The best part is that flock owns the cameras and the poles so even when the contract expires the cameras keep running and recording data that flock can sell to e.g. CHP, LASD, FBI, Palantir; and LAPD can just call them and access the data
the flock scam was engineered to be resilient to political pressure by giving departments and jursidictions this fake exit ability while the data continues to be harvested, it is a noose that only tightens; the amount of flock cameras recording only ever goes up not down.
Yeah it's kinda crazy you can't legally take them down even if they are banned/contract expires. IKE Skelton, a county commissioner took it into his own hands and they were pressing felony charges on him. Not sure what ended up happening. Basically flock wouldn't respond to take them down, he felt it was his duty to remove them, he brought them back to his office, and then the state hunted him down.
I'm curious how they could prevent taking them down if the local gov doesn't renew the contract? Presumably they're installed under some works dept land/pole/utility access permits that allow them the space and electrical, which all goes away and requires their removal.
Sorry if this is answered in the pod, don't have time for it immediately.
Id have to re-listen as well for all the details. But I think this is slightly different than the headline here.
In this case, the county voted for an ordinance banning them. Ike was threatened saying your going to be charged this is potentially state property, he did a sunshine request to see that they were privately owned by flock. Then he requested flock take them down but they didn't. After a few months he decided he will enforce the ordinance as the sheriff refused too.
He took them down brought them to his office. Then later 5 state officers (4 in plain clothing, one in uniform) were looking for him at his house. He brought them to the cameras and said here have them back.
Still got charged with theft somehow...
Moral of the story, that doesn't really sound like democracy to me. That sounds like kinda the opposite of democracy.
Anyway it's worth a listen if you have time. This isn't how these things should go and shows there is a little more than meets the eye here. Even if citizens perfectly execute democracy, these things may not budge. And there is a larger net of protection keeping these in place.
> I'm curious how they could prevent taking them down if the local gov doesn't renew the contract?
IANAL but based on the facts available to me, they can't. It's a sham held up by intimidating local officials. The cameras were installed on public property, that's that.
If they somehow keep this nonsense running for very long, I'd anticipate a Meigs Field-esque incident at some point.
You can definitely take the cameras down. We did, there was zero drama.
On the other hand, it wouldn't be surprising if a single county commissioner got in trouble for just deciding by fiat to take civic infrastructure down himself. That's not a power county commissioners have. Was there a county board vote authorizing that action?
In this case, law enforcement selectively enforced local laws. So the commissioner exhausted his options. And flock didn't seem to be bothered by breaking the local laws and their action was inaction.
So what else are you suppose to do? I think it's reasonable to decide that if no one is enforcing the new local law, that it may be the commissioners purview and authority to enforce after exhausting all his options.
Charging the commissioner with felony theft is clearly just bullying at that point.
> In January of 2024, the Camden County Commission passed a county ordinance banning the use of all automated license plate readers in the county (a 2023 ordinance had banned all static license plate readers, but the 2024 ordinance expanded that to include all automated license plate readers). In that ordinance, commissioners cited "numerous complaints" about the cameras "and the potential of unwarranted/inappropriate monitoring of its citizens [sic] freedom of movement and travel in violation of their right of privacy, unreasonable search and seizure and other constitutionally protected rights[.]"
> The ordinance also stated, "Any Automated License Plate Readers currently in violation of this Ordinance shall be immediately removed. If identification of ownership is listed on any such device, the listed owner shall be notified to remove said device. Any device not removed within 30 days of notification to remove said device may be removed by Order of the Camden County Commission."
My understanding of this case was that the commissioner was charged with theft because even though the county had an ordinance requiring flock to take the cameras down, and they had failed to do so, it was not lawful for him to remove them himself and then take possession of them because they were the property of Flock.
And final re: in many if not most of these cases the jurisdictions don't actually want to take the cameras down, they just want public pressure to let up a bit, and agencies are known to share flock data between each other, so law enforcement, the public, and lobbyists are all made happy by terminating the contract without removing the cameras, it is the smart thing to do politically.
What gives them the right to install and operate those cameras? I would have assumed that the license for placing them on public property was inherently linked to the services they provided to the local government.
But if it's not tied to that, does that mean that anyone can install cameras anywhere? What grounds would they have to give permits to Flock while refusing them to other interested parties, like StalkingMyEx LLC. and CopTrack Corp.?
I don't have the answer, but I wonder if they are considered a utility and operate on utility easements. Then we have to look at the county and state, too.
On the other side, I've read they operate a considerable number of private installations, too. Even that is suspect, too, in that there is existing case law affirming that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in "the whole of their public movements."
No, the right-of-way is not anything-goes. The property is legally owned by the deed holder of the real property thru which it passes, but practically the right-of-way is managed and maintained by the jurisdiction claiming the right-of-way, i.e. municipal, county, state government agencies. Installations need to be permitted by the agency.
IANAL, but making some assumptions to fill in gaps, it seems they are avoiding having to comply with CCPA and other privacy laws like this: they harvest camera data and retain the images probably forever, but only turn it into identifying data on demand for customers. So you really do have to go talk to the customer, because Flock never "has" any identifying data about anyone, they just have anonymous images that when mixed with a model happen to produce identifying data.
This allows them to promise that they don't keep any data and have strict retention policies etc. to jurisdictions that are on the fence or where the contract-purchasers are constrained by law in some way, but they can transfer identifying information at any point in the future to any customer, by mixing raw data and a model.
> but only turn it into identifying data on demand for customers.
How could this seriously hold legal weight? The data is identifiable. Just because it’s gated by some transformation doesn’t mean they are magically not holding my identifiable information.
Is there any realistic road to having them outlawed nationwide? Eg, ignoring probabilities here, could a wildly successful grassroots program where it became an issue as politically salient as immigration or abortion eventually lead to legislation banning them?
A national ban is unlikely to happen. Big companies like Flock are incredibly experienced at paying off enough of the Congress to stop legislation they don't like. You're better off trying to focus your efforts on your local municipalities and the state.
Dane County, Wisconsin Sheriff's Office took steps to prevent unauthorized surveillance.
"With the contract set to expire on May 31st, the Sheriff’s Office informed Flock Safety that all 26 cameras must be removed by that date. When removal did not occur, the Sheriff’s Office took steps to ensure the cameras were not in use and placed covers over them."
With Marc Andreessen, the boy from rural Wisconsin, major investor and ambassador of Flock Safety, now part of the federal government, expect the number of Flock civil surveillance systems to increase even more.
The Flock contract I read from Oak Park, where we designed what I think are the country's most restrictive ALPR rules and ultimately took our cameras down, did not allow Flock to continue running, recording, and selling data after we turned the cameras off. In fact: they explicitly didn't allow them to sell the data at all. Can I ask where you got this idea from?
Just out of curiosity: doesn't the US have any laws against private surveillance of public spaces? As a European I find this quite irritating (not saying we do not have problems as well with more and more cams installed and risks related to an increasing number of e.g. parking lot cams)
I'm not a lawyer and I think this varies state by state, but I think that in general anyone is allowed to record in public spaces.
I think the general idea is that if you could (legally) go stand in that public space (sidewalks, roads, parks) and watch something happen then you're allowed to record what you see.
This is probably good - I think it's the basis of being able to record misbehavior (by private citizens and/or the police), for example.
In contrast you're generally not allowed to record stuff happening in a private space unless everyone's been informed that this will happen.
This is why you'll see signs saying "Warning - this place is under surveillance" signs on every single door going into a corporation that wants to use security cameras.
This norm around privacy was kinda set before the concept of mass surveillance became a thing, though. Maybe we should revisit it and rethink what privacy means.
People shouldn't expect privacy in public, sure. They should expect they may be overheard or witnessed. But that's not really equivalent to mass surveillance and long-term recording
"You should not expect privacy in public" does not imply "you should expect no privacy and you should expect everything you do is recorded and stored forever"
Can they? Does anyone know the terms of these contracts? Does flock just look the other way if a licensee just gives away the data to some other entity without getting a fee for it? I can see arguments on both sides from flock's perspective, i.e., revenue vs lock-in.
I didn’t know this but it’s the kind of stuff our tax dollars pay for and ultimately why I’m so disgruntled about the high taxes we pay - especially in the middle class
No problem paying taxes - my entire gripe is with what what the moneys spent on
The US has below average middle class tax rates. But luckily we can just choose what our tax dollars are spent on through democracy! The main problem is nobody agrees about anything and lots of people are really dumb and can't handle the responsibility of electing competent people into government.
This is naïve. The US government is less democratic than advertised, and there are many factors for that. Not going to write a tome, but if you're going to point a finger at one group, it shouldn't be private citizens.
>The best part is that flock owns the cameras and the poles so even when the contract expires the cameras keep running and recording data that flock can sell
if the cameras continue recording, LA can subpoena those recordings on an as needed basis.
I don't understand flock cameras in high crime areas. Every time somebody commits a heinous crime it's always like "they were arrested 72 times and were well known by the police"
What's the point in helping the police catch criminals when they don't do anything after the fact!
Have you ever looked in who is the police? How they become police in first place? Like how police even started to be police in the first place. Is quite a ride and I can see many similarities to organized gangs.
Why do you think the government couldn’t collect this information themselves? ALPRs are legal, cameras covering a public roadway are legal, and the 4th amendment doesn’t extend to driving on a public roadway.
Could the government set up 80,000 cameras to spy on everyone? No, they are not aloud to create dragnets or conduct mass surveillance. They need warrants.
It obvious this should be the case, but when you dump billions of dollars getting around 4th amendment protections, lets just say it takes awhile to close the loopholes.
This wouldn't even help anyway. Flock sells to law enforcement, sure, but they also sell data to everyone else who wants to know everything about everyone.
I'm not defending flock, and have mixed feelings on the matter due to having personal experience with flock. My neighborhood was being hit by sophisticated robberies one after another. Police could not catch the guys. The police confirmed that it was a Tren de Aruagua operation. They would buy cars mainly BMWs off Facebook marketplace. Go rob a house and sell the car within 24-48 hours. Our neighborhood had cameras, but by manually going through the footage to find what was relevant, it was too late. After working with the police, the HOA decided to install a flock camera set at each entrance. Once it was installed, which was over a year ago, we haven't had a break in since. I know they are tracking my car going in and out but my phone and car also do this. Objectively, my neighborhood is less private but more safe. I think if I had to choose, this would be my choice. I wish I could have a safe and private neighborhood, but this isn't the world we live in.
Why couldn't the police, who you pay taxes to, do their jobs? Apparently a sophisticated robbery ring was operating with a well understood MO in a predictable location and the police couldn't figure out how to use those facts to effect an arrest?
Instead of "protecting" one neighborhood by installing privately owned surveillance devices, seems like the police could have just sat there, waited for a BMW full of Tren de Araugua gangsters to show up and arrest them.
In what world is this the reasonable course of action that was arrived at with the police.
Nothing about OP's story sounds plausible or reasonable. The criminal gangs are magically afraid of flock cameras but not any other kind of surveillance? They had footage of the crooks but it took too long to evaluate it, and yet the cops knew exactly which gang was doing it?
Do you need flock to do this for you, though? I have cameras around my property, and they catch everyone entering and leaving my subdivision. If the police need access to the recordings, they can get a court order or ask nicely. What I don't do, is share the feeds with everyone willy-nilly so the police can cast wide dragnets and do god-knows-what-else with the data.
By the time you get a court order. The trail has gone cold at least that's what the police said at our HOA meetings. Maybe they're getting paid by big money to say these things but these were not head of police people. Low levels coming to HOA meetings.
Presumably a victim of a crime would provide the footage without a court order. A court order would be more applicable if it caught something unrelated to the actual property the camera was on.
There is a difference between this situation, a targeted install in a problem situation, and hundreds of thousands of these cameras at every intersection in the country
Also, Flock cameras are not just on roads. Many institutions use them for surveillance inside buildings. There is a community center in Atlanta that has them and there is evidence that random people with access to all Atlanta area cameras, including Flock employees and police officers in other jurisdictions, were watching juveniles at the pool. More than one deputy at a suburban Atlanta sheriff's department has been fired for abusing Flock cameras to track romantic interests
Like everything else in this country we've taken something that has a useful purpose when used in a limited, controlled fashion and pushed it to the maximum extreme. We can't do anything based on nuance anymore
Something of consideration: Flock cameras were installed after discussions across the HOA and local police department, after a multiple crimes happened in an area. So long as a discussion about the lifetime of the cameras is raised eventually, this sounds like a measured and reasonable use of surveillance.
There is still something to be said about the lack of alignment between Flock the company and the HOA as to how that data is used, but the compromise was explicit, and there was at least some coordination within the community. At the heart of the issue with automatic surveillance is the lack of accountability over those who retain the data and the lack of consent of those surveilled, and measures were taken to address one of those two within your community.
Yes, it's a nice catch phrase. Would you say that after a Tren de Aeagua gang member stole all your crap? At least I'm free you say. I don't think we've been free in the US for a long time. My tax bill says I'm in bondage.
There is a lot of middle ground between ">100k cameras tracking the movement of every vehicle in the country and retaining those data indefinitely" and "cameras in a private neighborhood in response to a specific crime wave".
This is such a bizarre story, each detail more absurd and ridiculous than the last, that I can't believe HN is falling for it.
Honestly there are a number of incredibly weird comments like this throughout the discussion. Is Flock astroturfing every discussion about the company?
I don't believe it. I mean, you might, but the story is fantastical nonsense.
Ignoring that the police "confirmed" suspects that they didn't catch, or that you claim the police would need a "court order" to look at cameras the HOA would own (and which require absolutely zero involvement of flock, with the enormous downsides that dystopian, busted company brings), or that you cited "manually going through footage" like it's 1997 and not 2026 where every security system flags every event -- car, person, line crossing -- with instant-accessible timestamps, the biggest problem with your comment is that gangs do not care about security cameras.
The preventative effect of cameras on such activity hovers around 0%. This ridiculous tale that a flock camera was a magic no crime shield is simply nonsensical.
Again, you might actually believe this. You might have misheard some things and come away with this impression. But it's ridiculous.
I'm a big fan of privately controlled, limited access-guarded and audited cameras, understanding that they're useful post facto to figure out what happened, and sometimes to catch criminals (but catching illegal immigrant SCARY GANG NAME criminals, usually in stolen cars and with masks...lol...utterly useless), but your post is 100% selling the tiger repellent rock, and it's simply incredible if anyone actually falls for that.
Flock's effect on crime has mostly been to increase it, by allowing sexual predator cops to stalk random women.
>This ridiculous tale that a flock camera was a magic no crime shield is simply nonsensical.
I was confused as well. I thought the next beat on the story after the camera was installed was going to be "and the next time the guys struck they were found within the day" or something, not "and the camera repelled the robbers somehow".
Are there any privacy-first security camera provider where it's the city that manages data access and uses it purely for local law enforcement purposes?
I wonder why we aren't addressing the real problem which seems to be cops behaving completely unethically. Their job is about enforcing the system that codifies our societies agreed up and codified rules of ethics. They should be obsessed with this the same way people here obsess over system performance, correctness, etc! If we cannot trust them with the very basics of ethical behavior they are absolutely in the wrong job and there need to be very clear consequences.
Because finding people that are 100% ethical is extremely difficult. Even if we are wildly optimistic and say 20% of the population is 100% ethical. You aren't likely to weed out unethical people, so you are hiring people, training them, and then firing them 4 out of 5 of them. There are many cases where an experienced but occasionally unethical worker is better than an unexperienced but ethical worker. When faced with this dilemma it is likely that more police debts would simply cheat or cover up police abuses to retain valuable staff or staff at all.
The solution is not making humans more virtuous but reducing the capability and the harm done that unethical humans can do.
> If we cannot trust them with the very basics of ethical behavior they are absolutely in the wrong job and there need to be very clear consequences.
Police should not be trusted because they are police. There should be audits and controls that prevent abuse and unethical behavior. Small unethical behaviors should result in corrective measures but not termination, since when the punishment becomes too great you create incentives for cover ups or scapegoats. A small number of minor punishments, that catch people as soon as they step over the line, functions better as a deterrent than a large scale punishments that are unlikely to be actually enforced. Granted if a police officer does a major crime, they should face serious consequences, but the goal should be to creating a system that makes major crimes by police less likely. If they know they will get caught for minor crimes, they are less likely to commit bigger crimes.
It's not possible. Whether it's a city government, judges, cops, schoolteachers, or clergy... some number of people are unethical. Trying to pretend otherwise is a source of a lot of problems. The best way to avoid it is to make it impossible, i.e. in this case don't collect the camera data in the first place. Once it is collected, it will eventually be abused no matter who has control of it.
The problem is simple: qualified immunity has become a blank check. The officer can simply claim they didn't know the law. They somehow can't be expected to understand basic constitutional protections.
Qualified immunity is more nuanced. It allows the first offense to be absolved but it works like legal precedent where future offenses by _any law enforcement officer_ is not covered.
Now there’s plenty of loopholes where you can craft “unique defenses” based on nearly identical underlying offenses. But it’s important to have the distinction
How many instances of are there of qualified immunity actually resulting in an officer being found liable because of past precedent where someone else was considered to have had qualified immunity in the same circumstances? If it's not anywhere close to the number of times when they were found to be immune, then the distinction is theoretical only, and it's arguably more misleading to emphasize it as if it's a real limitation.
Cameras do address that problem. We live in a country where people go to jail for life because two witnesses they swear they saw pookie shoot dee dee. Where cops beat the hell out of citizens and say they were resisting arrest.
That Pookie can show a video from a flock camera showing him somewhere else is a massive boost to his civil liberties. Same with whatever poor sap gets beat by the cops.
> If you hold police accountable, they respond by refusing to work. That's a problem that, at this time, has no solution
Of course it does. You dissolve the police department and create a new one. New York did it twice, first replacing the city-controlled Municipals with the state-controlled Metropolitans [1], and then in 1870 creating the NYPD [2].
> they respond by refusing to work. That's a ~~problem~~ solution that, at this time, has no ~~solution~~ problem.
If a police department reuses to accept accountability, and dig in their heels by refusing to work, "just" dissolve it. And while at it, half the calls could be handled by folks without guns.
In practice that obviously would not go over well, people are too attached to the status quo. We just lack the political will to rethink and retool the system (despite most Americans favoring police reform).
> half the calls could be handled by folks without guns
This can't be emphasized enough. A lot of enforcement and "civil order" work does not require guns, and in many cases (e.g., mental health crises), they're the wrong people to be engaged to resolve.
I think one of the biggest issues with policing is that they are supported by the "law and order" crowd, which is a euphemism for keeping "others" in their place.
I swear to god that "Defund the police" was an inside job to discredit police reform by turning it into an all or nothing proposition and that's not gonna fly.
Oakland CA has serious crime problems because there's "not enough" policing and a lot of people are emboldened to do all the crime they want because nobody's there to stop them. One of many articles on this: https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/oakland-business-o...
I believe there are some fundamental changes to the system that could correct a lot of this:
1. End the War on Drugs. It's literally designed to create crime and it's low hanging fruit for cops to focus on rather than real crime.
2. Legalize and regulate sex work. Like drugs, this is a moral issue and by driving it underground it's designed to create more crime. Regulate and monitor the fuck out of it to minimize opportunities for sex trafficking. It's also a favored low-hanging fruit for cops to bust.
3. Use social workers for mental health emergencies and have the cops notified for possible backup
4. Invest in housing/mental health/rehab services and get the homeless off the streets
5. Revisit the legal system to avoid catch and release scenarios (though most of it is #1 and #2). If the cops are busting the same people over and over again that disincentives them to even bother
6. Fix qualified immunity and put some teeth into it. We should never simply take the officer's word for anything without some sort of proof (like leaving their body cams on).
7. Make the police self-insured backed by their pension fund. They have no skin in the game and municipalities pay out vast sums of money for the misdeeds of officers.
In other countries, cops may carry guns, but if those guns are ever fired, there is an investigation to ensure it was fired for a very good reason. Those places still have cops.
They also have months or years of cop training, not weeks.
It's easy to say these anti-capitalistic platitudes, but do you really want to live in a society where the concept of private ownership is not supported by the state?
Society is not starting at zero right now, it has developed for 10.000 years with many genocidal wars. As a result, 1% of the population has achieved generational wealth due to some sort of "value creation" by their ancestors.
Through trial and error and a lot of violence, humanity has noticed that with free trade and free enterprise, the welfare of everyone else can significantly improve (toilets, food, entertainment), while the overall amount of violence significantly decreases.
Because when people put their money where their mouth is, capital can be allocated much more efficient than through other means (e.g. the King of England forcing a levy and centrally deciding what industry to invest it).
The only problem with this model is deflation, because if there is no incentive to deploy capital, then the overall pie shrinks and people start fighting about keeping their shares. That's why central banks talk about target inflation rates of 2%, because purchasing power of your hoarded capital needs to shrink in order to incentivize you to use your capital in a productive way, which also increases the overall pie for society.
The main thing one can criticize about generational wealth such as Trump, Epstein, Musk or Thiel is the fact that they have to lie about its existence, and keep up a charade of "I'm self-made" due to their low self esteem.
The alternatives are always worse for the common person. I'd rather have Trump, Epstein, Musk and Thiel than even bigger capital concentration like it was with the British crown and the Catholic church in their full bloom.
Ideally, those figures would also follow the moral code of the rest of society, but still it's much better than their parents who did crazy shit in Africa only 50 years ago, or the crown and the catholic inquisition a couple hundred years ago.
The government is not a monolith. Being owned by the city doesn't have to mean the cops are in control. The municipality can determin by law exactly who operates the infrastructure, who has access to what, what process they must follow, and how that all will be monitored and enforced. "The government didn't handle this well, therefore they can't be trusted for anything like it again" is a misunderstanding of how governments are constructed and how power can be separated between legislatively mandated structures. Find the source of the abuse, then build a structure to check that abuse.
Do we genuinely, really need a mass surveillance network? Isn't the expansion of surveillance through increasing prevalence of technology already way too much? Police can real-time track almost anyone if they have a warrant as it is, thanks to the magic of modern cell phones. We didn't even have time to discuss whether that was a good status quo before it became normal. Are we really sure we want to expand this to a massive network of cameras?
I get that it helps solve crimes, but solving crime is not the end-all-be-all of improving society. If anything, it's a highly symptom-oriented solution, and we absolutely have plenty of levers we could be trying to pull if we wanted to prevent crime instead.
Forget whether one global surveillance network is more trustworthy than another global surveillance network for a minute. Do we want this at all?
Hmm. Personally, I disagree; I'd prefer to outlaw it explicitly. That's just my opinion, but I think that regulation has failed to keep up with the pace of technology and we've essentially lost the effect of some constitutional protections.
Sadly this was the entire lesson of Marbury v Madison, and the courts are supposed to be the mechanism that brings the hammer down on things that clearly violate the constitution where legislation has not yet arrived, but the courts are completely failing to protect us from what are obviously 4th amendment violations writ large on the entire nation, absurd.
I don't necessarily disagree, but I also don't think that it makes sense to wait to address the immediate issue of a private company centralizing the surveillance until there's sufficient political will for that (which realistically might not ever happen).
The large distribution of silo'ed law enforcement across the US is one of the driving reasons why it can be so hard to solve crimes (murder, vehicular theft, etc). Once any crime has the potential to cross state or even jurisdiction lines, dealing with the inner-bureaucracy of crossed enforcement agencies adds days to weeks to solving urgent crimes.
A distributed system without consideration into how to coalesce the data together is no better of a solution vs what we have today.
I would like to see some evidence of this demonstrated. I feel a large majority of high-profile cases that went unsolved for a long time most often hinged on incompetence or negligence rather than lack of information sharing.
Also, once crime does cross state lines the local FBI gets involved and they have a lot more resources than a small-town police force
Agreed, and more than that, those siloes are governed by democratic processes. Of course, democracy doesn't preclude abuse but it's a lot better than private governance.
I want local cameras that require physical connections to offload data. Camera access panels can be locked with a wireless system that publishes the access timestamp and details to the city’s website. Each access must correspond with signed warrant.
If my family gets kidnapped, I want a department to be able to check a camera. I’ll wait for the judge’s signature.
But that’s night & day from today’s reality. I simply cannot stand being recorded to the cloud by a creepy corporation everywhere I drive in California with just about no oversight.
A better designed system could be driven by warrants issued by courts, without (or at least minimal) access to individual officers.
It requires better access controls.
Even invasive ideas like automated license plate scanning city-wide can have its data only accessible to an API to eg, track a stolen car across the city to avoid a dangerous high-speed chase in populated areas.
I think to throw the baby out with the bathwater around networked security cameras is failure around designing robust and secure APIs and systems (including audit trails).
Bars on windows and cages on retail goods, gated driveways, armed security at anything of importance, etc, etc, are a heck of a lot cheaper in the long run than a 1984 police state.
The difference is that the government has rules and limitations on the data they collection. Meanwhile for-profit corporations operate under an obligation to make as much money as possible for the shareholders.
flock shares the data with other cities and jurisdictions a little more easily, and also flock workers can see your videos. That's some amount of extra abuse potential?
The one who owns the data is the one who should be responsible to provide proper guardrails in certain cases if not all, specially like these ones. It comes down to the fine line around business, rules and regulations. The motivation of business is to make most profit with least cost and implementing regulatory mechanisms are cost. Abuses are natural to happen in the absence of guardrails and audits.
The purchasers of the cameras, ie HOAs, law enforcement, etc, own the data. They are also the ones routinely caught abusing this. This is a real problem that should be dealt with by enforcing laws against the people improperly using the data.
I'm not sure what a realistic solution is for Flock to try and manage data they do not own nor if it makes sense for them to deny access to data they are not the owners of.
This is false. the HOAs and LEOS have access to the data. Even if the contract specifies that the data is owned by these organizations, they are not the true owners.
You don't need to trust them. You can request information as allowed under FOIA and vote the mayor out in the next election if there is any sign of misuse.
And another common claimed abuse of Flock data is cops using it to stalk people in other cities, other states, and across the country.
The potential for abuse rises with the number of people who have access to that data, regardless of who they work for. Restricting access strictly to users in the municipality under contract reduces the number of people with access and thereby mitigates some abuse vectors.
Also, there's plenty of past incidents of cops abusing their access to state and federal databases for the same kinds of purposes.
The profession attracts individuals who are willing to abuse power for their own purposes. That's not to say that every cop is in the job to abuse power, but many are, and we have to build our law enforcement structures in a way that directly acknowledges and addresses this fact.
The problem with Flock is its continued existence as part of the surveillance state. Like guns or bombs, these are things with one intent, and that intent is always ALWAYS bad as the resource is inevitably concentrated in the hands of a few to control the many.
Garrett would acknowledge being inspired by Minority Report, ignoring the message of it as a cautionary tale. Hell, he's even said that to him, a false positive in Flock is better than a false negative, which is a hell of a hot take in our current climate.
Because there's a more robust legal framework for curtailing the inevitable abuse when the government does it than when it's done via the "oops our contractor who's a private company" slight of hand.
Same basic reason I'd rather have the cops after me than have the environmental/zoning/whatever civil enforcement jerks after me. There's just sooooo much more scrutiny (which really says a lot considering how bad the cops are).
Said by someone who's clearly never tangled with civil enforcement.
Nearly your rights go out the window when it's non-criminal prosecution. The organizations also aren't nearly as robustly structured to limit damage by "bad apples" as real police departments are.
I know this sounds insane in light of how bad the cops are. That's because it is. Civil enforcement is essentially 50yr behind policing when it comes to transparency and accountability.
I think Flock is probably the worst solution besides all the rest. They seem to be the most auditable and accountable. The fact that anyone even knows the service and founder is a testament to accountability.
Lol, what totalitarian nightmare do we live in that this is your standard for acceptability when it comes to mass surveillance. “Well fellas, atleast we know whats happening and look here’s the name of the guy in charge, I mean how bad it could be?”
Yes guys if you don’t like flock please please please just send a dm to the ceo with your social media account, or you can send him a letter in the mail, just dont send some anonymous crap he doesnt like that just use your real name and address or your social media handle and just go ahead and send him a message and let him know how ya feel. Flock loves to know how it’s customers are feeling, and will definitely keep a ticket open for any unsatisfied customers with your name and how to contact you so they can fix it.
You do realize that we have "executives" in most government jurisdictions as well? And that there are actual mechanism for changing who they are that you have the ability to take part in as a citizen, which is not a privilege afforded to everyone under surveillance by these systems for the CEO of Flock?
(Yes, I know that shareholders have the ability to vote on board proposals as well, but even if you think those mechanisms are equivalent, there's a pretty huge difference between "if you buy stock, you get the right to vote" and "you have inherent human rights including but not limited to the ones enumerated by a written constitution")
> The fact that anyone even knows the service and founder is a testament to accountability.
As opposed to their mayor/governor/president, who they not only can easily find out who it is if they don't already, but can also vote out (and who often will have term limits)?
Lmao not remotely. Their security is a joke. Axon's evidence system at least has concepts of security. Flock has had numerous high publicity security failures (see: Benn Jordan's work with 404 media).
A lot of the "don't tread on me" is window dressing.
Peter Thiel and his ilk absolutely adore what China has done. You have an elite - in this case, the CCP - that is entitled to their position by law. It bills itself as the "best and brightest" of society and has ideological constraints that it gets to impose on its members through the cadre system. The rest of the population labors for the benefit of this elite with little-to-no input on the operation of the ruling class.
That's what Thiel wants, just with his kind in the positions of power. It'd eliminate any opposition to what they imagine as the "right" way of doing things and reduce the friction to the creation of economic value for their holdings.
Note that "friction" in this case means things like human rights, democracy, competition, workers rights, etc.
Salem, Oregon, assembled its own using OpenALPR and an on-prem server. There are plenty of reasonable criticisms of that approach too, but it's currently the farthest thing from Flock on the municipal mass-surveillance tech scale bar that I'm aware of.
"The system does not utilize facial recognition and does not have automated functions, such as automatically running license plates through the state Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) or Law Enforcement Data System (LEDS) databases. All license plates must still be verified by an investigator and then individually queried through the appropriate database."
This sounds like a lot more than your average flock installation at a local PD
It's astonishing to me that the largest tech hubs in the world do not have the money to invest in developing a camera system that is sovereignly owned by the city. There are a lot of very talented engineers who would work on a project like this.
Also simply putting a person in between the information would certainly reduce the profile for abuse with stalking and harassing people
do not have the money to invest in developing a camera system that is sovereignly owned by the city
That would render the city liable for handling the data which is already politically volatile. In America, if it's a commercial entity doing it then there is no liability and you can just fold the company if something bad happens.
And in reality, it's a handwave. The city will refer you to Flock, and then Flock will cancel the contract, but leave the cameras up, so now there's no customer. Funny that.
that's not privacy-first. There's no such thing as privacy-first surveillance. How can Americans spend so much time criticizing surveillance states only to build the world's largest
I'd say most are hosted first, Milestone, Genetec, Avigilon, etc. They all sell software to host feeds from your own standardized cams (Axis, Hanwah, Samsung, etc) via h.264/mpeg. The cloud hosted CCTV at scale is relatively recent.
Any number of companies sell cameras and recorders both on-premise and cloud stored which are managed entirely by the customer. Most security cameras you see on any given building work this way, and most such camera systems also support features like LPR (license plate recognition). Most of the time you're on your own to sort out connectivity and power though.
What Flock is selling is the whole package: The hardware (including power, networking, and the pole), the software, the infrastructure, the logic design, the connectivity. For someone who doesn't want to operate and support a wide area network of IoT devices, you can see why "just give them money to watch your streets" looks appealing.
Does it say how many cameras the LAPD pays for or if they are getting rid of the flock software from their org? Folks conflate this a lot but often times most regions have a substantial number of private flock deployments, city owned, rarely directly with the police.
Police get access to software no costs (AFAIK) for BOLO alerts on tags.
This is good. But unfortunately it doesn't mean the Flock cameras will be removed because the city doesn't own them. Flock does. And Flock will likely want to keep them there. In other cities when the contract is canceled or let expire Flock prevented those cities from removing the cameras. Some had to resort to covering them with trash bags because they could not legally remove them. This happened in Dayton, Ohio and many other cities. https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/cities-covering-flock-surv...
> "Some locals have taken matters into their own hands by dismantling Flock cameras and covering them with trash bags"
This techcrunch article incorrectly characterizes this need and required behavior as something done by random citizens. But it is actually the cities themselves having to resort to it, totally officially and legally, because of Flock behaving badly.
Aren't the cameras on city's land or did city lease the land to Flock? If they are on city's land couldn't city require that Flock removes their stuff from city's property or city will do it on Flock's expense?
I've seen videos of flock cameras installed improperly (missing a breakaway device) right next to roads. The city must be able to remove unsafe devices!
Presumably the license to surveil the city is extended to flock by the city? Presumably they should be able to compel them to disable them, and provide proof of this (whether they’re trusted or not…)
are they on land flock owns though? I don't think I could go put up a camera on city infrastructure like traffic lights without their permission. does flock buy a lot of little permissions to install and power their cameras or something?
I assure you that if I slapped a camera on city infrastructure they would absolutely find some license or permission that I don't have and threaten me with a million+ dollar fine over it.
Thanks !! It is so easy to assume that ending contract means turning off the cameras. Hopefully ciities can fight back harder for them to remove them, specially when people don't want that surveillance.
I don't know, I'd prefer cops have access to technology that helps them apprehend criminals and enforce the law. Better audits and accountability are the solution, not removing technology.
I do not want to live in a society that is under 24/7 surveillance. Of course, if the cops can watch everything you do all the time, there will be less crime. But that is not a sacrifice I’m willing to make.
> if the cops can watch everything you do all the time, there will be less crime
I disagree there. If cops watch us at all times then more crimes will be prosecuted, think they'll just sit bored with nothing happening? They will find things, real or not.
The reality is that crime is way down, we do not need more enforcement. Leave us alone already.
https://www.opencrime.us/years
What planet do you live on? Go to a low crime neighborhood. Cops are super friendly and basically spend their day happily helping old ladies cross the street or getting cats down from trees.
If you think cops like cracking heads and dealing with petty crime that they'll just invent otherwise and use to harass people, you're out of your mind. You really need to get out more.
You're right and wrong. The first paragraph is absolutely accurate -- I live near some of these areas (SW Connecticut) and the contrast is stark.
The second is not. There are absolutely people who take pleasure in the bullying behavior cops are often associated with. They're the ones who want the cushy jobs in Greenwich but don't get them (probably for the aforementioned reasons in many cases) and wind up being doubly punitive and cruel to people in Bridgeport.
Police body cameras have completely dispelled this notion and are a god-send to the vast majority of police officers that want to do good work. So much so the left has turned against them
>Go to a low crime neighborhood. Cops are super friendly and basically spend their day happily helping old ladies cross the street or getting cats down from trees.
>If you think cops like cracking heads
They adore getting to crack heads. That's the entire reason they became cops. They love being able to use their power, rightfully or not, they don't really care.
Thats not necessary. They have the loving embrace of Nest cameras connected directly to Google. Gladly share footage when there's a string of property crimes. Whats your point?
I'll take shifting crime as long as it's away from me.
Camera's 100% prevent crime because you catch the bad guy, and in a sane society lock the person up so he can no longer commit crime. See how that works?
I don't think this is true. With the advent of body cameras, cellphones with cameras and FOIA requests you can build a good case if someone violates your rights. The bigger issues are that there is little to no consequence of a flagrant violation of rights because the police union is VERY protective over its members.
The ability to make a case is directly related to how much free time you have and how much money you are able to spend.
We cannot just wave this away when the vast majority of people cannot take off time from work or afford to hire attorneys when their rights are violated.
I think you should have the liberty to do both but there should be no reason for anyone to do so. Your two instances are happening because that's what available for them.
They should hire some juniors to patch together analysis with local LLMs and do that on an as needed basis to avoid the creepiness. Networks of cameras remain a highly powerful way of holding evildoers accountable.
The best part is that flock owns the cameras and the poles so even when the contract expires the cameras keep running and recording data that flock can sell to e.g. CHP, LASD, FBI, Palantir; and LAPD can just call them and access the data
the flock scam was engineered to be resilient to political pressure by giving departments and jursidictions this fake exit ability while the data continues to be harvested, it is a noose that only tightens; the amount of flock cameras recording only ever goes up not down.
Yeah it's kinda crazy you can't legally take them down even if they are banned/contract expires. IKE Skelton, a county commissioner took it into his own hands and they were pressing felony charges on him. Not sure what ended up happening. Basically flock wouldn't respond to take them down, he felt it was his duty to remove them, he brought them back to his office, and then the state hunted him down.
Here is a podcast about it. https://internationalflavor.podbean.com/e/the-surveillance-s...
I'm curious how they could prevent taking them down if the local gov doesn't renew the contract? Presumably they're installed under some works dept land/pole/utility access permits that allow them the space and electrical, which all goes away and requires their removal.
Sorry if this is answered in the pod, don't have time for it immediately.
Id have to re-listen as well for all the details. But I think this is slightly different than the headline here.
In this case, the county voted for an ordinance banning them. Ike was threatened saying your going to be charged this is potentially state property, he did a sunshine request to see that they were privately owned by flock. Then he requested flock take them down but they didn't. After a few months he decided he will enforce the ordinance as the sheriff refused too.
He took them down brought them to his office. Then later 5 state officers (4 in plain clothing, one in uniform) were looking for him at his house. He brought them to the cameras and said here have them back.
Still got charged with theft somehow...
Moral of the story, that doesn't really sound like democracy to me. That sounds like kinda the opposite of democracy.
Anyway it's worth a listen if you have time. This isn't how these things should go and shows there is a little more than meets the eye here. Even if citizens perfectly execute democracy, these things may not budge. And there is a larger net of protection keeping these in place.
Didn't know about sunshine request - the website[1] - until I searched for this term!
[1]: https://www.sunshinerequest.com/
Im not sure if there is a way to verify that the one he is talking about, but for public records request muckrock is great.
https://www.muckrock.com
Moral of the story: never talk to the police. Even if your yourself are police.
> I'm curious how they could prevent taking them down if the local gov doesn't renew the contract?
IANAL but based on the facts available to me, they can't. It's a sham held up by intimidating local officials. The cameras were installed on public property, that's that.
If they somehow keep this nonsense running for very long, I'd anticipate a Meigs Field-esque incident at some point.
If Flock can put them up, can I/my city just decide to put signs or lasers in front of the cameras?
There's instagram stories of people riding around destroying them, so yes, it's possible.
Or just cut the power?
You can definitely take the cameras down. We did, there was zero drama.
On the other hand, it wouldn't be surprising if a single county commissioner got in trouble for just deciding by fiat to take civic infrastructure down himself. That's not a power county commissioners have. Was there a county board vote authorizing that action?
In this case, law enforcement selectively enforced local laws. So the commissioner exhausted his options. And flock didn't seem to be bothered by breaking the local laws and their action was inaction.
So what else are you suppose to do? I think it's reasonable to decide that if no one is enforcing the new local law, that it may be the commissioners purview and authority to enforce after exhausting all his options.
Charging the commissioner with felony theft is clearly just bullying at that point.
> So what else are you suppose to do?
File a civil suit and get a court order for their removal.
re: the commisioner:
> In January of 2024, the Camden County Commission passed a county ordinance banning the use of all automated license plate readers in the county (a 2023 ordinance had banned all static license plate readers, but the 2024 ordinance expanded that to include all automated license plate readers). In that ordinance, commissioners cited "numerous complaints" about the cameras "and the potential of unwarranted/inappropriate monitoring of its citizens [sic] freedom of movement and travel in violation of their right of privacy, unreasonable search and seizure and other constitutionally protected rights[.]"
> The ordinance also stated, "Any Automated License Plate Readers currently in violation of this Ordinance shall be immediately removed. If identification of ownership is listed on any such device, the listed owner shall be notified to remove said device. Any device not removed within 30 days of notification to remove said device may be removed by Order of the Camden County Commission."
My understanding of this case was that the commissioner was charged with theft because even though the county had an ordinance requiring flock to take the cameras down, and they had failed to do so, it was not lawful for him to remove them himself and then take possession of them because they were the property of Flock.
https://www.lakeexpo.com/news/politics/felony-charges-droppe...
Re: zero drama taking down cameras, there has been quite a bit of drama:
https://www.wmtv15news.com/2026/06/05/dane-county-covers-flo...
https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/cities-covering-flock-surv...
https://dailynorthwestern.com/2025/09/28/top-stories/flock-c...
https://www.newsfromthestates.com/article/verona-has-waited-...
And final re: in many if not most of these cases the jurisdictions don't actually want to take the cameras down, they just want public pressure to let up a bit, and agencies are known to share flock data between each other, so law enforcement, the public, and lobbyists are all made happy by terminating the contract without removing the cameras, it is the smart thing to do politically.
What gives them the right to install and operate those cameras? I would have assumed that the license for placing them on public property was inherently linked to the services they provided to the local government.
But if it's not tied to that, does that mean that anyone can install cameras anywhere? What grounds would they have to give permits to Flock while refusing them to other interested parties, like StalkingMyEx LLC. and CopTrack Corp.?
I don't have the answer, but I wonder if they are considered a utility and operate on utility easements. Then we have to look at the county and state, too.
On the other side, I've read they operate a considerable number of private installations, too. Even that is suspect, too, in that there is existing case law affirming that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in "the whole of their public movements."
They’re not utility. But you don’t have to be a utility to construct in the right-of-way.
Good point. Then, if the contract lapses, who is responsible for that infrastructure? Does flock have to tear it down?
No, the right-of-way is not anything-goes. The property is legally owned by the deed holder of the real property thru which it passes, but practically the right-of-way is managed and maintained by the jurisdiction claiming the right-of-way, i.e. municipal, county, state government agencies. Installations need to be permitted by the agency.
IANAL but if this is actually true then they're violating California law.
I submitted a CCPA request to them to give me and delete everything they had on me.
Their response is that they own no data, and I have to make the request to their customer, whomever that may be.
If they're retaining any identifying data about me and then selling it to new customers, they are explicitly violating CCPA.
That’s nice you got a response from them. I did not.
IANAL, but making some assumptions to fill in gaps, it seems they are avoiding having to comply with CCPA and other privacy laws like this: they harvest camera data and retain the images probably forever, but only turn it into identifying data on demand for customers. So you really do have to go talk to the customer, because Flock never "has" any identifying data about anyone, they just have anonymous images that when mixed with a model happen to produce identifying data.
This allows them to promise that they don't keep any data and have strict retention policies etc. to jurisdictions that are on the fence or where the contract-purchasers are constrained by law in some way, but they can transfer identifying information at any point in the future to any customer, by mixing raw data and a model.
> but only turn it into identifying data on demand for customers.
How could this seriously hold legal weight? The data is identifiable. Just because it’s gated by some transformation doesn’t mean they are magically not holding my identifiable information.
Is there any realistic road to having them outlawed nationwide? Eg, ignoring probabilities here, could a wildly successful grassroots program where it became an issue as politically salient as immigration or abortion eventually lead to legislation banning them?
A national ban is unlikely to happen. Big companies like Flock are incredibly experienced at paying off enough of the Congress to stop legislation they don't like. You're better off trying to focus your efforts on your local municipalities and the state.
Probably? Would be easier to develop drones to rip off the solar panels.
Black spray paint is less effort
Paintballs are even better, environmentally and effort-wise.
Especially if the propellant tank is pressurized using a solar powered compressor.
(Theoretically, of course. I wouldn’t advocate destroying private property.)
Destroying public property is bad in a general sense, but not enough to describe the situation here.
Would you take the knife out of your robber? Or is that stealing private property?
Surveillance endangers society/democracy and it's a threat too
Paintballs are destroying public property?
Flock cameras are public property?
Hypothetically, of course, it would be even easier to just sneak up from behind and drop contractor bags over them.
Dane County, Wisconsin Sheriff's Office took steps to prevent unauthorized surveillance.
"With the contract set to expire on May 31st, the Sheriff’s Office informed Flock Safety that all 26 cameras must be removed by that date. When removal did not occur, the Sheriff’s Office took steps to ensure the cameras were not in use and placed covers over them."
https://www.danecounty.gov/PressDetail/11899
With Marc Andreessen, the boy from rural Wisconsin, major investor and ambassador of Flock Safety, now part of the federal government, expect the number of Flock civil surveillance systems to increase even more.
In the UK the government put up ANPR cameras to enforce a clean air zone.
People with electric saws love pulling them down.
They're only as permanent as their protection.
The Flock contract I read from Oak Park, where we designed what I think are the country's most restrictive ALPR rules and ultimately took our cameras down, did not allow Flock to continue running, recording, and selling data after we turned the cameras off. In fact: they explicitly didn't allow them to sell the data at all. Can I ask where you got this idea from?
Thank you for pointing this out, I would just assumed the parent commenter was correct.
Just out of curiosity: doesn't the US have any laws against private surveillance of public spaces? As a European I find this quite irritating (not saying we do not have problems as well with more and more cams installed and risks related to an increasing number of e.g. parking lot cams)
I'm not a lawyer and I think this varies state by state, but I think that in general anyone is allowed to record in public spaces.
I think the general idea is that if you could (legally) go stand in that public space (sidewalks, roads, parks) and watch something happen then you're allowed to record what you see.
This is probably good - I think it's the basis of being able to record misbehavior (by private citizens and/or the police), for example.
In contrast you're generally not allowed to record stuff happening in a private space unless everyone's been informed that this will happen.
This is why you'll see signs saying "Warning - this place is under surveillance" signs on every single door going into a corporation that wants to use security cameras.
No, you don’t have an expectation of privacy on a public roadway, public parking lot, etc.
This norm around privacy was kinda set before the concept of mass surveillance became a thing, though. Maybe we should revisit it and rethink what privacy means.
People shouldn't expect privacy in public, sure. They should expect they may be overheard or witnessed. But that's not really equivalent to mass surveillance and long-term recording
"You should not expect privacy in public" does not imply "you should expect no privacy and you should expect everything you do is recorded and stored forever"
If this is the case then people can pressure their representatives to make this against the law. The people have agency here.
>LAPD can just call them and access the data
Can they? Does anyone know the terms of these contracts? Does flock just look the other way if a licensee just gives away the data to some other entity without getting a fee for it? I can see arguments on both sides from flock's perspective, i.e., revenue vs lock-in.
City can eminent domain those pole locations to put up their own solution.
Does the city own the land the poles are on?
What prevents another group from installing a sign directly in front of a flock camera.
I didn’t know this but it’s the kind of stuff our tax dollars pay for and ultimately why I’m so disgruntled about the high taxes we pay - especially in the middle class
No problem paying taxes - my entire gripe is with what what the moneys spent on
The US has below average middle class tax rates. But luckily we can just choose what our tax dollars are spent on through democracy! The main problem is nobody agrees about anything and lots of people are really dumb and can't handle the responsibility of electing competent people into government.
This is naïve. The US government is less democratic than advertised, and there are many factors for that. Not going to write a tome, but if you're going to point a finger at one group, it shouldn't be private citizens.
It would be a mistake to assume that people who don’t agree with you are really dumb.
No, no, almost everyone is really dumb, including the people who do agree with me.
Would love to see someone vibecode an explorer for seeing how their jurisdiction spent their taxes. Denver has a decent explorer here: https://www.denvergov.org/transparency/checkbook#/home?year=...
Why do you need to vibecode an explorer when financial analysis tools are a dime a dozen?
>The best part is that flock owns the cameras and the poles so even when the contract expires the cameras keep running and recording data that flock can sell
if the cameras continue recording, LA can subpoena those recordings on an as needed basis.
I don't understand flock cameras in high crime areas. Every time somebody commits a heinous crime it's always like "they were arrested 72 times and were well known by the police"
What's the point in helping the police catch criminals when they don't do anything after the fact!
Maybe the police are part of the problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_LASD_deputy_gangs
Main article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gangs_in_the_Los_Angeles_Count...
The problem GP is describing is mostly with the courts, not the cops.
Because this kind of stuff is used for way beyond this
It’s used for surveillance in the truest sense
Heaven forbid you are on someone’s watchlist, they will just track your movement across the city
This isn’t some fake CSI pop dream - this kind of tech isn’t used to catch the people breaking into your house
Just going to leave this here as an example use-case:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/05/she-got-abortion-so-te...
Have you ever looked in who is the police? How they become police in first place? Like how police even started to be police in the first place. Is quite a ride and I can see many similarities to organized gangs.
it needs to be illegal for the government to buy data or intelligence that it could not otherwise legally collect itself.
Why do you think the government couldn’t collect this information themselves? ALPRs are legal, cameras covering a public roadway are legal, and the 4th amendment doesn’t extend to driving on a public roadway.
Could the government set up 80,000 cameras to spy on everyone? No, they are not aloud to create dragnets or conduct mass surveillance. They need warrants.
Thats the loophole that flock capitalized on.
Thats a perfect statement to close the loophole.
It obvious this should be the case, but when you dump billions of dollars getting around 4th amendment protections, lets just say it takes awhile to close the loopholes.
This wouldn't even help anyway. Flock sells to law enforcement, sure, but they also sell data to everyone else who wants to know everything about everyone.
They aren't crash compliant, aren't tagged with inspection stickers for signage, and the county/state road agencies could remove them for that alone.
I'm not defending flock, and have mixed feelings on the matter due to having personal experience with flock. My neighborhood was being hit by sophisticated robberies one after another. Police could not catch the guys. The police confirmed that it was a Tren de Aruagua operation. They would buy cars mainly BMWs off Facebook marketplace. Go rob a house and sell the car within 24-48 hours. Our neighborhood had cameras, but by manually going through the footage to find what was relevant, it was too late. After working with the police, the HOA decided to install a flock camera set at each entrance. Once it was installed, which was over a year ago, we haven't had a break in since. I know they are tracking my car going in and out but my phone and car also do this. Objectively, my neighborhood is less private but more safe. I think if I had to choose, this would be my choice. I wish I could have a safe and private neighborhood, but this isn't the world we live in.
Why couldn't the police, who you pay taxes to, do their jobs? Apparently a sophisticated robbery ring was operating with a well understood MO in a predictable location and the police couldn't figure out how to use those facts to effect an arrest?
Instead of "protecting" one neighborhood by installing privately owned surveillance devices, seems like the police could have just sat there, waited for a BMW full of Tren de Araugua gangsters to show up and arrest them.
In what world is this the reasonable course of action that was arrived at with the police.
Nothing about OP's story sounds plausible or reasonable. The criminal gangs are magically afraid of flock cameras but not any other kind of surveillance? They had footage of the crooks but it took too long to evaluate it, and yet the cops knew exactly which gang was doing it?
The world of practical realties that the police can't be everywhere at once?
Do you need flock to do this for you, though? I have cameras around my property, and they catch everyone entering and leaving my subdivision. If the police need access to the recordings, they can get a court order or ask nicely. What I don't do, is share the feeds with everyone willy-nilly so the police can cast wide dragnets and do god-knows-what-else with the data.
By the time you get a court order. The trail has gone cold at least that's what the police said at our HOA meetings. Maybe they're getting paid by big money to say these things but these were not head of police people. Low levels coming to HOA meetings.
Presumably a victim of a crime would provide the footage without a court order. A court order would be more applicable if it caught something unrelated to the actual property the camera was on.
There is a difference between this situation, a targeted install in a problem situation, and hundreds of thousands of these cameras at every intersection in the country
Also, Flock cameras are not just on roads. Many institutions use them for surveillance inside buildings. There is a community center in Atlanta that has them and there is evidence that random people with access to all Atlanta area cameras, including Flock employees and police officers in other jurisdictions, were watching juveniles at the pool. More than one deputy at a suburban Atlanta sheriff's department has been fired for abusing Flock cameras to track romantic interests
Like everything else in this country we've taken something that has a useful purpose when used in a limited, controlled fashion and pushed it to the maximum extreme. We can't do anything based on nuance anymore
I agree with you; I don't want a surveillance state either but I understand why people install them in their neighborhoods
Everywhere people live is someone's neighborhood. So if everyone installs it in their neighborhood the cameras are everywhere.
Something of consideration: Flock cameras were installed after discussions across the HOA and local police department, after a multiple crimes happened in an area. So long as a discussion about the lifetime of the cameras is raised eventually, this sounds like a measured and reasonable use of surveillance.
There is still something to be said about the lack of alignment between Flock the company and the HOA as to how that data is used, but the compromise was explicit, and there was at least some coordination within the community. At the heart of the issue with automatic surveillance is the lack of accountability over those who retain the data and the lack of consent of those surveilled, and measures were taken to address one of those two within your community.
trade security for civil liberties and you wil lose both.
Catchy phrase, but having lived in places outside the US, it isn't really true.
Ironically in California you’ve already lost a number of your civil liberties, while having 0 security as a commoner, with or without Flock.
Yes, it's a nice catch phrase. Would you say that after a Tren de Aeagua gang member stole all your crap? At least I'm free you say. I don't think we've been free in the US for a long time. My tax bill says I'm in bondage.
Your tax bill says that you’re in bondage? That’s quite the tax system you have there. Or maybe you’re exaggerating?
There is a lot of middle ground between ">100k cameras tracking the movement of every vehicle in the country and retaining those data indefinitely" and "cameras in a private neighborhood in response to a specific crime wave".
This is such a bizarre story, each detail more absurd and ridiculous than the last, that I can't believe HN is falling for it.
Honestly there are a number of incredibly weird comments like this throughout the discussion. Is Flock astroturfing every discussion about the company?
You don't have to believe it. It happens to be true, but whatever. I'm not affiliated with flock, but not every issue is black or white.
I don't believe it. I mean, you might, but the story is fantastical nonsense.
Ignoring that the police "confirmed" suspects that they didn't catch, or that you claim the police would need a "court order" to look at cameras the HOA would own (and which require absolutely zero involvement of flock, with the enormous downsides that dystopian, busted company brings), or that you cited "manually going through footage" like it's 1997 and not 2026 where every security system flags every event -- car, person, line crossing -- with instant-accessible timestamps, the biggest problem with your comment is that gangs do not care about security cameras.
The preventative effect of cameras on such activity hovers around 0%. This ridiculous tale that a flock camera was a magic no crime shield is simply nonsensical.
Again, you might actually believe this. You might have misheard some things and come away with this impression. But it's ridiculous.
I'm a big fan of privately controlled, limited access-guarded and audited cameras, understanding that they're useful post facto to figure out what happened, and sometimes to catch criminals (but catching illegal immigrant SCARY GANG NAME criminals, usually in stolen cars and with masks...lol...utterly useless), but your post is 100% selling the tiger repellent rock, and it's simply incredible if anyone actually falls for that.
Flock's effect on crime has mostly been to increase it, by allowing sexual predator cops to stalk random women.
>This ridiculous tale that a flock camera was a magic no crime shield is simply nonsensical.
I was confused as well. I thought the next beat on the story after the camera was installed was going to be "and the next time the guys struck they were found within the day" or something, not "and the camera repelled the robbers somehow".
Are there any privacy-first security camera provider where it's the city that manages data access and uses it purely for local law enforcement purposes?
Why would you trust the city more than Flock. One of the common claimed abuses of Flock data is city cops using it to stalk exes and crushes.
The problem with Flock is not who owns the data, it's the potential for abuse.
I wonder why we aren't addressing the real problem which seems to be cops behaving completely unethically. Their job is about enforcing the system that codifies our societies agreed up and codified rules of ethics. They should be obsessed with this the same way people here obsess over system performance, correctness, etc! If we cannot trust them with the very basics of ethical behavior they are absolutely in the wrong job and there need to be very clear consequences.
Because finding people that are 100% ethical is extremely difficult. Even if we are wildly optimistic and say 20% of the population is 100% ethical. You aren't likely to weed out unethical people, so you are hiring people, training them, and then firing them 4 out of 5 of them. There are many cases where an experienced but occasionally unethical worker is better than an unexperienced but ethical worker. When faced with this dilemma it is likely that more police debts would simply cheat or cover up police abuses to retain valuable staff or staff at all.
The solution is not making humans more virtuous but reducing the capability and the harm done that unethical humans can do.
> If we cannot trust them with the very basics of ethical behavior they are absolutely in the wrong job and there need to be very clear consequences.
Police should not be trusted because they are police. There should be audits and controls that prevent abuse and unethical behavior. Small unethical behaviors should result in corrective measures but not termination, since when the punishment becomes too great you create incentives for cover ups or scapegoats. A small number of minor punishments, that catch people as soon as they step over the line, functions better as a deterrent than a large scale punishments that are unlikely to be actually enforced. Granted if a police officer does a major crime, they should face serious consequences, but the goal should be to creating a system that makes major crimes by police less likely. If they know they will get caught for minor crimes, they are less likely to commit bigger crimes.
So revealed preferences of voters is that they just dont care that much about weeding out bad apples?
From what it sounds like, it’s likely not on any sizable group’s top 10 priority list in LA.
It's not possible. Whether it's a city government, judges, cops, schoolteachers, or clergy... some number of people are unethical. Trying to pretend otherwise is a source of a lot of problems. The best way to avoid it is to make it impossible, i.e. in this case don't collect the camera data in the first place. Once it is collected, it will eventually be abused no matter who has control of it.
The problem is simple: qualified immunity has become a blank check. The officer can simply claim they didn't know the law. They somehow can't be expected to understand basic constitutional protections.
Qualified immunity is more nuanced. It allows the first offense to be absolved but it works like legal precedent where future offenses by _any law enforcement officer_ is not covered.
Now there’s plenty of loopholes where you can craft “unique defenses” based on nearly identical underlying offenses. But it’s important to have the distinction
How many instances of are there of qualified immunity actually resulting in an officer being found liable because of past precedent where someone else was considered to have had qualified immunity in the same circumstances? If it's not anywhere close to the number of times when they were found to be immune, then the distinction is theoretical only, and it's arguably more misleading to emphasize it as if it's a real limitation.
Cameras do address that problem. We live in a country where people go to jail for life because two witnesses they swear they saw pookie shoot dee dee. Where cops beat the hell out of citizens and say they were resisting arrest.
That Pookie can show a video from a flock camera showing him somewhere else is a massive boost to his civil liberties. Same with whatever poor sap gets beat by the cops.
If you hold police accountable, they respond by refusing to work. That's a problem that, at this time, has no solution.
> If you hold police accountable, they respond by refusing to work. That's a problem that, at this time, has no solution
Of course it does. You dissolve the police department and create a new one. New York did it twice, first replacing the city-controlled Municipals with the state-controlled Metropolitans [1], and then in 1870 creating the NYPD [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Police_riot
[2] https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/about/history/history-timeline...
> they respond by refusing to work. That's a ~~problem~~ solution that, at this time, has no ~~solution~~ problem.
If a police department reuses to accept accountability, and dig in their heels by refusing to work, "just" dissolve it. And while at it, half the calls could be handled by folks without guns.
In practice that obviously would not go over well, people are too attached to the status quo. We just lack the political will to rethink and retool the system (despite most Americans favoring police reform).
> half the calls could be handled by folks without guns
This can't be emphasized enough. A lot of enforcement and "civil order" work does not require guns, and in many cases (e.g., mental health crises), they're the wrong people to be engaged to resolve.
I think one of the biggest issues with policing is that they are supported by the "law and order" crowd, which is a euphemism for keeping "others" in their place.
I swear to god that "Defund the police" was an inside job to discredit police reform by turning it into an all or nothing proposition and that's not gonna fly.
Oakland CA has serious crime problems because there's "not enough" policing and a lot of people are emboldened to do all the crime they want because nobody's there to stop them. One of many articles on this: https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/oakland-business-o...
I believe there are some fundamental changes to the system that could correct a lot of this:
1. End the War on Drugs. It's literally designed to create crime and it's low hanging fruit for cops to focus on rather than real crime.
2. Legalize and regulate sex work. Like drugs, this is a moral issue and by driving it underground it's designed to create more crime. Regulate and monitor the fuck out of it to minimize opportunities for sex trafficking. It's also a favored low-hanging fruit for cops to bust.
3. Use social workers for mental health emergencies and have the cops notified for possible backup
4. Invest in housing/mental health/rehab services and get the homeless off the streets
5. Revisit the legal system to avoid catch and release scenarios (though most of it is #1 and #2). If the cops are busting the same people over and over again that disincentives them to even bother
6. Fix qualified immunity and put some teeth into it. We should never simply take the officer's word for anything without some sort of proof (like leaving their body cams on).
7. Make the police self-insured backed by their pension fund. They have no skin in the game and municipalities pay out vast sums of money for the misdeeds of officers.
Easy peasy!
In other countries, cops may carry guns, but if those guns are ever fired, there is an investigation to ensure it was fired for a very good reason. Those places still have cops.
They also have months or years of cop training, not weeks.
They also teach the cops the law and ensure they're morally sound instead of unofficially endorsing breaking the law
The government has had no qualms in the past using the army or national guard to break strikes.
They don't strike, they just respond really slowly, pretend they didn't see something or just take reports and barely solve anything.
Since they are all unionized and replacing them is crazy slow and expensive, nothing happens.
Yup, we saw it happen after the George Floyd/BLM protests. An undeclared work to rule action.
So you're saying that the solution is RICO, because they're operating as a protection racket?
Robots!
There is so much rot in law enforcement. LASD still has deputy gangs.
Police actually exist to protect capital. At least in the USA.
When you get robbed who else are you going to call when you need someone to show up 7 hours later and shrug their shoulders.
Hey now! If your black they might just shoot your dog
Also to reduce capital murder...
Correct. There is no actual obligation to protect and to serve, according to SCOTUS.
It's easy to say these anti-capitalistic platitudes, but do you really want to live in a society where the concept of private ownership is not supported by the state?
Society is not starting at zero right now, it has developed for 10.000 years with many genocidal wars. As a result, 1% of the population has achieved generational wealth due to some sort of "value creation" by their ancestors.
Through trial and error and a lot of violence, humanity has noticed that with free trade and free enterprise, the welfare of everyone else can significantly improve (toilets, food, entertainment), while the overall amount of violence significantly decreases.
Because when people put their money where their mouth is, capital can be allocated much more efficient than through other means (e.g. the King of England forcing a levy and centrally deciding what industry to invest it).
The only problem with this model is deflation, because if there is no incentive to deploy capital, then the overall pie shrinks and people start fighting about keeping their shares. That's why central banks talk about target inflation rates of 2%, because purchasing power of your hoarded capital needs to shrink in order to incentivize you to use your capital in a productive way, which also increases the overall pie for society.
The main thing one can criticize about generational wealth such as Trump, Epstein, Musk or Thiel is the fact that they have to lie about its existence, and keep up a charade of "I'm self-made" due to their low self esteem.
The alternatives are always worse for the common person. I'd rather have Trump, Epstein, Musk and Thiel than even bigger capital concentration like it was with the British crown and the Catholic church in their full bloom.
Ideally, those figures would also follow the moral code of the rest of society, but still it's much better than their parents who did crazy shit in Africa only 50 years ago, or the crown and the catholic inquisition a couple hundred years ago.
It would be fine if they protected property rights if they also protected human rights.
It seems that making government union members accountable is an intractable problem in the current political landscape.
The government is not a monolith. Being owned by the city doesn't have to mean the cops are in control. The municipality can determin by law exactly who operates the infrastructure, who has access to what, what process they must follow, and how that all will be monitored and enforced. "The government didn't handle this well, therefore they can't be trusted for anything like it again" is a misunderstanding of how governments are constructed and how power can be separated between legislatively mandated structures. Find the source of the abuse, then build a structure to check that abuse.
> Why would you trust the city more than Flock
Nationally, I trust a system where the data are split up between siloes more than a single, privately-owned database.
Do we genuinely, really need a mass surveillance network? Isn't the expansion of surveillance through increasing prevalence of technology already way too much? Police can real-time track almost anyone if they have a warrant as it is, thanks to the magic of modern cell phones. We didn't even have time to discuss whether that was a good status quo before it became normal. Are we really sure we want to expand this to a massive network of cameras?
I get that it helps solve crimes, but solving crime is not the end-all-be-all of improving society. If anything, it's a highly symptom-oriented solution, and we absolutely have plenty of levers we could be trying to pull if we wanted to prevent crime instead.
Forget whether one global surveillance network is more trustworthy than another global surveillance network for a minute. Do we want this at all?
> Do we genuinely, really need a mass surveillance network?
I think that's a fair question for each local jurisdiction to make on its own.
Hmm. Personally, I disagree; I'd prefer to outlaw it explicitly. That's just my opinion, but I think that regulation has failed to keep up with the pace of technology and we've essentially lost the effect of some constitutional protections.
Sadly this was the entire lesson of Marbury v Madison, and the courts are supposed to be the mechanism that brings the hammer down on things that clearly violate the constitution where legislation has not yet arrived, but the courts are completely failing to protect us from what are obviously 4th amendment violations writ large on the entire nation, absurd.
I don't necessarily disagree, but I also don't think that it makes sense to wait to address the immediate issue of a private company centralizing the surveillance until there's sufficient political will for that (which realistically might not ever happen).
The large distribution of silo'ed law enforcement across the US is one of the driving reasons why it can be so hard to solve crimes (murder, vehicular theft, etc). Once any crime has the potential to cross state or even jurisdiction lines, dealing with the inner-bureaucracy of crossed enforcement agencies adds days to weeks to solving urgent crimes. A distributed system without consideration into how to coalesce the data together is no better of a solution vs what we have today.
> A distributed system without consideration into how to coalesce the data together is no better of a solution vs what we have today.
Unless you'd rather prioritize liberty over safety. I want crimes to be harder to solve if the alternative is a panopticon.
I would like to see some evidence of this demonstrated. I feel a large majority of high-profile cases that went unsolved for a long time most often hinged on incompetence or negligence rather than lack of information sharing.
Also, once crime does cross state lines the local FBI gets involved and they have a lot more resources than a small-town police force
> often hinged on incompetence or negligence rather than lack of information sharing.
Or just technology. Almost every “50 year old cold case solved” I see is because advancements in DNA processing .
Agreed, and more than that, those siloes are governed by democratic processes. Of course, democracy doesn't preclude abuse but it's a lot better than private governance.
In other words centralization of the power is most risky end game here
I want local cameras that require physical connections to offload data. Camera access panels can be locked with a wireless system that publishes the access timestamp and details to the city’s website. Each access must correspond with signed warrant.
If my family gets kidnapped, I want a department to be able to check a camera. I’ll wait for the judge’s signature.
But that’s night & day from today’s reality. I simply cannot stand being recorded to the cloud by a creepy corporation everywhere I drive in California with just about no oversight.
Do you have a phone, modern car, or social media account? If so, I have some bad news for you…
The city doesn't run around accusing private citizens of being terrorists like Flock's CEO does.
A better designed system could be driven by warrants issued by courts, without (or at least minimal) access to individual officers.
It requires better access controls.
Even invasive ideas like automated license plate scanning city-wide can have its data only accessible to an API to eg, track a stolen car across the city to avoid a dangerous high-speed chase in populated areas.
I think to throw the baby out with the bathwater around networked security cameras is failure around designing robust and secure APIs and systems (including audit trails).
Or… hear me out… no surveillance system at all.
Bars on windows and cages on retail goods, gated driveways, armed security at anything of importance, etc, etc, are a heck of a lot cheaper in the long run than a 1984 police state.
Maybe enforced small theft laws and shared cultural values… you know… what worked FOREVER…
The difference is that the government has rules and limitations on the data they collection. Meanwhile for-profit corporations operate under an obligation to make as much money as possible for the shareholders.
flock shares the data with other cities and jurisdictions a little more easily, and also flock workers can see your videos. That's some amount of extra abuse potential?
I'd trust a municipality I have a vote in more than a private company.
> The problem with Flock is not who owns the data
The one who owns the data is the one who should be responsible to provide proper guardrails in certain cases if not all, specially like these ones. It comes down to the fine line around business, rules and regulations. The motivation of business is to make most profit with least cost and implementing regulatory mechanisms are cost. Abuses are natural to happen in the absence of guardrails and audits.
The purchasers of the cameras, ie HOAs, law enforcement, etc, own the data. They are also the ones routinely caught abusing this. This is a real problem that should be dealt with by enforcing laws against the people improperly using the data.
I'm not sure what a realistic solution is for Flock to try and manage data they do not own nor if it makes sense for them to deny access to data they are not the owners of.
This is false. the HOAs and LEOS have access to the data. Even if the contract specifies that the data is owned by these organizations, they are not the true owners.
Have you seen Flock's CEO?
You don't need to trust them. You can request information as allowed under FOIA and vote the mayor out in the next election if there is any sign of misuse.
With Flock? Good luck.
And another common claimed abuse of Flock data is cops using it to stalk people in other cities, other states, and across the country.
The potential for abuse rises with the number of people who have access to that data, regardless of who they work for. Restricting access strictly to users in the municipality under contract reduces the number of people with access and thereby mitigates some abuse vectors.
Also, there's plenty of past incidents of cops abusing their access to state and federal databases for the same kinds of purposes.
The profession attracts individuals who are willing to abuse power for their own purposes. That's not to say that every cop is in the job to abuse power, but many are, and we have to build our law enforcement structures in a way that directly acknowledges and addresses this fact.
As the saying goes: A few bad apples spoil the bunch. It's a rotten profession.
The problem with Flock is its continued existence as part of the surveillance state. Like guns or bombs, these are things with one intent, and that intent is always ALWAYS bad as the resource is inevitably concentrated in the hands of a few to control the many.
Garrett would acknowledge being inspired by Minority Report, ignoring the message of it as a cautionary tale. Hell, he's even said that to him, a false positive in Flock is better than a false negative, which is a hell of a hot take in our current climate.
Because there's a more robust legal framework for curtailing the inevitable abuse when the government does it than when it's done via the "oops our contractor who's a private company" slight of hand.
Same basic reason I'd rather have the cops after me than have the environmental/zoning/whatever civil enforcement jerks after me. There's just sooooo much more scrutiny (which really says a lot considering how bad the cops are).
Said by someone who's clearly never had cops after them...
Said by someone who's clearly never tangled with civil enforcement.
Nearly your rights go out the window when it's non-criminal prosecution. The organizations also aren't nearly as robustly structured to limit damage by "bad apples" as real police departments are.
I know this sounds insane in light of how bad the cops are. That's because it is. Civil enforcement is essentially 50yr behind policing when it comes to transparency and accountability.
how many times does civil enforcement shoot people in a year though?
do they have the power to assault you and then have it be your fault?
I think Flock is probably the worst solution besides all the rest. They seem to be the most auditable and accountable. The fact that anyone even knows the service and founder is a testament to accountability.
Lol, what totalitarian nightmare do we live in that this is your standard for acceptability when it comes to mass surveillance. “Well fellas, atleast we know whats happening and look here’s the name of the guy in charge, I mean how bad it could be?”
Knowing about the CEO of a company is the lowest bar for, "testament to accountability" I've ever seen.
You have someone in charge. You know who to question. You can even spam him on social media and a decent chance he'll reply.
Try to get something out of the CEO of Bank of America or some other faceless corporation
Yes guys if you don’t like flock please please please just send a dm to the ceo with your social media account, or you can send him a letter in the mail, just dont send some anonymous crap he doesnt like that just use your real name and address or your social media handle and just go ahead and send him a message and let him know how ya feel. Flock loves to know how it’s customers are feeling, and will definitely keep a ticket open for any unsatisfied customers with your name and how to contact you so they can fix it.
> Try to get something out of the CEO of Bank of America or some other faceless corporation
I have. It's easier than you think.
You do realize that we have "executives" in most government jurisdictions as well? And that there are actual mechanism for changing who they are that you have the ability to take part in as a citizen, which is not a privilege afforded to everyone under surveillance by these systems for the CEO of Flock?
(Yes, I know that shareholders have the ability to vote on board proposals as well, but even if you think those mechanisms are equivalent, there's a pretty huge difference between "if you buy stock, you get the right to vote" and "you have inherent human rights including but not limited to the ones enumerated by a written constitution")
If you're lucky, he might call you a domestic terrorist for questioning him and Flock's motives!
> The fact that anyone even knows the service and founder is a testament to accountability.
As opposed to their mayor/governor/president, who they not only can easily find out who it is if they don't already, but can also vote out (and who often will have term limits)?
Try going to one of flock's PR meetups and ask questions. You will not get a straight answer at all, you might even get back-talked.
Lmao not remotely. Their security is a joke. Axon's evidence system at least has concepts of security. Flock has had numerous high publicity security failures (see: Benn Jordan's work with 404 media).
Can we normalize a healthy 4th amendment posture? It’s wild that the Peter Thiel “don’t tread on me” folks are so cool with a China like police state.
It's because their actual motto is "Don't tread on me, tread on them"
It's not "don't tread on us"
A lot of the "don't tread on me" is window dressing.
Peter Thiel and his ilk absolutely adore what China has done. You have an elite - in this case, the CCP - that is entitled to their position by law. It bills itself as the "best and brightest" of society and has ideological constraints that it gets to impose on its members through the cadre system. The rest of the population labors for the benefit of this elite with little-to-no input on the operation of the ruling class.
That's what Thiel wants, just with his kind in the positions of power. It'd eliminate any opposition to what they imagine as the "right" way of doing things and reduce the friction to the creation of economic value for their holdings.
Note that "friction" in this case means things like human rights, democracy, competition, workers rights, etc.
Salem, Oregon, assembled its own using OpenALPR and an on-prem server. There are plenty of reasonable criticisms of that approach too, but it's currently the farthest thing from Flock on the municipal mass-surveillance tech scale bar that I'm aware of.
"The system does not utilize facial recognition and does not have automated functions, such as automatically running license plates through the state Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) or Law Enforcement Data System (LEDS) databases. All license plates must still be verified by an investigator and then individually queried through the appropriate database."
This sounds like a lot more than your average flock installation at a local PD
https://salem.legistar.com/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=7375982...
OpenALPR is not open source despite the open name, sigh
AGPL-licensed: https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr
(Not updated in years though.)
It's astonishing to me that the largest tech hubs in the world do not have the money to invest in developing a camera system that is sovereignly owned by the city. There are a lot of very talented engineers who would work on a project like this. Also simply putting a person in between the information would certainly reduce the profile for abuse with stalking and harassing people
Isn't it obvious? There's way more profit in building a Torment Nexus.
Well according to Flock, the data is actually owned by the city and they are already responsible. This is just private sector loopholing
And in reality, it's a handwave. The city will refer you to Flock, and then Flock will cancel the contract, but leave the cameras up, so now there's no customer. Funny that.
that's not privacy-first. There's no such thing as privacy-first surveillance. How can Americans spend so much time criticizing surveillance states only to build the world's largest
I'd say most are hosted first, Milestone, Genetec, Avigilon, etc. They all sell software to host feeds from your own standardized cams (Axis, Hanwah, Samsung, etc) via h.264/mpeg. The cloud hosted CCTV at scale is relatively recent.
if the data exists, it will be abused
Any number of companies sell cameras and recorders both on-premise and cloud stored which are managed entirely by the customer. Most security cameras you see on any given building work this way, and most such camera systems also support features like LPR (license plate recognition). Most of the time you're on your own to sort out connectivity and power though.
What Flock is selling is the whole package: The hardware (including power, networking, and the pole), the software, the infrastructure, the logic design, the connectivity. For someone who doesn't want to operate and support a wide area network of IoT devices, you can see why "just give them money to watch your streets" looks appealing.
https://archive.is/zUou2
Does it say how many cameras the LAPD pays for or if they are getting rid of the flock software from their org? Folks conflate this a lot but often times most regions have a substantial number of private flock deployments, city owned, rarely directly with the police.
Police get access to software no costs (AFAIK) for BOLO alerts on tags.
Fun fact: When they switch to Axon Outposts instead, just know that they have Amazon Sidewalk modules inside them, too for backdoor C2 to Axon.
(Go check the FCC docs for X4GS06009 and note that there's a Quectel KG100S sitting on the power supply board. https://fccid.io/X4GS06009)
Anyone know the proper ritual for summoning tptacek to this thread?
This is good. But unfortunately it doesn't mean the Flock cameras will be removed because the city doesn't own them. Flock does. And Flock will likely want to keep them there. In other cities when the contract is canceled or let expire Flock prevented those cities from removing the cameras. Some had to resort to covering them with trash bags because they could not legally remove them. This happened in Dayton, Ohio and many other cities. https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/cities-covering-flock-surv...
> "Some locals have taken matters into their own hands by dismantling Flock cameras and covering them with trash bags"
This techcrunch article incorrectly characterizes this need and required behavior as something done by random citizens. But it is actually the cities themselves having to resort to it, totally officially and legally, because of Flock behaving badly.
Aren't the cameras on city's land or did city lease the land to Flock? If they are on city's land couldn't city require that Flock removes their stuff from city's property or city will do it on Flock's expense?
I've seen videos of flock cameras installed improperly (missing a breakaway device) right next to roads. The city must be able to remove unsafe devices!
https://highways.dot.gov/safety/local-rural/maintenance-sign...
Presumably the license to surveil the city is extended to flock by the city? Presumably they should be able to compel them to disable them, and provide proof of this (whether they’re trusted or not…)
I think the problem is that people are allowed to set up cameras of public spaces without requiring any “license to surveil”.
are they on land flock owns though? I don't think I could go put up a camera on city infrastructure like traffic lights without their permission. does flock buy a lot of little permissions to install and power their cameras or something?
Making recording in public require a license is a very easy way to cut free speech and document wrong-doing of a system.
I assure you that if I slapped a camera on city infrastructure they would absolutely find some license or permission that I don't have and threaten me with a million+ dollar fine over it.
Thanks !! It is so easy to assume that ending contract means turning off the cameras. Hopefully ciities can fight back harder for them to remove them, specially when people don't want that surveillance.
It could also mean "we get the cameras for free now ..."
I don't know, I'd prefer cops have access to technology that helps them apprehend criminals and enforce the law. Better audits and accountability are the solution, not removing technology.
I do know.
I do not want to live in a society that is under 24/7 surveillance. Of course, if the cops can watch everything you do all the time, there will be less crime. But that is not a sacrifice I’m willing to make.
> if the cops can watch everything you do all the time, there will be less crime
I disagree there. If cops watch us at all times then more crimes will be prosecuted, think they'll just sit bored with nothing happening? They will find things, real or not.
The reality is that crime is way down, we do not need more enforcement. Leave us alone already. https://www.opencrime.us/years
What planet do you live on? Go to a low crime neighborhood. Cops are super friendly and basically spend their day happily helping old ladies cross the street or getting cats down from trees.
If you think cops like cracking heads and dealing with petty crime that they'll just invent otherwise and use to harass people, you're out of your mind. You really need to get out more.
You're right and wrong. The first paragraph is absolutely accurate -- I live near some of these areas (SW Connecticut) and the contrast is stark.
The second is not. There are absolutely people who take pleasure in the bullying behavior cops are often associated with. They're the ones who want the cushy jobs in Greenwich but don't get them (probably for the aforementioned reasons in many cases) and wind up being doubly punitive and cruel to people in Bridgeport.
Violent crime / property crime per 100k people:
Bridgeport ~393 ~1,700
Greenwich ~9.4 ~867
More cops, more crime! In other news, wet sidewalks cause rain.
I could show you 10,000 yt videos that show there are plenty of cops that abuse power and harass.
Police body cameras have completely dispelled this notion and are a god-send to the vast majority of police officers that want to do good work. So much so the left has turned against them
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jP4_2soVZe0
>Go to a low crime neighborhood. Cops are super friendly and basically spend their day happily helping old ladies cross the street or getting cats down from trees.
>If you think cops like cracking heads
They adore getting to crack heads. That's the entire reason they became cops. They love being able to use their power, rightfully or not, they don't really care.
Cops themselves say this!
Cool, I choose to live in a highly policed neighborhood with well funded police. Essentially a gated community.
You can enjoy your "freedom", but based on the real estate prices, I think more people have my preference.
Yeah, right. That's why the rich were the first to have the city install Flock cameras on their lawns and driveways, right?
Thats not necessary. They have the loving embrace of Nest cameras connected directly to Google. Gladly share footage when there's a string of property crimes. Whats your point?
Cameras don't prevent crime, they just increase the cost of doing so (or the cost of preparing for it).
Most crime is spontaneous. Plenty of examples from across the world that installing cameras or other checks at best shifts crime to other areas.
I'll take shifting crime as long as it's away from me.
Camera's 100% prevent crime because you catch the bad guy, and in a sane society lock the person up so he can no longer commit crime. See how that works?
What is a dragnet? Why are dragnets illegal?
Flock is essentially a private loophole that creates a nationwide dragnet.
while cops are impossible to hold accountable, id prefer to give them fewer capabilities rather than more
I don't think this is true. With the advent of body cameras, cellphones with cameras and FOIA requests you can build a good case if someone violates your rights. The bigger issues are that there is little to no consequence of a flagrant violation of rights because the police union is VERY protective over its members.
The ability to make a case is directly related to how much free time you have and how much money you are able to spend.
We cannot just wave this away when the vast majority of people cannot take off time from work or afford to hire attorneys when their rights are violated.
Time you have also directly bounded by how alive you are after the event
> I'm cool with zero privacy if it means cops can arrest people more easily since they have perfect judgement
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety" - Ben Franklin
Grant me the liberty to camp out on a public sidewalk and use hard drugs in a children's playground or give me death!
I think you should have the liberty to do both but there should be no reason for anyone to do so. Your two instances are happening because that's what available for them.
Lets make it not available to them, deal?
No.
They should hire some juniors to patch together analysis with local LLMs and do that on an as needed basis to avoid the creepiness. Networks of cameras remain a highly powerful way of holding evildoers accountable.
This is easily solved by paying homeless people to destroy the devices.