Remember that scene from "Men in Black" where K watches surveillance video feed of his ex? In the movie it was meant to be wistful and cute, I guess. Now that such systems are getting closer to reality, you realize the potential for abuse in enormous.
All about perspective! Plenty of romance stories that start out with stalking. (Though I guess from a social normative conversation pov, you would want to keep up the kayfabe).
That was after having his memory erased though. Which, if Flock streams automatically did the same thing, would probably help with the ethical issues for those they surveil.
This shouldn't be hard to understand. Don't talk to the police, without your attorney present, under any circumstances whatsoever.
Dating the police is just such an astoundingly egregious violation of this principle that I can only wonder what, if anything, those people are thinking.
Anyway, the key takeaway seems to don't date anyone who dates the police. Firstly, because it directly puts your own safety at risk, as this article exemplifies. Secondly, because it demonstrates terrible judgment; it seems reasonable to assume they are likely to make other terrible decisions in the future.
> Dating the police is just such an astoundingly egregious violation of this principle
There are still quite a few people who think the police are the friendly government-provided customer service agents of life, although I've watched this viewpoint decline markedly over the last twenty years at least.
Locally, a woman went on a hiking date with a Phoenix cop and wound up dead [0]. Notably, the woman was from New England, while the cop was local and absolutely should have known better how dangerous conditions would be. The police, of course, investigated themselves and found they did nothing wrong.
A female high on meth gets disoriented and dies from heat exposure in the mountains. As per article she willingly separated from the guy whom she sent to the top of the peak "to continue to get pic for social media". He probably should have know better and just go down with her and call it a day, or not getting high on meth in dangerous environment in the first place but thats about it.
Unless you have a better article on that, that really ain't evidence of anything.
A trained police officer leaves his obviously high (police can always tell even on first contact and from far away, right?) and exhausted hiking partner to return alone, with no water, in blazing heat, on an unfamiliar trail, to eventually die alone.
Meth and amphetamine are very different drugs, but a bootlicker wouldn't know the difference. She could also have been spiked and left to die by the cop, can't really know without a proper investigation, which the police never subject themselves to.
They are different drugs in the sense that methamphetamine will cause more serotonin release and will act longer than amphetamine, but they will both cause increase in blood pressure, increase heart rate and increase internal temperature. The rest of your comment is right though.
Her source of trust was instagram. The cop’s instagram led her to travel to Arizona and be with him. She was convinced by his instagram that she agreed to do all of this. That’s really dumb and it’s what you get playing stupid games with strangers on the internet.
"Don't talk to the police, without your attorney present, under any circumstances whatsoever."
Oh but I did. Multiple times, without a lawyer ever, how shocking:
"Hey, my bicycle was stolen, I need to file it so I get insurance payout"
"Hey, this demonstration and the roadblock of yours for guarding it, will it be around for much longer?"
"Hey, nice weather, isn't it?"
(Misdirecting small talk, while they were searching for drugs on the road to a festival, but then didn't really check me)
"Yes I know I have to have a light with a bicycle, but the battery went out and it was a emergency now to go anyway"
(Did not had to pay a fine)
And countless other examples like this.
Also more serious ones.
"Yes, it was those neonazis who beat up my friend"
So .. I never cared much for this online advice, but then again I also don't live in the US. Maybe there they shoot and arrest anyone approaching them on general principle?
Well in my world, that was actually shaped a lot by anarchistic anti establishment people, I found that one can talk to cops as inhuman cops, then they will act like one, or you talk to them as humans and might be surprised that they reply as humans.
That doesn't mean, that there ain't lots of assholes on a power trip in uniforms, but the "never talk to them advice" assumes they all are. And this is just wrong and act as a self fullfilling prophecy.
Internet experts, also here on HN, tried to convince me otherwise.
Also no, in the drug search example I just wanted to be left alone (and not have them find the small bag of weed). So I answered, but talked about harmless things.
I'm referring to things like the UK's right to remain silent, where the Miranda-style warning is:
> You do not have to say anything. But it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.
Basically, your alibi is considered much less credible if your first mention of it is at trial.
This is an extremely online belief. Oak Park, IL, the inner-ring suburb of Chicago where I live, is almost certainly one of the 10 most progressive and left-leaning municipalities in the country. Oak Parkers (not me) have the opposite concern: we're below our threshold number of sworn officers, and desperate to add more. The median Oak Parker has very positive views of the police (and also all the standard progressive concerns about abuses.)
Lots of political beliefs are like this! There are plenty of things people believe very strongly, and get near universal reinforcement on in their communities, that don't survive contact with actual living grass. The median American has an extraordinarily high opinion of Amazon, for instance, something you'd never know unless you sought out polling (or, you know, took a walk down a residential block and looked at the stoops.)
Correct: "never talk to the police" is a very online belief. I watch people talk to police all the time. People go out of their way to do it.
I don't even know what to do with the "never date police officers" thing. Most police officers are married. It's a shift-work job, so they have high divorce rates, but they just remarry.
> I don't even know what to do with the "never date police officers" thing. Most police officers are married. It's a shift-work job, so they have high divorce rates, but they just remarry.
They have also unusually high domestic violence rates. That is where the bit comes from.
This is first time I have seen the claim that firefighters have the same domestic violence rates as police. I have seen multiple studies on police vs regular citizens and police were more violent in all of them. I did not seen comparable numbers about firefighters.
The factors police have and firemen dont are a.) victim not being able to go to police, cause those are his buddies b.) training teaches cops to take and keep charge (escalating aggression until compliance is acquired).
The question in my mind is what people are expecting? What do they think this proves? Policing is a conflict focused job that involves violence so I wouldnt expect it to be the same as baseline to begin with.
I would caution against "just so" explainations. There are obviously lots of complex reasons and one can speculate a lot of stories one way or another.
I'm not making a normative claim about what your best strategy is to protect yourself from a police investigation, but rather a positive claim about ordinary people's attitudes towards the police, which are not (gesturing towards this thread) this.
Okay, but "never talk to the police" is a normative statement, not a descriptive statement, so your contrast of it with a people's attitudes towards police is kind of apples and oranges.
Saying never talk to the police is an 'online belief' is frankly baffling.
There are multiple examples of prominent law professors bringing in ex-police professionals who all say the exact same thing: never talk to the police. If you spend five minutes around a lawyer they will say the same thing. If you ever end up finding yourself in legal turmoil it is the very first thing a lawyer will directly advise you to do.
People being stupid I don't think suddenly makes this advice terminally online. I was hearing it, in person, when I was in college over a decade ago.
Most people simply don't see themselves as being in zero-sum contests with the police. If you are in such a contest, those videos you've watched are quite useful and important. But when there's a hit and run on your block, expect your neighbors to go out of their way to volunteer information to the police.
I've read threads here where people have made impassioned arguments that you yourself should never volunteer information to the police investigating a crime such as a hit and run. The police will turn it against you and somehow make you the target of their investigation! Ordinary people out in the world do not think that way, and you will not succeed in making them think that way by showing them videos of lawyers explaining why the only thing you should ever say is "I do not consent to any searches and will not answer any of your questions".
If you said that to a police officer doing a canvass in my neighborhood, people would look at you like a space alien.
I think it's helpful to understand all this stuff when reading things about Flock. People on HN and in activist communities seem gobsmacked that all the Flock cameras haven't been taken down yet (in fact: ALPR deployments are growing, not shrinking). But they have wildly different priors about policing than the median resident of a muni with ALPR cameras.
No, but online is where you see this advice being most commonly posted and repeated. Second-most might be in lawyer's offices, but a) most people don't interact with lawyers, especially not in the context of criminal investigations, and b) the lawyers themselves have a distorted view of this system, because they are almost always dealing with people who, for one reason or another, should not talk to the police.
Using "terminally online" for "the advice layers consistently give both online and offline but people don't follow" is, imo, using that term incorrectly. "Terminally online" is derogatory term which involves you doing or thinking something insane. If literal layers give that advice in their literal offices and wherever they go around, it is simply "rarely followed advice".
And I will also claim that layers have way less distorted view of the system then us, people whose view of the system is based on movies and rare cases that hit the news.
Category error. Points can be valid and salient mostly online at the same time.
Though: the validity of "nobody should ever talk to the police" is highly disputable. It assumes the only objective anybody would have in a police encounter is not being prosecuted. Prosecution is unlikely, and there are other important objectives.
I will point out that the original poster did not say "terminally online", but "very online". (oh, and "extremely online"). I don't personally feel that has the same kind of connotations.
The context they make these statements is when you are a person of interest to the police, if you are just a witness to an event unrelated to you its different. But people mostly just say 'never' without regard of the situation.
Not that its always benign to do in cases like this, you can easily talk yourself into becoming a person of interest. Especially true if the officer happens to have a 'bad day' or is a bad apple, you can't really tell because the police keeps employing these people. An example I saw a woman went into the station to provide a video from their phone as evidence of some event and ending up getting taken to the ground in the lobby and arrested for resisting arrest or some bullshit. All because the officer tried to snatch the phone out of her hand without saying anything and then used her keeping hold of the phone as a reason for assaulting her.
> The context they make these statements is when you are a person of interest to the police, if you are just a witness to an event unrelated to you its different. But people mostly just say 'never' without regard of the situation.
Not true, the context I have seen it very much included being a witness who is not a person of interest to the police. It especially explicitly included that situation.
> An example I saw a woman went into the station to provide a video from their phone as evidence of some event and ending up getting taken to the ground in the lobby and arrested for resisting arrest or some bullshit. All because the officer tried to snatch the phone out of her hand without saying anything and then used her keeping hold of the phone as a reason for assaulting her.
That is egregious abuse of power. The layers I have in mind were not explicitly mentioning that high level of lawlessness from the police.
>Not true, the context I have seen it very much included being a witness who is not a person of interest to the police. It especially explicitly included that situation.
Even without context, its good advice. By talking to them you might even be confessing to some crime that you didn't even know exist.
>That is egregious abuse of power. The layers I have in mind were not explicitly mentioning that high level of lawlessness from the police.
That's the entire point. This idealized version of the police you seem to have, maybe some European countries come close it due to their requirements on officers and training, is not reality. Departments allow officers that act like this to resign so they can move to a different department.
Surely there's more interesting conversation to be had here than just "your opinions about interacting with law enforcement are moot because I know people in my Chicago neighbourhood who disagree with them."
The main contention seems to be 'surely everyone knows you shouldn't talk to the police' and 'no, quite a lot of people believe the opposite, but it's not as common to see that belief online', with a bit of this being conflated with whether this belief is accurate or not.
>I don't even know what to do with the "never date police officers" thing. Most police officers are married. It's a shift-work job, so they have high divorce rates, but they just remarry.
This is a deeply masculine take, Zuck would be proud.
Oak Park. Home to Frank Lloyd Wright’s original studio/home and multiple works designed by him? Birthplace and hometown of Ernest Hemingway?
A municipality comparable to Berkeley, California or New Rochelle, New York?
What?
I agree with you that a blanket statement of not talking to the police is ridiculous, but arguing that Oak Park is a good representation outside of affluent America is not to be taken seriously.
No, it shows that we have a destructive, trust undermining security industry that sells abusive surveillance software that by spirit of the law would be clearly illegal in any country that pretends to be a free and open society and has a constitution in the direction.
No, it shows that even trust has been utterly undermined by a police force that cannot control itself. This is just the latest in a long line of abuses, and completely eliminating Flock would not even touch the underlying problem.
Ah, yes, the 'public' space of a paid-for monitoring service, most likely accessed from private domiciles. One you use to track random citizens without their knowledge or consent. To act like this is equivalent to taking a photo of something in person is irresponsible and downright dangerous.
This is far more similar to stalking than just public viewing. If you followed somebody around and took pictures of their car and their person, just because, you'd likely end up with a restraining order or stalking charges.
I doubt the founders of your country predicted private companies being able to easily mass surveil citizens without their knowledge & sell this data to the highest bidder. You forget that this data isn't just sold to government agencies. It's also sold to.. Lowe's? Random HOAs (Home Owner Associations)? Your local big box retail store?
In the USA you can film whatever you want in public but if you target and follow someone while filming them you open yourself up to harassment or stalking charges. The flock network does something similar and this article is literally about police officers using it to stalk exes.
Even flock’s own employees (including the VP) accessed cameras stationed at a children’s gymnasium. They claim it was for a sales pitch but who knows. The names of the cameras imply they’re inside the facility, not on the street corner.
Are you loosely paraphrasing here? The closest thing I could find by Scott Adams was "Whenever you have a lot of money in play, combined with the ability to hide misbehavior behind complexity, you should expect widespread fraud to happen."
I sometimes think of this from the other direction.
Don't put people in situations of great temptation, like access to company cash with no oversight. They'll often fall for the temptation and ruin their lives in the process.
It's a slightly different framing from the "evil people will take advantage and get away with it" but they both lead to putting some kind of process in place to prevent abuse.
This is like when store-bought locks are able to be picked by a novice, or broken with a hammer, or bypassed with a magnet. The phrase used is "it keeps good people honest", rather than "it keeps absolutely all bad guys out".
The irony here being that we are so beyond healthy that the vast majority of people are well beyond even realizing or recognizing that the very need for locks everywhere is self-evident of an unhealthy society.
Imagining a condition where you had to lock away your valuables in your own home out of concern for them being taken by people in your own home probably makes it a bit more apparent to some people who can mentally model alternatives.
If you were ever to go to places where the rich are in what are effectively little oasis, kind of like “green zones” where they hide away from the chaos and misery they cause the wider society, no one locks their doors even though the homes are all full of stuff that is worth more than the average person will ever even earn in their whole lifetime and they walk around with jewelry and clothing multiple times more expensive than the average house price. They literally, by various mechanisms and methods “keep absolute all bad guys out”, effectively, without locks on every door.
What we’ve long lost was systematic secure systems architecture and we replaced it with extremely costly, expensive and risky brute force, hard coded illusion of saver of the kind you refer to that is ironically not even necessary in most cases either. Locks don’t keep good people out at all, good people aren’t emoted and wouldn’t enter a place that isn’t locked without permission in the first place; hence my above point of locks being a good indicator of the health of a society and the failure of a government, i.e., the cluster and quality of the people left in control of things.
Ultimately, there’s a sort of homeostasis in people’s tolerance for crime. If you need video evidence for prosecution, those who want it prosecuted will produce video cameras. If you make warrants impossible to produce in a timely manner, the camera search will be warrant exempted.
Attempts to damage state power to ensure crime isn’t prosecuted will be likely met with methods that are immune to them.
Given the constraints we operate under, the ideal number of unsolved crimes is not zero and the ideal number of crimes committed using state apparatus is also not zero. So being informed that either is non-zero is not of use to decision making in my opinion.
> the ideal number of unsolved crimes is not zero and the ideal number of crimes committed using state apparatus is also not zero
I feel this is an _extremely_ good point, the kind that seems obvious only once you hear it. But i feel there’s an implication that could be made explicit here — we should be looking at the distribution of both apparatus-enabled-crimes and unsolved-crimes when we’re discussing this sort of thing. And if those metrics aren’t tabulated for easy access, they probably should be.
> And if those metrics aren’t tabulated for easy access, they probably should be.
I couldn't agree more. They're two different error rates for our society and measuring them accurately would help us go to where we should be on the curve.
Somebody should make a website visualizing the data we do have, perhaps with uncertainty bounds, and a recursive breakdown locale-by-locale… Nose goes!!
Edit: wow I bet this is a project that would be _way_ too difficult to vibe code with AI, with well documented data sources and what not. Sure would be a shame if somebody proved me wrong.
I think there's a bias in public discussion towards idealism, because most discussions will start by the argument that we need to reduce X, or we need to reduce Y. If there is a conflict and there needs to be a trade off, very few discussions and points will be about the tradeoff, but there will be a whole bunch of discussions about just plain reducing X or reducing Y.
> If you need video evidence for prosecution, those who want it prosecuted will produce video cameras. If you make warrants impossible to produce in a timely manner, the camera search will be warrant exempted.
That's the legislator's fallacy. "Something must be done, this is something, therefore we must do this."
Suppose you address the problem in other ways, e.g. improve the economy and reduce poverty so there is less crime, or reform the laws so that we're not providing violent gangs with funding sources by criminalizing the consensual behavior of adults.
Warrantless surveillance is not the only option and it's a bad one.
> Attempts to damage state power to ensure crime isn’t prosecuted will be likely met with methods that are immune to them.
This has the same shape as "attempts to enforce the law will be likely met with methods that are immune to it".
Government agencies are going to buck attempts to hold them accountable for abuse. The goal is to make their attempts ineffective, not to throw up our hands because doing it right isn't easy.
Or let's turn your reasoning against itself: We have a law against the police misusing surveillance, so then all the cameras should be destroyed as the backlash against the police violating the law, right? Either your argument is sound and we should get on with destroying all the cameras because the police are breaking the law and we'll just have to use other means to deal with other people breaking other laws, or people are actually willing to tolerate a significant amount of lawbreaking, and then we should get on with destroying all the cameras because they're dangerous and the claim that we can't because people won't tolerate the law going unenforced is empirically deficient.
The quote says "reduce poverty so there is less crime", not "reducing poverty will entirely eliminate crime." Aren't those very different things? Seems like a bad reading of what they said.
If you disagree with what they said, address it directly instead of addressing an exaggeration of what they said.
You can also build systems that require secondary approvals without needing approval escalation up the chain. Creeping on women is a lot less likely if you need a peer or even a subordinate to review what you're doing.
They will just find some other creepy friend that will sign off without looking, in exchange for them getting the same treatment. It needs to go to a different system, with different priorities, but even then we know of corrupt judges rubber stamping warrants.
Why dont we have a AI verify that each search is tied to a real case, and if its not block their access and they now have to go before a judge to explain why they should be unblocked and what they where doing. If they are going to use AI against us, then we should use AI to make sure they dont commit any crimes.
You could easily just do both - peer review gives you immediate access, then a supervisor audits it on a slightly slower time scale. Make anyone who signed off on access an accomplice to the crime so that peers and supervisors have an incentive not to rubber-stamp everything
This isnt even AI, its just basic control acess or whatever.
The same or a similar thing already exists with doctors and nurses, particularly when a celebrity patient comes round. Not your patient/zero nexus for you to be involved in accessing their private medical charts?
> Given the constraints we operate under, the ideal number of unsolved crimes is not zero and the ideal number of crimes committed using state apparatus is also not zero.
That statement doesn't make any sense. What's the ideal number? +Infinity? "Not zero" includes that too. There has to be a way to place a ceiling on the number, asking for a non-zero "ideal" doesn't do that, on the contrary, it hides the all important question of what will keep the numbers low enough.
Using this case an example, if the offender wasn't abusing the system hundreds of times in the span of 1.5 years, he would've never been caught. So, we don't even know the real, "non-zero", number of such cases. That's a big problem.
The point the poster is trying to make by "the ideal number ... is not zero" is:
There is a trade-off where a more complete and accessible surveillance apparatus could allow crimes to be solved but invites the system to be abused by police. So when we think about how much of a surveillance system we as a society want to allow, it is probably somewhere between "nothing" and "everything". Therefore,
- It is worth allowing some crimes to go unsolved in order to prevent abuse of the surveillance state. ("The ideal amount of unsolved crime is not zero")
- It might be worth allowing enough surveillance that it will inevitably be abused to some degree in order to help solve crime. ("The ideal amount of abuse of surveillance is not zero")
Thus instead of centering discussions around "thing bad", it's probably more productive to talk about how we can get as much as possible of the upside while reigning in a use, and considering where we want the tradeoff to be.
Given the power dynamics at play I'm not convinced I agree -- Flock is closely associated with Peter Thiel who is explicitly anti-democracy, and police are notorious for covering up crimes committed by fellow police. But I suppose it is worth considering that safe ethical surveillance (if it existed) could have some value, while keeping in mind that what we are getting is very far from that.
> He characterizes the behavior as rare. He simultaneously identifies it as the most common form of abuse. The tension between those two statements is the problem Flock has left unaddressed.
I don’t see how there’s any tension between these statements. The overall occurrence of abuse can be rare while the most common form of the abuse that does occur is of officers tracking people they know.
The tension is that the abuse is far more likely than any value these cameras bring.
And what is commonly rare in a country of 342 million? Prairie Grove, Illinois has 1930 people and he did this to at least 3 people according to the report. .15% of the population. If you extrapolate that out to the national population, its roughly 520k people. Or, the entire population of Sacramento, Ca, being victimized by law enforcement with a surveillance power they should never have been allowed to have.
In a community of 20 people you have one person who commits robbery, that's 5% of the pop being a robbers. One _could_ extrapolate that but we'd fall victim to the law of small numbers.
Rare in comparison to what, the total number of searches across the platform?
But even that is the wrong focus. One could make the same case for rejecting police body cams because incidents of police abuse are rare, relatively speaking.
The real issue is that the platform isn't completely locked down by default with strict access control grants, monitoring, auditing, etc. Shoot I have way less access at my work to data and systems which do not have that level of sensitivity and have to go through multiple approval steps to be granted anything new.
But I guess those things don't help the sales pitches. To be fair policing the police isn't flock's job and doesn't make them money. Laws and regulations are the only real vehicles of change.
Sell to a LE agency in a state that doesn't allow data sharing in certain ways? Flock certainly won't disable it. They'll even still train you in how to use it.
Garrett is very much a believer in Minority Report.
>>Flock and law enforcement regularly cite documented cases where LPR helped solve violent crimes, recover stolen vehicles, and locate missing persons. Those outcomes are real.
My opposition wouldn't change regardless but are those outcomes real?
Cops can politely ask owners of private cameras for access for things like murder investigation. If the polite answer is no (most people will say yes), they can go to court for a subpoena. This has happened for a long time. This is how it should work. If the cops are too lazy or chicken to ask a judge while investigating a murder, they don't deserve the footage.
This is very doable when what you're dealing with is a Major Crime That Gets Full Institutional and Individual Attention.
What about a bike theft, a jacked car or a stolen parcel though?
There is a price to having information easily available to the law enforcement. There is a price to not having this information easily available to the law enforcement too.
Yes, many cases of people calling the police with actual tracker data showing exactly where their stolen property is, and the response being to get laughed at and told it's not a priority.
That entirely varies by locality. My parents just had their vehicle broken into and their credit and debit cards stolen (in addition to some cash) and the local police department visited the grocery store where the thief used the cards to buy gift cards multiple times to collect security footage to try and track them down (the grocery store store’s security lead was out the first time on vacation). If your local police department won’t do this and you want them to, ask your community to raise taxes to hire more and/or better cops.
Doesn't matter, they should have to follow the same process.
Cops, at least where I live, don't give af about any of those crimes though. Bike gets stolen? You'll be lucky if they even show up at all, let alone do anything about it, surveillance data available or not. They largely don't even get prosecuted when caught.
This depends on what evidence there is. If it's just "omg, bike was here yesterday, but is not here today, find it!" then what are they really going to do? They are not calling a CSI team and collect fibers from the scene, this is not a TV show.
In my experience, the police will follow the leads if they have them. I had several bikes stolen by homeless so they hid them in some commercial property few blocks away. One bike had a tracker, which they found and disabled but they did it near where they ultimately hid the bikes. Using the last location from the tracker cops were able to find the bikes and return them. If there were cameras they might be able to also find the perps and put them to jail.
The 4th amendment doesn’t really have much of anything to say about public surveillance; the courts have largely agreed it does not constitute a search unless it reveals information that is not intended to be public (such as the thermal imaging of buildings) or reveals intimate personal information (such as documentation of habits through long term data aggregation).
The majority of crime is committed by a relatively small number of individuals. If citizens feel crime is out of control they need to vote in politicians and judges who sentence repeat offenders to long sentences or involuntary commitment.
Long sentences are far less effective than reliable enforcement. Something that seems to be very true in practice. If you steal or vandalise something in China, there is an extremely high chance you will get caught, you won't get a massive penalty, but it will be enough to cover the damages + some.
If you for example knew that stealing had a penalty of 100% of the item value + 10% fine, with a 100% chance of getting caught, you'd never steal anything again even though the penalty is so much smaller than what it is currently in most countries. And then if you make a dumb decision as a teenager or in a lapse of judgement, it won't ruin your life.
Long sentences and reliable enforcement are complimentary.
If you can reliably prosecute the repeat offenders you catch, and put them behind bars for a long time? You stop them from committing more crimes. The crime rate falls, and the amount of enforcement manpower you have available per crime rises. Making it easier to catch and prosecute the remaining offenders.
Most of the low level crime isn't done by "a dumb decision as a teenager or in a lapse of judgement". It's done by someone who has done it 5 times before and will do it again. Unless jailed, that is. The jail doesn't fix whatever's wrong with them, but it is hard to keep doing crimes while behind bars.
For violent crime sure. But for theft if you can just consistently recover the loss + a penalty it will do so much more to discourage it than simply raising the penalty.
That's for theft specifically. Most thefts are committed by repeat offenders.
You are making a very common mistake of assuming that criminals are prone to making good decisions.
If they were, they probably wouldn't offend the first time. And almost certainly wouldn't reoffend - once the costs of getting caught are clear to them.
"Consistently" is not very realistic without a way of making repeat offenders stop reoffending. You need the level of law enforcement to completely overpower the crime rate - and that means either getting better funded, better staffed, better equipped, more professional enforcement, or lowering crime rates. "We need to overfund the police" is expensive and unpopular, "we need to give the police more surveillance powers" is extremely unpopular, and there are very few ways of getting lower crime rates. Jail bars, however, are a proven one.
Of course you could still rack up a large penalty / jail time if you cause an incredible amount of damage quickly, but in general you'd catch people before they get that far. Catching a bike thief after the first 1-2 bikes rather than when they have stolen 100.
Is that true? USA seems to have long sentences and a high incarceration rate, yet still has high crime when compared to other countries with less incarceration.
They can get a subpoena for that, too. The bike and the parcel are already long gone by the time police do anything. (Nor will they do anything other than file a report if you are lucky.)
This was exactly the case on a King County jury I was on. Lots of camera footage, most from security cams of individual businesses, some from red light cameras.
The event predated Flock rollout though, so no idea if the distribution of camera sources has shifted.
Regardless though, in the end the phone location data meant a lot more than any of the camera data, which just confirmed the path from phone sources.
Right and what if lots of crime happens in a place where there are not many businesses? Hardly an implausible scenario given that crime is bad for business.
The city can set up its own camera for its own use. Is that really that wild of a proposal?
That whole premise of "what if lots of crime happens" -- already false.
Did you know that most places in America are at historically low crime rates in most of our lifetimes? It is garbage to say this needs deep societal focus right now. I don't give a shit about the hypothetical hurt feelings of small town cops whining that they don't have always-on spy equipment.
In fact, there's a pretty strong argument that the reason crime has decreased so much in the US is because we've put strict controls and protections limiting lead in the environment.
We do still need deep societal focus, but that's mostly around things like further getting lead out of homes and pipes.
While I would oppose a city setting up CCTV to be used the way Flock is used - that would be orders of magnitude less bad than Flock.
As it is, you can assume that at the very least, every time your vehicle has passed one of the >100k Flock cameras, there's a database entry and a photo that will never, ever be deleted. Your full travel history from this point forward is available for a nominal fee, and without any regard for your privacy.
People seem to struggle to wrap their head around the fact that privacy laws don't prevent people from recording them in public. You can be recorded at any time in public, by the government or another private person.
> You can be recorded at any time in public, by the government or another private person.
Similar to "free speech", it is not as simple as that. Harassment and stalking among other things. I dare you to try hanging around a school with a DSLR taking pictures of kids in the playground and defend yourself with "But I'm in public!"
Without going into the list of misdemeanors, generally the point is intent.
If you take a picture, or ten, ostensibly of Times Square, no one cares. You can't piece together a person's day.
The application of computing@scale (processing, storage, pattern recognition) changes the outcomes significantly. The hard to piece together day of the everyperson suddenly becomes a trivial query away.
Whether that should be legal or not is quite rightly up for debate.
The city's scope is smaller than Flock's - it's a city, not a multi-national corporation.
Yes, I'm aware of what "expectation of privacy" means. I've been a photographer for ~25 years.
> People seem to struggle to wrap their head around the fact that privacy laws don't prevent people from recording them in public. You can be recorded at any time in public, by the government or another private person.
This isn't about recording in public - it's about building a comprehensive dataset containing the movement and association history of the entire US population. Not only is that without a warrant, it's being collected prior to any accusation being made.
"Anyone can record you at any time in public" is vastly different from "a single entity is recording you over time and locations across the country/state/city"
The hopefully we'll be able to at least narrow down the list of suspects to the people who entered the bathroom around the time they the murder took place.
Surveillance often doesn't directly capture crime on camera, but is rather used to identify who traveled to and from the crime scene around the time of the incident
No? If someone broke into your car as stole your luggage, the surveillance camera might not directly capture the thief breaking into your car. But if the camera recorded someone entering the parking garage and then exiting the garage carrying your luggage a few minutes later, that's strong evidence is it not?
You're missing the part where, for that to work, we have a government with access to a massive surveillance system capable of identifying and tracking the population at scale.
And you're missing that, instead of specifically identifying a specific individual doing a specific thing, this network would be used to place under suspicion, investigation and possible arrest, people who's only documented action was "being somewhere."
Oh, and while your example is "committed a crime", that same network could easily be used to identity and track people who were, say, coming and going from protests. Or libraries. Or voting.
> investigation and possible arrest, people who's only documented action was "being somewhere."
In the example above, the police wouldn't arrest every single person who entered and exited the parking lot. They'd arrest the person who walked out of the lot with your stolen luggage.
> Oh, and while your example is "committed a crime", that same network could easily be used to identity and track people who were, say, coming and going from protests
There's no right to have your public demonstrations off limits for recording. The whole point of a protest is to be seen. If someone is concerned that they will be associated with some group or cause because of their decision to protest, then they seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of what a protest is.
> Or voting
You realize the government already has that information? Voters literally filled out ballots and delivered it to the government. They don't need a camera to know who voted, they have the ballots.
Then we would start putting cameras in bathrooms? Or start closing public bathrooms? Nobody wants to go into a bathroom and get murdered. We as a society are not going to just accept a high bathroom murder rate. Culture will adapt to reality, one way or another.
You know what... go ahead and build your panopticon somewhere. The rest of us are going to have an actual society somewhere else, the way it has worked for thousands of years.
If you're so scared of your own shadow you'd tie a noose around your own neck and hand the other end to those in power in exchange for an illusion of safety, I won't stand in your way.
Build that cage around yourself and hope the jailer will be benevolent. Just don't drag others down with you. Some of us have decided to learn from history.
They pay to have them installed and maintained, they're not different in that sense from subscribing to Office 365 licensing, it's a subscription product.
They key difference is not whether they own their cameras but the automatic data sharing with other agencies and their cameras. Arguably law enforcement does this casually on request anyways but the drastically reduced friction of an automatic system enables easy abuse.
An officer may hesitate to ask a neighboring agency for data on their girlfriend, and would likely be very hesitant to file actual paperwork to request it. But a search in Flock's interface is probably all of the same legal peril in a venue which doesn't feel as intimidating or risky to do and doesn't see the same level of human review or scrutiny.
The wording he used was that it helped make arrests in 53% of cases. Nothing about whether those cases were solved, or whether the arrests were correct, or whether he's counting times where the cameras see police making an arrest and count it as 'helping'.
>technology and professional analysts with helping detectives make arrests in 53%
"technology and analysts" "help" "make arrests" not surveillance, not convictions and only the implication that they wouldn't have made the arrest otherwise.
Like look at the example: somebody calls in an OD and a guy sees that the dude ODing matches (the clothing of) a suspect in some other crime and so they arrest him.
Once again an arrest is not a conviction but also what part of that needed/used pervasive surveillance?
ALSO a conviction is not the same thing as truth.
ALSO ALSO by basic subtraction the panopticon wasn't even helpful 47% of the time.
Yes. Prior to flock, my city trialed LPRs attached to the local power company’s poles. In the first month, they recovered more stolen cars than any prior years total recoveries. I’ve got mixed feelings about Flock, LPRs, and what it allows people and governments to do.
The problem imo is the usage and laws rather than the technology. Security cameras used for public good is good. But it needs to be heavily limited to preventing crime, with strict access logs and penalties for misuse.
Nobody is questioning the value of unconstrained mass surveillance on solving crimes.
Unfortunately it also enables a good deal of more heinous crimes against the people its supposed to protect, by the people who are supposed to be protecting them.
Part of that is cops also doing their jobs in the first place versus "not giving a shit". Like when shown an eBay page of the person who sold my stolen phone. Nearly a hundred iPhones, all "activation locked", "no charger", same for Mac laptops, "no chargers, no accessories, may be locked".
Cops: "Well he probably didn't steal them himself."
Me: "Even so, knowingly selling stolen property is a crime too, no?"
HN has always been associated with tech entrepreneurship rather than 'hacker' in the way that it's commonly used.
I'm not sure there was ever a time when 99.9% of the userbase, or even a much smaller percentage, actually valued privacy and freedom rather than seeing them as obstacles to value extraction.
> We valued privacy and freedom over surveillance and “results.”
The relative value of one over the other depends on the absolute value of either. In a Mad Max scenario, very few would value the principles of privacy and freedom over the immediate need to reestablish basic order.
Take auto theft as an example. Depending on how old you are, the recent spike in auto theft is either "nothing compared to the 80s" or "entirely unacceptable in civilized society"; in select cities, the rate almost tripled in five years[0] (an incredible jump), though remaining well below the historical peak.
However, case clearance rates are at an all time low, which I'm sure furthers frustration for the victims. That is, you're statistically less likely to be a victim of auto theft today than during the historical peak, but if you are, you're statistically more likely to be SOL.
You're probably approaching this from a civil libertarian point of view, but the Constitution is not a suicide pact[1]. Members of society who collectively uphold the law also have a vested interested in the maintenance of the conditions that would further perpetuate upholding the law, i.e. law and order.
I have no doubt that provided a vast camera network covering every ingress and egress into a city, and every major intersection, plus a database of when and where a license plate was last seen, cops can find their suspect
It used to be that news articles would claim that the police used “CCTV from local businesses” to catch a crook. Even back then I knew this was cover for Ring, Flock and who knows what else. they just didn’t want the bad press.
At this point you don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to understand that parallel construction happens all the time. They have more tools that we know about, and they want to keep it that way.
Everyone should throw some money to 404 media. They are independent and doing the best work right now to keep these things in the public eye.
That's the thing though, I do doubt that. Surveillance that you don't need a warrant to put in front of a jury is a perfect thing to use for the ostensibly-legal construction in parallel construction.
guess what prolific career criminals do with crime cars?
they look for a car that is very similar if not exact make and model of thier stolen vehicle, then they "clone" the victims license plate with a sheet of embossment copper and a stylus, apply paint at thier shop and affix the imposter to the crime vehicle. that buggers the whole LPR thing.
they can replicate dozens of plates in a day and offer the service for contras.
That seems like a lot of effort when you can just take the license plate off and if you're really worried print off a convincing temporary license and tape in the back window.
its effort well worth it, and really is not a lot of effort. if you stole the plate, the theft is evident, when there are duplicates then it becomes difficult to know which one to suspect, and that also presupposes knowledge of the duplication.
you would have to realize, it is not feasible for a car to be in location 1 thenbe in location 2 many miles away in a few minutes.
the odd thing about criminals is thier effort to perpetuate crime is often far greater than getting a job, but is somehow the preferable option.
> you would have to realize, it is not feasible for a car to be in location 1 thenbe in location 2 many miles away in a few minutes.
You say that but just last week there was a post here about how LPR claimed that the same car was in two locations in a timeframe that would have required the car to have been traveling non-stop at 160mph for 20 minutes through suburban streets, and even then authorities and proponents were defending it as plausible, or that the LPR was right, but there might just have been timing issues, or, or, or.
i think i saw that post, i think we're both describing what happens when someone copies plates and doppelgangs people to throw off the surveillance.
i think in this case the LPR was right, the same plate number was in two different places, the assumption of how many plates were involved needs review.
160mph for 20min through suburban streets, that kind of attracts attention, there would be a lot of complaints and witnesses if that happened
It's also very likely not physically possible for that car, and unless they're referring to straight-line stroads, many suburban routes can't sustain an average of 160mph with any current car.
Not really because it flags an anomaly where the same plate is found in two places that are impossibly far to reach in the time span. Then police can just pull over that plate when they see it with a 50/50 chance it's the stolen car.
The more cameras in the network the faster and more likely a duplicated plate will be spotted.
Sure. But if we have enough surveillance cameras, we can just trace the full path of the car from the moment of theft to now. I'm reminded of Gorgon Stare [1]. Stolen cars suck. But how about murders? I'm sure all of the people who've had loved ones murdered in, say, South Chicago, might have a more positive opinion of such a system. Especially since it wouldn't have to rely on witnesses who are cowed by the threat of reprisal and anti-snitch culture.
Flock's position, statistically, is that if during the course of an investigation into a crime, a detective queries Flock, and the crime is later solved, that Flock "helped solve a crime", regardless of the merit or value of the query. "Saw a vehicle, look it up, "nope, unrelated", but still "helped solve".
Check your town's website for correspondence with your state's chapter of the ACLU in regards to Flock cameras. If your police chief (not an elected official) is installing them then contact your local ACLU chapter about it. These are 4th amendment violations.
To the contrary, little of what Flock does would be restricted by the 4th amendment. The cameras are in public, and neither the government nor individual citizens need authorization to film people in public.
All flock cameras are privately owned, by flock. They install them at a charge per the jurisdiction that orders them and pays the subscription costs… those subscription fees allow Mr Local Law Abuser to lookup any license plate it has read, when, where, with a picture of the vehicle.
The point is, some of flock's customers are private businesses. E.g. the Home Depot by me uses them. No amount of pressure by voters can take those cameras down.
So when I put a bag over the camera, it's up to flock to remove it? I haven't stuck around to find out who shows up. Sometimes it takes a week or so, other times it's next day.
The case you linked isn't about the government filming people in public, though. Carpenter vs. US was a case about the government demanding private information about users' locations from cell service providers. By comparison, the 9th circuit concluded that the plain view doctrine means electronic license plate readers are legal :https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2020/05/04/1...
An officer doesn't need a warrant to sit at a cross section and write down license plate numbers. A device doing the same thing is also legal.
Of course that's a fair interpretation, I am saying there's some tension between mass surveillance and the fourth just because its "done in public" doesn't mean it automatically escapes scrutiny now or going forward.
No, the fact that it's recording people in public does make it escape scrutiny moving forward. In public you can be filmed by anyone - be they government or private citizens.
I find a lot of people fail to realize this, both in regards to surveillance and otherwise. Recently in my city there was a big uproar about a nudist beach that was at risk of having nudity prohibited. So a bunch of nudists went out and paraded around the beach while disrobed, some of them bringing their children with them. People sailed by and photographed many of the nudists, and put their images online. Many alleged that must be a violation of some privacy law, but no, the law in Washington (and most, perhaps all, of the US) is quite clear: if you're in public, you can be filmed and photographed. If you don't want to be filmed nude, don't go walking around naked in public.
Regardless, back to the topic at hand, the fact that Flock cameras a in public spaces does in fact mean that there's no requirement to get a warrant to use them.
> No, the fact that it's recording people in public does make it escape scrutiny moving forward. In public you can be filmed by anyone - be they government or private citizens.
This is false. While there is no strongly established precedent yet, there are certainly serious and plausible legal arguments being made that unlimited collection and collation/cross-referencing/etc. of "public" information can under certain circumstances constitute a search. It will most certainly not "escape scrutiny moving forward".
The legality of automated license plate readers has gone all the way up to the United States Court of Appeals. That's the second highest court in the country, superseded only by the Supreme Court.
This is as strong as precedent gets, short of a SCOTUS decision.
That doesn't sound like escaping scrutiny to me! Sounds like it's getting pretty thoroughly scrutinized, in fact.
> This is as stromg (sic) as precedent gets, short of a SCOTUS decision.
Another egregious misrepresentation. The courts are obviously making their rulings as narrow as possible because they know the "mosaic theory" style arguments have some merit. Look at US vs. Yang, for example, in which the court dodged the issue completely with some argument about rental car contract periods. And Schmidt v. Norfolk, which IIUC directly challenges Flock ALPRs on 4A grounds, is pending.
Lots and lots of scrutiny. Your claim that the conclusion is foregone here is obviously absurd. Even when/if it gets to SCOTUS I expect they'll write as narrow an opinion as they can get away with, in whatever direction it falls.
So what's the logical conclusion, that there will be a company with a drone following every individual in a public space at all times and that the government will pay for the data?
The logical conclusion is that the US brings itself in line with the rest of the developed world, and realizes video cameras are useful for solving crime.
Flying drones are not required, stationary cameras are more than enough outside of specific scenarios like active pursuit.
Considering how desperately that user is responding to every comment on this post, it seems they have a vested interest in playing blind for Flock, which makes me think they are paid by Flock.
But no, I just like to dispel the myths people have about their imaginary right to not be filmed in public. Whether it's by the government or by other private people.
Manual D, the flock system is still very new. Why are you confident a private companies monetization of public whereabouts will stay legal? There hasent really been any precedent set on this. And the system is wildly unpopular In the public eye?
In case you didn't read it, the 9th circuit upheld the use of Flock cameras. The precedence is as high as it gets, short of a supreme Court decision: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48636421
You're being exposed to a very specific group of people when you read Hacker News or Reddit. Plenty of people are happy to have Flock cameras in their neighborhood on account of the improved ability to investigate crime.
Clearly a different situation considering the guy was in a rental vehical with GPS.
Of course their is no reasonable expectation of privacy here. It's not his car lol. The LEARN db query was auxillary to the precedent here.
I can't see the jump your making at all or how this precedent holds any would hold water in the case of a innocent party. Its probably just a matter of time until the perfect case is presented and new case law established. Precedents change you know?
Is there a reasonable expectation of privacy operating a car on public roads?
People generally don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy in public. That's why you can record and photograph people in public whether or not they agree to be recorded. It's the same logic that makes red light cameras and parking license plate scanners legal.
it's not about filming in public. it's about systematic data collection by law enforcement, using private infrastructure present by its nature in public. that's why the Carpenter decision is relevant.
The Carpenter decision was about the US government compelling mobile data providers to hand over private use information. It's really not relevant to flock. That's why the 9th Circuit decided that automated license plate readers don't need a warrant. A cop and stand at an intersection and write down license plate numbers without a warrant. A device can do the same.
If the city hires enough police officers, yes. It'd almost certainly require an unfathomably large budget, but it's not impossible.
The point is, the plain view doctrine means the police don't need a warrant to record observation that are in plain view. The licence plates of cars on the street are in plain view.
I really don't understand how people got this idea in their head that their license plates are private information . How do red light cameras identify cars? How does parking enforcement work? By recording people's license plates. The whole reason why we mandate that cars display license plates to is to facilitate identifying vehicles.
>If the city hires enough police officers, yes. It'd almost certainly require an unfathomably large budget, but it's not impossible.
If the precedent was set based on this idea. It will fall apart with further scrutiny.
>I really don't understand how people got this idea in their head that their license plates are private information . How do red light cameras identify cars? How does parking enforcement work? By recording people's license plates. The whole reason why we mandate that cars display license plates to is to facilitate identifying vehicles.
I don't think that is where the crux of the issue lay.
Why would it fall apart? The plain view doctrine holds that the police don't need a warrant to observe things in plain view. Like your car driving on the public roads.
Privacy laws are generally about protecting what you do in private, not in public. In the US, anyone can film you in public, government or otherwise.
The year is 2026 and the 4th amendment only means what the currently sitting justices say that it means, and the executive branch was literally given a pass to violate any law on the books that they want.
The 9th circuit upheld that the police do not need warrants to operate and access data from license plate readers. The 9th Circuit isn't exactly a conservative stronghold.
That’s really beside the point. It doesn’t matter what the 9th circuit or any other court says.
Our country is no longer a country of laws. Laws are only as good as they are enforced. The SCOTUS, the DOJ, the FBI, and congress have openly abdicated any constitutional responsibility to provide checks and balances to reign in the abuses we see posted to HN every day.
I believe they would all argue that they haven't. They would argue that the current administration is operating within the law towards ends supported, repeatedly, by their constituents.
That's not applicable to Flock, though. That case pertained to the government requesting that mobile service providers give historical location data on users.
I feel like you haven't properly thought this through. Cell towers are monitoring a public broadcast from a beacon you voluntarily carry on your person. For some reason querying that dataset requires a warrant but querying a broadly analogous dataset from the operator of a network of cameras doesn't?
More generally you're confidently making wild extrapolations from the current very limited case law without regard for either its limitations or the general temperature that can be inferred from the full opinions.
> Cell towers are monitoring a public broadcast from a beacon you voluntarily carry on your person.
It's an encrypted broadcast, not a public broadcast. This is why the police needed to ask the mobile service providers for this data. It is not public.
> For some reason querying that dataset requires a warrant but querying a broadly analogous dataset from the operator of a network of cameras doesn't?
The data is not broadly analogous. One is encrypted radio traffic. The other is unencrypted, and you can record it yourself with a pen, paper, and the Mk I eyeball. This is why the "plain view" doctrine applies.
Again, the courts have already ruled on the use of ALPRs. The defense tried to use US vs Carpenter in US vs Yang, and the courts did not accept that argument that ALPRs are analogous to cell phone location data.
But the government is allowed to track people's license plates. There's nothing against the law for a police officer to stand at an intersection writing down all passing car's license plates with a pen and paper. Flock is the same thing, just much more cost efficient.
It is exactly that. These cameras are only recording cars on public roads (and sometimes e.g in the parking lot of Home Depot, but those areas are still in plain view).
Yes. Let's restrict police and take away every possible tool they can use to solve and fight crime. Not all criminals are bad criminals. They don't use Flock to spy on their ex-girlfriends but every cop in America has done it.
At least according to the internet which knows everything.
Don't misrepresent what others say. The 4th amendment should not be violated. I can only interpret your response as "the 4th amendment should be violated".
Then you would be wrong. I'm pointing out the internet's liberal obsession with anti-police and, seemingly, pro-criminal activity. The internet likes to find fault with the police while dismissing or ignoring criminal activity. It's a horror I cannot understand. It's pure insanity.
Okay, then pontificate that as a top level comment. Responding to someone saying the 4th amendment should not be circumvented with a refute is a statement about the 4th amendment, not some imagined counter party.
This whole thread represents the imaginary of the internet and it makes me sick. I have to get off the internet. I've spent too much time with it lately.
> take away every possible tool they can use to solve and fight crime
Flock is a new tool, with a string of related abuses already and an unconvincing record of successes. Removing it is in no way tantamount to taking away every possible tool.
Misogyny in government is a bellwether for authoritarianism. If a man doesn't respect women, you can bet they won't respect men or minorities either, although they may be less inclined to admit such in public.
Would love to see the same attitude extended to everyone, e.g. “respect all people”, but I guess if we don’t put the pussy on a pedestal we’re all authoritarians. If you keep pushing that narrative, you will be disappointed in what happens.
I'm not sure you understood the parent comment? At least, not in the way that they mean. What they're saying is, those who are likely to not respect women are also likely to not respect other groups. But, they are less likely to voice their lack of respect for other groups because doing so would incur more pushback.
The sexist undertones of your response aside, you seem to have very poor reading comprehension.
Warrants are needed, and much more transparency. These platforms should be monitored and policed aggressively to keep everybody honest. There's a precedent for this with for example body cam footage means it's now much easier to audit police conduct.
Surveillance technology potentially enables a lot of abuse if used without checks and balances. But the same technology also enables monitoring for abuse. Use of surveillance technology should be actively monitored and supervised. There should be auditable logs, footage, etc. with very long retention periods and active spot checks. In case of conflicts/abuse, there should be ample evidence.
The fact police can go in and just look at camera footage without warrant proves your point precisely, officers have used it to stalk family members, etc.
Is this much different than a doctor/sw/nurse/admin looking up patient records? I know that doctors are not the government, so no 4th amendment rights, but folks in the medical community have the basically the same level of access to much more sensitive information.
also, since there has been a lot of talk of warrantless searches, 4th a, etc.... is there an expectation to privacy when out in public when one would be captured on a flock camera? like red light cameras already exist and some non-sworn pd admin is looking through your file to send you a ticket...
This type of thing is definitely real. A friend of mine went on a date with an NYPD cop back in the 90s. She refused a second date, and the stalking began. It wasn't 'tech stalking', like today, but the cop started asking interrogating questions to her landlord and co-workers; she started getting weird/false parking tickets, etc. The only way she made it stop was that her cousin was a veteran with NYPD, and well, he had a little chat with the young, stalking cop. But who knows where it all would've ended up if her cousin wasn't also a cop???
Young stalking cop should have been charged and kicked off the force. Already proved they're incapable of handling even basic adult responsibilities, so police powers should be kept well it off such a person's reach.
It should go without saying that all humans are flawed, regardless of their training, their uniform, their position in society.
The local pedohunters group dumpen.se in Sweden actually caught a cop trying to meet a fictional 14 year old, and the cop used his access to public CCTV to check the meeting point before going there.
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." -- Cardinal Richelieu
Privacy protects personal dignity, not just illicit behavior. We close bathroom doors, keep journals, and have intimate conversations not because we are breaking the law, but because we value personal modesty and boundaries.
We are quickly approaching a time when we are all guilty until proven innocent by voyeuristic power-hungry psychopathic megalomaniacs who cry the old cry of "If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear"
It was not that long ago that i was watching Top Gear UK talk about how much they admired the US for its libertarian ideals, and how Americans don’t tolerate things like speed cameras on a cultural level.
Within a decade, we ushered in CCTV and automated plate readers to a degree that would make the CCP blush.
Not sure how much warrants are going to help when a judge will see a stack of requests from a police chief and just rubber stamp them all without looking. This is already a problem in places where warrants are required.
Can I set up my own camera on the side of the road (in a public place) to scan people's faces and license plates, link them up to one of the many data brokers (or leaks) and use a big display to show the drivers' pictures and something like "Hey Rick Larsen, it's the 24th time we've seen you this week. We'll let our clients know there's no one home at 2930 Wetmore Avenue, Everett most weekdays between 8 and 4!", and then place them somewhere like oh, I don't know, in close proximity to a capitol building?
We can pay the regular fees that advertisers pay to have billboards up.
And if we're not allowed to do that, why is Flock?
first - yes, as others have noted, very easy to set this up and I encourage you to try! you could have a mini flock set up for your neighborhood or apartment in no time (not to mention ring cameras - look up the super bowl ad that went south quick).
second - five eyes (i think?) treaties allow tons of mass surveillance, the only rule is that you can't spy on your own country, but trading the data is above board
No one has the right to privacy in a public setting. That's why street photographers can roam around and take photos of anyone and publish them. Whether you can publish personally identifiable information based on that, I don't know.
Since forever, that's literally their business model. My (and your) private information was leaked (unconsensually), including timestamped location, travel companions, photographs from inside your vehicle, what you're wearing, etc. all leaked / stolen and then publicized to all kinds of people (criminals with badges, Palantir, the secretaries in the city council, etc.).
Big fan of court ordered warrants as a way to limit law enforcement here.
That said, warrants protect law enforcement like searching someone's house. It seems that some less intrusive powers like running someone's plate has been given to the police with lower controls.
And it makes sense right? If every judge needed to approve every potential plate check, it might be too much for daily operations.
So option A, push towards everything being protected under warrants.
Sure, option B, how about protection mechanisms that sit somewhere in the middle? For example, what if some powers were audited (sounds like they are logged already) on a probabilistic basis. What if judges could inspect some fraction of searches after the fact, and ask for justification afterwards. Of course this would have no effect on the actual search, but it would have long term effects on future searches.
Even if 1% of lesser searches are audited, I'm sure most policemen would be much more weary about using them for personal matters like stalking women.
I am sure an automated report to the chief/captain would solve most of this and making sure that every query/report had an associated case/complaint number too. real crimes attached to real searches.
There are other options. One is to allow them to be audited not just by judges but by various "watchdog" groups which themselves go through some kind of vetting process. If you think police would be wary if they knew judges were watching 1% of their videos, imagine how they'd feel if they knew the ACLU had the option of watching every single one.
The other side of it, though, is enforcement, and to me this seems like what's mostly lacking. It remains to be seen what will happen with this case but the article mentions a variety of actions over a period of time
1. he tracked six separate people
2. he ran license plates for these people 140 times
2. he searched the database while off duty
3. he called the ex-boyfriend
4. he said "This is the only time I'm going to be nice about this" which pretty clearly is threatening statement
For this he was charged with. . . two Illinois class-3 felonies, which from what I see online means each charge can get you 2-5 years in prison. So he's looking at 10 years max, if he gets convicted with the charges as they stand.
What each individual misuse of the tracking was charged as a separate offense? What if the standard of proof for officer misconduct was drastically lowered, so that, for instance, they could be fired or incur significant financial penalties with a much quicker process? And if the full criminal process does go through, as far as I'm concerned, a police officer who misuses their position in this manner should probably be wearing an ankle monitor for the rest of their life and/or have to register in a manner similar to sex offenders. We are way too lenient with the punishments for misuse of authority.
Random people at your workplace likely know others with access and use it to spy on their own coworkers. I know of cases where they report the smallest details to Human Resources.
It's not even that hard to make AI output images that don't look like AI slop either, just have to use some "in the style of" or "as if it was taken with a film camera" types of modifiers. This is what confuses me about AI slop, not only did you use the lowest effort method, you didn't even put a minimal amount of effort into making it work well.
verkada (a building access systems company), had multiple incidents of stalking of employees by other employees, using their own installation in their own hq
Remember that scene from "Men in Black" where K watches surveillance video feed of his ex? In the movie it was meant to be wistful and cute, I guess. Now that such systems are getting closer to reality, you realize the potential for abuse in enormous.
More like his widow than his ex - he was unable to ever contact her, which is what made it cute rather than creepy.
Someone stalking you is not cute even if they don't try to talk to you
All about perspective! Plenty of romance stories that start out with stalking. (Though I guess from a social normative conversation pov, you would want to keep up the kayfabe).
Please explain that to the ad-tech industry…
Cancel that, they do try to talk to me every damn chance they get!
I mean at least in that situation, K was forbidden from ever making contact with his ex, with far greater consequences.
You mean the ex that he actually did make contact with?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Czp6cXAsHj8
That was after having his memory erased though. Which, if Flock streams automatically did the same thing, would probably help with the ethical issues for those they surveil.
This shouldn't be hard to understand. Don't talk to the police, without your attorney present, under any circumstances whatsoever.
Dating the police is just such an astoundingly egregious violation of this principle that I can only wonder what, if anything, those people are thinking.
Anyway, the key takeaway seems to don't date anyone who dates the police. Firstly, because it directly puts your own safety at risk, as this article exemplifies. Secondly, because it demonstrates terrible judgment; it seems reasonable to assume they are likely to make other terrible decisions in the future.
> Dating the police is just such an astoundingly egregious violation of this principle
There are still quite a few people who think the police are the friendly government-provided customer service agents of life, although I've watched this viewpoint decline markedly over the last twenty years at least.
Locally, a woman went on a hiking date with a Phoenix cop and wound up dead [0]. Notably, the woman was from New England, while the cop was local and absolutely should have known better how dangerous conditions would be. The police, of course, investigated themselves and found they did nothing wrong.
[0] https://www.fox10phoenix.com/news/hiker-recalls-seeing-woman...
A female high on meth gets disoriented and dies from heat exposure in the mountains. As per article she willingly separated from the guy whom she sent to the top of the peak "to continue to get pic for social media". He probably should have know better and just go down with her and call it a day, or not getting high on meth in dangerous environment in the first place but thats about it.
Unless you have a better article on that, that really ain't evidence of anything.
A trained police officer leaves his obviously high (police can always tell even on first contact and from far away, right?) and exhausted hiking partner to return alone, with no water, in blazing heat, on an unfamiliar trail, to eventually die alone.
Peak police.
Meth and amphetamine are very different drugs, but a bootlicker wouldn't know the difference. She could also have been spiked and left to die by the cop, can't really know without a proper investigation, which the police never subject themselves to.
They are different drugs in the sense that methamphetamine will cause more serotonin release and will act longer than amphetamine, but they will both cause increase in blood pressure, increase heart rate and increase internal temperature. The rest of your comment is right though.
Meth and amphetamine also have very different connotations.
Connotations are by far the biggest difference between these two substances.
Her source of trust was instagram. The cop’s instagram led her to travel to Arizona and be with him. She was convinced by his instagram that she agreed to do all of this. That’s really dumb and it’s what you get playing stupid games with strangers on the internet.
What is this nonsense. Instagram isn't an entity like that, she talked to a cop over a messaging service.
Says the person using social media.
IDK, In my town that is what they are, they come when called, they are respectful, they live in the town they service.
I only see problems with police [generally speaking] in two scenarios.
1) Very large cities like NYC where police don't [cannot afford] to live in the area they work in.
2) Very small citie where the mayor, judge and sherrif are all related.
That sounds great for you, but the point is: what if they were not inclined to do those things?
What if they didn’t come when called? What if they weren’t respectful? What if they weren’t a part of your community?
What recourse do you have against cops?
If I pivot to law enforcement does my wife have to stop talking to me?
She's a permanent resident and has already been given the do not talk to the police speech and role play practice from me.
Best hope you don't catch the eye of an officer even. Things can go poorly without a relationship, or even without a direct rejection.
"Don't talk to the police, without your attorney present, under any circumstances whatsoever."
Oh but I did. Multiple times, without a lawyer ever, how shocking:
"Hey, my bicycle was stolen, I need to file it so I get insurance payout"
"Hey, this demonstration and the roadblock of yours for guarding it, will it be around for much longer?"
"Hey, nice weather, isn't it?"
(Misdirecting small talk, while they were searching for drugs on the road to a festival, but then didn't really check me)
"Yes I know I have to have a light with a bicycle, but the battery went out and it was a emergency now to go anyway"
(Did not had to pay a fine)
And countless other examples like this.
Also more serious ones.
"Yes, it was those neonazis who beat up my friend"
So .. I never cared much for this online advice, but then again I also don't live in the US. Maybe there they shoot and arrest anyone approaching them on general principle?
Well in my world, that was actually shaped a lot by anarchistic anti establishment people, I found that one can talk to cops as inhuman cops, then they will act like one, or you talk to them as humans and might be surprised that they reply as humans.
That doesn't mean, that there ain't lots of assholes on a power trip in uniforms, but the "never talk to them advice" assumes they all are. And this is just wrong and act as a self fullfilling prophecy.
In all your cases, you wanted something from LE. The advice to stay shut is mainly for the other way around.
Internet experts, also here on HN, tried to convince me otherwise.
Also no, in the drug search example I just wanted to be left alone (and not have them find the small bag of weed). So I answered, but talked about harmless things.
> I also don't live in the US
“Don’t talk to the cops” is not global advice. In some countries it harms your defense in court. In others it gets you beaten.
Most times you hear it it’s an American talking to Americans.
"some countries it harms your defense in court. "
In all countries it harms your defence if you confess something wrong. But itnis not a general rule that it always hurts.
I'm referring to things like the UK's right to remain silent, where the Miranda-style warning is:
> You do not have to say anything. But it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.
Basically, your alibi is considered much less credible if your first mention of it is at trial.
> “Don’t talk to the cops” is not global advice.
I’ve seen the advice several times on HN (a global site) and it never claimed to be USA-only.
You'll find HN is very frequently US-centric, yes.
The key statement here is "I don't live in the US"
I grew up outside of the US and immigrated here in 1995. US police are on a completely different level.
> but then again I also don't live in the US
You could have said that up front and we would immediately know to skip the rest, as the advice is founded on the behavior of police in the US.
This is an extremely online belief. Oak Park, IL, the inner-ring suburb of Chicago where I live, is almost certainly one of the 10 most progressive and left-leaning municipalities in the country. Oak Parkers (not me) have the opposite concern: we're below our threshold number of sworn officers, and desperate to add more. The median Oak Parker has very positive views of the police (and also all the standard progressive concerns about abuses.)
Lots of political beliefs are like this! There are plenty of things people believe very strongly, and get near universal reinforcement on in their communities, that don't survive contact with actual living grass. The median American has an extraordinarily high opinion of Amazon, for instance, something you'd never know unless you sought out polling (or, you know, took a walk down a residential block and looked at the stoops.)
Don't talk to the police - advice given to university students by a lawyer and then by a cop:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE
If this isn't trustworthy, I don't know what is.
Isn't his follow up "be extremely careful when talking to the police"? He gave a follow up lecture some years later.
I didn't see that. Link?
If all cops are evil, why would you take advice from a cop?
Because reality doesn't work like board game rules.
To clarify, you're stating that "Don't talk to the police" is an "extremely online belief"? Or were you referencing the dating portion of the comment?
Correct: "never talk to the police" is a very online belief. I watch people talk to police all the time. People go out of their way to do it.
I don't even know what to do with the "never date police officers" thing. Most police officers are married. It's a shift-work job, so they have high divorce rates, but they just remarry.
This site attracts ivory tower residents. Your comment is a great example of this.
Try growing up poor and see how your perspective changes on the police.
> I don't even know what to do with the "never date police officers" thing. Most police officers are married. It's a shift-work job, so they have high divorce rates, but they just remarry.
They have also unusually high domestic violence rates. That is where the bit comes from.
So do firefighters.
This is first time I have seen the claim that firefighters have the same domestic violence rates as police. I have seen multiple studies on police vs regular citizens and police were more violent in all of them. I did not seen comparable numbers about firefighters.
The factors police have and firemen dont are a.) victim not being able to go to police, cause those are his buddies b.) training teaches cops to take and keep charge (escalating aggression until compliance is acquired).
Nobody said "the same".
The question in my mind is what people are expecting? What do they think this proves? Policing is a conflict focused job that involves violence so I wouldnt expect it to be the same as baseline to begin with.
I would caution against "just so" explainations. There are obviously lots of complex reasons and one can speculate a lot of stories one way or another.
The fact that most people believe it's not good advice doesn't mean it actually is not good advice.
I'm not making a normative claim about what your best strategy is to protect yourself from a police investigation, but rather a positive claim about ordinary people's attitudes towards the police, which are not (gesturing towards this thread) this.
Meanwhile I’ve spent way too much time around people in real life on both sides of the isle that absolutely loathed the police.
The general attitude seems extremely positively correlated with income, and the average American isn’t particularly well off.
The biggest complaint working class families on the west side of Chicago have about the police is that they're never around when they're needed.
Which is significantly less of a concern in wealthy areas. When fines are meaningless and police plentiful people’s attitude changes.
I don’t know, as someone firmly in the top 0.1% of taxpayers, most cops seem gleefully unaware of their place in life.
But perhaps that just reflects the public/private split when it comes to quality of services
Okay, but "never talk to the police" is a normative statement, not a descriptive statement, so your contrast of it with a people's attitudes towards police is kind of apples and oranges.
Saying never talk to the police is an 'online belief' is frankly baffling.
There are multiple examples of prominent law professors bringing in ex-police professionals who all say the exact same thing: never talk to the police. If you spend five minutes around a lawyer they will say the same thing. If you ever end up finding yourself in legal turmoil it is the very first thing a lawyer will directly advise you to do.
People being stupid I don't think suddenly makes this advice terminally online. I was hearing it, in person, when I was in college over a decade ago.
Most people simply don't see themselves as being in zero-sum contests with the police. If you are in such a contest, those videos you've watched are quite useful and important. But when there's a hit and run on your block, expect your neighbors to go out of their way to volunteer information to the police.
I've read threads here where people have made impassioned arguments that you yourself should never volunteer information to the police investigating a crime such as a hit and run. The police will turn it against you and somehow make you the target of their investigation! Ordinary people out in the world do not think that way, and you will not succeed in making them think that way by showing them videos of lawyers explaining why the only thing you should ever say is "I do not consent to any searches and will not answer any of your questions".
If you said that to a police officer doing a canvass in my neighborhood, people would look at you like a space alien.
I think it's helpful to understand all this stuff when reading things about Flock. People on HN and in activist communities seem gobsmacked that all the Flock cameras haven't been taken down yet (in fact: ALPR deployments are growing, not shrinking). But they have wildly different priors about policing than the median resident of a muni with ALPR cameras.
> Most people simply don't see themselves as being in zero-sum contests with the police.
Yes, that is why they don't do it. It does not mean the advice is "terminally online". It is the advice coming from layers that deal with the system.
Layers saying those things, online and offline, are not terminally online.
No, but online is where you see this advice being most commonly posted and repeated. Second-most might be in lawyer's offices, but a) most people don't interact with lawyers, especially not in the context of criminal investigations, and b) the lawyers themselves have a distorted view of this system, because they are almost always dealing with people who, for one reason or another, should not talk to the police.
Using "terminally online" for "the advice layers consistently give both online and offline but people don't follow" is, imo, using that term incorrectly. "Terminally online" is derogatory term which involves you doing or thinking something insane. If literal layers give that advice in their literal offices and wherever they go around, it is simply "rarely followed advice".
And I will also claim that layers have way less distorted view of the system then us, people whose view of the system is based on movies and rare cases that hit the news.
Category error. Points can be valid and salient mostly online at the same time.
Though: the validity of "nobody should ever talk to the police" is highly disputable. It assumes the only objective anybody would have in a police encounter is not being prosecuted. Prosecution is unlikely, and there are other important objectives.
I will point out that the original poster did not say "terminally online", but "very online". (oh, and "extremely online"). I don't personally feel that has the same kind of connotations.
The context they make these statements is when you are a person of interest to the police, if you are just a witness to an event unrelated to you its different. But people mostly just say 'never' without regard of the situation.
Not that its always benign to do in cases like this, you can easily talk yourself into becoming a person of interest. Especially true if the officer happens to have a 'bad day' or is a bad apple, you can't really tell because the police keeps employing these people. An example I saw a woman went into the station to provide a video from their phone as evidence of some event and ending up getting taken to the ground in the lobby and arrested for resisting arrest or some bullshit. All because the officer tried to snatch the phone out of her hand without saying anything and then used her keeping hold of the phone as a reason for assaulting her.
> The context they make these statements is when you are a person of interest to the police, if you are just a witness to an event unrelated to you its different. But people mostly just say 'never' without regard of the situation.
Not true, the context I have seen it very much included being a witness who is not a person of interest to the police. It especially explicitly included that situation.
> An example I saw a woman went into the station to provide a video from their phone as evidence of some event and ending up getting taken to the ground in the lobby and arrested for resisting arrest or some bullshit. All because the officer tried to snatch the phone out of her hand without saying anything and then used her keeping hold of the phone as a reason for assaulting her.
That is egregious abuse of power. The layers I have in mind were not explicitly mentioning that high level of lawlessness from the police.
>Not true, the context I have seen it very much included being a witness who is not a person of interest to the police. It especially explicitly included that situation.
Even without context, its good advice. By talking to them you might even be confessing to some crime that you didn't even know exist.
>That is egregious abuse of power. The layers I have in mind were not explicitly mentioning that high level of lawlessness from the police.
That's the entire point. This idealized version of the police you seem to have, maybe some European countries come close it due to their requirements on officers and training, is not reality. Departments allow officers that act like this to resign so they can move to a different department.
You mean "lawyers", right?
Surely there's more interesting conversation to be had here than just "your opinions about interacting with law enforcement are moot because I know people in my Chicago neighbourhood who disagree with them."
The main contention seems to be 'surely everyone knows you shouldn't talk to the police' and 'no, quite a lot of people believe the opposite, but it's not as common to see that belief online', with a bit of this being conflated with whether this belief is accurate or not.
Multiple? I only ever see that one guy's video linked.
>I don't even know what to do with the "never date police officers" thing. Most police officers are married. It's a shift-work job, so they have high divorce rates, but they just remarry.
This is a deeply masculine take, Zuck would be proud.
This is such a widely known problem, I’m really surprised you’re not familiar with it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Officer-involved_domestic_viol...
“Never date a cop” is very common advice women will give to each other, has nothing to do with politics or being excessively online.
Oak Park. Home to Frank Lloyd Wright’s original studio/home and multiple works designed by him? Birthplace and hometown of Ernest Hemingway?
A municipality comparable to Berkeley, California or New Rochelle, New York?
What?
I agree with you that a blanket statement of not talking to the police is ridiculous, but arguing that Oak Park is a good representation outside of affluent America is not to be taken seriously.
Yes. Yes. Yes.
Berkeley is more affluent than Oak Park, and (by a little bit) so is New Rochelle.
Everything you believe about the police you gleaned from children's cartoons as a toddler.
Sick burn.
Wow. I've heard some pretty egregious victim blaming before, but this really takes the cake.
No, it shows that we have a destructive, trust undermining security industry that sells abusive surveillance software that by spirit of the law would be clearly illegal in any country that pretends to be a free and open society and has a constitution in the direction.
No, it shows that even trust has been utterly undermined by a police force that cannot control itself. This is just the latest in a long line of abuses, and completely eliminating Flock would not even touch the underlying problem.
You shouldn't give them more tools to terrorize the populace though.
Freedom to take pictures of public spaces?
Freedom to use a network of cameras to take pictures of random people and track their behaviors and location without their consent?
Thankfully the founders of my country set up a system where we are allowed to watch whatever we want in public.
Ah, yes, the 'public' space of a paid-for monitoring service, most likely accessed from private domiciles. One you use to track random citizens without their knowledge or consent. To act like this is equivalent to taking a photo of something in person is irresponsible and downright dangerous.
This is far more similar to stalking than just public viewing. If you followed somebody around and took pictures of their car and their person, just because, you'd likely end up with a restraining order or stalking charges.
I doubt the founders of your country predicted private companies being able to easily mass surveil citizens without their knowledge & sell this data to the highest bidder. You forget that this data isn't just sold to government agencies. It's also sold to.. Lowe's? Random HOAs (Home Owner Associations)? Your local big box retail store?
In the USA you can film whatever you want in public but if you target and follow someone while filming them you open yourself up to harassment or stalking charges. The flock network does something similar and this article is literally about police officers using it to stalk exes.
Even flock’s own employees (including the VP) accessed cameras stationed at a children’s gymnasium. They claim it was for a sales pitch but who knows. The names of the cameras imply they’re inside the facility, not on the street corner.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/flock-safety-employees-w...
I don't think "public" would qualify in this case. Or at least it would be severely in dispute.
Scott Adams' had a great line:
"Whenever people have the opportunity to commit fraud and there is no monitoring, you can assume they are committing fraud."
Are you loosely paraphrasing here? The closest thing I could find by Scott Adams was "Whenever you have a lot of money in play, combined with the ability to hide misbehavior behind complexity, you should expect widespread fraud to happen."
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/10213582-whenever-you-have-...
(I didn't check the book, though.)
I sometimes think of this from the other direction.
Don't put people in situations of great temptation, like access to company cash with no oversight. They'll often fall for the temptation and ruin their lives in the process.
It's a slightly different framing from the "evil people will take advantage and get away with it" but they both lead to putting some kind of process in place to prevent abuse.
This is like when store-bought locks are able to be picked by a novice, or broken with a hammer, or bypassed with a magnet. The phrase used is "it keeps good people honest", rather than "it keeps absolutely all bad guys out".
The irony here being that we are so beyond healthy that the vast majority of people are well beyond even realizing or recognizing that the very need for locks everywhere is self-evident of an unhealthy society.
Imagining a condition where you had to lock away your valuables in your own home out of concern for them being taken by people in your own home probably makes it a bit more apparent to some people who can mentally model alternatives.
If you were ever to go to places where the rich are in what are effectively little oasis, kind of like “green zones” where they hide away from the chaos and misery they cause the wider society, no one locks their doors even though the homes are all full of stuff that is worth more than the average person will ever even earn in their whole lifetime and they walk around with jewelry and clothing multiple times more expensive than the average house price. They literally, by various mechanisms and methods “keep absolute all bad guys out”, effectively, without locks on every door.
What we’ve long lost was systematic secure systems architecture and we replaced it with extremely costly, expensive and risky brute force, hard coded illusion of saver of the kind you refer to that is ironically not even necessary in most cases either. Locks don’t keep good people out at all, good people aren’t emoted and wouldn’t enter a place that isn’t locked without permission in the first place; hence my above point of locks being a good indicator of the health of a society and the failure of a government, i.e., the cluster and quality of the people left in control of things.
Ultimately, there’s a sort of homeostasis in people’s tolerance for crime. If you need video evidence for prosecution, those who want it prosecuted will produce video cameras. If you make warrants impossible to produce in a timely manner, the camera search will be warrant exempted.
Attempts to damage state power to ensure crime isn’t prosecuted will be likely met with methods that are immune to them.
Given the constraints we operate under, the ideal number of unsolved crimes is not zero and the ideal number of crimes committed using state apparatus is also not zero. So being informed that either is non-zero is not of use to decision making in my opinion.
> the ideal number of unsolved crimes is not zero and the ideal number of crimes committed using state apparatus is also not zero
I feel this is an _extremely_ good point, the kind that seems obvious only once you hear it. But i feel there’s an implication that could be made explicit here — we should be looking at the distribution of both apparatus-enabled-crimes and unsolved-crimes when we’re discussing this sort of thing. And if those metrics aren’t tabulated for easy access, they probably should be.
> And if those metrics aren’t tabulated for easy access, they probably should be.
I couldn't agree more. They're two different error rates for our society and measuring them accurately would help us go to where we should be on the curve.
Somebody should make a website visualizing the data we do have, perhaps with uncertainty bounds, and a recursive breakdown locale-by-locale… Nose goes!!
Edit: wow I bet this is a project that would be _way_ too difficult to vibe code with AI, with well documented data sources and what not. Sure would be a shame if somebody proved me wrong.
I think there's a bias in public discussion towards idealism, because most discussions will start by the argument that we need to reduce X, or we need to reduce Y. If there is a conflict and there needs to be a trade off, very few discussions and points will be about the tradeoff, but there will be a whole bunch of discussions about just plain reducing X or reducing Y.
> If you need video evidence for prosecution, those who want it prosecuted will produce video cameras. If you make warrants impossible to produce in a timely manner, the camera search will be warrant exempted.
That's the legislator's fallacy. "Something must be done, this is something, therefore we must do this."
Suppose you address the problem in other ways, e.g. improve the economy and reduce poverty so there is less crime, or reform the laws so that we're not providing violent gangs with funding sources by criminalizing the consensual behavior of adults.
Warrantless surveillance is not the only option and it's a bad one.
> Attempts to damage state power to ensure crime isn’t prosecuted will be likely met with methods that are immune to them.
This has the same shape as "attempts to enforce the law will be likely met with methods that are immune to it".
Government agencies are going to buck attempts to hold them accountable for abuse. The goal is to make their attempts ineffective, not to throw up our hands because doing it right isn't easy.
Or let's turn your reasoning against itself: We have a law against the police misusing surveillance, so then all the cameras should be destroyed as the backlash against the police violating the law, right? Either your argument is sound and we should get on with destroying all the cameras because the police are breaking the law and we'll just have to use other means to deal with other people breaking other laws, or people are actually willing to tolerate a significant amount of lawbreaking, and then we should get on with destroying all the cameras because they're dangerous and the claim that we can't because people won't tolerate the law going unenforced is empirically deficient.
> Suppose you address the problem in other ways, e.g. improve the economy and reduce poverty so there is less crime
The idea that reducing poverty will entirely eliminate crime is laughable.
The quote says "reduce poverty so there is less crime", not "reducing poverty will entirely eliminate crime." Aren't those very different things? Seems like a bad reading of what they said.
If you disagree with what they said, address it directly instead of addressing an exaggeration of what they said.
To use a corporate example:
People act like the only options are:
- make it so hard to log in that no one can use a system
- just give everyone root access
You can build systems of approval that are fast, obvious who should be approving and are auditable.
You can also build systems that require secondary approvals without needing approval escalation up the chain. Creeping on women is a lot less likely if you need a peer or even a subordinate to review what you're doing.
They will just find some other creepy friend that will sign off without looking, in exchange for them getting the same treatment. It needs to go to a different system, with different priorities, but even then we know of corrupt judges rubber stamping warrants.
Why dont we have a AI verify that each search is tied to a real case, and if its not block their access and they now have to go before a judge to explain why they should be unblocked and what they where doing. If they are going to use AI against us, then we should use AI to make sure they dont commit any crimes.
You could easily just do both - peer review gives you immediate access, then a supervisor audits it on a slightly slower time scale. Make anyone who signed off on access an accomplice to the crime so that peers and supervisors have an incentive not to rubber-stamp everything
This isnt even AI, its just basic control acess or whatever.
The same or a similar thing already exists with doctors and nurses, particularly when a celebrity patient comes round. Not your patient/zero nexus for you to be involved in accessing their private medical charts?
Out you go
> Given the constraints we operate under, the ideal number of unsolved crimes is not zero and the ideal number of crimes committed using state apparatus is also not zero.
That statement doesn't make any sense. What's the ideal number? +Infinity? "Not zero" includes that too. There has to be a way to place a ceiling on the number, asking for a non-zero "ideal" doesn't do that, on the contrary, it hides the all important question of what will keep the numbers low enough.
Using this case an example, if the offender wasn't abusing the system hundreds of times in the span of 1.5 years, he would've never been caught. So, we don't even know the real, "non-zero", number of such cases. That's a big problem.
The point the poster is trying to make by "the ideal number ... is not zero" is:
There is a trade-off where a more complete and accessible surveillance apparatus could allow crimes to be solved but invites the system to be abused by police. So when we think about how much of a surveillance system we as a society want to allow, it is probably somewhere between "nothing" and "everything". Therefore,
- It is worth allowing some crimes to go unsolved in order to prevent abuse of the surveillance state. ("The ideal amount of unsolved crime is not zero")
- It might be worth allowing enough surveillance that it will inevitably be abused to some degree in order to help solve crime. ("The ideal amount of abuse of surveillance is not zero")
Thus instead of centering discussions around "thing bad", it's probably more productive to talk about how we can get as much as possible of the upside while reigning in a use, and considering where we want the tradeoff to be.
Given the power dynamics at play I'm not convinced I agree -- Flock is closely associated with Peter Thiel who is explicitly anti-democracy, and police are notorious for covering up crimes committed by fellow police. But I suppose it is worth considering that safe ethical surveillance (if it existed) could have some value, while keeping in mind that what we are getting is very far from that.
An unsolved crime is much less serious than a crime committed using state apparatus, though.
And if you need confessions, confessions will be made.
Precisely! Illustrates the problem perfectly.
> He characterizes the behavior as rare. He simultaneously identifies it as the most common form of abuse. The tension between those two statements is the problem Flock has left unaddressed.
I don’t see how there’s any tension between these statements. The overall occurrence of abuse can be rare while the most common form of the abuse that does occur is of officers tracking people they know.
The tension is that the abuse is far more likely than any value these cameras bring.
And what is commonly rare in a country of 342 million? Prairie Grove, Illinois has 1930 people and he did this to at least 3 people according to the report. .15% of the population. If you extrapolate that out to the national population, its roughly 520k people. Or, the entire population of Sacramento, Ca, being victimized by law enforcement with a surveillance power they should never have been allowed to have.
I agree but I don’t think that was the point, or I’ve misunderstood the statement about the tension between those other two statements.
In a community of 20 people you have one person who commits robbery, that's 5% of the pop being a robbers. One _could_ extrapolate that but we'd fall victim to the law of small numbers.
Either way, I support a world where exactly 0/1 Flock corporations exist.
Rare in comparison to what, the total number of searches across the platform?
But even that is the wrong focus. One could make the same case for rejecting police body cams because incidents of police abuse are rare, relatively speaking.
The real issue is that the platform isn't completely locked down by default with strict access control grants, monitoring, auditing, etc. Shoot I have way less access at my work to data and systems which do not have that level of sensitivity and have to go through multiple approval steps to be granted anything new.
But I guess those things don't help the sales pitches. To be fair policing the police isn't flock's job and doesn't make them money. Laws and regulations are the only real vehicles of change.
Yeah, in fact they're very nudge nudge wink wink.
Sell to a LE agency in a state that doesn't allow data sharing in certain ways? Flock certainly won't disable it. They'll even still train you in how to use it.
Garrett is very much a believer in Minority Report.
You're right both can be logically true. Now the tension doesn't reside in the logic, but in the intent of the statements.
First statement minimizes the problem's impact, second argues it's still worth tackling.
>>Flock and law enforcement regularly cite documented cases where LPR helped solve violent crimes, recover stolen vehicles, and locate missing persons. Those outcomes are real.
My opposition wouldn't change regardless but are those outcomes real?
In Seattle at least, the majority of homicide cases are solved with the assistance of surveillance cameras (though what % of said cameras are specifically Flock, I'm not sure): https://spdblotter.seattle.gov/2026/03/05/new-analysis-rtcc-...
Cops can politely ask owners of private cameras for access for things like murder investigation. If the polite answer is no (most people will say yes), they can go to court for a subpoena. This has happened for a long time. This is how it should work. If the cops are too lazy or chicken to ask a judge while investigating a murder, they don't deserve the footage.
This is very doable when what you're dealing with is a Major Crime That Gets Full Institutional and Individual Attention.
What about a bike theft, a jacked car or a stolen parcel though?
There is a price to having information easily available to the law enforcement. There is a price to not having this information easily available to the law enforcement too.
Even with Flock, police aren't solving those crimes.
Yes, many cases of people calling the police with actual tracker data showing exactly where their stolen property is, and the response being to get laughed at and told it's not a priority.
That entirely varies by locality. My parents just had their vehicle broken into and their credit and debit cards stolen (in addition to some cash) and the local police department visited the grocery store where the thief used the cards to buy gift cards multiple times to collect security footage to try and track them down (the grocery store store’s security lead was out the first time on vacation). If your local police department won’t do this and you want them to, ask your community to raise taxes to hire more and/or better cops.
Doesn't matter, they should have to follow the same process.
Cops, at least where I live, don't give af about any of those crimes though. Bike gets stolen? You'll be lucky if they even show up at all, let alone do anything about it, surveillance data available or not. They largely don't even get prosecuted when caught.
This depends on what evidence there is. If it's just "omg, bike was here yesterday, but is not here today, find it!" then what are they really going to do? They are not calling a CSI team and collect fibers from the scene, this is not a TV show.
In my experience, the police will follow the leads if they have them. I had several bikes stolen by homeless so they hid them in some commercial property few blocks away. One bike had a tracker, which they found and disabled but they did it near where they ultimately hid the bikes. Using the last location from the tracker cops were able to find the bikes and return them. If there were cameras they might be able to also find the perps and put them to jail.
It's true. We're getting the worst possible outcome. Police state surveillance that tolerates nearly every level of criminality. Anarcho-tyranny.
If only we had an amendment in the original bill of rights that drew the line here.
The 4th amendment doesn’t really have much of anything to say about public surveillance; the courts have largely agreed it does not constitute a search unless it reveals information that is not intended to be public (such as the thermal imaging of buildings) or reveals intimate personal information (such as documentation of habits through long term data aggregation).
> (such as documentation of habits through long term data aggregation)
Don't ALPRs do exactly this?
The majority of crime is committed by a relatively small number of individuals. If citizens feel crime is out of control they need to vote in politicians and judges who sentence repeat offenders to long sentences or involuntary commitment.
Long sentences are far less effective than reliable enforcement. Something that seems to be very true in practice. If you steal or vandalise something in China, there is an extremely high chance you will get caught, you won't get a massive penalty, but it will be enough to cover the damages + some.
If you for example knew that stealing had a penalty of 100% of the item value + 10% fine, with a 100% chance of getting caught, you'd never steal anything again even though the penalty is so much smaller than what it is currently in most countries. And then if you make a dumb decision as a teenager or in a lapse of judgement, it won't ruin your life.
Long sentences and reliable enforcement are complimentary.
If you can reliably prosecute the repeat offenders you catch, and put them behind bars for a long time? You stop them from committing more crimes. The crime rate falls, and the amount of enforcement manpower you have available per crime rises. Making it easier to catch and prosecute the remaining offenders.
Most of the low level crime isn't done by "a dumb decision as a teenager or in a lapse of judgement". It's done by someone who has done it 5 times before and will do it again. Unless jailed, that is. The jail doesn't fix whatever's wrong with them, but it is hard to keep doing crimes while behind bars.
For violent crime sure. But for theft if you can just consistently recover the loss + a penalty it will do so much more to discourage it than simply raising the penalty.
That's for theft specifically. Most thefts are committed by repeat offenders.
You are making a very common mistake of assuming that criminals are prone to making good decisions.
If they were, they probably wouldn't offend the first time. And almost certainly wouldn't reoffend - once the costs of getting caught are clear to them.
"Consistently" is not very realistic without a way of making repeat offenders stop reoffending. You need the level of law enforcement to completely overpower the crime rate - and that means either getting better funded, better staffed, better equipped, more professional enforcement, or lowering crime rates. "We need to overfund the police" is expensive and unpopular, "we need to give the police more surveillance powers" is extremely unpopular, and there are very few ways of getting lower crime rates. Jail bars, however, are a proven one.
How do you recover the loss from a druggie who has no assets and does not work?
How does that work when you don't have enough assets to cover the cost of the thing you broke or stole?
Of course you could still rack up a large penalty / jail time if you cause an incredible amount of damage quickly, but in general you'd catch people before they get that far. Catching a bike thief after the first 1-2 bikes rather than when they have stolen 100.
Is that true? USA seems to have long sentences and a high incarceration rate, yet still has high crime when compared to other countries with less incarceration.
A few years ago I had police knock on my door to see if our camera had footage of a crash on our block. This is not a problem.
A little friction in the right places is a good thing.
They can get a subpoena for that, too. The bike and the parcel are already long gone by the time police do anything. (Nor will they do anything other than file a report if you are lucky.)
This was exactly the case on a King County jury I was on. Lots of camera footage, most from security cams of individual businesses, some from red light cameras.
The event predated Flock rollout though, so no idea if the distribution of camera sources has shifted.
Regardless though, in the end the phone location data meant a lot more than any of the camera data, which just confirmed the path from phone sources.
Right and what if lots of crime happens in a place where there are not many businesses? Hardly an implausible scenario given that crime is bad for business.
The city can set up its own camera for its own use. Is that really that wild of a proposal?
What if what if what if?
That whole premise of "what if lots of crime happens" -- already false.
Did you know that most places in America are at historically low crime rates in most of our lifetimes? It is garbage to say this needs deep societal focus right now. I don't give a shit about the hypothetical hurt feelings of small town cops whining that they don't have always-on spy equipment.
In fact, there's a pretty strong argument that the reason crime has decreased so much in the US is because we've put strict controls and protections limiting lead in the environment.
We do still need deep societal focus, but that's mostly around things like further getting lead out of homes and pipes.
Historically low American crime rates are still several times higher than most of the developed world.
While I would oppose a city setting up CCTV to be used the way Flock is used - that would be orders of magnitude less bad than Flock.
As it is, you can assume that at the very least, every time your vehicle has passed one of the >100k Flock cameras, there's a database entry and a photo that will never, ever be deleted. Your full travel history from this point forward is available for a nominal fee, and without any regard for your privacy.
Who says the city's retention period would be smaller than Flock?
Furthermore, do you realize that you're free to photograph people in public and sell those images, no permission required: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nussenzweig_v._DiCorcia
People seem to struggle to wrap their head around the fact that privacy laws don't prevent people from recording them in public. You can be recorded at any time in public, by the government or another private person.
> You can be recorded at any time in public, by the government or another private person.
Similar to "free speech", it is not as simple as that. Harassment and stalking among other things. I dare you to try hanging around a school with a DSLR taking pictures of kids in the playground and defend yourself with "But I'm in public!"
Without going into the list of misdemeanors, generally the point is intent.
If you take a picture, or ten, ostensibly of Times Square, no one cares. You can't piece together a person's day.
The application of computing@scale (processing, storage, pattern recognition) changes the outcomes significantly. The hard to piece together day of the everyperson suddenly becomes a trivial query away.
Whether that should be legal or not is quite rightly up for debate.
> I dare you to try hanging around a school with a DSLR taking pictures of kids in the playground and defend yourself with "But I'm in public."
You'll probably get harassed by school staff and parents, but the police will have no grounds to arrest you.
> If you take a picture, or ten, ostensibly of Times Square, no one cares. You can't piece together a person's day.
Yes, you can. Private investigators often do exactly that.
The city's scope is smaller than Flock's - it's a city, not a multi-national corporation.
Yes, I'm aware of what "expectation of privacy" means. I've been a photographer for ~25 years.
> People seem to struggle to wrap their head around the fact that privacy laws don't prevent people from recording them in public. You can be recorded at any time in public, by the government or another private person.
This isn't about recording in public - it's about building a comprehensive dataset containing the movement and association history of the entire US population. Not only is that without a warrant, it's being collected prior to any accusation being made.
And how are they building that dataset? By recording in public. Yes it is about recording in public.
> People seem to struggle to wrap their head around the fact that privacy laws don't prevent people from recording them in public.
Maybe this needs to be restricted in some capacity, then.
"Anyone can record you at any time in public" is vastly different from "a single entity is recording you over time and locations across the country/state/city"
What if lots of murders happened in bathrooms?
The hopefully we'll be able to at least narrow down the list of suspects to the people who entered the bathroom around the time they the murder took place.
Surveillance often doesn't directly capture crime on camera, but is rather used to identify who traveled to and from the crime scene around the time of the incident
You understand why that's worse, right?
No? If someone broke into your car as stole your luggage, the surveillance camera might not directly capture the thief breaking into your car. But if the camera recorded someone entering the parking garage and then exiting the garage carrying your luggage a few minutes later, that's strong evidence is it not?
You're missing the part where, for that to work, we have a government with access to a massive surveillance system capable of identifying and tracking the population at scale.
And you're missing that, instead of specifically identifying a specific individual doing a specific thing, this network would be used to place under suspicion, investigation and possible arrest, people who's only documented action was "being somewhere."
Oh, and while your example is "committed a crime", that same network could easily be used to identity and track people who were, say, coming and going from protests. Or libraries. Or voting.
> investigation and possible arrest, people who's only documented action was "being somewhere."
In the example above, the police wouldn't arrest every single person who entered and exited the parking lot. They'd arrest the person who walked out of the lot with your stolen luggage.
> Oh, and while your example is "committed a crime", that same network could easily be used to identity and track people who were, say, coming and going from protests
Again realize that this is legal right? https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/14/us/charlottesville-doxxin...
There's no right to have your public demonstrations off limits for recording. The whole point of a protest is to be seen. If someone is concerned that they will be associated with some group or cause because of their decision to protest, then they seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of what a protest is.
> Or voting
You realize the government already has that information? Voters literally filled out ballots and delivered it to the government. They don't need a camera to know who voted, they have the ballots.
We create doors that physically limit access to one person at a time.
> What if lots of murders happened in bathrooms?
Then we would start putting cameras in bathrooms? Or start closing public bathrooms? Nobody wants to go into a bathroom and get murdered. We as a society are not going to just accept a high bathroom murder rate. Culture will adapt to reality, one way or another.
You know what... go ahead and build your panopticon somewhere. The rest of us are going to have an actual society somewhere else, the way it has worked for thousands of years.
If you're so scared of your own shadow you'd tie a noose around your own neck and hand the other end to those in power in exchange for an illusion of safety, I won't stand in your way.
Build that cage around yourself and hope the jailer will be benevolent. Just don't drag others down with you. Some of us have decided to learn from history.
You asked a 'what if' question, I gave you a reasonable answer. What solution would you propose for a hypothetical high bathroom murder rate?
That is not this, however. This is the city hooking into a private, nationwide surveillance network.
You didn't think these cities actually own these Flock cameras, did you?
They pay to have them installed and maintained, they're not different in that sense from subscribing to Office 365 licensing, it's a subscription product.
They key difference is not whether they own their cameras but the automatic data sharing with other agencies and their cameras. Arguably law enforcement does this casually on request anyways but the drastically reduced friction of an automatic system enables easy abuse.
An officer may hesitate to ask a neighboring agency for data on their girlfriend, and would likely be very hesitant to file actual paperwork to request it. But a search in Flock's interface is probably all of the same legal peril in a venue which doesn't feel as intimidating or risky to do and doesn't see the same level of human review or scrutiny.
In America, yes.
Obviously in other places, no.
The wording he used was that it helped make arrests in 53% of cases. Nothing about whether those cases were solved, or whether the arrests were correct, or whether he's counting times where the cameras see police making an arrest and count it as 'helping'.
That's not what that says though.
>technology and professional analysts with helping detectives make arrests in 53%
"technology and analysts" "help" "make arrests" not surveillance, not convictions and only the implication that they wouldn't have made the arrest otherwise.
Like look at the example: somebody calls in an OD and a guy sees that the dude ODing matches (the clothing of) a suspect in some other crime and so they arrest him.
Once again an arrest is not a conviction but also what part of that needed/used pervasive surveillance?
ALSO a conviction is not the same thing as truth.
ALSO ALSO by basic subtraction the panopticon wasn't even helpful 47% of the time.
Even better, they saw a guy who was nearby the dude ODing.
Historically Seattle's surveillance has been fulfilled via Axon.
Yes. Prior to flock, my city trialed LPRs attached to the local power company’s poles. In the first month, they recovered more stolen cars than any prior years total recoveries. I’ve got mixed feelings about Flock, LPRs, and what it allows people and governments to do.
I’m 100% sold on the results.
The problem imo is the usage and laws rather than the technology. Security cameras used for public good is good. But it needs to be heavily limited to preventing crime, with strict access logs and penalties for misuse.
Nobody is questioning the value of unconstrained mass surveillance on solving crimes.
Unfortunately it also enables a good deal of more heinous crimes against the people its supposed to protect, by the people who are supposed to be protecting them.
Imagine if the police had the names and faces of every marcher in every protest. They too would be (are) 100% sold on the results.
Why would you go to a protest if you don’t want people to know that you are there?
Flock doesnt scan faces, only cars.
So they claim. But the footage will continue to exist if somebody or themselves decide to identify faces.
Flock provide more than LPRs. Check out the "Condor" cameras.
Part of that is cops also doing their jobs in the first place versus "not giving a shit". Like when shown an eBay page of the person who sold my stolen phone. Nearly a hundred iPhones, all "activation locked", "no charger", same for Mac laptops, "no chargers, no accessories, may be locked".
Cops: "Well he probably didn't steal them himself."
Me: "Even so, knowingly selling stolen property is a crime too, no?"
Cops: "..."
So, ends justifies the means. Got it.
I guess I’m old enough to remember when 99.9% of us on hacker news were…well, hackers. We valued privacy and freedom over surveillance and “results.”
I miss those days.
HN has always been associated with tech entrepreneurship rather than 'hacker' in the way that it's commonly used.
I'm not sure there was ever a time when 99.9% of the userbase, or even a much smaller percentage, actually valued privacy and freedom rather than seeing them as obstacles to value extraction.
> We valued privacy and freedom over surveillance and “results.”
The relative value of one over the other depends on the absolute value of either. In a Mad Max scenario, very few would value the principles of privacy and freedom over the immediate need to reestablish basic order.
Take auto theft as an example. Depending on how old you are, the recent spike in auto theft is either "nothing compared to the 80s" or "entirely unacceptable in civilized society"; in select cities, the rate almost tripled in five years[0] (an incredible jump), though remaining well below the historical peak.
However, case clearance rates are at an all time low, which I'm sure furthers frustration for the victims. That is, you're statistically less likely to be a victim of auto theft today than during the historical peak, but if you are, you're statistically more likely to be SOL.
You're probably approaching this from a civil libertarian point of view, but the Constitution is not a suicide pact[1]. Members of society who collectively uphold the law also have a vested interested in the maintenance of the conditions that would further perpetuate upholding the law, i.e. law and order.
[0]: https://counciloncj.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/motor-veh...
[1]: Terminiello v. Chicago, 337 U.S. 1 (1949)
I have no doubt that provided a vast camera network covering every ingress and egress into a city, and every major intersection, plus a database of when and where a license plate was last seen, cops can find their suspect
It used to be that news articles would claim that the police used “CCTV from local businesses” to catch a crook. Even back then I knew this was cover for Ring, Flock and who knows what else. they just didn’t want the bad press.
At this point you don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to understand that parallel construction happens all the time. They have more tools that we know about, and they want to keep it that way.
Everyone should throw some money to 404 media. They are independent and doing the best work right now to keep these things in the public eye.
That's the thing though, I do doubt that. Surveillance that you don't need a warrant to put in front of a jury is a perfect thing to use for the ostensibly-legal construction in parallel construction.
guess what prolific career criminals do with crime cars?
they look for a car that is very similar if not exact make and model of thier stolen vehicle, then they "clone" the victims license plate with a sheet of embossment copper and a stylus, apply paint at thier shop and affix the imposter to the crime vehicle. that buggers the whole LPR thing.
they can replicate dozens of plates in a day and offer the service for contras.
That seems like a lot of effort when you can just take the license plate off and if you're really worried print off a convincing temporary license and tape in the back window.
its effort well worth it, and really is not a lot of effort. if you stole the plate, the theft is evident, when there are duplicates then it becomes difficult to know which one to suspect, and that also presupposes knowledge of the duplication.
you would have to realize, it is not feasible for a car to be in location 1 thenbe in location 2 many miles away in a few minutes.
the odd thing about criminals is thier effort to perpetuate crime is often far greater than getting a job, but is somehow the preferable option.
> you would have to realize, it is not feasible for a car to be in location 1 thenbe in location 2 many miles away in a few minutes.
You say that but just last week there was a post here about how LPR claimed that the same car was in two locations in a timeframe that would have required the car to have been traveling non-stop at 160mph for 20 minutes through suburban streets, and even then authorities and proponents were defending it as plausible, or that the LPR was right, but there might just have been timing issues, or, or, or.
i think i saw that post, i think we're both describing what happens when someone copies plates and doppelgangs people to throw off the surveillance.
i think in this case the LPR was right, the same plate number was in two different places, the assumption of how many plates were involved needs review.
160mph for 20min through suburban streets, that kind of attracts attention, there would be a lot of complaints and witnesses if that happened
It's also very likely not physically possible for that car, and unless they're referring to straight-line stroads, many suburban routes can't sustain an average of 160mph with any current car.
Not really because it flags an anomaly where the same plate is found in two places that are impossibly far to reach in the time span. Then police can just pull over that plate when they see it with a 50/50 chance it's the stolen car.
The more cameras in the network the faster and more likely a duplicated plate will be spotted.
Sure. But if we have enough surveillance cameras, we can just trace the full path of the car from the moment of theft to now. I'm reminded of Gorgon Stare [1]. Stolen cars suck. But how about murders? I'm sure all of the people who've had loved ones murdered in, say, South Chicago, might have a more positive opinion of such a system. Especially since it wouldn't have to rely on witnesses who are cowed by the threat of reprisal and anti-snitch culture.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgon_Stare
Flock's position, statistically, is that if during the course of an investigation into a crime, a detective queries Flock, and the crime is later solved, that Flock "helped solve a crime", regardless of the merit or value of the query. "Saw a vehicle, look it up, "nope, unrelated", but still "helped solve".
Right, that's more or less my suspicion.
So stalking your ex-girlfriend's ex-boyfriend is actually a public service as long as you solve some crimes along the way!
The AI slop in that quote sure is real.
Check your town's website for correspondence with your state's chapter of the ACLU in regards to Flock cameras. If your police chief (not an elected official) is installing them then contact your local ACLU chapter about it. These are 4th amendment violations.
To the contrary, little of what Flock does would be restricted by the 4th amendment. The cameras are in public, and neither the government nor individual citizens need authorization to film people in public.
Many Flock cameras are also privately owned, too.
All flock cameras are privately owned, by flock. They install them at a charge per the jurisdiction that orders them and pays the subscription costs… those subscription fees allow Mr Local Law Abuser to lookup any license plate it has read, when, where, with a picture of the vehicle.
https://deflock.org
You’d be surprised how many there are.
The point is, some of flock's customers are private businesses. E.g. the Home Depot by me uses them. No amount of pressure by voters can take those cameras down.
Shady part is, all of flock’s customers are businesses. Municipalities that use flock do so through a contracting company, it’s always once removed…
So when I put a bag over the camera, it's up to flock to remove it? I haven't stuck around to find out who shows up. Sometimes it takes a week or so, other times it's next day.
https://www.wired.com/story/carpenter-v-united-states-suprem... https://www.eff.org/cases/us-v-jones There has been plenty of past rulings that indicate long term collection of data is not something that the fourth amendment had baked in.
The case you linked isn't about the government filming people in public, though. Carpenter vs. US was a case about the government demanding private information about users' locations from cell service providers. By comparison, the 9th circuit concluded that the plain view doctrine means electronic license plate readers are legal :https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2020/05/04/1...
An officer doesn't need a warrant to sit at a cross section and write down license plate numbers. A device doing the same thing is also legal.
Of course that's a fair interpretation, I am saying there's some tension between mass surveillance and the fourth just because its "done in public" doesn't mean it automatically escapes scrutiny now or going forward.
No, the fact that it's recording people in public does make it escape scrutiny moving forward. In public you can be filmed by anyone - be they government or private citizens.
I find a lot of people fail to realize this, both in regards to surveillance and otherwise. Recently in my city there was a big uproar about a nudist beach that was at risk of having nudity prohibited. So a bunch of nudists went out and paraded around the beach while disrobed, some of them bringing their children with them. People sailed by and photographed many of the nudists, and put their images online. Many alleged that must be a violation of some privacy law, but no, the law in Washington (and most, perhaps all, of the US) is quite clear: if you're in public, you can be filmed and photographed. If you don't want to be filmed nude, don't go walking around naked in public.
Regardless, back to the topic at hand, the fact that Flock cameras a in public spaces does in fact mean that there's no requirement to get a warrant to use them.
> No, the fact that it's recording people in public does make it escape scrutiny moving forward. In public you can be filmed by anyone - be they government or private citizens.
This is false. While there is no strongly established precedent yet, there are certainly serious and plausible legal arguments being made that unlimited collection and collation/cross-referencing/etc. of "public" information can under certain circumstances constitute a search. It will most certainly not "escape scrutiny moving forward".
e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_theory_of_the_Fourth_Am...
The legality of automated license plate readers has gone all the way up to the United States Court of Appeals. That's the second highest court in the country, superseded only by the Supreme Court.
This is as strong as precedent gets, short of a SCOTUS decision.
That doesn't sound like escaping scrutiny to me! Sounds like it's getting pretty thoroughly scrutinized, in fact.
> This is as stromg (sic) as precedent gets, short of a SCOTUS decision.
Another egregious misrepresentation. The courts are obviously making their rulings as narrow as possible because they know the "mosaic theory" style arguments have some merit. Look at US vs. Yang, for example, in which the court dodged the issue completely with some argument about rental car contract periods. And Schmidt v. Norfolk, which IIUC directly challenges Flock ALPRs on 4A grounds, is pending.
Lots and lots of scrutiny. Your claim that the conclusion is foregone here is obviously absurd. Even when/if it gets to SCOTUS I expect they'll write as narrow an opinion as they can get away with, in whatever direction it falls.
So what's the logical conclusion, that there will be a company with a drone following every individual in a public space at all times and that the government will pay for the data?
The logical conclusion is that the US brings itself in line with the rest of the developed world, and realizes video cameras are useful for solving crime.
Flying drones are not required, stationary cameras are more than enough outside of specific scenarios like active pursuit.
Considering how desperately that user is responding to every comment on this post, it seems they have a vested interest in playing blind for Flock, which makes me think they are paid by Flock.
Lol, I should be getting paid.
But no, I just like to dispel the myths people have about their imaginary right to not be filmed in public. Whether it's by the government or by other private people.
Manual D, the flock system is still very new. Why are you confident a private companies monetization of public whereabouts will stay legal? There hasent really been any precedent set on this. And the system is wildly unpopular In the public eye?
In case you didn't read it, the 9th circuit upheld the use of Flock cameras. The precedence is as high as it gets, short of a supreme Court decision: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48636421
You're being exposed to a very specific group of people when you read Hacker News or Reddit. Plenty of people are happy to have Flock cameras in their neighborhood on account of the improved ability to investigate crime.
Are you referring to the IJ case?
https://ij.org/case/norfolk-virginia-camera-surveillance/
I'm referring to the case I linked.
Clearly a different situation considering the guy was in a rental vehical with GPS.
Of course their is no reasonable expectation of privacy here. It's not his car lol. The LEARN db query was auxillary to the precedent here.
I can't see the jump your making at all or how this precedent holds any would hold water in the case of a innocent party. Its probably just a matter of time until the perfect case is presented and new case law established. Precedents change you know?
Is there a reasonable expectation of privacy operating a car on public roads?
People generally don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy in public. That's why you can record and photograph people in public whether or not they agree to be recorded. It's the same logic that makes red light cameras and parking license plate scanners legal.
And this is how freedom dies, not by the letter of the law, but by the spirit.
it's not about filming in public. it's about systematic data collection by law enforcement, using private infrastructure present by its nature in public. that's why the Carpenter decision is relevant.
The Carpenter decision was about the US government compelling mobile data providers to hand over private use information. It's really not relevant to flock. That's why the 9th Circuit decided that automated license plate readers don't need a warrant. A cop and stand at an intersection and write down license plate numbers without a warrant. A device can do the same.
>A cop and stand at an intersection and write down license plate numbers without a warrant.
I dont believe you think the police force could replicate the injest of information these systems allow do you?
If the city hires enough police officers, yes. It'd almost certainly require an unfathomably large budget, but it's not impossible.
The point is, the plain view doctrine means the police don't need a warrant to record observation that are in plain view. The licence plates of cars on the street are in plain view.
I really don't understand how people got this idea in their head that their license plates are private information . How do red light cameras identify cars? How does parking enforcement work? By recording people's license plates. The whole reason why we mandate that cars display license plates to is to facilitate identifying vehicles.
>If the city hires enough police officers, yes. It'd almost certainly require an unfathomably large budget, but it's not impossible.
If the precedent was set based on this idea. It will fall apart with further scrutiny.
>I really don't understand how people got this idea in their head that their license plates are private information . How do red light cameras identify cars? How does parking enforcement work? By recording people's license plates. The whole reason why we mandate that cars display license plates to is to facilitate identifying vehicles.
I don't think that is where the crux of the issue lay.
Why would it fall apart? The plain view doctrine holds that the police don't need a warrant to observe things in plain view. Like your car driving on the public roads.
Privacy laws are generally about protecting what you do in private, not in public. In the US, anyone can film you in public, government or otherwise.
The year is 2026 and the 4th amendment only means what the currently sitting justices say that it means, and the executive branch was literally given a pass to violate any law on the books that they want.
The 9th circuit upheld that the police do not need warrants to operate and access data from license plate readers. The 9th Circuit isn't exactly a conservative stronghold.
That’s really beside the point. It doesn’t matter what the 9th circuit or any other court says.
Our country is no longer a country of laws. Laws are only as good as they are enforced. The SCOTUS, the DOJ, the FBI, and congress have openly abdicated any constitutional responsibility to provide checks and balances to reign in the abuses we see posted to HN every day.
I believe they would all argue that they haven't. They would argue that the current administration is operating within the law towards ends supported, repeatedly, by their constituents.
I disagree with them, but that isn't relevant.
Wrong. See Carpenter v US.
That's not applicable to Flock, though. That case pertained to the government requesting that mobile service providers give historical location data on users.
I feel like you haven't properly thought this through. Cell towers are monitoring a public broadcast from a beacon you voluntarily carry on your person. For some reason querying that dataset requires a warrant but querying a broadly analogous dataset from the operator of a network of cameras doesn't?
More generally you're confidently making wild extrapolations from the current very limited case law without regard for either its limitations or the general temperature that can be inferred from the full opinions.
> Cell towers are monitoring a public broadcast from a beacon you voluntarily carry on your person.
It's an encrypted broadcast, not a public broadcast. This is why the police needed to ask the mobile service providers for this data. It is not public.
> For some reason querying that dataset requires a warrant but querying a broadly analogous dataset from the operator of a network of cameras doesn't?
The data is not broadly analogous. One is encrypted radio traffic. The other is unencrypted, and you can record it yourself with a pen, paper, and the Mk I eyeball. This is why the "plain view" doctrine applies.
Again, the courts have already ruled on the use of ALPRs. The defense tried to use US vs Carpenter in US vs Yang, and the courts did not accept that argument that ALPRs are analogous to cell phone location data.
The government may not purchase services for acts it is not allowed to do itself: Pinkerton Act.
But the government is allowed to track people's license plates. There's nothing against the law for a police officer to stand at an intersection writing down all passing car's license plates with a pen and paper. Flock is the same thing, just much more cost efficient.
This is not that
It is exactly that. These cameras are only recording cars on public roads (and sometimes e.g in the parking lot of Home Depot, but those areas are still in plain view).
Yes. Let's restrict police and take away every possible tool they can use to solve and fight crime. Not all criminals are bad criminals. They don't use Flock to spy on their ex-girlfriends but every cop in America has done it.
At least according to the internet which knows everything.
Don't misrepresent what others say. The 4th amendment should not be violated. I can only interpret your response as "the 4th amendment should be violated".
Then you would be wrong. I'm pointing out the internet's liberal obsession with anti-police and, seemingly, pro-criminal activity. The internet likes to find fault with the police while dismissing or ignoring criminal activity. It's a horror I cannot understand. It's pure insanity.
Okay, then pontificate that as a top level comment. Responding to someone saying the 4th amendment should not be circumvented with a refute is a statement about the 4th amendment, not some imagined counter party.
This whole thread represents the imaginary of the internet and it makes me sick. I have to get off the internet. I've spent too much time with it lately.
I’m right here with you. This is a genuinely cool useful technology that helps solve crimes and all we get is pearl clutching.
Most people don’t give AF
> take away every possible tool they can use to solve and fight crime
Flock is a new tool, with a string of related abuses already and an unconvincing record of successes. Removing it is in no way tantamount to taking away every possible tool.
Misogyny in government is a bellwether for authoritarianism. If a man doesn't respect women, you can bet they won't respect men or minorities either, although they may be less inclined to admit such in public.
Would love to see the same attitude extended to everyone, e.g. “respect all people”, but I guess if we don’t put the pussy on a pedestal we’re all authoritarians. If you keep pushing that narrative, you will be disappointed in what happens.
I'm not sure you understood the parent comment? At least, not in the way that they mean. What they're saying is, those who are likely to not respect women are also likely to not respect other groups. But, they are less likely to voice their lack of respect for other groups because doing so would incur more pushback.
The sexist undertones of your response aside, you seem to have very poor reading comprehension.
Warrants are needed, and much more transparency. These platforms should be monitored and policed aggressively to keep everybody honest. There's a precedent for this with for example body cam footage means it's now much easier to audit police conduct.
Surveillance technology potentially enables a lot of abuse if used without checks and balances. But the same technology also enables monitoring for abuse. Use of surveillance technology should be actively monitored and supervised. There should be auditable logs, footage, etc. with very long retention periods and active spot checks. In case of conflicts/abuse, there should be ample evidence.
These platforms shouldn't exist to begin with... "land of the free" LOL!
Nit: the police chief was also stalking and harassing at least one man
But crimes against men don’t matter because by being a man, he is responsible for all crimes committed by men. /s
When flock data was FOIAd the state just exempted the data from FOIA.
So glad we got them kicked out of Mountain View.
The fact police can go in and just look at camera footage without warrant proves your point precisely, officers have used it to stalk family members, etc.
Is this much different than a doctor/sw/nurse/admin looking up patient records? I know that doctors are not the government, so no 4th amendment rights, but folks in the medical community have the basically the same level of access to much more sensitive information.
also, since there has been a lot of talk of warrantless searches, 4th a, etc.... is there an expectation to privacy when out in public when one would be captured on a flock camera? like red light cameras already exist and some non-sworn pd admin is looking through your file to send you a ticket...
This type of thing is definitely real. A friend of mine went on a date with an NYPD cop back in the 90s. She refused a second date, and the stalking began. It wasn't 'tech stalking', like today, but the cop started asking interrogating questions to her landlord and co-workers; she started getting weird/false parking tickets, etc. The only way she made it stop was that her cousin was a veteran with NYPD, and well, he had a little chat with the young, stalking cop. But who knows where it all would've ended up if her cousin wasn't also a cop???
Young stalking cop should have been charged and kicked off the force. Already proved they're incapable of handling even basic adult responsibilities, so police powers should be kept well it off such a person's reach.
I doubt any of that happened though.
Yeah what in the world, now imagine that nowadays with FLOCK cameras. I see that going nowhere good
It should go without saying that all humans are flawed, regardless of their training, their uniform, their position in society.
The local pedohunters group dumpen.se in Sweden actually caught a cop trying to meet a fictional 14 year old, and the cop used his access to public CCTV to check the meeting point before going there.
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." -- Cardinal Richelieu
Privacy protects personal dignity, not just illicit behavior. We close bathroom doors, keep journals, and have intimate conversations not because we are breaking the law, but because we value personal modesty and boundaries.
We are quickly approaching a time when we are all guilty until proven innocent by voyeuristic power-hungry psychopathic megalomaniacs who cry the old cry of "If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect
I do not disagree with the intentions of the quote, however it is disputed.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Cardinal_Richelieu#Disputed
Nobody is installing surveillance cameras in you bathroom.
They would really, really like to. Kids at school vape in there, people do drugs in public ones.
A warrant being required for a GPS tracker but not for nationwide direct visual monitoring seems absurd.
It was not that long ago that i was watching Top Gear UK talk about how much they admired the US for its libertarian ideals, and how Americans don’t tolerate things like speed cameras on a cultural level.
Within a decade, we ushered in CCTV and automated plate readers to a degree that would make the CCP blush.
Not sure how much warrants are going to help when a judge will see a stack of requests from a police chief and just rubber stamp them all without looking. This is already a problem in places where warrants are required.
With a search warrant, I can submit FOIA requests or go to the courthouse.
With flock searches, I (usually) can't because Illinois law exempts ALPR records. Here's the most egregious example I've seen: https://www.muckrock.com/foi/waukegan-11153/flock-safety-alp...
Yes this is how freedoms are restored. Next we need a story of flock tracking a reporter or political figure. Put that 4th amendment into sharp focus.
Can I set up my own camera on the side of the road (in a public place) to scan people's faces and license plates, link them up to one of the many data brokers (or leaks) and use a big display to show the drivers' pictures and something like "Hey Rick Larsen, it's the 24th time we've seen you this week. We'll let our clients know there's no one home at 2930 Wetmore Avenue, Everett most weekdays between 8 and 4!", and then place them somewhere like oh, I don't know, in close proximity to a capitol building?
We can pay the regular fees that advertisers pay to have billboards up.
And if we're not allowed to do that, why is Flock?
first - yes, as others have noted, very easy to set this up and I encourage you to try! you could have a mini flock set up for your neighborhood or apartment in no time (not to mention ring cameras - look up the super bowl ad that went south quick).
second - five eyes (i think?) treaties allow tons of mass surveillance, the only rule is that you can't spy on your own country, but trading the data is above board
No one has the right to privacy in a public setting. That's why street photographers can roam around and take photos of anyone and publish them. Whether you can publish personally identifiable information based on that, I don't know.
Yes, you are allowed to set up a camera, as long as you own the land you're putting the camera on or you have permission from the landowner.
Again, I'm surprised by how many people don't realize that it's legal to film people in public.
Since when is Flock publicizing private information obtained through data leaks?
Since forever, that's literally their business model. My (and your) private information was leaked (unconsensually), including timestamped location, travel companions, photographs from inside your vehicle, what you're wearing, etc. all leaked / stolen and then publicized to all kinds of people (criminals with badges, Palantir, the secretaries in the city council, etc.).
You can probably do that, so long as you're doing it on property you own.
As far as I can tell from the news, Flock is only used to commit crimes.
They silently stole $46 million secretly from Canada
No, it shows that cities need to do a better job of policing their police.
No it shows why mass surveillance systems should be outlawed.
Ubiquitous surveillance + no oversight: What could possibly go wrong.
Imagine what Musk can do with all the SSA and Tax data he stole in the most blatant and underreported data heist in history.
Big fan of court ordered warrants as a way to limit law enforcement here.
That said, warrants protect law enforcement like searching someone's house. It seems that some less intrusive powers like running someone's plate has been given to the police with lower controls.
And it makes sense right? If every judge needed to approve every potential plate check, it might be too much for daily operations.
So option A, push towards everything being protected under warrants.
Sure, option B, how about protection mechanisms that sit somewhere in the middle? For example, what if some powers were audited (sounds like they are logged already) on a probabilistic basis. What if judges could inspect some fraction of searches after the fact, and ask for justification afterwards. Of course this would have no effect on the actual search, but it would have long term effects on future searches.
Even if 1% of lesser searches are audited, I'm sure most policemen would be much more weary about using them for personal matters like stalking women.
I am sure an automated report to the chief/captain would solve most of this and making sure that every query/report had an associated case/complaint number too. real crimes attached to real searches.
There are other options. One is to allow them to be audited not just by judges but by various "watchdog" groups which themselves go through some kind of vetting process. If you think police would be wary if they knew judges were watching 1% of their videos, imagine how they'd feel if they knew the ACLU had the option of watching every single one.
The other side of it, though, is enforcement, and to me this seems like what's mostly lacking. It remains to be seen what will happen with this case but the article mentions a variety of actions over a period of time
1. he tracked six separate people
2. he ran license plates for these people 140 times
2. he searched the database while off duty
3. he called the ex-boyfriend
4. he said "This is the only time I'm going to be nice about this" which pretty clearly is threatening statement
For this he was charged with. . . two Illinois class-3 felonies, which from what I see online means each charge can get you 2-5 years in prison. So he's looking at 10 years max, if he gets convicted with the charges as they stand.
What each individual misuse of the tracking was charged as a separate offense? What if the standard of proof for officer misconduct was drastically lowered, so that, for instance, they could be fired or incur significant financial penalties with a much quicker process? And if the full criminal process does go through, as far as I'm concerned, a police officer who misuses their position in this manner should probably be wearing an ankle monitor for the rest of their life and/or have to register in a manner similar to sex offenders. We are way too lenient with the punishments for misuse of authority.
Statistically, police officers are much more likely than your average person to be a perpetrator of domestic abuse
Random people at your workplace likely know others with access and use it to spy on their own coworkers. I know of cases where they report the smallest details to Human Resources.
Regular reminder that their CEO called Deflock a terrorist organization. I hope they go out of business and their cameras end up as e-waste.
If I'm a terrorist, I've not been a very good one to this point.
> Important subject
> Uses slop AI art
Fastest way to make something into a farce.
Sure but use a real photo and someone will come with a copyright claim. The AI photo is the safest option.
How about not using a photo at all if it’s not relevant to the article?
It's not even that hard to make AI output images that don't look like AI slop either, just have to use some "in the style of" or "as if it was taken with a film camera" types of modifiers. This is what confuses me about AI slop, not only did you use the lowest effort method, you didn't even put a minimal amount of effort into making it work well.
It's genuinely triggering rage to see this on a "serious" article.
This problem is 99% cops and 1% flock.
verkada (a building access systems company), had multiple incidents of stalking of employees by other employees, using their own installation in their own hq
none of them were cops
It's sort of 50/50.
No? A mass surveillance apparatus is a pretty enormous problem.