I don't see anything so wrong with cutting them down. I see it similar to maintaining a local trail. Removing obstacles like fallen trees or brambles. These are pests that are unconstitutional.
It seems like a statement to the prosperity of the American ideals of freedom that they are being removed both by local activism and illegal means. Along with the general sentiment on social media. It's genuinely insane the power social media has on earth. It's attributed to the revolution in Nepal, major protests in India, and there were a bunch more in other countries[1].
We as humans have been brainwashed with the nothing to hide fallacy. It's good to see it dismantled once we see mass surveillance in practice.
[1] Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Kenya, Morocco, Madagascar, Peru, and Bulgaria from a Brave overview (can't say I researched any of these).
Prompt: other countries that had uprisings like the Nepal 2025 one
Cutting them down isn’t the worst idea but it would be nice if we could just elect people that wouldn’t allow this in the first place. Knowing that won’t happen, the only chance reasonable people have to stop this is to turn these systems against the decision makers until they yield.
Some kind of Flock@home volunteer surveillance network that tracks politicians, records LEO interactions (including those involving masked unaccountable agents), and provides the only accountability that the public has left.
What do you mean "allow"? Police chiefs are not elected positions and they often find funding outside of the town's budget for these automated bill of rights violation machines.
> Cutting them down isn’t the worst idea but it would be nice if we could just elect people that wouldn’t allow this in the first place.
Is this really better though? First-party community maintenance is more direct, cheaper, and doesn't rely on fragile central authorities (granted, it _does_ rely on a difficult pattern of community discussion and collaboration to satisfy tribal consensus, etc).
I'm broadly OK with cameras being in public, but I have much more trust in direct action than I do in elected "officials".
On medium time-scales, it seems to me that a great solution will be to have community-maintained cameras kinda all over the commons, but such that the camera eye can be accessed publicly (ie, removing the information asymmetry which gives the undesirable actors (police, etc) greater view than the actual community participants).
I don't really care too much one way or the other about these cameras, and generally think it's probably bad to have more surveillance but could you help me understand what exactly is "unconstitutional" or even nefarious with these cameras provided they are bought and installed on property that is owned by the installer or an entity such as the government which presumably has legal justification for installing them?
I'm genuinely asking since I'm a bit out of touch with this latest controversy, but how are they any different than a dash cam, doorbell camera, or my alley camera, for example such that they deserve special consideration?
It's the database query, not the physical cameras. In the pre-digital age where privacy was considered in constitutional law, tracking people's and vehicle's movements was horrendously expensive - you'd need multiple detectives doing things by hand per person of interest. This meant that it was reserved for when the government already had pretty strong reason to believe in some sort of wrongdoing. Even with a personal, non-internet-connected doorbell camera, the police would need to identify what cameras exist for a location and contact the owners in order for the footage to do anything.
With automated license plate readers, they can simply collect everything with a reasonably affordable network of cameras, then query the database when they want to find a particular pattern of activity. The police have already detained people for frequent border-crossing between marijuana-legal and illegal states. This gets exacerbated by granularity and extensiveness - imagine an anti-choice state pointing cameras at every maternity care parking lot in the state and tracking who visits them for cross-referencing with visits to pro-choice states.
And with the existence of parallel construction, there's no reasonable way short of dismantling the ALPR system to avoid abuse against the citizenry.
Please correct my understanding if this is not the case... so the issue isn't the cameras themselves it's that you believe (and I am sympathetic toward) that they are easily searchable without a warrant and so it's something akin to a 4th Amendment violation? Less so to do with surveillance state which we might consider a separate issue? I mention that just because the surveillance state with just cameras could include consumer cameras, drones, highway traffic cams, the damn automated plate reader and tracking camera that gave me a $100+ ticket in London for driving through a congestion zone and... those bast.... and... (jk - well sort of it, I mean it is part of the group here)
I'm not sure I'm on board with the efficiency argument but those are always interesting ones.
The privacy violation is that the database exists, full stop. I don't think a warrant requirement would be a meaningful barrier, since the data is already part of the camera network operators' database and all sorts of informal or backdoor agreements would easily happen.
Like, all a warrant requirement does is make it so that the police have to talk to a judge before making the searched data part of the evidence against you. It would do nothing to stop the police from fabricating some other pretext to lawfully stop and investigate you - say, parking a police cruiser at the border into the state and whenever the ALPR in that car hits a list of vehicles, stop them for going 0.1 MPH over the limit and the officer says they smell weed.
> The privacy violation is that the database exists, full stop.
Is that because the government has access to the database? Aside from that I'm not really sure what the difference is between Flock in this case and something like a doorbell camera.
It's nefarious and privacy-violating when the database exists, government involvement just exacerbates things because private companies aren't allowed to send armed goons to your house and break down your door.
There's also the matter of police accessing this massive data trove "for personal purposes, including tracking romantic partners, relatives or acquaintances."
It’s an interpretation of the Fourth Amendment, which is loosely supported by Supreme Court precent in Carpenter and Jones. See my previous comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46359826
Edit: To be more clear, the issue courts have considered is warrantless searches of ALPR databases (and whether that evidence should be excluded), not whether it’s constitutional to put up cameras.
More recently, there's also United States v. Chatrie, which was a 6-3 decision that searching Google's location history data is covered by the Fourth Amendment
The constitution forbids unreasonable search and seizure. Tracking people's movements without specific reason the believe that they are a criminal has generally been regarded, at least by the public, as a classic example of government overreach.
That's a bad assumption and incorrect in this case. Instead of assuming you should just ask. I also did my best to communicate that I was genuinely interested in learning more about what was the crux of the issue.
One of the oddities in reporting about Flock is that no one’s considered who the silent customers are. Even Techdirt is focusing on municipal abuses and greed, calling out Flock for reactivating cameras for its own sake. But the real question should be: is Flock reactivating municipal cameras on behalf of non-municipal customers? So, when we find out here that the most likely non-municipal customer is also monitoring social media about Flock, it intensifies my suspicion that Flock exists as a liability shield for warrantless surveillance for the government — and that municipalities are just a front.
Dollars to donuts it isn't just tiktok and instragram. If it's on the internet and not end-to-end encrypted with the proper ciphers it's being monitored. Shit, the police and feds keep things they can't decipher hoping they can in the future.
My rule of thumb is that if it's technically possible, someone, somewhere is doing it.
This is good to know, and we might even mostly be on the side of the lawbreakers here but, like, monitoring public coordinated attempts to break the law is squarely in the job description of law enforcement. Maybe if someone had done a better job of social media monitoring, we could have had a real response to Jan 6, 2021. (I know, I know, maybe not under the cheeto's authority specifically, but the point is that LEOs reading public messages is still something that happens in a government actually working for the people.)
A plague on our land. Hopefully the recent Chatrie v. United States decision gives courts the ammo they need to shut these down.
There is a big difference in a cop seeing you go by, checking a list, and coming after you than scanning every license plate, bumper sticker, etc. and putting in a database for every cop in the country.
I don't even have a problem with every cop being equipped with an automatic ALPR... So long as the data is not retained. I do believe that we need better auditing and oversight in response to the availability, but it's not a great evil that an APB can be virtually guaranteed to catch a car... So long as we're using them carefully and judiciously, in response to immediate and recent threats or a clearly understood long tail. There's supposed to be a balance of power; it's not evil to give the police new powers, but it is evil to give politicians unanswered and unlimited tracking of the movements of anyone they so desire.
Should be obvious to the government places that notice all this info coming out that people do not LIKE these as a solution, and they should maybe, I dunno, start listening to the people?
Nice hyperbole. I'm concerned about govt listening to our private conversations and mining our inner dialogue. I could not care less if they know when my car passes a camera in public. People are instantly very emotional about this without reflecting on why. If you want to live in a safe country, you must give up some level of freedom. That's life. Otherwise, why not just ban all forms of surveillance? Make it a rule that unless police witness a crime first-hand, no one can be prosecuted? See how that plays out.
I think that a reasonable argument that tracking someone's movements can give significant insight into private communication. If you know who someone is talking to, when, where, and how often, then you can deduce a lot of what they are communicating.
I'm not sure about your argument about giving up freedom for security. One of the quotes that has become embedded in American social consciousness is Ben Franklin's "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety".
I get that you don't agree with it, but that quote is part of most American's understanding of our country. If the government derives its authority from the people, then that has to matter.
>If you want to live in a safe country, you must give up some level of freedom
Is that why prisons so safe and free of crime? How is that life? Electronic mass surveillance is how old, the late 90s?
Yes, let's ban all mass surveillance. I know where that gets you, the 70s or 80s when the height of technology was localized tape CCTV in a handful of places. Did everyone die and everything burn down? How can anyone with a straight face be this hysterical when most people currently alive grew up without any surveillance
Crimes can be investigated without always-on survellience. Like has been done for decades.
Are all these deployed cameras actually solving crimes? What are the numbers? Aren't there already a bunch of other ways to track cars, like onstar sim chips?
Always-on survellience is always abused. It's already abused by US police officers. tracking their x-wives for example, the new boyfriends, etc. And there's room for much worse. Many of us grew up hearing about things that totalitarian communist governments were doing. The East German's would have loved to have such technologies.
New capabilities are being rolled out by flock- facial recognition and bluetooth tracking, for example.
This seems to be another example of the government contracting with private companies to do things that would be illegal for the government to do themselves.
Historically stuff like this ends up being abused by the establishment. facial recognition in Hong Kong. Protesters dissappeared. Stingray phone tracking in Portland. Protesters picked up by black SUVs. Freezing bank accounts in Ottawa. ICE deporting people without due process. Just keeps getting worse.
Think of all the modern niceties we enjoy that protesters earned. Will protesters of the future stand a chance when everyone is tracked all the time?
You don't see anything wrong with being tracked 24/7 ? The fact that it's already possible to be tracked with your phone signals that there is already a problem that needs fixing
Flock is not tracking you 24/7, your phone is. What is so dangerous about the government knowing that your car passed a camera at a particular point in time?
We can make up plenty of scenarios where it's dangerous, but even without those, can we not just... not like something? To use the common analogy, my neighbor staring at me through the window all the time wouldn't be dangerous. But it's weird, it's uncomfortable. Can we just not do it? I want to be able to drive places without my movements being logged. Clearly many millions of people agree, given the backlash against Flock. This isn't some essential technology, we got along just fine without it.
I would also like it if people would wake up to their phones tracking them, etc, and demand that laws be passed to deal with that. But this is a good start!
And what percentage of that backlash is by people with a criminal record? And what percentage of these criminals are the ones pushing the narrative of this being some grave invasion of privacy that must be stopped for "mah freedom"?
It's easy to work people up about anything involving monitoring, their brains immediately shut down and think emotionally about the subject. But not all forms of monitoring are equivalent, and some of it is useful and has net-benefit.
Imagine having a life you value. Now, imagine you have opinions you express.
Now, imagine expressing those opinions destroys the first.
Before you jump in with a rebuttal, any comment you reply with here must include your full name and address, otherwise, you admit to being a bot and therefore worthless.
Now imagine that none of that is relevant because we're not talking about listening devices or communication tapping.
This is just false equivalence, and this false equivalence is why people are immediately so defensive of anyone who suggest Flock is a good idea in principle.
As for the 'full name and address', also not relevant, Flock is not obtaining either of these details.
99% of the people who attend protests take their phone with them. Furthermore, Flock does not prove you participated in a protest. What if you were going to a shop near a protest? What if you were going to the park? This would never be considered sufficient evidence for anything actionable.
It would be pretty easy to determine most people's basic political alignment (e.g. party registration is public record) and therefore which side of a protest someone was on. I don't think it is likely that an authoritarian government would care if they could prove that you were actually at the protest. Even just prosecuting someone, even if it has no chance of success, is a significant punishment.
Right, and I think that part of Flock should be fixed. But I don't think in general it is a bad idea. Do these same people also think it is bad that the police can get a warrant to read your text messages?
If the warrant is a real warrant, not some rubber stamp or FISA court, then I'd have less of a problem with the Flock cameras. However, that's not how America works.
I agree with that too. So if the argument is: "Flock is good in principle but right now it doesn't have the necessary safeguards", well, that's exactly what I said in my original post.
The problem is that the safeguards will inevitably be bent, ignored, parallel constructioned, or repealed. As long as the cameras are there, they are a threat.
It seems like a statement to the prosperity of the American ideals of freedom that they are being removed both by local activism and illegal means. Along with the general sentiment on social media. It's genuinely insane the power social media has on earth. It's attributed to the revolution in Nepal, major protests in India, and there were a bunch more in other countries[1].
We as humans have been brainwashed with the nothing to hide fallacy. It's good to see it dismantled once we see mass surveillance in practice.
[1] Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Kenya, Morocco, Madagascar, Peru, and Bulgaria from a Brave overview (can't say I researched any of these).
Prompt: other countries that had uprisings like the Nepal 2025 one
Some kind of Flock@home volunteer surveillance network that tracks politicians, records LEO interactions (including those involving masked unaccountable agents), and provides the only accountability that the public has left.
Is this really better though? First-party community maintenance is more direct, cheaper, and doesn't rely on fragile central authorities (granted, it _does_ rely on a difficult pattern of community discussion and collaboration to satisfy tribal consensus, etc).
I'm broadly OK with cameras being in public, but I have much more trust in direct action than I do in elected "officials".
On medium time-scales, it seems to me that a great solution will be to have community-maintained cameras kinda all over the commons, but such that the camera eye can be accessed publicly (ie, removing the information asymmetry which gives the undesirable actors (police, etc) greater view than the actual community participants).
I'm genuinely asking since I'm a bit out of touch with this latest controversy, but how are they any different than a dash cam, doorbell camera, or my alley camera, for example such that they deserve special consideration?
With automated license plate readers, they can simply collect everything with a reasonably affordable network of cameras, then query the database when they want to find a particular pattern of activity. The police have already detained people for frequent border-crossing between marijuana-legal and illegal states. This gets exacerbated by granularity and extensiveness - imagine an anti-choice state pointing cameras at every maternity care parking lot in the state and tracking who visits them for cross-referencing with visits to pro-choice states.
And with the existence of parallel construction, there's no reasonable way short of dismantling the ALPR system to avoid abuse against the citizenry.
I'm not sure I'm on board with the efficiency argument but those are always interesting ones.
Like, all a warrant requirement does is make it so that the police have to talk to a judge before making the searched data part of the evidence against you. It would do nothing to stop the police from fabricating some other pretext to lawfully stop and investigate you - say, parking a police cruiser at the border into the state and whenever the ALPR in that car hits a list of vehicles, stop them for going 0.1 MPH over the limit and the officer says they smell weed.
Is that because the government has access to the database? Aside from that I'm not really sure what the difference is between Flock in this case and something like a doorbell camera.
https://www.newsweek.com/flock-camera-police-arrests-1226378...
Edit: To be more clear, the issue courts have considered is warrantless searches of ALPR databases (and whether that evidence should be excluded), not whether it’s constitutional to put up cameras.
See: https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-applauds-important-...
See: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25-112_0am4.pdf
"What is so wrong with having your house burn down? It's just a chemical process that happens all the time."
My rule of thumb is that if it's technically possible, someone, somewhere is doing it.
There is a big difference in a cop seeing you go by, checking a list, and coming after you than scanning every license plate, bumper sticker, etc. and putting in a database for every cop in the country.
Right after expressing complete acceptance of living in a surveillance state.
I'm not sure about your argument about giving up freedom for security. One of the quotes that has become embedded in American social consciousness is Ben Franklin's "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety".
Is that why prisons so safe and free of crime? How is that life? Electronic mass surveillance is how old, the late 90s?
Yes, let's ban all mass surveillance. I know where that gets you, the 70s or 80s when the height of technology was localized tape CCTV in a handful of places. Did everyone die and everything burn down? How can anyone with a straight face be this hysterical when most people currently alive grew up without any surveillance
Are all these deployed cameras actually solving crimes? What are the numbers? Aren't there already a bunch of other ways to track cars, like onstar sim chips?
Always-on survellience is always abused. It's already abused by US police officers. tracking their x-wives for example, the new boyfriends, etc. And there's room for much worse. Many of us grew up hearing about things that totalitarian communist governments were doing. The East German's would have loved to have such technologies.
New capabilities are being rolled out by flock- facial recognition and bluetooth tracking, for example.
This seems to be another example of the government contracting with private companies to do things that would be illegal for the government to do themselves.
Historically stuff like this ends up being abused by the establishment. facial recognition in Hong Kong. Protesters dissappeared. Stingray phone tracking in Portland. Protesters picked up by black SUVs. Freezing bank accounts in Ottawa. ICE deporting people without due process. Just keeps getting worse.
Think of all the modern niceties we enjoy that protesters earned. Will protesters of the future stand a chance when everyone is tracked all the time?
People in former communist countries and other oppressive places often have a different attitude about such things. They learned the hard way.
We can make up plenty of scenarios where it's dangerous, but even without those, can we not just... not like something? To use the common analogy, my neighbor staring at me through the window all the time wouldn't be dangerous. But it's weird, it's uncomfortable. Can we just not do it? I want to be able to drive places without my movements being logged. Clearly many millions of people agree, given the backlash against Flock. This isn't some essential technology, we got along just fine without it.
I would also like it if people would wake up to their phones tracking them, etc, and demand that laws be passed to deal with that. But this is a good start!
It's easy to work people up about anything involving monitoring, their brains immediately shut down and think emotionally about the subject. But not all forms of monitoring are equivalent, and some of it is useful and has net-benefit.
Now, imagine expressing those opinions destroys the first.
Before you jump in with a rebuttal, any comment you reply with here must include your full name and address, otherwise, you admit to being a bot and therefore worthless.
That's the concern.
This is just false equivalence, and this false equivalence is why people are immediately so defensive of anyone who suggest Flock is a good idea in principle.
As for the 'full name and address', also not relevant, Flock is not obtaining either of these details.
Also what's to say you aren't counter-protesting?
I mean functionally, given cell phones and ring doorbells we're already in a surveillance state.