violence laudable, or even desirable. It is simply inevitable without seemingly impossible positive change from an establishment that is hostile to such.
This is a nice description (i.e "where is the limit on this type of action?") of a reason why this approach is low on the list, and why ideally we would solve it with one of the other options.
You don't want to give people "moral license" to do this broadly, but we've hit a point where there are no options available that don't have downsides. Stated another way: Taking no action can also be unethical.
Man, I really emphasize with this, and that immediately raises my "motivated reasoning" hakles. There's a lot of people in America with deeply held views that I strongly disagree with, and I would be very worried if they began taking matters into their own hands; to pick a hopefully-uncontroversial example, bombing abortion clinics. They, too, would say "to take no action is also unethical". The purpose of society is to arbitrate these kinds of disputes...
I agree but will point out that abortion is an example of policing activity that does not affect oneself. Adding an additional clause reflecting that aspect seems to fix many of the issues that might concern you.
For me, Flock installing these cameras and other people taking them down are two sides of the same coin. One group puts cameras up in public without people's knowledge or permission, the other group takes cameras down without people's knowledge or permission. I find it kind of beautiful, like the ebb and flow of the tide.
the threat of vigilante mob justice is required for the law to work. its the tension that makes sure the rich and powerful want to stay involved, and be held accountable by it, rather than skipping over it and making it irrelevant.
the threat has to be credible, which is where things like this, and luigi are quite valuable
I believe in surveillance, but Flock is just the tip of the iceberg and rolling out mass public surveillance is just as likely to backfire as it is to lead to changes. More importantly, once you give folks moral license to do this stuff it’s hard to contain the scope of their activity.
FWIW the "rule of law" is a reference to the idea that the law should be applied equally to everyone regardless of their position in society, and has nothing to do with the crime rate.
It's not about crime rate or "many crimes" still being taken seriously, it's the fact that we all know now that there are certain crimes that, depending on where you are and who is in charge, simply don't count. Furthermore, depending on where you are and who is in charge, the authority may simply choose to not adhere to the law whatsoever.
Those aren't the problem, it's any "free" mobile app in the App Store or Play Store with an advertising SDK (which is almost all of them) that uses your location to "keep your weather forecast up-to-date" but also provide data brokers with your location...
Sure, and—setting aside the issues with all the millions of smart phone users who can't properly consent to these apps and their permissions because they don't have the knowledge to know what they're actually consenting to—the great thing is that I can choose not to install these apps. And I don't!
I don't have the same choice with cameras everywhere that feed into a company with a security team run by donkeys and that provides minimal to no oversight to the government bodies using the camera data to do an end run around the fourth amendment.
my point is people are freaking out about Flock but everyone has a tracking device in their pocket at all times, and people absolutely love Ring doorbell cameras (ok maybe not you, I get it).
It seems incongruous to me that people are willing to recognize the benefits that these tools provide law enforcement at solving crimes but when it comes to Flock cameras somehow things are totally different. They're just cameras with really good software, and law enforcement likes them because it makes their jobs easier.
A phone provides the individual with tangible benefits. It only tracks the individual. The individual is always free to opt out.
A ring doorbell camera provides the individual with tangible benefits. It is installed by the individual on personal property. It does however typically capture some amount of public space which I think is problematic.
Government run centralized surveillance does not provide the individual with tangible benefits. It almost exclusively captures public spaces (that's usually the entire point of the exercise after all). It generally is not realistic to opt out short of being denied access to any surveilled public spaces. If that's all the roads near your home then I guess you'll want to look into moving.
At this point, I wouldn't be surprised if FB bought raw data from the providers just to see if they could aggregate it into their shadow profiles. Whatever the cost of buying that data, it wouldn't mean anything to a corp that prints money. Yes, this is pure tin foil hat level conspiracy nonsense, but it goes to show how little I think of FB
I've done this recently. It's only been six weeks so not sure if I'll keep it up, but I have felt very little pain. I put my sim back in my iPhone the other day when I needed an Uber to go to the vet after reading that recently taxis in my city have been denying people with pets even if you tell them you have one when ordering. Sim went right back in my flip phone when I got home and I actually experienced some relief as I did it.
it's wild to me that Americand accept a private company plastering their town with surveillance cameras, given you know, everything
Additionally, that you draw the line at sharing that juicy data with law enforcement. I mean sure, yeah, but even before that, sharing essentially all your movement data with some company because...?
Recent: Across the US, people are dismantling and destroying Flock surveillance cameras (bloodinthemachine.com) | 456 points by latexr 2 days ago | 293 comments | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47095134
Kind of weird all of those people weren't all up in arms about it before the whole ice thing, why would you be mad that they're tracking somebody else but not mad that they have been slurping up data about your movements and habits this whole time, then monetizing said data by selling it to industries like insurance companies etc.
all of these people didnt even know these cameras existed until recently. even this weekend, was talking to a few friends and they had never heard of them. I think they wanted to just sort of sneak them in under the radar and all the current ICE stuff has created more scrutiny and public knowledge about surveillance in general.
Huh? even if you knew and understood the scope of it before (I’d say a vast majority did not and thought they were just red light cameras), it is not very hard to understand that when you see the people in masks without badges snatching your neighbors haphazardly and with specious reasons that you might make a chunk of that majority look at the cameras more skeptically and maybe, just maybe wonder if that technology could be turned against you too.
Until recently very few people could articulate the real risk this tech posed, now you can literally see it play out (depending where you live)
I wonder how resistant the cameras are to strong handheld lasers. I suppose they could harden them against some common wavelengths with filters, but that'd affect the image clarity in normal use.
I have worked with watt class lasers before and I implore you not to do this. Even if it's tempting. Most places where there are surveillance cameras are places where there are also people, and unless you want to hand out OD5 goggles to everyone in eyeshot... a pellet gun would be safer.
My friend in college did an internship on high frequency, short pulse beams (I wanna say violet and picosecond? Which I still think was exotic at the time).
Most of his work was dealing with and accounting for reflections that left the machine. If you have a prism that’s sending 95% of the light where you want it to go, when it’s a multi watt laser you can’t just let that 5% go wherever it wants. You will blind someone. So his job was getting black bodies in all the right spots to absorb the lost light.
His safety goggles looked like even more expensive Oakleys of that era and they were (much more expensive).
Unrelated, but I really want to take the opportunity:
How can one know what is dangerous for the eyes or not? Years ago I got an "IR illuminator" (from aliexpress, probably) that I wanted to use with my raspberrypi NoIR camera, for fun. Say filming myself during the night to see how much I move while sleeping, or making my own wildlife camera trap.
But I was scared that it could be dangerous and never used it (I tested it in an empty room, but that was it).
Is there a safe way for a hobbyist to get an IR illuminator and be sure that I won't make somebody blind with it?
IR illuminators are not lasers. Their purpose is to cast light across a broad area, not to deliver it all to one point. They should not be harmful to vision.
> Most places where there are surveillance cameras are places where there are also people
I assume you're concerned about reflections from the camera lens or housing? In my mind, the archetypal camera is mounted on a nice tall pole, silhouetted against open sky, and painted matte black.
> watt class lasers
Surely those would be excessive for someone attacking the sensor, unless they want to remotely sear some graffiti by burning away paint.
Please do not encourage people to go shining bright lasers at small targets from long distances right next to busy roads.
This is a nerd fantasy thing, but it's a really bad idea. It's hard to hit a tiny lens from a distance and it only takes one slip of the hand to shine it straight into traffic or someone walking down the sidewalk.
Lol that's almost literally the cheapest possible option. You can get these for $3-4 (on a board and with a mipi cable and everything) from China - I have a dozen in a box that I bought to test out a camera array idea before shelling out for nicer sensors.
The easier fix seems like doxxing politicians and embarrassing them until they protect all of their constituents against things like this. We got a small modicum of privacy with the Video Privacy Protection Act [0] after Bork's video rental history was going to be released.
I certainly agree about the lack of shame - but even if you destroyed all of the Flock cameras (and any other public traffic cams) you're still left with no actual protection for your private data.
There's more of us then there are of them - so their wealth can't protect them from everything. They can and do buy privacy so there must be something worth protecting that the masses can expose using their same methods.
Many in this administration are the lowest, least educated parts of their respective societies. They don’t have shame. You cannot shame them because this is literally their only way to make money.
If shame were a motivator for this administration or the current grifter class, neither of these things would exist to the current Armageddon-level they currently do. That is to say, completely agree with your take here. There are plenty of government-entity examples of this, but my favorite I've seen recently was a video montage of Elon saying annually, like clockwork, that sully autonomous driving would be here in 2-3 years for the last 12 years or so. If these people had shame, he wouldn't be doing that, as an example.
I'm sure they'd charge the municipalities and private entities for those replacements one way or another, which ultimately decreases the reliability and value proposition of their product.
the damage is showing that Flock, from an objective technology point of view, is really quite much more limited in terms of its efficacy than its sellers are leading the buyers to believe.
what good is their platform if it is easily defeated by a guy with a ladder and a hammer?
America is really now two Americas. The divide between traditional freedoms and neo-authoritarianism is getting wider. But America is so large that even the minority (just) that believes in freedom is still 167 million people. Even if only a small percentage of that number, from either side of the divide, believes in violent activism, things are going to get worse before they get better.
It just depends on if you're on the up portion of the K or the down stick. The larger picture might show an increase but if you split the data apart one leg is actually declining while the other is growing.
while an important consideration, I'm sure there are many on the up side of the k-economy that don't believe that persistent surveillance is warranted or ethical.
This is the most important comment here. There is a future reckoning to be had between the radical authoritarian fringe and normal Americans who do not want to live in an open air prison. The conflict is completley preventable, and makes a less safe place to live for us all.
America is converting into a radical authoritarian state, yes, but they're not a "fringe". They are, by a small margin, the dominant faction in the US. Popular vote counts prove it.
There isn't a radical authoritarian fringe in the US. There are multiple, competing radical authoritarian perspectives in the US, and I wouldn't be surprised if the sum of them constituted a majority.
They disagree on the authority, not the methods, and help the two institutional parties cooperate to destroy civil liberties by accusing their counterparts of abusing ("weaponizing") civil rights to commit crimes, spy for foreign governments, and/or abuse children.
As your net worth increases, the concern about what you have to lose from a personal safety perspective skyrockets. You start becoming far more paranoid and seeing crime everywhere. Tech CEOs and billionaires will build the dystopian panopticon society 100 times out of 100 because they don't care about other people, they just want to feel safe. If that means mass surveillance for the rest of the world, so be it.
If you don't believe me, just look at the CCP. It already happened there.
Being anti-crime doesn't mean lacking compassion. Crimes have victims, and reducing crime results in fewer of them. Poor people don't want to be victims any more than rich people do.
The back and forth between "the Left" and "the Right" seems to actually be about who gets to run the prison instead of whether we should run a nation like one.
So one one hand we have Nazi ideas[1] being platformed by the ruling political party which has barely disguised its support for ethnically cleansing the country of all non-white people[2]. And on the other hand we have radical democratic socialist candidates proposing stabilized rent[3]. What am I missing here?
You're implying here, I assume, that anyone who voted R is pro neo-authoritarianism. It is interesting too that you've also implicitly stated that the D's are pro-freedom. Both statements are false on their face and highly influenced by terminally online behavior.
I would suggest you go look at polls. Dems have been polling in the dirt among their own party since they decided to usurp Bernie in 2016 and embrace the rich, Repubs have been polling in the dirt since Trump took office last year.
Absolutely no one is happy about the state of America. You can argue semantics, but it's pointless navel gazing at the larger national issue. No one, of any political affiliation, believes the government can govern. It's probably the single uniting factor across all political stripes. No one is happy. No one believes America has gotten measurably better in the last 10-15 years, and everyone is suffering in one way or another. The flock/authoritarian bent is simply the last gasps of a neoliberal government that has realized there's no easy way out of the last 40 years of anti-citizen policies.
Downvotes are a good sign you made someone think about their own internal biases and they didn't like it. So they lash out in the only way the know how. Pathetic and weak.
Speaking only for areas near where I live, it was in response to a persistent uptick in home invasions. Police can't be everywhere at once, and LPR cameras flag stolen cars and mismatched plates that thieves like to use.
> Merchant reports instances of broken and smashed Flock cameras in La Mesa, California, just weeks after the city council approved the continuation of Flock cameras deployed in the city, despite a clear majority of attendees favoring their shutdown.
This site is turning into an echo chamber for antifa apologists. Reddit take 2. I think I’m done. The signal to noise ratio is so low with all the “AI” slop spam, far-left extreme political content where any dissent is flagged into oblivion, and generally just pointless fluff.
This is really bad for all the reasons that people have mentioned (vigilante "justice" never is a good thing) but people have a misplaced understanding of right and wrong here. Flock cameras have helped solve some major crimes, and people will be glad to have this technology around if they are ever a victim.
Police states are great at solving major crimes. And when those are sufficiently solved, to justify their continued existence, they have to solve lesser crimes, repeating until you need enough surveillance to ensure no one's flushing their toilet improperly.
Police states are like autoimmune diseases under the hygiene hypothesis. They'll keep ramping up their sensitivity until they're attacking everything, even when it's benign.
Flock cameras can be helpful in all sorts of crimes. They've been used to solve everything from kidnappings to minor property damage.
There obviously isn't a future without crime. This is just a tool to make it easier for police to do their job and deter criminals somewhat, but that is probably marginal.
There will always be kidnappings, there will always be property damage. Having technology available to make it easier to solve those crimes seems obvious to me.
Yes, I can see how they would be helpful in solving crimes down to minor property damage.
I do not want to live in a society where police are watching everything I do in the name of solving minor property damage. "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" is bullshit. I don't do anything illegal in my bathroom, but I do not wish to have a camera in there, even if it could solve a hypothetical crime.
"That it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape, than that one innocent Person should suffer, is a Maxim that has been long & generally approv’d"
The amount of damage these cameras have caused is totally disproportional to whatever meager benefit they may have wrought. These are antisocial machines.
Dude my car was literally jacked up and had the catalytic convertor chopped off in a parking with flock cameras at a hotel before, def never got caught, and according to the hotel security footage they parked right next to my car, got out and did everything real fast. Plus most people using cars to commit heinous crimes are usually stolen and ditched right after anyways, people who use their own car to commit crimes usually end up being lower level crimes like organized retail theft, drugs, etc, you know stuff id rather not trade privacy for security over.
yeah surveillance doesn't mean secure. A few weeks ago there was a solid 10-15 second run of automatic weapons fire on my street in an intersection. I do a lot of shooting and i could tell from the concussion it couldn't have been more than a couple hundred feet from my bedroom window. My neighbors turned in all their camera footage with recordings of two cars and the gunfire to a detective. When i asked them what happens next the detective just said in an annoyed voice "well i'll ask someone to check around..". Like it was plainly obvious he had zero interest at all.
edit: I live in Dallas so, although we sometimes hear gunshots when the Cowboys score a touchdown, i'm not in an active war zone.
I'm in Dallas as well, and I hear gun shots daily. New Years/4th July absolutely sound like a war zone. I found a slug next to my trash can after a 4th celebration a couple of years ago. Not a shell, the actual slug. I keep it on my desk as a reminder. My fur babies are not allowed outside on those nights.
My confusion stems from the fact that mass surveillance is already pretty normal in major cities. Your face is on a dozen cameras anytime you walk through the grocery store. Your precise location is pinged off cell towers multiple times a day. I understand specific qualms with Flock as a company and how they manage the data, but this libertarian demand for total privacy in public spaces has been long lost and the beef with Flock in particular doesn’t even scratch the surface.
Edit: And I don’t even know how to have good faith conversations about this topic in these spaces, because the hive mind has decided that anything but absolute outrage is untenable. I’m getting downvoted for sharing my opinion.
We already have mass surveillance, and yet we still have major crimes. It's not working, and I see no reason to believe that removing more freedom will lead to having safer streets. Why are we giving up liberty and getting nothing in return? That's an excellent reason to protest against adding more surveillance.
This breakdown in rule of law is unfortunate. Ideally, this would be handled by, in order of desirability:
Below this, is citizens breaking the law to address the situation, e.g. through this destruction. It is not ideal, but it is necessary when the higher-desirability options are not working.> It is not ideal, but it is necessary when the higher-desirability options are not working.
What has worried me for years is that Americans would not resort to this level. That things are just too comfortable at home to take that brave step into the firing lines of being on the right side of justice but the wrong side of the law.
I'm relieved to see more and more Americans causing necessary trouble. I still think that overall, Americans are deeply underreacting to the times. But that only goes as far as to be my opinion. I can't speak for them and I'm not their current king.
You won't get to the kind of change you thought you would see until food runs low and the economy stalls. The American Revolution was rare in that it didn't need to happen. The Founders were just being giant assholes (j/k). While the French Revolution just a few decades later was more status quo. A lot of starvation and poverty just pushed the population over the edge.
I would have believed that before 2020, but after COVID, I fully believe that if the food ran out, half the country would say it's a fake hoax. People would be on their death beds actually starving, and deny it was happening with their last breath.
I disagree. You can escape a disease, even during a global pandemic. And not every person that got COVID was on a ventilator or even felt that bad. Seeing the death toll statistics and even the direct effects through a screen is not visceral for many folks.
Starvation isn't avoidable and you can't ride it out. There isn't any chance that starving to death could be less severe than getting a bad flu. Nobody can avoid not eating for an extended period of time. If there is not enough food, it will affect everyone directly.
I had the same reaction. I thought things were getting bad before COVID, but I thought that, generally, when push came to shove, sanity would prevail.
Herman Cain denied COVID's severity right up until it killed him, and them even after he died, his team was still tweeting that "looks like COVID isn't as bad as the mainstream media made it out to be." When I saw that people were literally willing to die to "own the libs", I knew shared reality was toast.
Could also say that over half the population finding such ridiculous mandates justifiable: lockdowns and demands that employers enforce vaccination compliance for all employees, ordoned non democratically by a senile; in a country with constitutional rights likely meant we would not see activists engaging in vandalism anytime soon.
Are you calling Trump senile? Because you are correct.
2 of you folks died from COVID for each 1 of us.
> My comment is simply calling out the liberticide episode we attended rather quietly.
Intellectually dishonest polemics. The mandates were not "ridiculous", nor were they "ordoned non democratically by a senile" ... that doesn't even get the timeline right--Trump was President. As for whether he was senile ...
I was probably one of "you". My comment is simply calling out the liberticide episode we attended rather quietly.
For real. Literally killed millions. That didn’t get us to agree somehow.
> The American Revolution was rare in that it didn't need to happen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proclamation_of_Rebellion
Interestingly y'all Americans pay much more tax now than you did to England back in the day. Turns out King George was right, and it was just about changing who the tax was paid to.
Back then most taxes went to Britain.
Not really a secret. The slogan was "No taxation without representation" not "no taxation."
The degree to which legislation in the US is bought by big companies and rarely reflects democratic desires we may be in another "no taxation without representation" era.
> until food runs low and the economy stalls.
Well one of those is already on the fast tracking to happening (economy stalling).
Unfortunately, I don't have much faith that people will turn against the administration during any kind of major depression/food scarcity. I foresee people turning against each other for survival instead.
The American and French revolutions originated in the middle classes. The poor are often indifferent to politics because they're focused on survival. The middle classes, who own things they don't want to lose and have free time to aspire for more, are the ones who start revolutions. The poor only came in after being whipped up by the interested parties, and don't necessarily join the revolutionary side.
> You won't get to the kind of change you thought you would see until food runs low and the economy stalls.
These are no longer impossibles.
Boy is he trying on the latter. Quite impressive just how resilient it seems to be.
What confuses me is that no revolution is required. All we had to do to avoid this was to vote. Voting would still (probably) work.
Just like how all we had to do to shut down Guantanamo Bay was vote for President Obama, right? So glad that that worked out. By and large, our institutions are not democratic, in that they are not responsive to 'popular opinion'; while there are certain arenas where, for one reason or another, the will of the majority does sway the day (e.g. the influence of scandals on individual elected officials), by and large most things are decided by non-democratic factors like business interests and large donors, and the media just works to get people on-side with whatever comes out of that.
To quote a well-known study on the topic: “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”
(Gilens & Page, Perspectives in Politics)
This is ahistoric. No-one ever said we had to "just vote for Obama" to close Guantanamo Bay.
Frankly, Obama _tried_ to close Guantanamo Bay. He significantly shrunk the population of inmates, but it was ultimately Congress, and the courts that prevented the closure
Obama spent a huge amount of time and political capital trying to clean up Bush's messes.
You're supporting the point of the person you responded to.
One vote isn't enough. Just Obama was insufficient when congress was not sufficiently aligned.
No, they refuted their strawman.
This is far too nihilist.
Obama and Biden both led to meaningful policy improvements and they were far more stable than the current admin.
They were able to slow down the inevitable trajectory, they did nothing to reverse course. Doing anything different would be too "radical" for Obama or Biden.
Your voting system is shit. It results in a two party state. If one party fails to present a coherent offering and the other one is infiltrated by nut jobs then the system breaks down. After all, if it was such a good system, why didn’t you impose it on Germany and Japan when you won WW2? (This comment is politically neutral; who the incoherents and the nut jobs are are left to the reader’s discretion)
Who can I vote for that will stop flock cameras from being installed?
In many cases, the decision to install Flock cameras have been made by city councils and sheriffs' offices. So it very much depends on local candidates.
On the broader topic, I'm not sure that just voting is the way that we'll get out of this mess, but I think a large part of the problem is how our focus on wider, national issues has eroded the interest in the local. So people seem to be most disenfranchised from the level of politics where they can actually have the most influence, both by voting and direct action (protests, calls, etc).
The local government officials in charge of allowing these to be installed.
It also represents an opportunity for upstarts. If you want to get into local politics, this is a single issue that will unit voters and bring them in.
We had a city councilperson elected on the sole issue of replacing the purple street lights. She won decisively and her entire campaign was literally signs everywhere promising to fix the purple streetlights. (yes, they were fixed).
Badger your city council, work with like-minded residents in a way that can credibly threaten their re-elections, find and support privacy-conscious candidates who won't sign-onto Flock's agenda, create ads based on council meetings when councilors support surveillance in a way most voters will reject. Put their quotes on billboard with their picture, etc
Ok, you do all that work at home and manage to block flock in your area. It doesn’t matter because the next city over where you work installed them so you get tracked anyway.
Then 2 years later a new city council gets elected and they install flock cameras in your city too. You can never get rid of them because it already passed and nobody wants to relitigate the same thing every couple of years.
Local politics does not work here.
Our city voted out the cameras so the feds just installed flock cameras on every bit of federal property in and near town, plus they're at private places like hardware stores.
We turned over seats on our city council for the first time in decades and the new, "liberal" council members voted with the rest, unanimously, to install more Flock cameras.
Not sure if you are aware but we rarely directly get to vote on these things. You vote for a representative and hope they vote in a way that serves your interests. But now, we have omnibus bills. And it's 50/50 loaded with things we want and things we don't. The same bill that funds Pre-K will also have a section to fund a kitten shredding machine. But if you vote against it all voters will hear is how you don't want to fund education.
I do not live in the USA, but my understanding of those omnibus bills is that they are government blackmail of its people.
I remember being horrified the first time I heard this was legal in the USA.
How can the US citizens accept such a brutal denying of good governance is beyond me.
IIRC FDR pioneered the contemporary use of this to ram through progressive legislation, in particular social security by essentially packaging it up so the needy would get nothing in other programs if social security wasn't passed.
Though I wouldn't be surprised if the idea goes back to Roman times.
I don't think that's all we (assuming you're USA) had to do or need to do going forward. Voting is "necessary but not sufficient" as the quote goes.
Seconded. Democracy is the only transcendental political system: you can have any ideology you want (so be careful or you'll be voting only once). To survive, it depends on civic spirit - i.e. participation. Democracy always collapses into authoritarianism eventually. Then (if you want it bad enough), you have to claw it back, slowly and painfully. All just as Plato foresaw.
It really bothers me that so few people in the modern West understand just how lucky they are. If you didn't have the control you already have over your government, you'd be fighting for it.
Unfortunately, studies undertaken by MIT over a decade ago show that when it comes to law writing and passing, voters have no statistically measurable input at the federal level. (Since citizens united)
It’s all just identity politics. I will say that Trump has proven the exception to this rule, enacting a whole lot of policy that circumvents the law and has real effects. (And is likely mostly unconstitutional if actually put to the test)
So while locally, voting can be powerful, it’s mostly bread and circuses at the federal level since regulatory capture is bipartisan.
"All we had to do to avoid this was to vote."
Every time I hear this I cringe, whether this subject or any other. The people did vote and this is what they got - not necessarily what they specifically voted for. Different people hold things in different importance. Flock security cameras (or similar) generally don't even get noticed by the people voting on taxes, guns, abortions, etc.
Besides, establishment Democrats aren’t exactly for the common man, they’re just not as cartoonishly evil as the Republicans. Democrats would likely still be in favor of Flock cameras.
The age old tactic of vilification. It's easy to overlook all the nuances on all sides; it's a whole spectrum with plenty of overlap.
My hope in the US is that folks at least take the time to evaluate their options and/or candidates; voting a straight ticket just because someone calls themselves something can lead to undesirable outcomes.
Not to mention that most of the most upending, consequential changes and events in America were not only not voted on, but were wildly opposed by the populace, yet were imposed anyways and today, after decades of government “education”, people vigorously support and defend those tyrannical impositions.
The US is a semi-democracy, notably due to its hyper-polarized two party system that completely forbids (in the 2020s) any crossing of party lines for compromise.
The single biggest improvement to American society would be to implement multi-member districts for legislature, OR to implement STAR voting - any kind of system that promotes the existence of more parties, more political candidates, to break the two party cycle.
Far too many people fail to vote or research candidates due to how shitty our democracy is. Far too few candidates exist as a blend of values, and we are stuck with "every liberal policy" vs. "every conservative policy".
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To that end, it seems the cities that are banning Flock for proper privacy reasons are all in liberal states and cities. Conservative/moderate areas seem a lot less engaged on the topic. "That's just how it goes, of course government is going to tread on us, what can be done about it".
Voting doesn't work as well when there's billions of dollars being spent to influence the votes to make billionaires richer, while the working class that could vote against it is too busy working 3 part time jobs just to survive.
This is why I'm in favor of sortition instead of voting.
The majority of random people don't have combination of desire, corruption, sophistication, and political experience to pull off this kind of bribery.
Virtually every elected politician does.
~Everything about the election process selects for the worst kinds of people.
There is a lot of truth in this but I'm not convinced sortition is going to work either.
But what you could do is vote with a string attached and a penalty for being recalled that is going to make people think twice about running for office if their aim is to pull some kind of stunt. The 'you give me four years unconditionally' thing doesn't seem to work at all.
I've been mulling over a system where there's a legislative body composed of citizens picked through sortition and another legislative body that's elected like normal legislative bodies of today.
The twist on that body however is that voting is mandatory and ballots have a non of the above option on them. If a super majority (say 60-75%) vote none of the above the election is a do-over with all the people on the ballot being uneligable to run for that seat for say 5-10 years.
Nah thats a cheap excuse. Amorality of current gov was out there in plain sight, even before 2016 and definitely after. It was extremely hard for common folks to avoid it, some active acting would be required.
Then it boils down to morals, how flexible people are with them - this is weakness of character. Ability to ignore malevolent behavior if it suits me is more a ballpark of amoral sociopaths than good-hearted guy who simply doesn't have 2 hours a day to ponder philosophies of modern politics and regional historical details half around the globe. No amount of ads (which are so far trivial to avoid with reasonable lifestyle) change what a moral person considers moral.
And it couldn't have been easier this time, its not some left vs right view on things, just simple morality - lying, cheating, stealing, potential pedophilia, not hard to say of one is OK with that or not.
Sure I could eat a salad for 5$, but no I'll get a crappy burger for same amount because I like salty greasy stuff. Gee doctor why do I have bad heart, how could have I known? Must have been those evil mega corporations and their genius marketing.
The amorality was not in plain sight, if your only source of news is Fox News or Breitbart or Twitter.
I agree. The amount of cameras and tracking has gotten out of control. If America actually becomes an "authoritarian" country (seems almost likely) I imagine all these Flock pics with other data mining techniques will be used to send Communist Progressives to reeducation camp.
America is an authoritarian country for decades now.
It first dawned on me when i visited NYC some 30 years ago. I stepped over some arbitrary yellow line I wasn't supposed to - the uniformed cop that noticed that went from 0 to 100 in 0.1 second and behaved as if I just pulled a gun. Zero time to reflect and assume I might have made a legitimate mistake. Since then I've visited U.S. >150 times, and in my experience it was always thus in the U.S. - the law enforcement is on hair trigger and the populace has seemingly grown used to it and considers this behaviour normal. Geez.
(Go live in any northern european country for comparison. Any interaction with law enforcement is almost certainly going to be pleasant, cordial, and uniformed police typically does not rely on threats of violance for authority).
America is not NYC. NYC is proud of its police-state apparatus. Most of the rest of the country is very different.
> The amount of cameras and tracking has gotten out of control.
The UK looks at the use of cameras and feels threatened for its Nanny State title. We Yanks have laughed at that name while the water around us slowly came to a boil.
Some cities and/or states have banned the use of cameras at stop lights to issue tickets. Not really sure what caused that to happen, except the cynic in me thinks some politician received a ticket in the mail from one of the cameras.
On the contrary I think Americans are reacting about the same as any other set of people would react. There are always going to be people who, as long as their personal lives are stable, they are not going to do anything to put that stability at risk. America is also huge enough that even if one part of the country is having a crisis, millions of fellow citizens will not hear of it or have any 2nd, 3rd or 4th hand connection to the matter.
But also if a small portion of Americans disparately plan to do stuff like sabotage surveillance camera, it's still newsworthy.
You mean like South Korea? Thailand? Peru? Nepal?
Let’s be clear though - it’s not that Americans are clinging to some deep stability that brings them comfort or relaxation, it’s that they’re on the edge already. The vast vast majority of people are barely able to afford the basics of life, while we’re bombarded with an ever more shameless wealthy elite’s privileges.
Politics is like water boiling - it’s just going to be little bubbles at first but all of a sudden it will start to really rumble.
Is that really the case? It seems to me that the vast majority in the US can fairly easily afford a fair bit of material luxury, mostly because material luxuries have become incredibly cheap (by historical standards).
The trouble is at least in the high population areas (AFAICT) a huge swath of "average" people seem to be stuck living life on a paycheck-to-paycheck basis, renting, no prospect of property ownership, minimal to zero retirement savings, no realistic way to afford children, etc. Not abnormal by historic or global standards but very abnormal when compared to the past ~150 years of US history.
General strike! Close the ports, close the airports, steal dozers and park them on railroad tracks, teachers on the streets in front of their schools to protect their students, blockade the grocery distribution centers, so that the shelves go bare, just stop everything, everywhere.
When it hurts the billionaires, they will tell their politicians to invoke the 25th.
It's the only way, we've lost our democracy, but we still have economic power.
Get out there and be the change you want to see, king
I don't get the sarcasm here.. Instead of sniping with snark (see HN rules, please) post your better take.
> What has worried me for years is that Americans would not resort to this level.
They'll stop once the police (or ICE, more likely) start dishing out horrific punishments for it.
That's not how the political reality of exacting mostly voluntary compliance from the masses works.
While points 1 and 2 are indeed desirable, point 3 should be moot given we have a constitutional right to privacy and freedom from unreasonable search and seizures.
The combination of ubiquitous scanners, poor data controls on commercially owned date, and law enforcement access without proper warrants compounds to a situation that for many rational people would fail the test of being fair play under the Fourth Amendment. For similar reasons, for example, it has been held by the Supreme Court that installing a GPS tracker on a vehicle and monitoring it long-term without a warrant is a 4A violation (US v Jones). Similar cases have held that warrants are needed for cellphone location tracking.
So far, however, courts have not held Flock to the same standard -- or have at least held that Flock's data does not rise to the same standard.
I personally think this is a mistake and is a first-order reason we have this problem, and would prefer the matter to stop there rather than rely on ethics. (Relying on ethics brought us pollution in rivers, PFAS and Perc in the ground, and so on.)
Given the state of politics and the recent behavior of the Supreme Court, however, I would not hold my breath for this to change soon.
> This breakdown in rule of law is unfortunate.
Yearly reminder to read:
https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/kurz-the-discourse-of-vol...
This is excellent, I second your suggestion for everyone to read this.
i'm not a fan of lawlessness but on the other hand, i'm 100% ok with the government living in fear of the governed.
Lawlessness is superior to the law of the tyrant.
Having lived or spent time in a lot of 3rd world shitholes, including a civil war, I've only really felt freedom in places with lawless lack of government, never places with 'rule of law' -- that always gets twisted for the elite.
Of course the same happens in lawless regions, but power is fractured enough, there is a limit on power they can wield against the populace, as the opposing factions ultimately are a check on any one side oppressing the population to leave. They can't man machine guns at all the 'borders' and ultimately corruption becomes cheap enough that it is accessible to the common person which arguably provides more power to the common man than representative democracy does.
I think this element of factions in competition was part of the original genius of the '50' states with the very minimal federal government. But the consolidation of federal power and loss of the teeth of the 10th amendment and expansion of various clauses in the constitution means there is now no escape and very few remaining checks.
This is a personal preference and not some universal axiom.
Living under a tyrant at least tends to provide predictability and stability of a sort. The kind of violence that exists in a lawless society tends not to exist. State sanctioned violence, sure, but that's more often than not targeted.
Basically, given the choice of Somalia or North Korea, there will be a diversity of opinions as to which someone prefers. I'm not saying I prefer one to the other, just that "Somalia" is not an objectively correct choice.
As a note on Somalia: Somalia outside the state-like entities (Somaliland, Puntland, Al-Shaabab caliphate, and FGS / federally controlled somalia) is governed by xeer law.
It's actually not lawless, it just uses a decentralized (polycentric) legal system that is poorly understood by westerners. They've had better outcomes under this system than under democratic government of FGS, which led to all or nothing tribalism influences coming into office.
In a country like the US with a fairly democratic process at various levels of government, this just means that people with some strong opinions can subject the rest of the citizens to their desires. This is the universal veto on societal order. We can see that the desire for governments to "live in fear of the governed" usually rapidly disappears when people start destroying water lines and power lines. After all, 'the governed' and 'the government' are the same people just with different factions distributed in power.
A government that can't do anything to police unions is also the government living in fear of the governed. A government that can't rein in (say) PG&E is also a government living in fear of the governed. When political representatives are shot by a right-wing anti-abortion terrorist that is also (and perhaps even more viscerally so) a government living in fear of the governed. And I'm certainly not 100% okay with this.
The thing about that is the governments who most fear the governed are often extremely draconian. I actually do not think that it is constructive and it is precisely that fear that is driving things like voter suppression in the US.
All of this presumes that residents in municipalities with ALPRs don't want them used the way they are. That's not true! These things are broadly pretty popular among a broad set of residents.
You are unfortunately, for whatever your reasons you have, barking up the wrong tree. The people already made a law, the supreme law in fact, called the Constitution.
In fact the capital criminals in this matter are the people violating and betraying that supreme law; the politicians, sheriffs, city councils, and even the YC funders behind Flock, etc.
It is in fact not even just violating the supreme law, but though that betrayal, it is in fact also treason.
Where in the Constitution does it require us to give up our privacy to private companies with little oversight? Seems like there's contention here.
https://journals.law.unc.edu/ncjolt/blogs/under-surveillance...
The person you replied to is saying usage Flock is violating the constitution.
I was confused by the "barking up the wrong tree" opener because the parent commenter was not contradicting that line of thinking either. Though destroying property is not going to get anyone anywhere, that I can agree with if that's GP's point.
The higher-desirability options are practically only theoretical in many contexts. See also the United Healthcare CEO killing.
Flock would not exist if they held ethics as a priority. It's The Panopticon from the well known book The Panopticon is Unethical
Would someone please think of the rule of law?! :'((((
> It is not ideal, but it is necessary when the higher-desirability options are not working.
You are simply imposing your own views on others. Just because you disagree with Flock doesn't give you the right to destroy license plate readers that my tax dollars paid for. Who appointed you king?
People who rape, murder, and eat children run the country and face no hint of repurcussion. There never was rule of law. Only the appearance of it.
Rape is clearly in the Epstein files.
Murder is implied in the Epstein files with an email about burying girls on the property.
Eating sounds like an unhelpful exaggeration, unless I missed a major news story.
Dan Carlin, on his Common Sense podcast several years ago, said something that really stuck with me (and he probably was paraphrasing it from someone else).
Society is like a pressure cooker, with built-in safety release valves to prevent the pressure from getting too high. If your solution to the safety release is to block off the valves, with authoritarian surveillance, draconian laws, and lack of justice for the elites committing crimes, it just moves it somewhere else. Block off too many, and it explodes.
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable.”
- JFK
I mean, that's excellent wishcasting, but the reality is that current economic incentives combined with a lack of social ("cancel culture" got cancelled because "uwu too mean"), regulatory ("uwu can't hurt Capital or the rich people won't make jobs no more"), and criminal ("uwu can't hold Capital accountable for their actions when they do crimes or people will lose jobs") accountability means that this was always going to be the outcome.
More people need to understand that the system is working as designed, and the elimination of peaceful, incremental reform based on popular demand, along with mass manipulation of human emotions through media and advertising, means that this sort of resistance is the sole outcome left before devolving into naked sectarian violence.
Say what you will, but the anti-Flock camera smashers are at least doing something beyond wishcasting from a philosophical armchair in comment sections or social media threads.
I think you already jumped to far. You can't break the law when the law is broken by every other tier of society.
Sorry, try again!
I view this breakdown in law similar to the marijuana situation. It’s kind of a villainous administration, green lighting villainous things. The law doesn’t hold water in this case. The people have to do something drastic to get that across.
All those behaviours are consequences of direct civil disobedience, unrest and rebellion - not alternatives.
We either have out of control govt or civil unrest and only people who don’t know what the latter looks like cheer it on. We’re screwed unless someone unlocks the economy. Right now it’s not happening.
> This breakdown in rule of law is unfortunate.
Doesn't breakdown in rule of law happened when a corporation (surely) bribed local officials to install insecure surveillance devices with zero concern for the community living near them?
The real breakdown in the rule of law occurred when the US Supreme Court made the specious decision that amoral business entities (corporations) had the same rights in a democracy as citizens.
All this shit flows downhill from Citizens United.
You must be very young? These issues predate 2010 by millennia.
Citizens United was just the inevitable outgrowth of Buckley v. Valeo 50 years ago, declaring that money == speech.
That was the wellspring of all this shit.
Supreme Court decisions are not a deterministic process like you get with code. Justices twist and contradict precedents to suit their ideological goals all the time; these days they don't even try to hide it much. The Citizens United decision wasn't something that had to happen, it was a deliberate choice by conservatives.
How many homeowners install mystery-meat Chinese cameras on their houses that feed the data God knows where? Should their homes be vandalized too for their lack of concern for the community?
Beyond any discussion of “vigilante” / “criminal” destruction of cameras, there’s a clear difference between giving domestic corporations (who act hand in glove with your local government) access to cameras on your property vs. giving foreign corporations (working hand in glove with an adversary government) access to cameras on your property.
It really comes down to whether you consider an individual’s right to privacy more important than your state’s security. Neither is really a perfect options in this case, but having the Flock camera means some part of your property is under the panopticon of local law enforcement that could arrest you (loss of privacy).
Going with chinese tech, you are probably more private in regards to your own government, but you’re probably having some negative effect on state security based on the marginal benefit of CCP surveillance/ potential malware in your network.
The dichotomy is false. People could have cameras which report to no one, but that’s less useful for all governments involved.
ok so let's just put aside chinese companies! ring is an american company, should people's ring cameras be vandalized because ring might share their data with the american government?
I have not vandalized any Ring cameras, but I have paid to replace those installed by friends and family and have those replaced shredded as part of an electronics recycling waste stream. "Think globally, act locally" sort of thing.
i don't think the people destroying flock cameras are open to the idea of going through the legal process to replace them with alternatives that have better privacy, something (maybe the fact that they currently are vandalizing them) tells me that they are just interested in vandalizing them
Flock cameras are different, they take advantage of laws that have not kept pace with technology while being colocated and operated in public spaces, to where you are forced to live in a corporate surveillance state for Flock Group's enterprise value and potential shareholder returns. And so, destruction of the devices is all that is left available to them (if their jurisdiction opts to not remove them, as many have done [1]). Somewhat silly to blame humans who want privacy (arguably a human right [2]) just so the CEO of Flock can get wealthy (and YC can get liquidity) at IPO, no?
The human is doing what you would expect the human to do when faced with limited options in an operating environment that is not favorable to them. Crime has been trending down for some time [3], Flock cameras are a business driven on fear like Shotspotter, where the results are questionable at best and you're selling to the unsophisticated.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2026/02/17/nx-s1-5612825/flock-contracts...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_privacy
[3] https://time.com/7357500/crime-homicide-rate-violent-propert... | https://archive.today/vMACL
i've never found this type of "humans were left with no alternative" argument in defense of destruction of property convincing, some of the things that separates humans from other animals is the concept of private/public property, rule of law, etc, you know? there are alternatives, contrary to the alarmism found online the US is very far from actual dictatorships where people have close to 0 way of achieving change through the legal system, immediately jumping to violence without an imminent threat is something i'd expect from lower primates, not from homo sapiens.
You're free to your opinion. Property is just property, it is nothing special. Rule of law is highly dynamic and a shared delusion. Damaging or destruction of property is not violence, it is a property crime at best. In the scope of Flock, it is well documented as having been misused, illegally in many cases, by law enforcement and those with access to its systems [1] [2] [3].
> there are alternatives
This does not consistently appear to be the case in the US unfortunately.
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/12/effs-investigations-ex...
[2] https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/flock-roundup
[3] https://www.google.com/search?q=flock+misuse
> Damaging or destruction of property is not violence.
you wouldn't consider someone vandalizing your home or the infrastructure in your neighborhood to be violence? of course it is violence, an attack on the place i live (whether that's limited to just my home or to the larger community i live in) is an attack on me
is it not violence to, for example, burn down a business where people work in if you do it at a time where no one is around to get immediately hurt as a consequence? can i not call the financial damage caused both to the workers and the owners of that place violence?
> you wouldn't consider someone vandalizing your home or the infrastructure in your neighborhood to be violence?
Very obviously not. Words have meaning. You are misusing words to garner emotional support for your preferred political position.
Burning down anything (including a business) is arson. Not violence. It only becomes violence if people are present and at imminent risk of physical harm.
Financial damage is not violence. Speech is not violence. Please take your doublespeak back to reddit; it doesn't belong on HN.
how did you jump from property damage and arson to speech? non sequitur much? financial damage absolutely can be violence, you can ruin someone's life if you take away their job by burning down the place they work at and it could lead to something horrific like them taking their own lives or not being able to pay for their medication or not be able to pay for their child's education, etc as a direct consequence of your act of destroying that place. destroying infrastructure people rely on to stay healthy/safe/economically stable/etc should be considered by civilized people as a violent attack on them, you cannot pretend that disrupting someone's livelihood is not at all related to attacking their liberty and/or life
a case where you can argue speech can be violence would be a verbal threat to hurt or kill someone, but that has nothing to do with what we're talking about, i don't know why you're bringing up speech, are you trying to say that destroying these cameras is a form of expressing freedom of speech? (not accusing you of this btw, just genuinely curious what you meant by that)
I fail to see the equivalence between taking out a surveillance camera that is violating people's privacy with the other things that you list. Arguing like that is simply not going to work.
the person i replied to made a broad "destroying property is not violence" claim, the scope of the conversation is more than just that
also, i consider a security camera in a place i live to be security infrastructure, you should not be able to come into a place and do act like a vigilante imposing your view on what should and should not be recorded through force, if you have a problem with the way things work you should try to work within the law
again, this is what separates civilization from chaos
It is clear that they were in no way making that claim in the context that you put it in, that's on you, not on them.
are you sure? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47129267 they seem to disagree
> you wouldn't consider someone vandalizing your home or the infrastructure in your neighborhood to be violence? of course it is violence, an attack on the place i live (whether that's limited to just my home or to the larger community i live in) is an attack on me
No, I file an insurance claim and move on with my life. It is just property, and almost all property can be trivially replaced. Your property is not you. It is just property. We simply see the world differently, that's all. Good luck to you.
oh of course, because insurance claim payments are instantaneous (just like the reconstruction work they'll have to do) and the people who work there can just go work somewhere else by just finding another job, right?
life is very simple when you live in fairy land
As long as they're not pointed at the street that should be fine. If they are pointed at the street then, depending on where you live, that may not be acceptable.
Rather, a community could pass a law to prevent persistent filming of public locations—why not, right?
Well, not in the US since filming in public is (at least AFAIK) constitutionally protected. It's weird though, somehow two party consent for audio recording (even in public) seems to be accepted by the courts. Although it's entirely possible that I have a misunderstanding.
It is actually kind of hard to look this up: I get lots of search results about the right to record police being protected constitutionally. And the lack of an inherent right to privacy, when in public. But, this doesn’t seem to preclude a locality from creating a law that disallows recording of public locations, right? You may not have a constitutional right to safe air, but as far as I know states can pass their own environmental regulations…
(All US specific)
Far cry difference between that and the mass dragnet and centralized surveillance of entire communities at tap for agencies/police/fed.
> Should their homes be vandalized too for their lack of concern for the community?
If enough people can be convinced that those cameras are somehow helping Trump, you’ll find a lot of people in here and Reddit saying “yes”, I’ll imagine. Before this we had people vandalizing Teslas because of Elon.
yes.
[flagged]
Sometimes I envy the simplicity of the mental worlds some people apparently occupy
What other social issues should be solved with vigilante justice?
I don't like all this surveillance stuff, but Flock is just the tip of the iceberg and "direct action" against Flock is just as likely to backfire as it is to lead to changes. More importantly, once you give folks moral license to do this stuff it's hard to contain the scope of their activity.
>What other social issues should be solved with vigilante justice?
Everything you said is true, but I suspect, also irrelevant, because options short of vigilante justice aren't going to be seen by the public as viable for much longer (if they're even seen so now). America's social contract is breaking, and existing institutions make it clear, daily, that they will strengthen that trend rather than reverse it. And as JFK said, 'Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.' That doesn't make the violence laudable, or even desirable. It is simply inevitable without seemingly impossible positive change from an establishment that is hostile to such.
This is a nice description (i.e "where is the limit on this type of action?") of a reason why this approach is low on the list, and why ideally we would solve it with one of the other options.
You don't want to give people "moral license" to do this broadly, but we've hit a point where there are no options available that don't have downsides. Stated another way: Taking no action can also be unethical.
Man, I really emphasize with this, and that immediately raises my "motivated reasoning" hakles. There's a lot of people in America with deeply held views that I strongly disagree with, and I would be very worried if they began taking matters into their own hands; to pick a hopefully-uncontroversial example, bombing abortion clinics. They, too, would say "to take no action is also unethical". The purpose of society is to arbitrate these kinds of disputes...
I agree but will point out that abortion is an example of policing activity that does not affect oneself. Adding an additional clause reflecting that aspect seems to fix many of the issues that might concern you.
For me, Flock installing these cameras and other people taking them down are two sides of the same coin. One group puts cameras up in public without people's knowledge or permission, the other group takes cameras down without people's knowledge or permission. I find it kind of beautiful, like the ebb and flow of the tide.
the threat of vigilante mob justice is required for the law to work. its the tension that makes sure the rich and powerful want to stay involved, and be held accountable by it, rather than skipping over it and making it irrelevant.
the threat has to be credible, which is where things like this, and luigi are quite valuable
Consider the converse of your statement
I believe in surveillance, but Flock is just the tip of the iceberg and rolling out mass public surveillance is just as likely to backfire as it is to lead to changes. More importantly, once you give folks moral license to do this stuff it’s hard to contain the scope of their activity.
Rule of law is long gone, neither party has any interest in it, it's more of a guideline of law now.
Doomer vibes are common, but meanwhile, state and local justice systems continue to prosecute many crimes and crime is on a downward trend [1].
[1] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/record-low-crime-rates-are-...
FWIW the "rule of law" is a reference to the idea that the law should be applied equally to everyone regardless of their position in society, and has nothing to do with the crime rate.
https://www.uscourts.gov/educational-resources/educational-a...
Prosecuting the working class, sure.
It's not about crime rate or "many crimes" still being taken seriously, it's the fact that we all know now that there are certain crimes that, depending on where you are and who is in charge, simply don't count. Furthermore, depending on where you are and who is in charge, the authority may simply choose to not adhere to the law whatsoever.
Don’t both sides this. Explicitly point out that the GOP is many orders of magnitude worse.
Who was leading the push on drug "decriminalization"?
complete non-sequiter. legalization would solve many of our problems, and if done 20-25 years ago, have taken care of that cartel issue down south.
You mean weed?
Are you really both-sides-ing this?
Yeah I am actually, I'm tired of carrying water for people who openly hate me.
> While some communities are calling on their cities to end their contracts with Flock, others are taking matters into their own hands.
This is absolutely the right thing to do.
Remove and smash the cellular modem in your car while you are at it.
The cellular modem is usually on a dedicated fuse. No need for violence unless smashing it would be satisfying.
I took a look at the schematics for the two fuse boxes in my 2023 Chevrolet and _could not tell which/if any_ fuse was dedicated to a cellular modem.
This was in regards to: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2025/01/...
Counter point: BREAK SHIT
And PUNCH NAZIS!
and for good measure get rid of the tracking device in your pocket that you willingly use all day to send your location to facebook, X, tiktok, etc.
> and for good measure get rid of the tracking device in your pocket that you willingly use all day to send your location to facebook, X, tiktok, etc.
I don't have facebook, X, or tiktok installed on my phone.
Those aren't the problem, it's any "free" mobile app in the App Store or Play Store with an advertising SDK (which is almost all of them) that uses your location to "keep your weather forecast up-to-date" but also provide data brokers with your location...
https://darkanswers.com/how-your-location-is-sold-to-adverti...
Sure, and—setting aside the issues with all the millions of smart phone users who can't properly consent to these apps and their permissions because they don't have the knowledge to know what they're actually consenting to—the great thing is that I can choose not to install these apps. And I don't!
I don't have the same choice with cameras everywhere that feed into a company with a security team run by donkeys and that provides minimal to no oversight to the government bodies using the camera data to do an end run around the fourth amendment.
my point is people are freaking out about Flock but everyone has a tracking device in their pocket at all times, and people absolutely love Ring doorbell cameras (ok maybe not you, I get it).
It seems incongruous to me that people are willing to recognize the benefits that these tools provide law enforcement at solving crimes but when it comes to Flock cameras somehow things are totally different. They're just cameras with really good software, and law enforcement likes them because it makes their jobs easier.
A phone provides the individual with tangible benefits. It only tracks the individual. The individual is always free to opt out.
A ring doorbell camera provides the individual with tangible benefits. It is installed by the individual on personal property. It does however typically capture some amount of public space which I think is problematic.
Government run centralized surveillance does not provide the individual with tangible benefits. It almost exclusively captures public spaces (that's usually the entire point of the exercise after all). It generally is not realistic to opt out short of being denied access to any surveilled public spaces. If that's all the roads near your home then I guess you'll want to look into moving.
Some of these sites, if not all, allegedly keep a profile on you regardless of if you've ever had an account with them or not.
Same thing here. I don't use that malware at all.
Disconnect its modem
At this point, I wouldn't be surprised if FB bought raw data from the providers just to see if they could aggregate it into their shadow profiles. Whatever the cost of buying that data, it wouldn't mean anything to a corp that prints money. Yes, this is pure tin foil hat level conspiracy nonsense, but it goes to show how little I think of FB
Thank you for letting us know.
I've done this recently. It's only been six weeks so not sure if I'll keep it up, but I have felt very little pain. I put my sim back in my iPhone the other day when I needed an Uber to go to the vet after reading that recently taxis in my city have been denying people with pets even if you tell them you have one when ordering. Sim went right back in my flip phone when I got home and I actually experienced some relief as I did it.
Enjoy your portable physical SIM while you can, they are absolutely coming for it
I just want a hot NSA rep. Is that too much to ask?
it's wild to me that Americand accept a private company plastering their town with surveillance cameras, given you know, everything
Additionally, that you draw the line at sharing that juicy data with law enforcement. I mean sure, yeah, but even before that, sharing essentially all your movement data with some company because...?
These kinds of headlines always read like wishful thinking on the author's part more than a real trend
Some of the "news" items these days read more like suggestions.
Until they get so expensive and there is so much pushback that cities end their contracts with them which seems to be the goal here.
Recent: Across the US, people are dismantling and destroying Flock surveillance cameras (bloodinthemachine.com) | 456 points by latexr 2 days ago | 293 comments | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47095134
Kind of weird all of those people weren't all up in arms about it before the whole ice thing, why would you be mad that they're tracking somebody else but not mad that they have been slurping up data about your movements and habits this whole time, then monetizing said data by selling it to industries like insurance companies etc.
all of these people didnt even know these cameras existed until recently. even this weekend, was talking to a few friends and they had never heard of them. I think they wanted to just sort of sneak them in under the radar and all the current ICE stuff has created more scrutiny and public knowledge about surveillance in general.
how is it weird for you exactly? we didn't have masked gestapo thugs before.
Huh? even if you knew and understood the scope of it before (I’d say a vast majority did not and thought they were just red light cameras), it is not very hard to understand that when you see the people in masks without badges snatching your neighbors haphazardly and with specious reasons that you might make a chunk of that majority look at the cameras more skeptically and maybe, just maybe wonder if that technology could be turned against you too.
Until recently very few people could articulate the real risk this tech posed, now you can literally see it play out (depending where you live)
You should be glad they came around instead of lamenting why it didn’t happen earlier
I don't think OP is glad people came around on it
Good. Flock deserves it. So, do all big tech companies that have been "move fast break things"
Could someone explain how they are doing this, safely and without detection or damage to municipal property?
> broken and smashed Flock cameras
I wonder how resistant the cameras are to strong handheld lasers. I suppose they could harden them against some common wavelengths with filters, but that'd affect the image clarity in normal use.
I have worked with watt class lasers before and I implore you not to do this. Even if it's tempting. Most places where there are surveillance cameras are places where there are also people, and unless you want to hand out OD5 goggles to everyone in eyeshot... a pellet gun would be safer.
My friend in college did an internship on high frequency, short pulse beams (I wanna say violet and picosecond? Which I still think was exotic at the time).
Most of his work was dealing with and accounting for reflections that left the machine. If you have a prism that’s sending 95% of the light where you want it to go, when it’s a multi watt laser you can’t just let that 5% go wherever it wants. You will blind someone. So his job was getting black bodies in all the right spots to absorb the lost light.
His safety goggles looked like even more expensive Oakleys of that era and they were (much more expensive).
The amount of safety when working with lasers is ridiculous. And for a good reason, you can get permanent eye damage faster than the blink of an eye.
Please, don't play with lasers. At all. Even supposedly "safe" lasers can output far more light than expected.
Not to mention the ones that have peaks in invisible parts of the spectrum.
Another friend’s favorite saying is, “do not look into laser with remaining eye.”
Unrelated, but I really want to take the opportunity:
How can one know what is dangerous for the eyes or not? Years ago I got an "IR illuminator" (from aliexpress, probably) that I wanted to use with my raspberrypi NoIR camera, for fun. Say filming myself during the night to see how much I move while sleeping, or making my own wildlife camera trap.
But I was scared that it could be dangerous and never used it (I tested it in an empty room, but that was it).
Is there a safe way for a hobbyist to get an IR illuminator and be sure that I won't make somebody blind with it?
IR illuminators are not lasers. Their purpose is to cast light across a broad area, not to deliver it all to one point. They should not be harmful to vision.
Buy from a reputable dealer. I don’t buy batteries, lasers, or items I ingest from locations lacking any repercussions.
> Most places where there are surveillance cameras are places where there are also people
I assume you're concerned about reflections from the camera lens or housing? In my mind, the archetypal camera is mounted on a nice tall pole, silhouetted against open sky, and painted matte black.
> watt class lasers
Surely those would be excessive for someone attacking the sensor, unless they want to remotely sear some graffiti by burning away paint.
Hitting the lens at an oblique angle won’t fry the sensor though? You have to get close to the cone of visibility which is then within the bloom area.
Please do not encourage people to go shining bright lasers at small targets from long distances right next to busy roads.
This is a nerd fantasy thing, but it's a really bad idea. It's hard to hit a tiny lens from a distance and it only takes one slip of the hand to shine it straight into traffic or someone walking down the sidewalk.
Maybe pick up one [1] and experiment with it. If I had some spare change I would love to grab one just to hack it.
[1] https://www.ebay.com/itm/297938376075
Do not do this.
Comments in the sub-$200 LiDAR thread suggested those would play merry havoc with a camera too.
Last I recall they’re just a crappy 5 megapixel Arducam camera module based on teardowns.
https://www.cehrp.org/dissection-of-flock-safety-camera/
https://www.arducam.com/product/arducam-ov5647-noir-camera-b...
Lol that's almost literally the cheapest possible option. You can get these for $3-4 (on a board and with a mipi cable and everything) from China - I have a dozen in a box that I bought to test out a camera array idea before shelling out for nicer sensors.
The easier fix seems like doxxing politicians and embarrassing them until they protect all of their constituents against things like this. We got a small modicum of privacy with the Video Privacy Protection Act [0] after Bork's video rental history was going to be released.
[0] https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=video+r...
That's not easier, and they don't have shame. They're proud of becoming wealthy.
I certainly agree about the lack of shame - but even if you destroyed all of the Flock cameras (and any other public traffic cams) you're still left with no actual protection for your private data.
There's more of us then there are of them - so their wealth can't protect them from everything. They can and do buy privacy so there must be something worth protecting that the masses can expose using their same methods.
Many in this administration are the lowest, least educated parts of their respective societies. They don’t have shame. You cannot shame them because this is literally their only way to make money.
If shame were a motivator for this administration or the current grifter class, neither of these things would exist to the current Armageddon-level they currently do. That is to say, completely agree with your take here. There are plenty of government-entity examples of this, but my favorite I've seen recently was a video montage of Elon saying annually, like clockwork, that sully autonomous driving would be here in 2-3 years for the last 12 years or so. If these people had shame, he wouldn't be doing that, as an example.
Waow (based based based)
Doesn’t that just mean Flock makes more money from making replacements?
I'm sure they'd charge the municipalities and private entities for those replacements one way or another, which ultimately decreases the reliability and value proposition of their product.
All paid for by taxpayers because a few extremists have appointed themselves kings
the damage is showing that Flock, from an objective technology point of view, is really quite much more limited in terms of its efficacy than its sellers are leading the buyers to believe.
what good is their platform if it is easily defeated by a guy with a ladder and a hammer?
America is really now two Americas. The divide between traditional freedoms and neo-authoritarianism is getting wider. But America is so large that even the minority (just) that believes in freedom is still 167 million people. Even if only a small percentage of that number, from either side of the divide, believes in violent activism, things are going to get worse before they get better.
They talk about a K shaped recovery in economics.
It just depends on if you're on the up portion of the K or the down stick. The larger picture might show an increase but if you split the data apart one leg is actually declining while the other is growing.
while an important consideration, I'm sure there are many on the up side of the k-economy that don't believe that persistent surveillance is warranted or ethical.
They will fall in line as property crime increases.
This is the most important comment here. There is a future reckoning to be had between the radical authoritarian fringe and normal Americans who do not want to live in an open air prison. The conflict is completley preventable, and makes a less safe place to live for us all.
America is converting into a radical authoritarian state, yes, but they're not a "fringe". They are, by a small margin, the dominant faction in the US. Popular vote counts prove it.
Unfortunately this country has literacy and education problems, and many voters were plainly ignorant of what they were voting for.
There isn't a radical authoritarian fringe in the US. There are multiple, competing radical authoritarian perspectives in the US, and I wouldn't be surprised if the sum of them constituted a majority.
They disagree on the authority, not the methods, and help the two institutional parties cooperate to destroy civil liberties by accusing their counterparts of abusing ("weaponizing") civil rights to commit crimes, spy for foreign governments, and/or abuse children.
As your net worth increases, the concern about what you have to lose from a personal safety perspective skyrockets. You start becoming far more paranoid and seeing crime everywhere. Tech CEOs and billionaires will build the dystopian panopticon society 100 times out of 100 because they don't care about other people, they just want to feel safe. If that means mass surveillance for the rest of the world, so be it.
If you don't believe me, just look at the CCP. It already happened there.
Being anti-crime doesn't mean lacking compassion. Crimes have victims, and reducing crime results in fewer of them. Poor people don't want to be victims any more than rich people do.
Building the panopticon does not reduce crime.
The back and forth between "the Left" and "the Right" seems to actually be about who gets to run the prison instead of whether we should run a nation like one.
The right has become so untenable that the only viable defense of it is a bad faith distraction tactic to pretend that it's comparable to the left.
You're in a bubble. It's not wholly a bad faith distraction tactic, and denying wrongdoing by anyone flying the "left" banner is a scary thought.
So one one hand we have Nazi ideas[1] being platformed by the ruling political party which has barely disguised its support for ethnically cleansing the country of all non-white people[2]. And on the other hand we have radical democratic socialist candidates proposing stabilized rent[3]. What am I missing here?
1. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/04/republican-part...
2. https://www.esiweb.org/newsletter/100-million-expulsions-pro...
3. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/06/europe-zohra...
You're implying here, I assume, that anyone who voted R is pro neo-authoritarianism. It is interesting too that you've also implicitly stated that the D's are pro-freedom. Both statements are false on their face and highly influenced by terminally online behavior.
I would suggest you go look at polls. Dems have been polling in the dirt among their own party since they decided to usurp Bernie in 2016 and embrace the rich, Repubs have been polling in the dirt since Trump took office last year.
Absolutely no one is happy about the state of America. You can argue semantics, but it's pointless navel gazing at the larger national issue. No one, of any political affiliation, believes the government can govern. It's probably the single uniting factor across all political stripes. No one is happy. No one believes America has gotten measurably better in the last 10-15 years, and everyone is suffering in one way or another. The flock/authoritarian bent is simply the last gasps of a neoliberal government that has realized there's no easy way out of the last 40 years of anti-citizen policies.
Yeah, it doesn't seem productive to paint this as a partisan issue
Your assumptions are probably reflective of my downvotes, but I choose my words carefully.
Downvotes are a good sign you made someone think about their own internal biases and they didn't like it. So they lash out in the only way the know how. Pathetic and weak.
No one said the Democrats are pro-freedom. Both parties are authoritarian. One is just less effective.
Why were those installed in the first place?
Speaking only for areas near where I live, it was in response to a persistent uptick in home invasions. Police can't be everywhere at once, and LPR cameras flag stolen cars and mismatched plates that thieves like to use.
All they had to do was not air a very expensive superbowl commercial
Are you thinking of the Ring camera commercial or did I miss a flock one during the same Superbowl?
> Merchant reports instances of broken and smashed Flock cameras in La Mesa, California, just weeks after the city council approved the continuation of Flock cameras deployed in the city, despite a clear majority of attendees favoring their shutdown.
Well who could've seen that coming.
This is my America. Bravo.
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47095134
This site is turning into an echo chamber for antifa apologists. Reddit take 2. I think I’m done. The signal to noise ratio is so low with all the “AI” slop spam, far-left extreme political content where any dissent is flagged into oblivion, and generally just pointless fluff.
HN was special while it lasted o7
Agree with all your points. HN has become such slop.
A little direct action a day, keeps the fascists away
good.
God Bless America
Oh no.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPQFF0oqsto
[dead]
GOOD
The authors misspelled “domestic terrorists”.
This is really bad for all the reasons that people have mentioned (vigilante "justice" never is a good thing) but people have a misplaced understanding of right and wrong here. Flock cameras have helped solve some major crimes, and people will be glad to have this technology around if they are ever a victim.
Police states are great at solving major crimes. And when those are sufficiently solved, to justify their continued existence, they have to solve lesser crimes, repeating until you need enough surveillance to ensure no one's flushing their toilet improperly.
Police states are like autoimmune diseases under the hygiene hypothesis. They'll keep ramping up their sensitivity until they're attacking everything, even when it's benign.
Flock cameras can be helpful in all sorts of crimes. They've been used to solve everything from kidnappings to minor property damage.
There obviously isn't a future without crime. This is just a tool to make it easier for police to do their job and deter criminals somewhat, but that is probably marginal.
There will always be kidnappings, there will always be property damage. Having technology available to make it easier to solve those crimes seems obvious to me.
Yes, I can see how they would be helpful in solving crimes down to minor property damage.
I do not want to live in a society where police are watching everything I do in the name of solving minor property damage. "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" is bullshit. I don't do anything illegal in my bathroom, but I do not wish to have a camera in there, even if it could solve a hypothetical crime.
I think most opposing Flock have considered and rejected the bargain of trading their freedom for security in this case.
There are other ways to sacrifice your privacy for a sense of safety that doesn't impose your 'understanding of right and wrong' on the entire public.
>have a misplaced understanding of right and wrong here.
"Could I be making wrong assumptions? No I'm a hacker, it must be everyone else who is wrong."
"That it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape, than that one innocent Person should suffer, is a Maxim that has been long & generally approv’d"
The amount of damage these cameras have caused is totally disproportional to whatever meager benefit they may have wrought. These are antisocial machines.
Always nice to hear from someone completely immune to miscarriages of justice.
Dude my car was literally jacked up and had the catalytic convertor chopped off in a parking with flock cameras at a hotel before, def never got caught, and according to the hotel security footage they parked right next to my car, got out and did everything real fast. Plus most people using cars to commit heinous crimes are usually stolen and ditched right after anyways, people who use their own car to commit crimes usually end up being lower level crimes like organized retail theft, drugs, etc, you know stuff id rather not trade privacy for security over.
yeah surveillance doesn't mean secure. A few weeks ago there was a solid 10-15 second run of automatic weapons fire on my street in an intersection. I do a lot of shooting and i could tell from the concussion it couldn't have been more than a couple hundred feet from my bedroom window. My neighbors turned in all their camera footage with recordings of two cars and the gunfire to a detective. When i asked them what happens next the detective just said in an annoyed voice "well i'll ask someone to check around..". Like it was plainly obvious he had zero interest at all.
edit: I live in Dallas so, although we sometimes hear gunshots when the Cowboys score a touchdown, i'm not in an active war zone.
I'm in Dallas as well, and I hear gun shots daily. New Years/4th July absolutely sound like a war zone. I found a slug next to my trash can after a 4th celebration a couple of years ago. Not a shell, the actual slug. I keep it on my desk as a reminder. My fur babies are not allowed outside on those nights.
All fun and good until whatever you are comes under the scrutiny of the police state.
My confusion stems from the fact that mass surveillance is already pretty normal in major cities. Your face is on a dozen cameras anytime you walk through the grocery store. Your precise location is pinged off cell towers multiple times a day. I understand specific qualms with Flock as a company and how they manage the data, but this libertarian demand for total privacy in public spaces has been long lost and the beef with Flock in particular doesn’t even scratch the surface.
Edit: And I don’t even know how to have good faith conversations about this topic in these spaces, because the hive mind has decided that anything but absolute outrage is untenable. I’m getting downvoted for sharing my opinion.
We already have mass surveillance, and yet we still have major crimes. It's not working, and I see no reason to believe that removing more freedom will lead to having safer streets. Why are we giving up liberty and getting nothing in return? That's an excellent reason to protest against adding more surveillance.