Flock was pitched as the triumph of technology over criminality. It's surveillance network was supposed to end crime. However, when people witness extreme criminality thriving unpunished at the top levels of U.S. politics, the lie becomes evident. Flock isn't about ending crime. It's a tool of control to be used by criminals.
It's a nice idea. Everything is backwards right now. It should to be the other way around: random citizens should be essentially anonymous while all members of the government are surveilled 24/7. Surveillance should scale with power.
Yeah, this is really messed up. I think our instincts ("tribal leader is powerful and has extra rights") are doing us a disservice. In democracies, all politicians are our employees: They are supposed to do our bidding, and if they act on their own, only in our direct or indirect (no bullshit interpretations please) interest.
Surveillance should be done on people with power, sure but the society isn’t structured like that except maybe for a few small advanced European countries. The people at the top have a specific function and apparently the society likes it that way as you can tell from the indifference towards their criminality.
Just compare the crime statistics with the worst group you can think of, i.e. convicted presidents are significantly more than the convicted general population etc.
I guess since those at the top are a very small minority it feels like soap opera up until enormous damage is done.
This is a perspective I hadn’t heard or considered before.
Often times common crime (petty/violent) is viewed as a totally different area as white-collar crime or corruption. But they’re related.
As someone who’s had bikes stolen and car broken into, I sympathize with the desire for surveillance (especially in San Francisco). But Flock has no safeguards against cops using it to stalk ex-wives or misusing a partial match.
I put privacy over ending crime. That’s the unspoken stance everyone needs to decide on. Ubiquitous surveillance will end most crime but do we want that if the cost is our privacy?
It doesn't even do that, is the worst part. So the trade is to give up all privacy, but low-level crime continues unchanged.
Anyone who has tried to get the police interested in a theft where you have clear HD video of the action and a clear view of their faces and/or license plate, has lived this experience.
That's a HUGE assumption about the ability of surveillance to succeed, and it goes against the evidence of the most surveillance-heavy states in the present and history. There are flaws in systems that go beyond collecting evidence, for example corruption can undermine any technical approach as we see in places like China where surveillance is omnipresent.
Hell if "total surveillance" was the secret to ending crime, prisons would paradise. The panopticon would have been a great success. In reality the only way to make it work is to assign people two-by-two to watch each other 24/7, and that only works if they're both honest, attentive, and incorruptible.
This assumes the people watching actually cared about stopping crime enough to step in and arrest the offenders.
To echo the topmost comment's point, you can't convince the public that law enforcement actually cared when the elites who flew on the Lolita express to the child rape island are facing zero consequences while urinating on the side of a highway gets you put on a list forever.
Again by this logic prisons should be free of crime, rather than hotbeds of it. Insisting that something is true because it makes sense to you doesn’t make it true.
Passed an old guy sitting on the side of the road with a lawn chair today, he was holding a pool skimmer with cardboard attached at the end to block a flock camera. There was a local news story about it [1]. Happy to see it.
Despite differences in political beliefs you probably have more in common with this man than any of the politicians that claim to care about your or your values.
On some level, it feels like (some) politicians haven't realised this, or have forgotten it.
We can either have a functioning democracy and justice system, where responsibility is delegated to people whose job it is to uphold the values society's values, or we can have individual people that job themselves. If a judge or police officer isn't going to carry out justice, then eventually people are going to do it themselves. That tends to get messy, so we stopped doing that with good reason, and built institutions to better service justice, but if the institutions aren't doing their jobs, they should be reformed or thrown out.
I had this thought just the other day. It is not possible for any governing body to completely ignore the governed unless the governed have no issues that that lead to speach/action. There will always be a petition/revolt/exodus which results in the governing body hearing the governed.
> the governed unless the governed have no issues that that lead to speach/action
What about if the speech is censored, shadow-banned, limited etc in some other ways? Where the governed does not know their speech was limited in reach, censored etc? (which btw is a real approach social media companies are taking today).
You’re getting at the distinction between the right to speak and the right to be heard.
There are tons of time-and-place limitations that make perfect sense. I can’t interrupt a city council meeting to give a speech about, well, anything not on the agenda.
And of course social media companies have no legal obligation to allow free speech at all, which is their own right to speech.
Core freedom of speech means the government cannot arrest you for what you say. Going beyond that to private companies being obligated to ensure your reach can be a moral argument but not a legal one.
... or infighting, or self-destruction, or doomscrolling... the pressure will go somewhere but not necessarily into channels that relieve it. That takes more effort and persistence, and also a society (our consumer societies hardly rate as such in my books).
the right to free speech has nothing to do with what social media companies do. Social media companies are not compelled by anything, in law or otherwise, to amplify your particular post.
This isn't a vigilante movement. These cameras are being installed without any constitutional basis. And people don't need legal authority to correct an unlawful camera installation problem that cities are not handling.
I think it should depend on what residents living in the street want with several tiers. Public cam, paywall, law enforcement 24/7 or for a specific case, encrypted court order only, fake cams.
Each with different aproval requirements. A public cam would require 100%. Fake cams req only one vote. etc
I think I may have a minority view about surveillance. At least I need someone to explain something to me.
Is the backlash really about privacy, or is the real problem a complete lack of trust in government?
Because if I thought someone would actually use the cameras to enforce the law, that's not actually such a bad outcome. You aren't supposed to speed, you aren't supposed to let your dog poop without cleaning up after it, and there's a bunch of other offences as well.
Why would I not support a hypothetical police that enforced these rules? Guy takes his dog for a walk, doesn't pick up, boom, cameras plus AI finds the person and issues a fine. Enforcing a social norm, cheaply. There seems to be evidence that it works with speeding: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/04/250402181306.h...
The kind of story that I've actually come across is that someone with access to the public database abuses it. They peek into their ex girlfriend's records, that kind of thing. Obviously nobody thinks that's ok, and I can understand if the main pushback people have is that none of the first thing will happen and lots of the second thing will happen. But that doesn't seem to address the principle itself.
So what exactly is the argument for why we shouldn't have cameras catching people who break the law? Presumably we would have no issue with a cop seeing someone breaking the law, and enforcing. The issue comes up when we replace the policeman with a system that is always on and way cheaper to run than a cop.
EDIT
Just to be clear, I understand it if people don't trust the government. What I'm looking for is an argument other than that. Thus far every response has been along the lines of "you can't trust the government to use this fairly/correctly".
That's known, everybody can see that argument.
I want to know if there's a reason beyond that why widespread surveillance shouldn't be a thing.
Our laws only work because of a hidden assumption that trivial or victimless crimes won't be prosecuted. This assumption isn't always upheld, but automatic surveilance would break it pretty much every time.
Even if our laws were actually written with perfect enforcement in mind, only outlawing what's actually antisocial, I don't think I could ever trust a government enough to give it that kind of power. Mass surveillance makes it easier to enforce any law, just or not, and most countries haven't been able to go even one lifetime without turning into a totalitarian hellhole or at least persecuting part of their population.
Another part of it may be that emigrating is so costly (not just in money) that most people won't ever be able to do it. When you're de facto forced to live in a country whose laws you (partly) disagree with, it's easier to add barriers to law enforcement than to get those laws changed.
> Why would I not support a hypothetical police that enforced these rules?
Because such hypothetical police does not exist and cannot ever exist.
Humans are corrupted by power, basic human nature.
So if a system is staffed by humans, it must be designed to take human nature into account. It needs to be designed to be resilient against the flaws of human nature that will inevitably happen, such as corruption and bribery and self-interest.
> Is the backlash really about privacy, or is the real problem a complete lack of trust in government?
Both.
Even if a hypothetical perfect police force could serve justice better with a panopticon, that is A.) not the police force that exists today, and 2.) who's to day that there won't be a worse government in X years that will use that panopticon and police force to be dicks?
The benefit of minor crimes being addressed today is very small compared to the potential disaster of tomorrow.
This answer might be US specific but one significant reason for the pushback (at least from me) is the centralizing force.
Generally the things cameras like that are good for enforcing are handled by local law enforcement. Probably at the city/county level, at most the state. So prior to Flock and their ilk, camera surveillance was used by local people in the community to enforce laws enacted by the community.
Flock enables that but also provides a nation wide, searchable database available to local and federal law enforcement. Recently SCOTUS ruled that broad geo-based warrants (law enforcement would ask Google for all devices in an area for a time frame) are illegal and overbroad.
A nationwide Flock network with facial recognition ends up in the same place of being able not only to enforce laws, but track people in a warrantless way.
Conceptually at least, this feels very similar to government attacks on encryption where a government wants to see and have access to everything without cause just in case, which is definitely at least in sprint opposed to the right of free association. Flock does the same kind of thing but in the physical world.
I also think a general computer security rule of thumb probably applies here, where for the best security/safety, trust should be provable. If trusting a human is required to make a system work correctly, the system is flawed.
All of that to say I don't think the majority of pushback is against enforcing laws by camera specifically, but a Panopticon-ness of it and all the downstream effects that causes.
I think this is reason enough. The US (and others) are turning a little more despotic and totalitarian every day. Imagine what they can do with such tools?
Same reason why for example banning encryption “to save the children” is laudable but it would weaken the ability to exchange messages privately so much that it’s unacceptable. The powers that be would very much like messages not to be private, partly because it would neuter any ability people would have to organize and challenge the current powers.
It’s unfortunate that giving up these cameras or the ban of encryption would also empower other types of crime but to most the trade-offs are too big and so we’d rather have stronger privacy at the cost of (potentially) a little more unpunished crime.
I'd like to point of the recent case where a women crossed state lines for reproductive healthcare and the local police used flock to track those movements and prosecute.
The cameras enable good and reasonable prosecutions as much as they do oppressive political ideologies.
You know how animals in captivity behave differently from animals living in the wild and why this is judged to be a bad thing for the animals? Humans under surveillance also act differently from free humans and it's a bad thing for the same reason.
Although this is by no means a consensus view on the human spirit. Culture and civilization are in many ways simply what you describe, means of domesticating the human animal. It's quite loaded to assume everyone who isn't on board with the Taxi Driver view of the human spirit is 'bad'.
Another user points to the Panopticon which wasn't viewed as evil or 'dystopian'. It was thought of as a humane, progressive reform of prisons that does away with the violence and privation you had in prisons up until that time. In a lot of Confucian cultures that remains today, you don't find a lot of Koreans, Japanese or Chinese people who think law enforcement and surveillance is crushing the human spirit, they'd tell you these are tools to cultivate civilized human beings so you don't end up like monkeys in the banana factory.
Real world results are poor. I've gotten a ticket for not coming to a "full and complete stop" at an empty intersection at 2AM. I drove up to the corner extremely slowly instead. A $500 fine.
That tends to be people's experience with this sort of thing. Laws the police generally wouldn't bother enforcing are maximally enforced, because it generates revenue.
They got rid of that camera eventually because it was "too easy for people to get out of tickets", meaning they were getting tossed when people challenged them.
There's a social norm that it's rude to follow someone around watching everything they do, and that the state shouldn't do it unless they have good reason to suspect that person of a crime.
Even if our current government is perfect, there's a misunderstanding of the argument here. When you argue for building vast surveillance infrastructure, you're not implicitly arguing the government is perfect. You're arguing every government, until the end of time, including hypothetical unknowable governments of the future, will be perfect.
And that argument is just really hard to defend, so much so that most people feel confident just dismissing it entirely.
I liked president Obama, now we have Trump. It's barely been over a decade. If this stuff was installed under president Obama, I would have protested it then, too. Even though I didn't foresee Trump. And we still don't know if this is "the end". The US could slip into a completely totalitarian fascist state. It's happened to many countries before.
1. If someone is running to a cop because someone didn’t pick up after their dog, that is a sad state of affairs.
2. If we are so interested in enforcing laws, what about all of the white collar crime, crypto scams, insider trading, and grifting off of the public sector? Clearly doing more harm to society than some dog poop. Where are the $8bn market cap companies that go around enforcing securities laws?
Lets instead talk about the growing vigalante action by Flock corporation refusing to allow cities to remove cameras from their property after the contract is cancelled. Some cities have been forced to cover the cameras with trash bags.
Local politicians need to coordinate to remove their Flock cameras at the same time and pass laws to prevent any new one from being put up. Flock doesn't have the resources to sue every single one of them, especially if every city commits to dragging out the process for as long as possible by creating as many legal hurdles as they can, all of which Flock would have to have a court rule on.
Kind of like how practically every Scientologist filed suit against the IRS over CoS having their tax exempt status revoked, to which the IRS eventually relented.
It's also wild to me we live in a country where people who _live_ in a region are not allowed to make decisions about something as foul as surveillance cameras. If people who live, work, and are affected by these don't want them that should be the end of the conversation.
It should be to the people who live in an area to make decisions about it. With the legal ability to tell a company like Flock to fuck off.
Congratulations, Flock, on establishing the most successful honeypot of all time!
No matter what the level of corruption, no matter which side of the surveillance state you support, no matter which side of the cameras you're on, Flock has a way to shine a spotlight on you and bring you out of the closet!
Currently following a YouTuber who knows all the roadside regulations for signposts and he points out how the Flock poles are all installed dangerously wrong, and will surely impale the next driver to crash out on the shoulder!
>No Federal agency may purchase, deploy, operate, access, or contract for any automated surveillance system that identifies, tracks, or records individuals [. . .]
Emphasis mine.
Am I wrong or does this 1. not outlaw the purchase of the data, just the systems themselves, 2. not outlaw the use of the data unless it was obtained by the federal government through a system they have purchased, and 3. not outlaw local or state law enforcement from buying it, just outlaws the use of federal funds to buy these systems.
So flock feed the data through brokers instead of directly, correct? Or am I reading this wrong?
AFAICT, municipalities get paid to put up the cameras, which isn't federal, so flock can then use those cameras to freely gather data and sell it to police
> municipalities get paid to put up the cameras
I've read lots of FOIAd flock contracts, and I have yet to see any municipality get paid by flock - they pay flock per-camera. Is that just a hunch, or are there cases of towns getting money from flock?
Flock was pitched as the triumph of technology over criminality. It's surveillance network was supposed to end crime. However, when people witness extreme criminality thriving unpunished at the top levels of U.S. politics, the lie becomes evident. Flock isn't about ending crime. It's a tool of control to be used by criminals.
Who watches the watchers? Everyone.
It's a nice idea. Everything is backwards right now. It should to be the other way around: random citizens should be essentially anonymous while all members of the government are surveilled 24/7. Surveillance should scale with power.
Yeah, this is really messed up. I think our instincts ("tribal leader is powerful and has extra rights") are doing us a disservice. In democracies, all politicians are our employees: They are supposed to do our bidding, and if they act on their own, only in our direct or indirect (no bullshit interpretations please) interest.
Surveillance should be done on people with power, sure but the society isn’t structured like that except maybe for a few small advanced European countries. The people at the top have a specific function and apparently the society likes it that way as you can tell from the indifference towards their criminality.
Just compare the crime statistics with the worst group you can think of, i.e. convicted presidents are significantly more than the convicted general population etc.
I guess since those at the top are a very small minority it feels like soap opera up until enormous damage is done.
This is a perspective I hadn’t heard or considered before.
Often times common crime (petty/violent) is viewed as a totally different area as white-collar crime or corruption. But they’re related.
As someone who’s had bikes stolen and car broken into, I sympathize with the desire for surveillance (especially in San Francisco). But Flock has no safeguards against cops using it to stalk ex-wives or misusing a partial match.
> As someone who’s had bikes stolen and car broken into, I sympathize with the desire for surveillance (especially in San Francisco).
That isn't what it is being used for. That would still require cops to be investigating petty theft as if they cared about it.
I think it would be kind of different if people were having cars broken into less often or bikes returned after being stolen
But it's clear that increased surveillance hasn't been leading to stolen property being recovered.
I put privacy over ending crime. That’s the unspoken stance everyone needs to decide on. Ubiquitous surveillance will end most crime but do we want that if the cost is our privacy?
> Ubiquitous surveillance will end most crime
It doesn't even do that, is the worst part. So the trade is to give up all privacy, but low-level crime continues unchanged.
Anyone who has tried to get the police interested in a theft where you have clear HD video of the action and a clear view of their faces and/or license plate, has lived this experience.
That's a HUGE assumption about the ability of surveillance to succeed, and it goes against the evidence of the most surveillance-heavy states in the present and history. There are flaws in systems that go beyond collecting evidence, for example corruption can undermine any technical approach as we see in places like China where surveillance is omnipresent.
Hell if "total surveillance" was the secret to ending crime, prisons would paradise. The panopticon would have been a great success. In reality the only way to make it work is to assign people two-by-two to watch each other 24/7, and that only works if they're both honest, attentive, and incorruptible.
Total surveillance would be watching people all the time, indoors too aka Fahrenheit. It would absolutely end 95% of crime.
This assumes the people watching actually cared about stopping crime enough to step in and arrest the offenders.
To echo the topmost comment's point, you can't convince the public that law enforcement actually cared when the elites who flew on the Lolita express to the child rape island are facing zero consequences while urinating on the side of a highway gets you put on a list forever.
Again by this logic prisons should be free of crime, rather than hotbeds of it. Insisting that something is true because it makes sense to you doesn’t make it true.
Passed an old guy sitting on the side of the road with a lawn chair today, he was holding a pool skimmer with cardboard attached at the end to block a flock camera. There was a local news story about it [1]. Happy to see it.
[1] https://www.cltampa.com/news/a-77-year-old-republican-man-is...
Well that is just art and quite the signal.
I'm sure my politics are very different than that man's, but at least we agree on the fact that Flock fucking sucks.
Despite differences in political beliefs you probably have more in common with this man than any of the politicians that claim to care about your or your values.
When people feel like their voice isn’t heard, this is the inevitable result.
On some level, it feels like (some) politicians haven't realised this, or have forgotten it.
We can either have a functioning democracy and justice system, where responsibility is delegated to people whose job it is to uphold the values society's values, or we can have individual people that job themselves. If a judge or police officer isn't going to carry out justice, then eventually people are going to do it themselves. That tends to get messy, so we stopped doing that with good reason, and built institutions to better service justice, but if the institutions aren't doing their jobs, they should be reformed or thrown out.
I had this thought just the other day. It is not possible for any governing body to completely ignore the governed unless the governed have no issues that that lead to speach/action. There will always be a petition/revolt/exodus which results in the governing body hearing the governed.
Yeah speech is the first way the populace indicates to the ruling what they want.
Physical action is inevitable if the speech isn't listened to.
> Physical action is inevitable if the speech isn't listened to.
see also: "The Four boxes of liberty"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_boxes_of_liberty
> the governed unless the governed have no issues that that lead to speach/action
What about if the speech is censored, shadow-banned, limited etc in some other ways? Where the governed does not know their speech was limited in reach, censored etc? (which btw is a real approach social media companies are taking today).
You’re getting at the distinction between the right to speak and the right to be heard.
There are tons of time-and-place limitations that make perfect sense. I can’t interrupt a city council meeting to give a speech about, well, anything not on the agenda.
And of course social media companies have no legal obligation to allow free speech at all, which is their own right to speech.
Core freedom of speech means the government cannot arrest you for what you say. Going beyond that to private companies being obligated to ensure your reach can be a moral argument but not a legal one.
Theyll see no effect of their speech, and try something else. Like voting, protests, and violence. In thay order
... or infighting, or self-destruction, or doomscrolling... the pressure will go somewhere but not necessarily into channels that relieve it. That takes more effort and persistence, and also a society (our consumer societies hardly rate as such in my books).
the right to free speech has nothing to do with what social media companies do. Social media companies are not compelled by anything, in law or otherwise, to amplify your particular post.
Is there any historical precedent for a defacto public square?
We can't relegate (unwillingly even) every bit of our lives to the private sector and suddenly say rights shouldn't exist.
If we want a digital public square we should fund one with public tax dollars.
There was a faint whooshing sound there where you didn't comprehend anything I wrote.
Violence and destruction are perfectly natural ways of communicating. Some animals use sounds and almost all use body language.
One could even argue communicating over the phone or internet lacks the destructive component. Irl behavior is heavily modified by it.
Verbal communication is a work in progress. We really want it to work. Sometimes you have to make people listen. Get them back in the program :)
> Violence and destruction are perfectly natural ways of communicating. Some animals use sounds and almost all use body language.
Except that animals don't have knives, guns, bombs and nuclear warheads.
> Sometimes you have to make people listen. Get them back in the program :)
Works great until you're the one being made to listen.
They certainly have knives, go look at what a tiger is sporting on his paws
> Except that animals don't have knives, guns, bombs and nuclear warheads.
Yeah, animals will spill your intestines out on the ground and start eating you asshole first while you scream.
And they may even do it for fun and not even eat you, and just let your fleshy bits rot in the sun.
The rhinoceros are still wondering what part of stay away we dont understand.
NO! Even if your voice is heard, the state doesn't need to track your every move.
This isn't a vigilante movement. These cameras are being installed without any constitutional basis. And people don't need legal authority to correct an unlawful camera installation problem that cities are not handling.
eh? it's still vigilantism if they're 'correcting' something unlawful?
Flock is definitely not the only provider of this kind of surveillance. What is the real reason that this is getting so much media attention?
They’re hiring software engineers!
I think it should depend on what residents living in the street want with several tiers. Public cam, paywall, law enforcement 24/7 or for a specific case, encrypted court order only, fake cams.
Each with different aproval requirements. A public cam would require 100%. Fake cams req only one vote. etc
I think I may have a minority view about surveillance. At least I need someone to explain something to me.
Is the backlash really about privacy, or is the real problem a complete lack of trust in government?
Because if I thought someone would actually use the cameras to enforce the law, that's not actually such a bad outcome. You aren't supposed to speed, you aren't supposed to let your dog poop without cleaning up after it, and there's a bunch of other offences as well.
Why would I not support a hypothetical police that enforced these rules? Guy takes his dog for a walk, doesn't pick up, boom, cameras plus AI finds the person and issues a fine. Enforcing a social norm, cheaply. There seems to be evidence that it works with speeding: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/04/250402181306.h...
The kind of story that I've actually come across is that someone with access to the public database abuses it. They peek into their ex girlfriend's records, that kind of thing. Obviously nobody thinks that's ok, and I can understand if the main pushback people have is that none of the first thing will happen and lots of the second thing will happen. But that doesn't seem to address the principle itself.
So what exactly is the argument for why we shouldn't have cameras catching people who break the law? Presumably we would have no issue with a cop seeing someone breaking the law, and enforcing. The issue comes up when we replace the policeman with a system that is always on and way cheaper to run than a cop.
EDIT
Just to be clear, I understand it if people don't trust the government. What I'm looking for is an argument other than that. Thus far every response has been along the lines of "you can't trust the government to use this fairly/correctly".
That's known, everybody can see that argument.
I want to know if there's a reason beyond that why widespread surveillance shouldn't be a thing.
Our laws only work because of a hidden assumption that trivial or victimless crimes won't be prosecuted. This assumption isn't always upheld, but automatic surveilance would break it pretty much every time.
Even if our laws were actually written with perfect enforcement in mind, only outlawing what's actually antisocial, I don't think I could ever trust a government enough to give it that kind of power. Mass surveillance makes it easier to enforce any law, just or not, and most countries haven't been able to go even one lifetime without turning into a totalitarian hellhole or at least persecuting part of their population.
Another part of it may be that emigrating is so costly (not just in money) that most people won't ever be able to do it. When you're de facto forced to live in a country whose laws you (partly) disagree with, it's easier to add barriers to law enforcement than to get those laws changed.
> Why would I not support a hypothetical police that enforced these rules?
Because such hypothetical police does not exist and cannot ever exist.
Humans are corrupted by power, basic human nature.
So if a system is staffed by humans, it must be designed to take human nature into account. It needs to be designed to be resilient against the flaws of human nature that will inevitably happen, such as corruption and bribery and self-interest.
It’s hard to parse this, it’s like asking, apart from the murdering, what’s wrong with murder?
> Is the backlash really about privacy, or is the real problem a complete lack of trust in government?
Both.
Even if a hypothetical perfect police force could serve justice better with a panopticon, that is A.) not the police force that exists today, and 2.) who's to day that there won't be a worse government in X years that will use that panopticon and police force to be dicks?
The benefit of minor crimes being addressed today is very small compared to the potential disaster of tomorrow.
This answer might be US specific but one significant reason for the pushback (at least from me) is the centralizing force.
Generally the things cameras like that are good for enforcing are handled by local law enforcement. Probably at the city/county level, at most the state. So prior to Flock and their ilk, camera surveillance was used by local people in the community to enforce laws enacted by the community.
Flock enables that but also provides a nation wide, searchable database available to local and federal law enforcement. Recently SCOTUS ruled that broad geo-based warrants (law enforcement would ask Google for all devices in an area for a time frame) are illegal and overbroad.
A nationwide Flock network with facial recognition ends up in the same place of being able not only to enforce laws, but track people in a warrantless way.
Conceptually at least, this feels very similar to government attacks on encryption where a government wants to see and have access to everything without cause just in case, which is definitely at least in sprint opposed to the right of free association. Flock does the same kind of thing but in the physical world.
I also think a general computer security rule of thumb probably applies here, where for the best security/safety, trust should be provable. If trusting a human is required to make a system work correctly, the system is flawed.
All of that to say I don't think the majority of pushback is against enforcing laws by camera specifically, but a Panopticon-ness of it and all the downstream effects that causes.
Laws are not perfectly moral, and future laws might be even less so. Same goes for governments - their power should not outweigh the governed's.
I think this is reason enough. The US (and others) are turning a little more despotic and totalitarian every day. Imagine what they can do with such tools?
Same reason why for example banning encryption “to save the children” is laudable but it would weaken the ability to exchange messages privately so much that it’s unacceptable. The powers that be would very much like messages not to be private, partly because it would neuter any ability people would have to organize and challenge the current powers.
It’s unfortunate that giving up these cameras or the ban of encryption would also empower other types of crime but to most the trade-offs are too big and so we’d rather have stronger privacy at the cost of (potentially) a little more unpunished crime.
I'd like to point of the recent case where a women crossed state lines for reproductive healthcare and the local police used flock to track those movements and prosecute.
The cameras enable good and reasonable prosecutions as much as they do oppressive political ideologies.
You know how animals in captivity behave differently from animals living in the wild and why this is judged to be a bad thing for the animals? Humans under surveillance also act differently from free humans and it's a bad thing for the same reason.
It is in essence an attack on the human spirit.
>It is in essence an attack on the human spirit.
Although this is by no means a consensus view on the human spirit. Culture and civilization are in many ways simply what you describe, means of domesticating the human animal. It's quite loaded to assume everyone who isn't on board with the Taxi Driver view of the human spirit is 'bad'.
Another user points to the Panopticon which wasn't viewed as evil or 'dystopian'. It was thought of as a humane, progressive reform of prisons that does away with the violence and privation you had in prisons up until that time. In a lot of Confucian cultures that remains today, you don't find a lot of Koreans, Japanese or Chinese people who think law enforcement and surveillance is crushing the human spirit, they'd tell you these are tools to cultivate civilized human beings so you don't end up like monkeys in the banana factory.
Real world results are poor. I've gotten a ticket for not coming to a "full and complete stop" at an empty intersection at 2AM. I drove up to the corner extremely slowly instead. A $500 fine.
That tends to be people's experience with this sort of thing. Laws the police generally wouldn't bother enforcing are maximally enforced, because it generates revenue.
They got rid of that camera eventually because it was "too easy for people to get out of tickets", meaning they were getting tossed when people challenged them.
There's a social norm that it's rude to follow someone around watching everything they do, and that the state shouldn't do it unless they have good reason to suspect that person of a crime.
Even if our current government is perfect, there's a misunderstanding of the argument here. When you argue for building vast surveillance infrastructure, you're not implicitly arguing the government is perfect. You're arguing every government, until the end of time, including hypothetical unknowable governments of the future, will be perfect.
And that argument is just really hard to defend, so much so that most people feel confident just dismissing it entirely.
I liked president Obama, now we have Trump. It's barely been over a decade. If this stuff was installed under president Obama, I would have protested it then, too. Even though I didn't foresee Trump. And we still don't know if this is "the end". The US could slip into a completely totalitarian fascist state. It's happened to many countries before.
1. If someone is running to a cop because someone didn’t pick up after their dog, that is a sad state of affairs.
2. If we are so interested in enforcing laws, what about all of the white collar crime, crypto scams, insider trading, and grifting off of the public sector? Clearly doing more harm to society than some dog poop. Where are the $8bn market cap companies that go around enforcing securities laws?
Lets instead talk about the growing vigalante action by Flock corporation refusing to allow cities to remove cameras from their property after the contract is cancelled. Some cities have been forced to cover the cameras with trash bags.
https://www.404media.co/flock-objects-to-our-removing-their-...
https://www.wmtv15news.com/2026/06/05/dane-county-covers-flo...
Local politicians need to coordinate to remove their Flock cameras at the same time and pass laws to prevent any new one from being put up. Flock doesn't have the resources to sue every single one of them, especially if every city commits to dragging out the process for as long as possible by creating as many legal hurdles as they can, all of which Flock would have to have a court rule on.
Kind of like how practically every Scientologist filed suit against the IRS over CoS having their tax exempt status revoked, to which the IRS eventually relented.
It's also wild to me we live in a country where people who _live_ in a region are not allowed to make decisions about something as foul as surveillance cameras. If people who live, work, and are affected by these don't want them that should be the end of the conversation.
It should be to the people who live in an area to make decisions about it. With the legal ability to tell a company like Flock to fuck off.
If I were a city government, I would just start charging Flock rent.
They'll be gone the next day!
Congratulations, Flock, on establishing the most successful honeypot of all time!
No matter what the level of corruption, no matter which side of the surveillance state you support, no matter which side of the cameras you're on, Flock has a way to shine a spotlight on you and bring you out of the closet!
Currently following a YouTuber who knows all the roadside regulations for signposts and he points out how the Flock poles are all installed dangerously wrong, and will surely impale the next driver to crash out on the shoulder!
This one [0] by chance?
[0] https://youtube.com/@theguardrailguy
@theguardrailguy is great, love his work, highly recommend.
Related:
H.R.9800 - Protection Against Mass Surveillance Act - https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/9800...
Not to be too cynical but
>No Federal agency may purchase, deploy, operate, access, or contract for any automated surveillance system that identifies, tracks, or records individuals [. . .]
Emphasis mine.
Am I wrong or does this 1. not outlaw the purchase of the data, just the systems themselves, 2. not outlaw the use of the data unless it was obtained by the federal government through a system they have purchased, and 3. not outlaw local or state law enforcement from buying it, just outlaws the use of federal funds to buy these systems.
So flock feed the data through brokers instead of directly, correct? Or am I reading this wrong?
AFAICT, municipalities get paid to put up the cameras, which isn't federal, so flock can then use those cameras to freely gather data and sell it to police
> municipalities get paid to put up the cameras I've read lots of FOIAd flock contracts, and I have yet to see any municipality get paid by flock - they pay flock per-camera. Is that just a hunch, or are there cases of towns getting money from flock?
I appear to have misread some things. I'll have to re-research the stuff.