Abuse by police officers and other individuals with access to these systems is the answer to the stupid but common question "why should I worry about surveillance if I have nothing to hide".
I never hear that question from Flock supporters. The question I hear[†] is "why shouldn't we be pulling over stolen cars?". It's a much harder one to answer than the straw man questions we set up for these things.
(To be clear: I think the current generation of ALPRs is a policy failure and that major changes need to happen inside state law enforcement systems before they can be deployed successfully. But I also think people on HN have a real problem in convincing themselves about the obvious righteousness of their anti-surveillance arguments.)
[†] I heard arguments like these because I was deeply involved in getting the cameras disabled in the inner-ring Chicago suburb in which I live, getting the first ACLU CCOPS ordinance in Illinois passed there, and helping draft what are probably the most detailed ALPR police General Orders in any municipality, or at least were at the time. Which is a long and pretentious way of saying I spent a lot of time talking to people who are not Very Online.
It should result in jail time. If I got access to government surveillance program and started using it for personal reasons, I would likely be charged with terrorism.
To paraphrase Homer: the cause of, and solution to, a problem! In this case police misconduct.
It does make me wonder whether electronic evidence of police behavior will materially impact actual behavior over time. But given that the normal reaction is to deny access to evidence, I doubt it.
The people who want to be police officers tend not to be the people everyone else would want to be police officers.
Whatever protections your area police have from these kinds of firings are a matter of public record. Have you FOIA'd your local department to see what they are? You might be surprised.
The real teeth behind these disciplinary events, at least in suburban/metro areas, are that departments don't want to lose the cameras, and know that they will if abuses aren't answered.
There's basically 3 ways to get a council to cancel a contract. 1) Persuade them to do it because it's the right thing for the community. This is best done in private. 2) Convince them that the legal liability out weighs the public benefit. This is best done in public. 3) Run for office.
If you have the energy you can do all 3 in parallel.
Please compare the number of officers doing such a thing to the number who did not. Also compare it to the number of incidents where the cameras helped capture criminals and pursue other illegal activities.
I'm betting that the number of officers who used it this way compared to the value it provides is minute to almost nil.
It would be interesting to find the number of Meta employees or Google employees who do similar activities.
I get that this comment is meant to warn about the creeping government overreach and a curtailment of free speech, by comparing the US against a society where government surveillance is already commonplace.
I wonder if it does a disservice to readers to not make that same comparison against more similar countries instead (UK, Germany, Australia to name a few examples)?
UK police simply do not have warrantless access to any system anything like as broad and contiguous in scope as Flock.
Much of the American hysteria about the UK as a surveillance state is profoundly misapprehended based on dramatisations, built in part on a misunderstood and misleading article about King’s Lynn back in the late 80s.
There is really no seamless CCTV network available to centralised UK police, at all. It is myth. We are not at all trackable from door to door. They only fully control a couple of hundred cameras in London, for example.
Almost all CCTV footage British police do get is either from council controlled traffic cameras (with a warrant) or private, fully closed circuit cameras (usually by knocking on doors and asking, sometimes with a warranted request to a CCTV provider). There’s a pretty extensive legal framework for what access they do have.
Local councils do operate more cameras, for road management etc. and for some shopping streets with serious shoplifting. They also operate some cameras around historic sites. But the police have a process to go through to get this.
In the town where I live I don’t think there are any directly police controlled cameras, and a handful of (maybe a couple of dozen) council controlled cameras —- some ANPR to monitor a complex traffic flow and catch drivers abusing a pedestrian section, presumably the shopping mall security cameras since the council now owns the mall, a few safety cameras in the pedestrianised section. I think the police can access a feed of these cameras through a specific agreement (because we have very few police officers) and the council monitors how they do that.
(I suppose there must be security cameras in the railway station and maybe these days there is a national feed of those for British Transport Police. British railway stations are routinely targeted by terrorists, so there have been cameras there for decades. If I had to bet on any national network of cameras being available to the security services, it would be motorway safety cameras and railway station concourses)
So the whole process is quite disjointed, non-unified, fairly bureaucratic, as you would expect from us Brits.
With Flock, Shotspotter (and Ring) the USA has quietly built a pretty seamless AV surveillance system that is vastly more powerful and less accountable than anything the UK has, for real. Because you don’t hold your police accountable or restrict them in any meaningful way.
And digital billboards in every space will tell us what to think.
Can't wait for the two to pair up and the billboards to target whoever is seen in the nearest camera. Or are they already doing it?
From reading the article it seems the problem was not surveillance in any form but unauthorized use of police systems. I am not seeing anything new here. For decades police can be investigated for any improper searches of license plates or personal IDs, which can result in criminal referrals.
This feels like a weird comment on an article about how they monitored usage, identified misuse, and terminated the people involved.
There's surely plenty of entities that need better controls around usage of technology / records / etc, but this is an example of somebody having an incentive and then following through.
its good PR for these systems that they are very keen to roll out, i would say theres a vested interest in stories like these from the exact agencies deploying them
If government entities get good PR for rolling out strong policies, practices, and tooling for the data they have, and that makes more of them very keen to do so... mission accomplished?
it's also possible that we're only seeing a few select departments fire their officers. there are no laws around this as far as I'm aware so enforcement is purely departmental policy. how many sheriff's offices and police departments do these audits and how many of them act on abuses?
you should need a warrant to monitor the products of mass surveillance and it should be as narrowly targeted towards a suspect as possible. or just not have any of the mass CCTV placements everywhere in the first place
I'm in favor of pushing for police departments (and really any governmental body with access to any kind of data) to have regulations around access to that data, access controls to restrict illegitimate access, and monitoring to detect improper access by people who do have legitimate access but don't follow the proper regulations.
I think you're correct that we don't tend to see the instances where improper usage occurs, tautologically because those entities aren't doing their homework on the above.
There always ends up being a real world to digital interface and it always has the potential for abuse, and thus always requires some level of monitoring and validation.
The department in this article appears to be doing just that:
> Every search run through the Flock Safety platform is automatically logged — who ran it, when, and the reason they gave for doing it. SPD said they also have other safeguards in place, including mandatory training, role-based access controls and supervisory oversight.
My town's covered with them already, without much warning in the local news, at least none I saw. And they're about to add 50% more all over the county. Planning on going to the zoning meeting Tuesday to speak against them. Also had a handful of yard signs printed up and put them at major intersections around town warning about the expansion, pointing people to the zoning meeting.
Very much not okay with this surveillance state bullshit.
I don't believe a legal solution is possible. We need a three-tiered response to Flock's surveillance state business strategy, depending on what level of meddling each citizen is comfortable with.
1. Protest via yard signs and awareness (what you're doing)
2. Impermanent vandalism. I like the idea of hanging copies of the fourth amendment over the lenses
3. Permanent vandalism. I think we need bounties on camera destruction and public legal funds to assist in defense, bail, etc.
The police as a class/caste are not interested in the fundamental principles that America was founded on. Individual officers may be interested in civil freedom and privacy but as an entity they only ever march in the direction of total surveillance and domination of the citizenry.
In what possible way would the broader public destroying Flock cameras on sight and allying with one another to defend those caught doing it benefit intelligence agencies?
You'll never gain traction with your post on social internet forums like this despite the reality and truth of it. You'll be downvoted to quiet and eliminate your opinion.
I would encourage you to add arrows to your signs/ stickers pointing out the cameras. More impactful when people see (and are unconsensually recorded by) the device first hand.
(To be clear: I think the current generation of ALPRs is a policy failure and that major changes need to happen inside state law enforcement systems before they can be deployed successfully. But I also think people on HN have a real problem in convincing themselves about the obvious righteousness of their anti-surveillance arguments.)
[†] I heard arguments like these because I was deeply involved in getting the cameras disabled in the inner-ring Chicago suburb in which I live, getting the first ACLU CCOPS ordinance in Illinois passed there, and helping draft what are probably the most detailed ALPR police General Orders in any municipality, or at least were at the time. Which is a long and pretentious way of saying I spent a lot of time talking to people who are not Very Online.
It does make me wonder whether electronic evidence of police behavior will materially impact actual behavior over time. But given that the normal reaction is to deny access to evidence, I doubt it.
The people who want to be police officers tend not to be the people everyone else would want to be police officers.
Gotta make a statement with the low level grunts so the citizenry think these systems have accountability.
The real teeth behind these disciplinary events, at least in suburban/metro areas, are that departments don't want to lose the cameras, and know that they will if abuses aren't answered.
If you have the energy you can do all 3 in parallel.
Here's my attempt at 2: https://rmnoflock.com/2026/07/29/rolling-meadows-flock-camer...
Does anyone have advice or experience with 2?
I'm betting that the number of officers who used it this way compared to the value it provides is minute to almost nil.
It would be interesting to find the number of Meta employees or Google employees who do similar activities.
I wonder if it does a disservice to readers to not make that same comparison against more similar countries instead (UK, Germany, Australia to name a few examples)?
Much of the American hysteria about the UK as a surveillance state is profoundly misapprehended based on dramatisations, built in part on a misunderstood and misleading article about King’s Lynn back in the late 80s.
There is really no seamless CCTV network available to centralised UK police, at all. It is myth. We are not at all trackable from door to door. They only fully control a couple of hundred cameras in London, for example.
Almost all CCTV footage British police do get is either from council controlled traffic cameras (with a warrant) or private, fully closed circuit cameras (usually by knocking on doors and asking, sometimes with a warranted request to a CCTV provider). There’s a pretty extensive legal framework for what access they do have.
Local councils do operate more cameras, for road management etc. and for some shopping streets with serious shoplifting. They also operate some cameras around historic sites. But the police have a process to go through to get this.
In the town where I live I don’t think there are any directly police controlled cameras, and a handful of (maybe a couple of dozen) council controlled cameras —- some ANPR to monitor a complex traffic flow and catch drivers abusing a pedestrian section, presumably the shopping mall security cameras since the council now owns the mall, a few safety cameras in the pedestrianised section. I think the police can access a feed of these cameras through a specific agreement (because we have very few police officers) and the council monitors how they do that.
(I suppose there must be security cameras in the railway station and maybe these days there is a national feed of those for British Transport Police. British railway stations are routinely targeted by terrorists, so there have been cameras there for decades. If I had to bet on any national network of cameras being available to the security services, it would be motorway safety cameras and railway station concourses)
So the whole process is quite disjointed, non-unified, fairly bureaucratic, as you would expect from us Brits.
With Flock, Shotspotter (and Ring) the USA has quietly built a pretty seamless AV surveillance system that is vastly more powerful and less accountable than anything the UK has, for real. Because you don’t hold your police accountable or restrict them in any meaningful way.
this is easily solved with current technology, if they had an incentive to do so.
besides firing folks that get caught, flock themselves should be brought to court.
There's surely plenty of entities that need better controls around usage of technology / records / etc, but this is an example of somebody having an incentive and then following through.
If government entities get good PR for rolling out strong policies, practices, and tooling for the data they have, and that makes more of them very keen to do so... mission accomplished?
you should need a warrant to monitor the products of mass surveillance and it should be as narrowly targeted towards a suspect as possible. or just not have any of the mass CCTV placements everywhere in the first place
I'm in favor of pushing for police departments (and really any governmental body with access to any kind of data) to have regulations around access to that data, access controls to restrict illegitimate access, and monitoring to detect improper access by people who do have legitimate access but don't follow the proper regulations.
I think you're correct that we don't tend to see the instances where improper usage occurs, tautologically because those entities aren't doing their homework on the above.
The department in this article appears to be doing just that:
> Every search run through the Flock Safety platform is automatically logged — who ran it, when, and the reason they gave for doing it. SPD said they also have other safeguards in place, including mandatory training, role-based access controls and supervisory oversight.
Very much not okay with this surveillance state bullshit.
1. Protest via yard signs and awareness (what you're doing)
2. Impermanent vandalism. I like the idea of hanging copies of the fourth amendment over the lenses
3. Permanent vandalism. I think we need bounties on camera destruction and public legal funds to assist in defense, bail, etc.
The police as a class/caste are not interested in the fundamental principles that America was founded on. Individual officers may be interested in civil freedom and privacy but as an entity they only ever march in the direction of total surveillance and domination of the citizenry.
And, which country routinely sets a bunch of shit on fire when they need to?
That's right.
Good work!