I can see some nuance to this one. Flock is intended to be searchable by law enforcement, not Joe Average. Tracking cops and then publishing that information is not exactly the same as turning Flock back on the Flockers.
I think the best solution is to just say nobody can do this, including the government. Or that if we allow things like Flock to exist, then we'd need actual legislation that tightens considerably how available the data is to be searched, and what approvals are necessary to access it.
The obvious next step, otherwise, is for someone to start OpenALPRMap and we all get to suffer together.
> Flock is intended to be searchable by law enforcement, not Joe Average.
Isn't Flock's alleged legality predicated on the principle that there is no "reasonable expectation of privacy" in public? I don't see why that would change depending on whether it's "Joe Average" or a police officer at the controls---IIUC I'm allowed to capture images, video, etc. of people in public just as much as cops are.
Agreed that these systems simply need to be banned.
This is exactly what the YouTuber was trying to illustrate - the whole legal justification of Flock cameras is that it's equated to someone sitting down in the location and writing down license plate numbers.
There's a sometimes fine distinction between "reasonable expectation of privacy" and stalking or harassment. Not that it's applicable in this case because courts have generally made the bar against police officers very high.
Youtube has a lot of videos of British "police auditors" who go to stand near police stations to take videos, get police attention and hilarity ensues. It's worth watching a few of them to get the taste.
We have the same auditors in the states, except that the auditors in the states who do this are often detained illegally by the police, then sue and win, and get paid out of taxpayer dollars with no repercussions for the police whatsoever who acted illegally. One guy in particular I know who used to do this went by TheBattousai or similar name and I believe went through this cycle 2 or 3 times with various police agencies. Not exactly hilarity here
You're correct, and also the pushback to these needs to be less a concern of privacy (though they are) and more an infringement on freedom of movement. There is no expectation of broad strokes "privacy" in public, that's true. However what flock is effectively doing would be considered stalking by any other execution method, and the way they're getting around that is because they're stalking everyone at the same time and calling it surveillance instead.
If you attach a GPS to your wife's car without her knowledge, you can (and should) be prosecuted. Flock cameras collect the same data (rough location of a vehicle) and they just do it for every single vehicle passing their sensor. Then, through analysis of that massive dataset, you can now effectively stalk anyone, in the past, for the cost of a database search.
And I have no interest in the distinction between Joe Average and LEOs. That's about 6 months of training, and we have an absolute avalanche of evidence of how LEOs are:
* Prone to unnecessary violence (google 40% cops)
* Are ALREADY abusing this system to stalk wives, girlfriends, exes of the two formers, or just people when they're fucking bored
The clear solution is to ban it, but our Government has both a financial and power stake in keeping people surveilled, which is why I'm a huge fan of how many people are just destroying these things at scale.
Agreed, how many times does the public have to be burned before "storing vast amounts of detailed, identifying information" will be banned. Not to be too hyperbolic, but to speak their language, shouldn't keeping this database of American's movements be considered a national security threat.
Not quite the same. Attaching a GPS tracker involves physical trespass and can track a person to non-public locations. Also, collecting data does not restrict one’s freedom of moment. Nor is it stalking. Stalking is a pattern of conduct designed to intimidate or inflict emotional distress. Flock may facilitate staking, but it is not stalking itself. If knowing that someone else knows you were at a particular location at a particular time causes you distress, you have issues. Do you flee from every other car that sees on the road?
> Isn't that like saying that guns may be legal but later use of those guns may not be?
Guns are legal but murder is not, so ... yes?
It makes sense to me that recording public activity may be legal but publishing those videos would not be (for example name-and-likeness copyrights).
Or that you'd need a warrant to search those videos and issuing a warrant comes with a one-time key that decrypts the search parameters you specified in advance to get the warrant.
In the US, photographing and recording police are first amendment-protected activities.
Likewise, the fourth amendement doesn't forbid a police officer from recording someone in public, because there's no expectation of privacy when out in public.
The courts have found that legally, one officer recording one person is no different from a large-scale, automated surveillance system recording everyone.
Well, that argument goes both ways. If the scale and automation don't make a difference, they don't make a difference.
Given that this is Canada, the first and fourth amendments don't come into the discussion.
Canada's rights are in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and they aren't absolute.
Part 1, Section 1.
The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.
Subject to that, we get Section 2.
Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms:
(a) freedom of conscience and religion;
(b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication;
I would think the natural follow on would be that police have a relative expectation to be photographed and recorded by the public, their actions being public record - they're acting on behalf of the government, FOIA and all that sort of thing applies, right?
Isn't this effectively outsourcing body cams? The frequent stated reason for lack of which is "we would but our department can't afford it :'( anyway check out this new armored vehicle we bought!"
"Tracking" on duty cops doesn't seem unusual, though I think a different argument could be made for their off duty time.
* Edit: this is Canada, so my feelings likely don't apply to their laws.
> The courts have found that legally, one officer recording one person is no different from a large-scale, automated surveillance system recording everyone.
That is not the case. It hasn't been truly tested, and there are very strong hints in SCOTUS's previous opinions that scale dramatically changes the equation for them.
Of course SCOTUS is currently much more amenable to the idea of changing their mind, so who knows how it'd actually hit, but it's far from decided law in the US.
For one example, Sotomayer's concurrence in US v. Jones (2012)
> Awareness that the Government may be watching chills associational and expressive freedoms. And the Government’s unrestrained power to assemble data that reveal private aspects of identity is susceptible to abuse. The net result is that GPS monitoring—by making available at a relatively low cost such a substantial quantum of intimate information about any person whom the Government, in its unfettered discretion, chooses to track—may “alter the relationship between citizen and government in a way that is inimical to democratic society.” United States v. Cuevas-Perez, 640 F. 3d 272, 285 (CA7 2011) (Flaum, J., concurring).
> I would take these attributes of GPS monitoring into account when considering the existence of a reasonable societal expectation of privacy in the sum of one’s public movements. I would ask whether people reasonably expect that their movements will be recorded and aggregated in a manner that enables the Government to ascertain, more or less at will, their political and religious beliefs, sexual habits, and so on. I do not regard as dispositive the fact that the Government might obtain the fruits of GPS monitoring through lawful conventional surveillance techniques. See Kyllo, 533 U. S., at 35, n. 2; ante, at 11 (leaving open the possibility that duplicating traditional surveillance “through electronic means, without an accompanying trespass, is an unconstitutional invasion of privacy”). I would also consider the appropriateness of entrusting to the Executive, in the absence of any oversight from a coordinate branch, a tool so amenable to misuse, especially in light of the Fourth Amendment’s goal to curb arbitrary exercises of police power to and prevent “a too permeating police surveillance,” United States v. Di Re, 332 U. S. 581, 595 (1948).*
> The courts have found that legally, one officer recording one person is no different from a large-scale, automated surveillance system recording everyone.
If you're talking about US courts, then no. If they had, then we wouldn't see -for example- SCOTUS ruling that "geofence warrants" were searches that require Fourth Amendment analysis, rather than being equivalent to picking up a recording of events that happened in plain sight. We also wouldn't see at least one Federal judge openly noting that the judges that cite US vs. Knotts really need to read the entire opinion, rather than just the bit that agrees with what is convenient for them.
US v. Knotts is the forty-year-old case that is the source of the "You've no right to privacy when you're on public roads" idea that both people and judges have been parroting for quite a while now. In addition to establishing that principle, it also considered a possible future where the electronic surveillance that -at the time-
* had to be manually installed into cargo destined for the target's vehicle
* was only capable of tracking a single target vehicle
would become sufficiently advanced as to permit 24/7 dragnet surveillance... at which time, courts would need to reconsider what was just and right in light of such dreadfully advanced mass surveillance capabilities.
Pages 28 (starting at section C.) through 38 of this judge's opinion and order [0] are good reading... it can be hard to tell, but the judge really takes other judges who rely on Knotts but clearly haven't actually read it to task. If you have a half hour free, you should really read the whole thing.
That's trying to unbake the cake. This technology will not go away. The powerful will use it in secret; and sometimes the less powerful too.
I'd rather see surveillance first pointed towards government leaders, and then once the government is highly surveilled, then maybe we can trust the government to surveil everyone else.
I don't know. My idea here isn't very realistic. It's not going to happen (though we should still try), so maybe just outlawing all of it would be more realistic.
"When the government fears the people there is liberty; when the people fear the government there is tyranny."
-- Thomas Jefferson
Filming cops in public is a legitimate activity protected by the Constitution, according to the Supreme Court. Using a nationwide surveillance network to track people not suspected of any crime and without a warrant is not.
It doesn't seem all that different. Cops use these cameras to stalk ex-girlfriends, target political foes, and perv on the public at large. The public watching them hardly seems worse.
I do agree that we just shouldn't have this kind of mass-surveillance in general, and I think that's kind of the point of this particular endeavor.
If Flock is specifically for law enforcement then it is a cut and dry violation of the 4th amendment. Case closed.
However, they are simply commissioned by law enforcement and law enforcement are just one of any number of customers. There is either an expectation of privacy or there isn't. This case highlights this exactly.
Why do you equate government and the honorable Joe Average? The government works at the pleasure of the Joe Average, so it's natural that the said Joe is interested to watch how his servants perform their duties - after all, he elected them to do that and pays them for that. At the same time Joe might be not interested for his lowly servants to keep tabs on him - that's none of their business, after all they don't compensate him for that information, so why shouldn't we have cameras to watch the police while completely denying them to use cameras to watch us?
> I can see some nuance to this one. Flock is intended to be searchable by law enforcement, not Joe Average.
I feel that's like saying there's "nuance" when the police choose to pull someone over because--unlike the other car--they didn't have a "I Donated To Cops" license plate.
Yes, it's technically a difference, but if it matters then the police are abusing their power to play favorites.
> I feel that's like saying there's "nuance" when the police choose to pull someone over because--unlike the other car--they didn't have a "I Donated To Cops" license plate.
That's not unusual at all. Here is New York parking enforcement ticketing cars who are not participating in a specific activity, while disregarding other double-parked cars that are participating. He even explicitly states that the policy is to allow double parked cars, so long as the driver participates in the desired activity:
If you’re driving a publicly funded vehicle we can know where you are and what you’re doing. Seems straightforward.
We should be able to subpoena the GPS records of the car’s location as well - or potentially FOIA that information. Sunlight is good. The opposite should only be done by going through a metric ton of hoops. Otherwise you end up… where we are now.
> I can see some nuance to this one. Flock is intended to be searchable by law enforcement, not Joe Average. Tracking cops and then publishing that information is not exactly the same as turning Flock back on the Flockers.
The fine article mentions that 3% of the queries against the database are from local law enforcement.
Under the American theory of government, Cops tracking people without warrant is the same amount of lawful as people tracking cops without warrant, in fact, the former is more restricted.
This was in Canada so I don't know if the same laws apply. In the US the justification for this tracking without a warrant is that you are in public. That same justification allows for filming police in the public.
The intent of Flock in the US at least was just to use technology to get around the 4th amendment.
The police shouldn't be allowed to use automated tools like this without a warrant.
The only nuance possible here is either that the government is more trustworthy than the average person (rather than less, as has been repeatedly proven), or that the police deserve special immunity in their activities (rather than needing closer scrutiny, as has been repeatedly proven as well). Either that, or that Flock is somehow a more trustworthy steward of the data, in terms of controlling access by agencies and individuals. It's also been proven that they're not, though, so that can't be either. IMO, this entire thing is just stupid hypocrisy.
Cops usually are worse than average Joe on many negative statistics (domestic abuse, etc), and that's not even factoring in how numbers are skewed by the well established thin blue line.
It's safer to give your info to average joe population than cops.
I would feel better if only cops didn't have access to see me on flock cameras and cops had to request footage through a public reddit or something.
This is all a bit of a joke sure, but less than police access to flock cams is.
What nuance though? Did everyone give the state permission to sniff after them? Because I did not. And I am almost certain a majority would not be ok with it either. There is a reason people hate flock sniffers.
When the people turn it around and sniff on cops, why is that then any different suddenly?
> we'd need actual legislation
Can the people do legislation? It's always some judges and politicians who form a clique at the end of the day.
Why is nothing being done about this? This is 1984 we were laughing about. USA laughed at China when they did the same, but when USA is doing the same people are not outraged shooting those down, painting over them. Am I missing something?
Destroying 450 out of 130,000, ie 0.3%, is not sufficient to resist the imposition of a surveillance state. Americans pretty clearly do not care for freedom as much as they yap about.
Because "1984" is one of those books that people pretend to have read so that they can use the word "Orwellian" to talk about surveillance they personally don't like while excusing the sort that's convenient or economically expedient for them.
(For what it's worth I haven't read ~half of the books on my book shelf. "Simulacra and Simulation" is mocking me from across the room)
ends up a good % of the US population is in favor of fascism. Same reason we elected orange mango man, same reason ICE is running around shooting people and imprisoning America citizens.
Someone should build OpenFlock which only tracks and makes public movement of city council members who voted for Flock cameras in their city. For empathy.
So the cops visited and talked to him, but didn't pursue any charges or issue any warnings. He was free to pursue his project (so far).
>“One of [the officers] took the time to specifically mention how scary it would be for them, because people would be able to find out where they lived, when they got on their shift and what they were doing throughout the day, and that that type of powerful information could put them personally at risk [from] any bad apples that might want to track them down.”
I know we're supposed to distill everything down to a "them vs us" mentality. But cops have been tracked down and killed by people using apps like Waze so it's not a completely unwarranted fear.
This also isn't an apples and oranges situation. A Flock database isn't public - police have access but at least ostensibly have oversight from the legal system. That's a much different set of concerns than the "UNO reverse card" the TikToker is trying to make it to be.
Police cars are painted differently to make them visible. They are public information. Police stations are visible. Cops addresses are not made public.
Police visiting a home is form of intimidation. That's not something to brush off.
Oh you haven't seen the all-white decals on white cruisers with no top lights? Or the decals that are visible only when you're directly in line with the cruiser? There was an undercover Mitsubishi Lancer back in my home town. They aren't always so up front.
What's interesting is that I've seen a noticeable uptick in ordinary cars being camouflaged, in quasi-legal ways. Dark tinted windows all over, plenty of license-plate cloaking techniques, and a new one which is probably specifically anti-AI/anti-Flock: people are cloaking or concealing their hood ornaments: that is, the unique logo of the maker of their vehicle. An idle pastime of mine has always been car ID, so it's interesting to be a little more challenged when I see a hood ornament that's encased in a tinted shield, and I still need to correctly guess the make/model of the vehicle.
Gemini tells me it's 100% legal everywhere in the USA, to swap, modify, or conceal vehicle branding on privately-owned vehicles.
This is paired with a rather alarming but "more harmless than it appears" fad where people modify their "exhaust tune" to sound like backfire/gunshots. And they drive past all night long. I hear them everywhere. I had an LLM chat about it, and it's really something people deliberately do. I feel it is mostly to spam people with these percussive noises so that we get fatigued with them, so that "Shotspotter" is spammed with false positives, and so that boomer Karens fatigue the cops in turn with calling in "gunshots heard" when there were no gunshots at all. If you get so fatigued with hearing car exhaust backfires all night, you'll probably be duly surprised, and unlikely/unable to promptly react, when a real drive-by shooting goes down.
In my case, IIRC, once like 15-20 years ago for some paperwork that needs an adress verified by the police, or something like that. I don't remember if it was for me or my wife. I don't remember the details.
It's funny, reading that list, it all gives me an instinctual "less-nice neighborhood I wouldn't want to live in" vibe. But I'm sure it's perfectly normal for people who live in more exciting places.
Hundreds of people have been tracked down and killed with flock cameras unnecessarily. The police routinely escalate interactions as a matter of procedure until they end in shootings.
On average over 1000 people are killed by police each year. A police officer is by far the most dangerous person you'll likely interact with on a day to day basis.
> Hundreds of people have been tracked down and killed with flock cameras unnecessarily.
This is not a real datapoint. We quite a few cases of wrongful stops or arrests, but there is only one case where it escalated to physical damage (Brandon Upchurch).
Only about 10% of officer involved shootings come from traffic stops, which is what we're talking about when we're talking about Flock license plate readers.
>But cops have been tracked down and killed by people using apps like Waze so it's not a completely unwarranted fear.
Sure, but you haven't made the case for why the fear is anyone else's problem. If a person is too scared to be a cop there's an easy fix: stop being a cop. Unfortunately, regular citizens who can't afford to up and move to a country that has civil rights (that is, most of them) don't have the same recourse.
I think your critique of police here is orthogonal to the privacy discussion, which affects everyone:
Imagine the danger and legitimate fear a stalking victim would face if there was a public real-time tracker for any license plate query you can imagine.
> But cops have been tracked down and killed by people using apps like Waze so it's not a completely unwarranted fear.
Has this actually happened, or is it something you made up? Because I found articles with police spokesmen saying it _could_ happen, but nothing suggesting it has.
It was reported to have happened but got thrown out in courts, so who knows? From the police's perspective it probably doesn't matter if it was proven or not.
Police are heavily indoctrinated as part of their training to be very paranoid, and are usually required to read up on (or watch) footage of every officer who dies in duty. So it should be no surprise that they are incredibly reactionary on this stuff.
Regardless of whether app assisted or not, actual ambush or unprovoked attack is actually very rare (only 5 cases last year).
What a BS take. Do a cursory google search and you'll find many abuses of the Flock cameras. There is no oversight. How incredibly ironic:
>One of [the officers] took the time to specifically mention how scary it would be for them, because people would be able to find out where they lived, when they got on their shift and what they were doing throughout the day, and that that type of powerful information could put them personally at risk [from] any bad apples that might want to track them down.
This is the exact reason Flock cameras shouldn't exist. Hell even you know how there is no oversight otherwise you wouldn't have used the word "ostensibly" with italics.
BTW did you just gloss over how they came to his home to intimidate him? Cops SHOULD be tracked because American cops are simply the worst bullies on the planet.
> cops have been tracked down and killed by people using apps like Waze
Do you have a source for that? I can only find 2 examples vaguely similar but neither are really what that statement claims. Specifically one of them was just cops making stuff up about wayze which was factually incorrect.
> police have access but at least ostensibly have oversight from the legal system
We've already seen plenty of examples of cops tracking ex-wives and such similar abuses with no real accountability - nobody's lost their job over it
Cops know exactly what they do when they show up like this, it's meant to intimidate, there are also plenty of cases where cops have repeatedly crossed the line harassing citizens breaking no laws, it's disgusting
I think it's fair, however I probably should've said something like "the vast majority of misuses are not being checked, and the vast majority of cops abusing the system havent and wont be disciplined accordingly"
So the cops showed up to intimidate a law-abiding citizen for doing something they don’t like, but were not feeling bold enough to rough him up or cart him off to jail on some made-up charge. Yay.
Cops are (supposed to be) public servants. Risk is part of the job. If they don’t like it, they are free to pursue a different career.
In Georgia, a police chief was found to have tracked his ex-girlfriend and her teenage daughter approximately 600 times.
In Texas, a sheriff's deputy utilized Flock ALPRs to locate a woman at the behest of her abusive partner.
Marin County Sheriff’s Office was sharing the sensitive location data of millions of drivers with out-of-state agencies and federal authorities, explicitly including ICE and CBP, circumventing California law.
So, yes, it's messed up that cops' fears are warranted, in your eyes, but not private citizens'.
> He was free to pursue his project
No, being intimidated by uniformed officers is not being "free".
Fantastic, I love it. (I mean the activist's work, not the cops trying to scare him into stopping.) These kinds of projects are needed to give government officials some empathetic understanding of what they're doing to the people.
This is government overreach. Everyone should be allowed to run a surveillance system. People should be allowed to sell biometric data to each other, to corporations, or to the government. Such a restriction is preventing so many jobs from being created.
In Europe there is this radio beacon tracking device listening for emergency services radio signals (Tetra/C2000), called Target Blue[1]. This is not illegal, except apparently for in Belgium.
I feel like this isn’t the best way to draw attention to the problem. Presumably having the police visit is what the YouTuber wanted? I’m not really sure of the lesson here but drama’s presumably the point as opposed to a side effect so it’s hard to take seriously.
Flock, at the core, isn't a public entity. They aren't a government. So they're a private entity, just like an individual, tracking who they want, when they want.
This person is doing the exact same thing as Flock, and suddenly it is a problem? Seems like a double-standard.
Biggest investors have always chosen the side of oppression. YC is no different than any other money lender. They will happily choose fascism over any kind of socialist wealth redistribution. Do not try to humanize an org that uses its wealth as a leverage to gain more wealth.
Alright HN, here’s your challenge: build an open source Flock but for cops and politicians.
Build plugins for common doorbell or surveillance systems consumers use - Ring, Ubiquiti, Frigate, whatever - and have it look for official vehicles (cops, diplomat plates, government plates, etc). When detected, publish the data to an open database searchable by the general public that includes location, time, date, direction of travel, make, model, and occupants of vehicle.
After all, if this data is really not protected by privacy laws as the cops/Flock/Axon/etc claim, then obviously it’s in our best interest to keep such a database ourselves to track those who track us. We may not have the right of way or easements or budgets to build out a network like these corporate spooks, but an open community database could cover a wide swath pretty quickly.
Surely someone out there has the time and expertise willing to take the heat for such a project.
Hell, you can already buy consumer solutions from companies like Ubiquiti that accomplish this. Just need a publishing mechanism connected to Unifi's API.
I'm not familiar with privacy and filming laws in canada, but if the cops just came there and chatted with him without any arrests, warnings, citations, detainment, etc, then it isn't really different from any other random citizen knocking on your door and asking about your security camera.
Is it that different from members of the public asking cops what intentions they have using Flock?
Seems like everyone is concerned about privacy, the only difference is that the police is more organised and has more leverage to protect themselves vs (often) fragmented public.
A city member coming to your house to ask you about your intentions for something is different from you going to city council meeting. Police, city official, elected officials etc are public servants, they work for the public. The public does not work for public servants and public servants are expected only to ask members of the public their intentions under specific circumstances (common circumstances but specific circumstances - the cops can pull you over for a number of things but they, officially cannot pull you over at random or based on you exercising your 1st amendment rights, etc).
Well I mean the state does have the monopoly on violence.
In a functioning state, anyway.
So yeah, of course rules are different for normal people compared with people that have a special role as assigned by the democratically legitimized system.
This is one of those emotionally satisfying stories... if you don't think about it very hard. It's symbolically rich, it fits the simplistic narratives of good vs evil we're all raised with, but this isn't a great example of a 'gotcha' moment.
Do I like Flock cameras? No. Do I like mass surveillance? No. Do I see a difference between an agent of the state doing something involving law enforcement or surveillance activities, and a private individual doing the same? Yes. You can't run around in uniform handcuffing people either.
I don't want HN'ers setting up surveillance networks anymore than I want them strapping a pistol to their hip and fighting crime. It's an asymmetry by design because the alternative is an unworkable nightmare, whereas the sad reality is that if people keep voting for people who openly spy on us, they're going to keep doing it.
Your “private individual” wording is carrying a lot of weight here. I wonder if Google knows where all the cops with Androids are? Or if Meta lets you bid for ad impressions from users “interested in law enforcement”
What if I wanted to record the cops to schedule my lemonade stand?
Basically, the answer to “Who gets to surveil?” is: Everyone but you
Start a site or a place where you can collect metrics and hand out cookies. Boom you're in the surveillance game. You can buy ad data, you can read census data, if you have the money it's all out there on the market. Hell if you don't have a conscience you can buy black market info.
You have to ask if you want more of that until we reach parity with Google and THE POLICE, or if you're reacting out of a sense of fairness that's taught to children.
Incredibly sometimes things are different because of different circumstances and the laws we've all taken part in constructing (when we bother to organize and vote of course).
You're an unregulated, unsupervised, and frankly unknown factor with no real accountability through any realistic chain of command to the results of the democratic process. However far from your imagined ideal, cops are.
I'm not assuming that, and if you read up a bit you'd see my views clearly spelled out. Please engage with the topic and not who you imagine I must be for not providing you with enough of an echo of your own views.
That's an argument you could make if police had to obtain warrants to access them. But they do not, at least in the US (things might be different in Canada where this happened, but I doubt it). Instead, they rely on rulings that there is no expectation of privacy in public. By the same principle, it's perfectly valid and legal for a civilian (or group of civilians) to set up an equivalent system to track police.
As you say this is Canada, so I don't particular care what the situation is in a totally different country where this didn't happen. Even in the US it's not as though "Warrants are for suckers" is just the law of the land, you and I and millions of others have and had the chance to weigh in on that. The fact that most people don't notice or care does make that sort of thing extremely difficult and frustrating, but that's not the same as it being futile or equivalent to "Guy sets up surveillance network to make a point and get media attention."
It's funny that you say that, because in fact if you look at the companies YC has ultimately birthed, the people that come through here... that's exactly what HN'ers have done. For ad-tech, for fun, for metrics, for AI companies, for the government and contractors.
Who do you think does all of this if not a bunch of people in the world of tech who mostly act as mercenaries?
> I don't want HN'ers setting up surveillance networks anymore than I want them strapping a pistol to their hip and fighting crime.
In exactly equal measure: I don't want cops setting up surveillance networks any more than I want HN'ers doing it (less so, actually). So this post, bringing attention to that issue, is good, imo.
As long as random joe dropout with a badge from boss hogg can do it, and vc-backed visionary mr misanthrope can do it, so can the rest of the people. Cops and corps are only special to the degree that We The People want them to be. And speaking for the plurality of We The People [0]: we do not want them to be special in this way.
"Raising awareness" is a scam, especially in this context on this site. Not a single person here is unaware of surveillance as a topic, that's no a serious idea. Again a simplistic model that "If A can do B, B can do A" is how children see the world. Different roles comes with different levels of accountability and oversight. Arguing for more or different oversight? Arguing to vote against mass surveillance measures and the politicians who support them? Organizing as a community? ALL GOOD.
Stunts for attention so that libertarians on HN can get a smugrection? Nah.
Your reply is mostly insults and shallow dismissals, so I don't see any reason to meaningfully respond to those parts. I'll check back later to see if you've edited insults out and substance in.
As for your separate ideas of community organization: good on you for spearheading that. The world could use more yous doing that, too. If there are any specific asks you have of the community to help you there, HN is full of capable folks.
We can watch them, as is evidenced by the fact that he is watching them. Misrepresenting the police response as preventing his actions is clearly not true. Characterizing a polite conversation as "slavery" is disrespectful to people worldwide actually experiencing slavery.
They're just most probable tokens. Either most probable to exist after the previous set of tokens, or most probable to get a specific outcome.
I am being sarcastic of course, as HN has still to some degree managed to avoid this, but even HN is struggling. The rest of "social media" operates exactly like that.
Flock isn't "the government". This is an interesting conversation because often Flock is a circumvention to the police not being able to do these things.
Why deal with annoying oversight and restrictive governance and audits and usage monitoring when you can just offload it to a private company and stalk women without restraint?
Technically, it is home users volunteering data to a cloud provider, that then mines the disclosed data as a service for any creep.
It would be a constitutional matter, and the city would lose in court given precedent lawsuits... if police used direct surveillance to follow people around even on public property where there was no expectation of privacy. Sue, and remember to vote. =3
I can see some nuance to this one. Flock is intended to be searchable by law enforcement, not Joe Average. Tracking cops and then publishing that information is not exactly the same as turning Flock back on the Flockers.
I think the best solution is to just say nobody can do this, including the government. Or that if we allow things like Flock to exist, then we'd need actual legislation that tightens considerably how available the data is to be searched, and what approvals are necessary to access it.
The obvious next step, otherwise, is for someone to start OpenALPRMap and we all get to suffer together.
> Flock is intended to be searchable by law enforcement, not Joe Average.
Isn't Flock's alleged legality predicated on the principle that there is no "reasonable expectation of privacy" in public? I don't see why that would change depending on whether it's "Joe Average" or a police officer at the controls---IIUC I'm allowed to capture images, video, etc. of people in public just as much as cops are.
Agreed that these systems simply need to be banned.
This is exactly what the YouTuber was trying to illustrate - the whole legal justification of Flock cameras is that it's equated to someone sitting down in the location and writing down license plate numbers.
There's a sometimes fine distinction between "reasonable expectation of privacy" and stalking or harassment. Not that it's applicable in this case because courts have generally made the bar against police officers very high.
And police officers have repeatedly stalked and harassed the public via flock access.
Youtube has a lot of videos of British "police auditors" who go to stand near police stations to take videos, get police attention and hilarity ensues. It's worth watching a few of them to get the taste.
We have the same auditors in the states, except that the auditors in the states who do this are often detained illegally by the police, then sue and win, and get paid out of taxpayer dollars with no repercussions for the police whatsoever who acted illegally. One guy in particular I know who used to do this went by TheBattousai or similar name and I believe went through this cycle 2 or 3 times with various police agencies. Not exactly hilarity here
You're correct, and also the pushback to these needs to be less a concern of privacy (though they are) and more an infringement on freedom of movement. There is no expectation of broad strokes "privacy" in public, that's true. However what flock is effectively doing would be considered stalking by any other execution method, and the way they're getting around that is because they're stalking everyone at the same time and calling it surveillance instead.
If you attach a GPS to your wife's car without her knowledge, you can (and should) be prosecuted. Flock cameras collect the same data (rough location of a vehicle) and they just do it for every single vehicle passing their sensor. Then, through analysis of that massive dataset, you can now effectively stalk anyone, in the past, for the cost of a database search.
And I have no interest in the distinction between Joe Average and LEOs. That's about 6 months of training, and we have an absolute avalanche of evidence of how LEOs are:
* Prone to unnecessary violence (google 40% cops)
* Are ALREADY abusing this system to stalk wives, girlfriends, exes of the two formers, or just people when they're fucking bored
The clear solution is to ban it, but our Government has both a financial and power stake in keeping people surveilled, which is why I'm a huge fan of how many people are just destroying these things at scale.
Agreed, how many times does the public have to be burned before "storing vast amounts of detailed, identifying information" will be banned. Not to be too hyperbolic, but to speak their language, shouldn't keeping this database of American's movements be considered a national security threat.
Not quite the same. Attaching a GPS tracker involves physical trespass and can track a person to non-public locations. Also, collecting data does not restrict one’s freedom of moment. Nor is it stalking. Stalking is a pattern of conduct designed to intimidate or inflict emotional distress. Flock may facilitate staking, but it is not stalking itself. If knowing that someone else knows you were at a particular location at a particular time causes you distress, you have issues. Do you flee from every other car that sees on the road?
The recording may be allowed but later use of that data may not be. For example if it was being used to aid criminals to commit crimes.
Is Flock equally liable for criminal use of its data by law enforcement officers?
Edit: Flock is/was breaking California state law by allowing outside partners to illegally access data collected in California.
Isn't that like saying that guns may be legal but later use of those guns may not be?
> Isn't that like saying that guns may be legal but later use of those guns may not be?
Guns are legal but murder is not, so ... yes?
It makes sense to me that recording public activity may be legal but publishing those videos would not be (for example name-and-likeness copyrights).
Or that you'd need a warrant to search those videos and issuing a warrant comes with a one-time key that decrypts the search parameters you specified in advance to get the warrant.
https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/26/us/flock-kentucky-police-offi...
In the US, photographing and recording police are first amendment-protected activities.
Likewise, the fourth amendement doesn't forbid a police officer from recording someone in public, because there's no expectation of privacy when out in public.
The courts have found that legally, one officer recording one person is no different from a large-scale, automated surveillance system recording everyone.
Well, that argument goes both ways. If the scale and automation don't make a difference, they don't make a difference.
Given that this is Canada, the first and fourth amendments don't come into the discussion.
Canada's rights are in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and they aren't absolute.
Part 1, Section 1.
The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.
Subject to that, we get Section 2.
Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms:
(a) freedom of conscience and religion;
(b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication;
(c) freedom of peaceful assembly; and
(d) freedom of association.
Section 1 is literally just "ignore everything below this section".
If they're not absolute, they're not rights. It's a feel-good document that protects jack shit.
I would think the natural follow on would be that police have a relative expectation to be photographed and recorded by the public, their actions being public record - they're acting on behalf of the government, FOIA and all that sort of thing applies, right?
Isn't this effectively outsourcing body cams? The frequent stated reason for lack of which is "we would but our department can't afford it :'( anyway check out this new armored vehicle we bought!"
"Tracking" on duty cops doesn't seem unusual, though I think a different argument could be made for their off duty time.
* Edit: this is Canada, so my feelings likely don't apply to their laws.
> Isn't this effectively outsourcing body cams?
I think its equivalent to putting a tracker in everyone's car and giving the police access to it.
Surveillance is also firmly in pre-crime territory. People being stalked when they haven't (yet) done a crime.
> The courts have found that legally, one officer recording one person is no different from a large-scale, automated surveillance system recording everyone.
That is not the case. It hasn't been truly tested, and there are very strong hints in SCOTUS's previous opinions that scale dramatically changes the equation for them.
Of course SCOTUS is currently much more amenable to the idea of changing their mind, so who knows how it'd actually hit, but it's far from decided law in the US.
For one example, Sotomayer's concurrence in US v. Jones (2012)
> Awareness that the Government may be watching chills associational and expressive freedoms. And the Government’s unrestrained power to assemble data that reveal private aspects of identity is susceptible to abuse. The net result is that GPS monitoring—by making available at a relatively low cost such a substantial quantum of intimate information about any person whom the Government, in its unfettered discretion, chooses to track—may “alter the relationship between citizen and government in a way that is inimical to democratic society.” United States v. Cuevas-Perez, 640 F. 3d 272, 285 (CA7 2011) (Flaum, J., concurring).
> I would take these attributes of GPS monitoring into account when considering the existence of a reasonable societal expectation of privacy in the sum of one’s public movements. I would ask whether people reasonably expect that their movements will be recorded and aggregated in a manner that enables the Government to ascertain, more or less at will, their political and religious beliefs, sexual habits, and so on. I do not regard as dispositive the fact that the Government might obtain the fruits of GPS monitoring through lawful conventional surveillance techniques. See Kyllo, 533 U. S., at 35, n. 2; ante, at 11 (leaving open the possibility that duplicating traditional surveillance “through electronic means, without an accompanying trespass, is an unconstitutional invasion of privacy”). I would also consider the appropriateness of entrusting to the Executive, in the absence of any oversight from a coordinate branch, a tool so amenable to misuse, especially in light of the Fourth Amendment’s goal to curb arbitrary exercises of police power to and prevent “a too permeating police surveillance,” United States v. Di Re, 332 U. S. 581, 595 (1948).*
> The courts have found that legally, one officer recording one person is no different from a large-scale, automated surveillance system recording everyone.
If you're talking about US courts, then no. If they had, then we wouldn't see -for example- SCOTUS ruling that "geofence warrants" were searches that require Fourth Amendment analysis, rather than being equivalent to picking up a recording of events that happened in plain sight. We also wouldn't see at least one Federal judge openly noting that the judges that cite US vs. Knotts really need to read the entire opinion, rather than just the bit that agrees with what is convenient for them.
US v. Knotts is the forty-year-old case that is the source of the "You've no right to privacy when you're on public roads" idea that both people and judges have been parroting for quite a while now. In addition to establishing that principle, it also considered a possible future where the electronic surveillance that -at the time-
* had to be manually installed into cargo destined for the target's vehicle
* was only capable of tracking a single target vehicle
would become sufficiently advanced as to permit 24/7 dragnet surveillance... at which time, courts would need to reconsider what was just and right in light of such dreadfully advanced mass surveillance capabilities.
Pages 28 (starting at section C.) through 38 of this judge's opinion and order [0] are good reading... it can be hard to tell, but the judge really takes other judges who rely on Knotts but clearly haven't actually read it to task. If you have a half hour free, you should really read the whole thing.
[0] <https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.oknd.76...>
That's trying to unbake the cake. This technology will not go away. The powerful will use it in secret; and sometimes the less powerful too.
I'd rather see surveillance first pointed towards government leaders, and then once the government is highly surveilled, then maybe we can trust the government to surveil everyone else.
I don't know. My idea here isn't very realistic. It's not going to happen (though we should still try), so maybe just outlawing all of it would be more realistic.
"When the government fears the people there is liberty; when the people fear the government there is tyranny." -- Thomas Jefferson
Filming cops in public is a legitimate activity protected by the Constitution, according to the Supreme Court. Using a nationwide surveillance network to track people not suspected of any crime and without a warrant is not.
It doesn't seem all that different. Cops use these cameras to stalk ex-girlfriends, target political foes, and perv on the public at large. The public watching them hardly seems worse.
I do agree that we just shouldn't have this kind of mass-surveillance in general, and I think that's kind of the point of this particular endeavor.
If Flock is specifically for law enforcement then it is a cut and dry violation of the 4th amendment. Case closed.
However, they are simply commissioned by law enforcement and law enforcement are just one of any number of customers. There is either an expectation of privacy or there isn't. This case highlights this exactly.
It is identifying a fleet vehicle, not their person.
Why do you equate government and the honorable Joe Average? The government works at the pleasure of the Joe Average, so it's natural that the said Joe is interested to watch how his servants perform their duties - after all, he elected them to do that and pays them for that. At the same time Joe might be not interested for his lowly servants to keep tabs on him - that's none of their business, after all they don't compensate him for that information, so why shouldn't we have cameras to watch the police while completely denying them to use cameras to watch us?
> I can see some nuance to this one. Flock is intended to be searchable by law enforcement, not Joe Average.
I feel that's like saying there's "nuance" when the police choose to pull someone over because--unlike the other car--they didn't have a "I Donated To Cops" license plate.
Yes, it's technically a difference, but if it matters then the police are abusing their power to play favorites.
https://m.youtube.com/shorts/J7yJfhsuJls
We know it's not unusual. That's the whole issue here.
I see no issue with tracking and monitoring public servants, just how public servants see no issue with tracking and monitoring the public.
If you’re driving a publicly funded vehicle we can know where you are and what you’re doing. Seems straightforward.
We should be able to subpoena the GPS records of the car’s location as well - or potentially FOIA that information. Sunlight is good. The opposite should only be done by going through a metric ton of hoops. Otherwise you end up… where we are now.
> Flock is intended to be searchable by law enforcement, not Joe Average.
Let’s pretend that police will only use the footage for good. No one else has access? That seems unlikely.
The IT department? Flock employees? Contractors? Managers?
cops are Joe Average with badges and a higher rate of spousal abuse.
Unfortunately, Joe Average knows a cop willing to sell their Flock credentials on the dark web so Joe can perform nationwide searches of his ex-wife.
You have to assume it’s not just used by sworn law enforcement officers, especially when Flock’s own civilian employees have abused it.
> Flock is intended to be searchable by law enforcement, not Joe Average
Then why can Lowes and Home Depot buy their own units, place them across properties that aren't theirs and search them nationwide?
Because it’s not just for law enforcement, anyone can buy it.
https://www.flocksafety.com/
Under the American theory of government, Cops tracking people without warrant is the same amount of lawful as people tracking cops without warrant, in fact, the former is more restricted.
This was in Canada so I don't know if the same laws apply. In the US the justification for this tracking without a warrant is that you are in public. That same justification allows for filming police in the public.
The intent of Flock in the US at least was just to use technology to get around the 4th amendment.
The police shouldn't be allowed to use automated tools like this without a warrant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance
https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=snPDoXl9ZPs&si=mxrTyJpsBrZ...
The only nuance possible here is either that the government is more trustworthy than the average person (rather than less, as has been repeatedly proven), or that the police deserve special immunity in their activities (rather than needing closer scrutiny, as has been repeatedly proven as well). Either that, or that Flock is somehow a more trustworthy steward of the data, in terms of controlling access by agencies and individuals. It's also been proven that they're not, though, so that can't be either. IMO, this entire thing is just stupid hypocrisy.
Cops usually are worse than average Joe on many negative statistics (domestic abuse, etc), and that's not even factoring in how numbers are skewed by the well established thin blue line.
It's safer to give your info to average joe population than cops.
I would feel better if only cops didn't have access to see me on flock cameras and cops had to request footage through a public reddit or something.
This is all a bit of a joke sure, but less than police access to flock cams is.
Well, actually mostly Average Joes become cops. As a matter of fact those Average Joes stalked on random people with 'LOL' in reason column.
What nuance though? Did everyone give the state permission to sniff after them? Because I did not. And I am almost certain a majority would not be ok with it either. There is a reason people hate flock sniffers.
When the people turn it around and sniff on cops, why is that then any different suddenly?
> we'd need actual legislation
Can the people do legislation? It's always some judges and politicians who form a clique at the end of the day.
There's no nuance because the power imbalance and overall context very obviously makes them fundamentally incomparable. What a weasel word
bro we have PRISM what are you talking about?
Why is nothing being done about this? This is 1984 we were laughing about. USA laughed at China when they did the same, but when USA is doing the same people are not outraged shooting those down, painting over them. Am I missing something?
people are in fact,
>> tracking locations of flock cameras (https://deflock.org/)
>> destroying/removing them (https://flockstats.org/)
>> litigating their use (https://www.aclu.org/campaigns-initiatives/get-the-flock-out)
What specific response from the general public would you like that it's arguably already happening?
> destroying/removing them (https://flockstats.org/)
Destroying 450 out of 130,000, ie 0.3%, is not sufficient to resist the imposition of a surveillance state. Americans pretty clearly do not care for freedom as much as they yap about.
Voting out those representatives that allowed flock cameras in their cities.
This happened in Canada
"Northern China"
“51st state”
Said the mad man
I drove past one with a literal American flag planted on it today so maybe we are taking back the Homeland alas?
It was a beautiful thing.
The state ordered the cameras removed but they left the posts, someone stuck a flag inside the old post.
https://postimg.cc/q6vSQ01V
Because "1984" is one of those books that people pretend to have read so that they can use the word "Orwellian" to talk about surveillance they personally don't like while excusing the sort that's convenient or economically expedient for them.
(For what it's worth I haven't read ~half of the books on my book shelf. "Simulacra and Simulation" is mocking me from across the room)
1984 is a tiny paperback that's very accessible and probably takes a couple hours to read?
People aren't pretending, they just like the word.
The scenario is distinctly different: in one scenario the government had "control" over it and in the other a private corporation has "control".
> Am I missing something?
Yes you missed something big. A little too excited to get in the America dig, didn’t even bother reading the article to realize it happened in Canada.
ends up a good % of the US population is in favor of fascism. Same reason we elected orange mango man, same reason ICE is running around shooting people and imprisoning America citizens.
Someone should build OpenFlock which only tracks and makes public movement of city council members who voted for Flock cameras in their city. For empathy.
So the cops visited and talked to him, but didn't pursue any charges or issue any warnings. He was free to pursue his project (so far).
>“One of [the officers] took the time to specifically mention how scary it would be for them, because people would be able to find out where they lived, when they got on their shift and what they were doing throughout the day, and that that type of powerful information could put them personally at risk [from] any bad apples that might want to track them down.”
I know we're supposed to distill everything down to a "them vs us" mentality. But cops have been tracked down and killed by people using apps like Waze so it's not a completely unwarranted fear.
This also isn't an apples and oranges situation. A Flock database isn't public - police have access but at least ostensibly have oversight from the legal system. That's a much different set of concerns than the "UNO reverse card" the TikToker is trying to make it to be.
Police cars are painted differently to make them visible. They are public information. Police stations are visible. Cops addresses are not made public.
Police visiting a home is form of intimidation. That's not something to brush off.
Oh you haven't seen the all-white decals on white cruisers with no top lights? Or the decals that are visible only when you're directly in line with the cruiser? There was an undercover Mitsubishi Lancer back in my home town. They aren't always so up front.
What's interesting is that I've seen a noticeable uptick in ordinary cars being camouflaged, in quasi-legal ways. Dark tinted windows all over, plenty of license-plate cloaking techniques, and a new one which is probably specifically anti-AI/anti-Flock: people are cloaking or concealing their hood ornaments: that is, the unique logo of the maker of their vehicle. An idle pastime of mine has always been car ID, so it's interesting to be a little more challenged when I see a hood ornament that's encased in a tinted shield, and I still need to correctly guess the make/model of the vehicle.
Gemini tells me it's 100% legal everywhere in the USA, to swap, modify, or conceal vehicle branding on privately-owned vehicles.
This is paired with a rather alarming but "more harmless than it appears" fad where people modify their "exhaust tune" to sound like backfire/gunshots. And they drive past all night long. I hear them everywhere. I had an LLM chat about it, and it's really something people deliberately do. I feel it is mostly to spam people with these percussive noises so that we get fatigued with them, so that "Shotspotter" is spammed with false positives, and so that boomer Karens fatigue the cops in turn with calling in "gunshots heard" when there were no gunshots at all. If you get so fatigued with hearing car exhaust backfires all night, you'll probably be duly surprised, and unlikely/unable to promptly react, when a real drive-by shooting goes down.
> Police visiting a home is form of intimidation.
Is it though?
I live in a weird location, but it's not uncommon to get a couple of police visits for random things in a year.
I don’t live at a weird location and have had one in a decade.
Why would police visit people periodically?
- There's a traffic accident on the street nearby and they're looking for someone who witnessed it
- Altercation at a neighbor's house and they come inform us what was going on
- A neighbor called the police and they're looking for the address
- Coordinating parking for a medical incident down the road
- Welfare check on the kids because the neighbors heard screaming
Just a bunch of little stuff over the years.
For me that would be annoying.
In my case, IIRC, once like 15-20 years ago for some paperwork that needs an adress verified by the police, or something like that. I don't remember if it was for me or my wife. I don't remember the details.
In this case they came to talk about the cameras he put up.
It's funny, reading that list, it all gives me an instinctual "less-nice neighborhood I wouldn't want to live in" vibe. But I'm sure it's perfectly normal for people who live in more exciting places.
Hundreds of people have been tracked down and killed with flock cameras unnecessarily. The police routinely escalate interactions as a matter of procedure until they end in shootings.
On average over 1000 people are killed by police each year. A police officer is by far the most dangerous person you'll likely interact with on a day to day basis.
Last year in the US, there were approximately 12k homicides and 191 civilians killed in interactions with the police.
Where do you get these numbers?
This says police killings are at about 1200 per year.
https://policeviolencereport.org/
> Hundreds of people have been tracked down and killed with flock cameras unnecessarily.
This is not a real datapoint. We quite a few cases of wrongful stops or arrests, but there is only one case where it escalated to physical damage (Brandon Upchurch).
Only about 10% of officer involved shootings come from traffic stops, which is what we're talking about when we're talking about Flock license plate readers.
Your numbers aren’t far off - it was about 1200 police killings last year, 112 during traffic stops.
That is shockingly bad. Where police officers can be identified, about 10% have shot someone before.
https://policeviolencereport.org/
Flock cameras are deployed in locations that cannot monitor traffic, too.
> Hundreds of people have been tracked down and killed with flock cameras unnecessarily.
Citation needed.
AFAIK every one of those "Waze police reports used to target cops for [bad thing]" stories fell apart under the slightest scrutiny.
Is there a specific (confirmed) case you're referencing?
>But cops have been tracked down and killed by people using apps like Waze so it's not a completely unwarranted fear.
Sure, but you haven't made the case for why the fear is anyone else's problem. If a person is too scared to be a cop there's an easy fix: stop being a cop. Unfortunately, regular citizens who can't afford to up and move to a country that has civil rights (that is, most of them) don't have the same recourse.
> cops have been tracked down and killed by people using apps like Waze
They 100% have not actually been tracked down and killed by people using apps like Waze
I think your critique of police here is orthogonal to the privacy discussion, which affects everyone:
Imagine the danger and legitimate fear a stalking victim would face if there was a public real-time tracker for any license plate query you can imagine.
What if there was a book that listed everyone's phone numbers?
So, like, cops are currently doing?
Imagine the danger and legitimate fear a stalking victim would face if their stalker is a police officer with access to Flock.
A lot of this boils down to ‘we have bad police’.
I am no fan of Flock but there is more than one problem here.
A few rotten apples do spoil the whole bunch.
> But cops have been tracked down and killed by people using apps like Waze so it's not a completely unwarranted fear.
Has this actually happened, or is it something you made up? Because I found articles with police spokesmen saying it _could_ happen, but nothing suggesting it has.
It was reported to have happened but got thrown out in courts, so who knows? From the police's perspective it probably doesn't matter if it was proven or not.
Police are heavily indoctrinated as part of their training to be very paranoid, and are usually required to read up on (or watch) footage of every officer who dies in duty. So it should be no surprise that they are incredibly reactionary on this stuff.
Regardless of whether app assisted or not, actual ambush or unprovoked attack is actually very rare (only 5 cases last year).
What a BS take. Do a cursory google search and you'll find many abuses of the Flock cameras. There is no oversight. How incredibly ironic:
>One of [the officers] took the time to specifically mention how scary it would be for them, because people would be able to find out where they lived, when they got on their shift and what they were doing throughout the day, and that that type of powerful information could put them personally at risk [from] any bad apples that might want to track them down.
This is the exact reason Flock cameras shouldn't exist. Hell even you know how there is no oversight otherwise you wouldn't have used the word "ostensibly" with italics.
BTW did you just gloss over how they came to his home to intimidate him? Cops SHOULD be tracked because American cops are simply the worst bullies on the planet.
> Do a cursory google search and you'll find many abuses of the Flock cameras. There is no oversight.
We know about them because they were caught.
> Cops SHOULD be tracked because American cops are simply the worst bullies on the planet.
Cops are tracked. Part of the reason the above were caught because their searches were logged in Flock and used against them in criminal proceedings.
But I'm not sure where you got that I am against police being tracked?
> Cops are tracked.
The body cam was faulty during the interaction.
> cops have been tracked down and killed by people using apps like Waze
Do you have a source for that? I can only find 2 examples vaguely similar but neither are really what that statement claims. Specifically one of them was just cops making stuff up about wayze which was factually incorrect.
> police have access but at least ostensibly have oversight from the legal system
We've already seen plenty of examples of cops tracking ex-wives and such similar abuses with no real accountability - nobody's lost their job over it
Cops know exactly what they do when they show up like this, it's meant to intimidate, there are also plenty of cases where cops have repeatedly crossed the line harassing citizens breaking no laws, it's disgusting
Actually... Several have. One such story: https://www.wsbtv.com/news/georgia/georgia-deputy-accused-mi...
That's a flock camera misuse story not related
I think it's fair, however I probably should've said something like "the vast majority of misuses are not being checked, and the vast majority of cops abusing the system havent and wont be disciplined accordingly"
So the cops showed up to intimidate a law-abiding citizen for doing something they don’t like, but were not feeling bold enough to rough him up or cart him off to jail on some made-up charge. Yay.
Cops are (supposed to be) public servants. Risk is part of the job. If they don’t like it, they are free to pursue a different career.
In Georgia, a police chief was found to have tracked his ex-girlfriend and her teenage daughter approximately 600 times.
In Texas, a sheriff's deputy utilized Flock ALPRs to locate a woman at the behest of her abusive partner.
Marin County Sheriff’s Office was sharing the sensitive location data of millions of drivers with out-of-state agencies and federal authorities, explicitly including ICE and CBP, circumventing California law.
So, yes, it's messed up that cops' fears are warranted, in your eyes, but not private citizens'.
> He was free to pursue his project
No, being intimidated by uniformed officers is not being "free".
It’s Canada, silly to expect the same standard of civil rights as their southern neighbors.
Fantastic, I love it. (I mean the activist's work, not the cops trying to scare him into stopping.) These kinds of projects are needed to give government officials some empathetic understanding of what they're doing to the people.
Keep up the good work!
This is government overreach. Everyone should be allowed to run a surveillance system. People should be allowed to sell biometric data to each other, to corporations, or to the government. Such a restriction is preventing so many jobs from being created.
If anyone is allowed to do this, everyone should be allowed to do this. Which is to say that no one should be allowed to do this.
Why should no one be allowed to do this? If photons are landing on my property, they belong to me.
Private security cameras aren't the issue here at all.
People are mostly objecting to government misuse of security tech to accelerate unconstitutional enforcement.
In Europe there is this radio beacon tracking device listening for emergency services radio signals (Tetra/C2000), called Target Blue[1]. This is not illegal, except apparently for in Belgium.
[1] https://blu-eye.eu/en
I feel like this isn’t the best way to draw attention to the problem. Presumably having the police visit is what the YouTuber wanted? I’m not really sure of the lesson here but drama’s presumably the point as opposed to a side effect so it’s hard to take seriously.
Can you explain your thinking?
Flock, at the core, isn't a public entity. They aren't a government. So they're a private entity, just like an individual, tracking who they want, when they want.
This person is doing the exact same thing as Flock, and suddenly it is a problem? Seems like a double-standard.
How many police have visited flock executives to ask them why they're doing what they're doing?
It should be mentioned that Flock is a YC company.
I like Dan G, Paul G, Gary T and all the lads but this is a fuck up. YC are supposed to be disruptive not borderline Stasi.
Biggest investors have always chosen the side of oppression. YC is no different than any other money lender. They will happily choose fascism over any kind of socialist wealth redistribution. Do not try to humanize an org that uses its wealth as a leverage to gain more wealth.
You feel that greater attention is typically paid online to undramatic things?
risky move to talk to cops at your door without a lawyer present, although i am not sure how different it is in canada
The police are like vampires. So long as you don't invite them, they can't come in. (with some exceptions of course, but that's not as pithy)
A decentralized p2p impossible to delete/sanction software to track cops would be good.
Sounds like there should be some laws in place that governs both the police and civilian surveillance. But alas
Alright HN, here’s your challenge: build an open source Flock but for cops and politicians.
Build plugins for common doorbell or surveillance systems consumers use - Ring, Ubiquiti, Frigate, whatever - and have it look for official vehicles (cops, diplomat plates, government plates, etc). When detected, publish the data to an open database searchable by the general public that includes location, time, date, direction of travel, make, model, and occupants of vehicle.
After all, if this data is really not protected by privacy laws as the cops/Flock/Axon/etc claim, then obviously it’s in our best interest to keep such a database ourselves to track those who track us. We may not have the right of way or easements or budgets to build out a network like these corporate spooks, but an open community database could cover a wide swath pretty quickly.
Surely someone out there has the time and expertise willing to take the heat for such a project.
Hell, you can already buy consumer solutions from companies like Ubiquiti that accomplish this. Just need a publishing mechanism connected to Unifi's API.
https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/physical-security-nvr/pr...
https://store.ui.com/us/en/products/uvc-ai-lpr
https://help.ui.com/hc/en-us/articles/360058867233-UniFi-Pro...
I'm not familiar with privacy and filming laws in canada, but if the cops just came there and chatted with him without any arrests, warnings, citations, detainment, etc, then it isn't really different from any other random citizen knocking on your door and asking about your security camera.
Is it that different from members of the public asking cops what intentions they have using Flock? Seems like everyone is concerned about privacy, the only difference is that the police is more organised and has more leverage to protect themselves vs (often) fragmented public.
Yes, it is.
A city member coming to your house to ask you about your intentions for something is different from you going to city council meeting. Police, city official, elected officials etc are public servants, they work for the public. The public does not work for public servants and public servants are expected only to ask members of the public their intentions under specific circumstances (common circumstances but specific circumstances - the cops can pull you over for a number of things but they, officially cannot pull you over at random or based on you exercising your 1st amendment rights, etc).
That was in Canada (Peel, Ontario) not in the US just for context and for people not reading the article
Tracking for thee but not for me
Well I mean the state does have the monopoly on violence.
In a functioning state, anyway.
So yeah, of course rules are different for normal people compared with people that have a special role as assigned by the democratically legitimized system.
Nice pithy statement, but police are able to do _many_ things that the general public aren't allowed to do, in order to do their jobs.
I'm not saying flock is good or anything like that, but arguing against it because the public can't do what the police can isn't a good argument.
But using cameras in public spaces is something the general public is allowed to do.
Rookie mistake. Need to start a religion first, then you can do whatever you want if you call it righteous.
This is one of those emotionally satisfying stories... if you don't think about it very hard. It's symbolically rich, it fits the simplistic narratives of good vs evil we're all raised with, but this isn't a great example of a 'gotcha' moment.
Do I like Flock cameras? No. Do I like mass surveillance? No. Do I see a difference between an agent of the state doing something involving law enforcement or surveillance activities, and a private individual doing the same? Yes. You can't run around in uniform handcuffing people either.
I don't want HN'ers setting up surveillance networks anymore than I want them strapping a pistol to their hip and fighting crime. It's an asymmetry by design because the alternative is an unworkable nightmare, whereas the sad reality is that if people keep voting for people who openly spy on us, they're going to keep doing it.
Your “private individual” wording is carrying a lot of weight here. I wonder if Google knows where all the cops with Androids are? Or if Meta lets you bid for ad impressions from users “interested in law enforcement”
What if I wanted to record the cops to schedule my lemonade stand?
Basically, the answer to “Who gets to surveil?” is: Everyone but you
Start a site or a place where you can collect metrics and hand out cookies. Boom you're in the surveillance game. You can buy ad data, you can read census data, if you have the money it's all out there on the market. Hell if you don't have a conscience you can buy black market info.
You have to ask if you want more of that until we reach parity with Google and THE POLICE, or if you're reacting out of a sense of fairness that's taught to children.
"You have no expectation of privacy in public, citizen."
"Officer, do you have any expectation of privacy in public?"
"That's different."
Incredibly sometimes things are different because of different circumstances and the laws we've all taken part in constructing (when we bother to organize and vote of course).
You're an unregulated, unsupervised, and frankly unknown factor with no real accountability through any realistic chain of command to the results of the democratic process. However far from your imagined ideal, cops are.
There's some public interest in noting and publishing observations of police (they appeared to be working while they were being paid, for instance).
The same is at least less true for private citizens that are not being accused of a crime.
Why are you assuming that the rest of us are fine with mass surveillance and authoritarianism? Are you a rationalist?
I'm not assuming that, and if you read up a bit you'd see my views clearly spelled out. Please engage with the topic and not who you imagine I must be for not providing you with enough of an echo of your own views.
That's an argument you could make if police had to obtain warrants to access them. But they do not, at least in the US (things might be different in Canada where this happened, but I doubt it). Instead, they rely on rulings that there is no expectation of privacy in public. By the same principle, it's perfectly valid and legal for a civilian (or group of civilians) to set up an equivalent system to track police.
As you say this is Canada, so I don't particular care what the situation is in a totally different country where this didn't happen. Even in the US it's not as though "Warrants are for suckers" is just the law of the land, you and I and millions of others have and had the chance to weigh in on that. The fact that most people don't notice or care does make that sort of thing extremely difficult and frustrating, but that's not the same as it being futile or equivalent to "Guy sets up surveillance network to make a point and get media attention."
I mean, the entire point of this project was to make a statement about mass surveillance and make the government feel uncomfortable about it.
You don't actually have to worry about "HN'ers setting up surveillance networks".
It's funny that you say that, because in fact if you look at the companies YC has ultimately birthed, the people that come through here... that's exactly what HN'ers have done. For ad-tech, for fun, for metrics, for AI companies, for the government and contractors.
Who do you think does all of this if not a bunch of people in the world of tech who mostly act as mercenaries?
> I don't want HN'ers setting up surveillance networks anymore than I want them strapping a pistol to their hip and fighting crime.
In exactly equal measure: I don't want cops setting up surveillance networks any more than I want HN'ers doing it (less so, actually). So this post, bringing attention to that issue, is good, imo.
As long as random joe dropout with a badge from boss hogg can do it, and vc-backed visionary mr misanthrope can do it, so can the rest of the people. Cops and corps are only special to the degree that We The People want them to be. And speaking for the plurality of We The People [0]: we do not want them to be special in this way.
0 – https://www.reuters.com/world/us/who-likes-flock-ai-cameras-...
"Raising awareness" is a scam, especially in this context on this site. Not a single person here is unaware of surveillance as a topic, that's no a serious idea. Again a simplistic model that "If A can do B, B can do A" is how children see the world. Different roles comes with different levels of accountability and oversight. Arguing for more or different oversight? Arguing to vote against mass surveillance measures and the politicians who support them? Organizing as a community? ALL GOOD.
Stunts for attention so that libertarians on HN can get a smugrection? Nah.
> a scam
> no a serious idea
> a simplistic model
> how children see the world
> stunts for attention
Your reply is mostly insults and shallow dismissals, so I don't see any reason to meaningfully respond to those parts. I'll check back later to see if you've edited insults out and substance in.
As for your separate ideas of community organization: good on you for spearheading that. The world could use more yous doing that, too. If there are any specific asks you have of the community to help you there, HN is full of capable folks.
So they can watch us - but we can not watch them.
At which point is this called slavery?
We can watch them, as is evidenced by the fact that he is watching them. Misrepresenting the police response as preventing his actions is clearly not true. Characterizing a polite conversation as "slavery" is disrespectful to people worldwide actually experiencing slavery.
Words have meanings
Not in 2026 they don't.
They're just most probable tokens. Either most probable to exist after the previous set of tokens, or most probable to get a specific outcome.
I am being sarcastic of course, as HN has still to some degree managed to avoid this, but even HN is struggling. The rest of "social media" operates exactly like that.
YouTuber is shocked to find out that the government is legally able to do things that you, a private citizen, cannot do.
What he did was not illegal and he was not charged. Four cops came to his house to intimidate him but left when it did not work
this is not a good summary of the video
The YouTuber just forgot that they need more subscribers to unlock those perks.
You gain those at iirc 10 million or so? Even comes with a decorative plate for your wall.
Goverement has monopoly to use violence against own citizens. Legally. Why opposite is illegal?
Flock isn't "the government". This is an interesting conversation because often Flock is a circumvention to the police not being able to do these things.
Why deal with annoying oversight and restrictive governance and audits and usage monitoring when you can just offload it to a private company and stalk women without restraint?
Cops, like everyone, have no "reasonable expectation of privacy." Until then, they are in fact treated like everyone else.
What I saw was cops making up laws and trying to intimidate people into following them. Wouldn't be the first time.
Legal gray area is still a legal gray area...
Technically, it is home users volunteering data to a cloud provider, that then mines the disclosed data as a service for any creep.
It would be a constitutional matter, and the city would lose in court given precedent lawsuits... if police used direct surveillance to follow people around even on public property where there was no expectation of privacy. Sue, and remember to vote. =3