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nkrisc 2 hours ago [-]
> He characterizes the behavior as rare. He simultaneously identifies it as the most common form of abuse. The tension between those two statements is the problem Flock has left unaddressed.
I don’t see how there’s any tension between these statements. The overall occurrence of abuse can be rare while the most common form of the abuse that does occur is of officers tracking people they know.
rose-knuckle17 1 hours ago [-]
The tension is that the abuse is far more likely than any value these cameras bring.
And what is commonly rare in a country of 342 million? Prairie Grove, Illinois has 1930 people and he did this to at least 3 people according to the report. .15% of the population. If you extrapolate that out to the national population, its roughly 520k people. Or, the entire population of Sacramento, Ca, being victimized by law enforcement with a surveillance power they should never have been allowed to have.
mc32 1 hours ago [-]
In a community of 20 people you have one person who commits robbery, that's 5% of the pop being a robbers. One _could_ extrapolate that but we'd fall victim to the law of small numbers.
orthecreedence 51 minutes ago [-]
Either way, I support a world where exactly 0/1 Flock corporations exist.
glitcher 28 minutes ago [-]
Rare in comparison to what, the total number of searches across the platform?
But even that is the wrong focus. One could make the same case for rejecting police body cams because incidents of police abuse are rare, relatively speaking.
The real issue is that the platform isn't completely locked down by default with strict access control grants, monitoring, auditing, etc. Shoot I have way less access at my work to data and systems which do not have that level of sensitivity and have to go through multiple approval steps to be granted anything new.
But I guess those things don't help the sales pitches. To be fair policing the police isn't flock's job and doesn't make them money. Laws and regulations are the only real vehicles of change.
makeitdouble 58 minutes ago [-]
You're right both can be logically true. Now the tension doesn't reside in the logic, but in the intent of the statements.
First statement minimizes the problem's impact, second argues it's still worth tackling.
gattr 4 hours ago [-]
Remember that scene from "Men in Black" where K watches surveillance video feed of his ex? In the movie it was meant to be wistful and cute, I guess. Now that such systems are getting closer to reality, you realize the potential for abuse in enormous.
arjie 4 hours ago [-]
Ultimately, there’s a sort of homeostasis in people’s tolerance for crime. If you need video evidence for prosecution, those who want it prosecuted will produce video cameras. If you make warrants impossible to produce in a timely manner, the camera search will be warrant exempted.
Attempts to damage state power to ensure crime isn’t prosecuted will be likely met with methods that are immune to them.
Given the constraints we operate under, the ideal number of unsolved crimes is not zero and the ideal number of crimes committed using state apparatus is also not zero. So being informed that either is non-zero is not of use to decision making in my opinion.
pinkmuffinere 1 hours ago [-]
> the ideal number of unsolved crimes is not zero and the ideal number of crimes committed using state apparatus is also not zero
I feel this is an _extremely_ good point, the kind that seems obvious only once you hear it. But i feel there’s an implication that could be made explicit here — we should be looking at the distribution of both apparatus-enabled-crimes and unsolved-crimes when we’re discussing this sort of thing. And if those metrics aren’t tabulated for easy access, they probably should be.
arjie 1 hours ago [-]
> And if those metrics aren’t tabulated for easy access, they probably should be.
I couldn't agree more. They're two different error rates for our society and measuring them accurately would help us go to where we should be on the curve.
pinkmuffinere 53 minutes ago [-]
Somebody should make a website visualizing the data we do have, perhaps with uncertainty bounds, and a recursive breakdown locale-by-locale… Nose goes!!
Edit: wow I bet this is a project that would be _way_ too difficult to vibe code with AI, with well documented data sources and what not. Sure would be a shame if somebody proved me wrong.
TZubiri 52 minutes ago [-]
I think there's a bias in public discussion towards idealism, because most discussions will start by the argument that we need to reduce X, or we need to reduce Y. If there is a conflict and there needs to be a trade off, very few discussions and points will be about the tradeoff, but there will be a whole bunch of discussions about just plain reducing X or reducing Y.
lazyasciiart 2 hours ago [-]
And if you need confessions, confessions will be made.
arjie 1 hours ago [-]
Precisely! Illustrates the problem perfectly.
Avshalom 4 hours ago [-]
>>Flock and law enforcement regularly cite documented cases where LPR helped solve violent crimes, recover stolen vehicles, and locate missing persons. Those outcomes are real.
My opposition wouldn't change regardless but are those outcomes real?
Cops can politely ask owners of private cameras for access for things like murder investigation. If the polite answer is no (most people will say yes), they can go to court for a subpoena. This has happened for a long time. This is how it should work. If the cops are too lazy or chicken to ask a judge while investigating a murder, they don't deserve the footage.
ACCount37 3 hours ago [-]
This is very doable when what you're dealing with is a Major Crime That Gets Full Institutional and Individual Attention.
What about a bike theft, a jacked car or a stolen parcel though?
There is a price to having information easily available to the law enforcement. There is a price to not having this information easily available to the law enforcement too.
eclipticplane 3 hours ago [-]
Even with Flock, police aren't solving those crimes.
seibelj 8 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
dw_arthur 3 hours ago [-]
The majority of crime is committed by a relatively small number of individuals. If citizens feel crime is out of control they need to vote in politicians and judges who sentence repeat offenders to long sentences or involuntary commitment.
Gigachad 2 hours ago [-]
Long sentences are far less effective than reliable enforcement. Something that seems to be very true in practice. If you steal or vandalise something in China, there is an extremely high chance you will get caught, you won't get a massive penalty, but it will be enough to cover the damages + some.
If you for example knew that stealing had a penalty of 100% of the item value + 10% fine, with a 100% chance of getting caught, you'd never steal anything again even though the penalty is so much smaller than what it is currently in most countries. And then if you make a dumb decision as a teenager or in a lapse of judgement, it won't ruin your life.
defen 2 hours ago [-]
How does that work when you don't have enough assets to cover the cost of the thing you broke or stole?
Gigachad 2 hours ago [-]
Of course you could still rack up a large penalty / jail time if you cause an incredible amount of damage quickly, but in general you'd catch people before they get that far. Catching a bike thief after the first 1-2 bikes rather than when they have stolen 100.
thewebguyd 3 hours ago [-]
Doesn't matter, they should have to follow the same process.
Cops, at least where I live, don't give af about any of those crimes though. Bike gets stolen? You'll be lucky if they even show up at all, let alone do anything about it, surveillance data available or not. They largely don't even get prosecuted when caught.
willis936 2 hours ago [-]
If only we had an amendment in the original bill of rights that drew the line here.
plagiarist 3 hours ago [-]
They can get a subpoena for that, too. The bike and the parcel are already long gone by the time police do anything. (Nor will they do anything other than file a report if you are lucky.)
glaslong 2 hours ago [-]
This was exactly the case on a King County jury I was on. Lots of camera footage, most from security cams of individual businesses, some from red light cameras.
The event predated Flock rollout though, so no idea if the distribution of camera sources has shifted.
Regardless though, in the end the phone location data meant a lot more than any of the camera data, which just confirmed the path from phone sources.
3 hours ago [-]
Manuel_D 4 hours ago [-]
Right and what if lots of crime happens in a place where there are not many businesses? Hardly an implausible scenario given that crime is bad for business.
The city can set up its own camera for its own use. Is that really that wild of a proposal?
asveikau 4 hours ago [-]
What if what if what if?
That whole premise of "what if lots of crime happens" -- already false.
Did you know that most places in America are at historically low crime rates in most of our lifetimes? It is garbage to say this needs deep societal focus right now. I don't give a shit about the hypothetical hurt feelings of small town cops whining that they don't have always-on spy equipment.
cogman10 19 minutes ago [-]
In fact, there's a pretty strong argument that the reason crime has decreased so much in the US is because we've put strict controls and protections limiting lead in the environment.
We do still need deep societal focus, but that's mostly around things like further getting lead out of homes and pipes.
chmod775 3 hours ago [-]
What if lots of murders happened in bathrooms?
Manuel_D 3 hours ago [-]
The hopefully we'll be able to at least narrow down the list of suspects to the people who entered the bathroom around the time they the murder took place.
Surveillance often doesn't directly capture crime on camera, but is rather used to identify who traveled to and from the crime scene around the time of the incident
etchalon 3 hours ago [-]
You understand why that's worse, right?
Manuel_D 3 hours ago [-]
No? If someone broke into your car as stole your luggage, the surveillance camera might not directly capture the thief breaking into your car. But if the camera recorded someone entering the parking garage and then exiting the garage carrying your luggage a few minutes later, that's strong evidence is it not?
etchalon 3 hours ago [-]
You're missing the part where, for that to work, we have a government with access to a massive surveillance system capable of identifying and tracking the population at scale.
And you're missing that, instead of specifically identifying a specific individual doing a specific thing, this network would be used to place under suspicion, investigation and possible arrest, people who's only documented action was "being somewhere."
Oh, and while your example is "committed a crime", that same network could easily be used to identity and track people who were, say, coming and going from protests. Or libraries. Or voting.
Manuel_D 2 hours ago [-]
> investigation and possible arrest, people who's only documented action was "being somewhere."
In the example above, the police wouldn't arrest every single person who entered and exited the parking lot. They'd arrest the person who walked out of the lot with your stolen luggage.
> Oh, and while your example is "committed a crime", that same network could easily be used to identity and track people who were, say, coming and going from protests
There's no right to have your public demonstrations off limits for recording. The whole point of a protest is to be seen. If someone is concerned that they will be associated with some group or cause because of their decision to protest, then they seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of what a protest is.
> Or voting
You realize the government already has that information? Voters literally filled out ballots and delivered it to the government. They don't need a camera to know who voted, they have the ballots.
etchalon 2 hours ago [-]
... I'm sorry. Are you not aware ballots are anonymous? Is that not a thing you knew?
Did you think our ballots tell the government who we were and how we voted?
Just, setting aside the rest of the idiocy of your defense here, that's ... a shocking thing to think as an adult in America.
Manuel_D 2 hours ago [-]
Yes, ballots are anonymous. But how would Flock cameras somehow de-anonymize votes? I had assumed you were referring to tracking people driving to polling stations to discover who voted - not how they voted. Because how on earth would automated license plate readers somehow de-anonymize individual ballots? Please do explain what you meant by that.
And do explain the "idiocy" of the rest of my comment. Do you actually dispute anything I wrote? Do you think that law enforcement weren't monitoring groups like the Proud Boys, Nation of Islam, militia organizations, etc. before Flock came around?
glitchc 2 hours ago [-]
We create doors that physically limit access to one person at a time.
LocalH 3 hours ago [-]
That is not this, however. This is the city hooking into a private, nationwide surveillance network.
You didn't think these cities actually own these Flock cameras, did you?
ocdtrekkie 3 hours ago [-]
They pay to have them installed and maintained, they're not different in that sense from subscribing to Office 365 licensing, it's a subscription product.
They key difference is not whether they own their cameras but the automatic data sharing with other agencies and their cameras. Arguably law enforcement does this casually on request anyways but the drastically reduced friction of an automatic system enables easy abuse.
An officer may hesitate to ask a neighboring agency for data on their girlfriend, and would likely be very hesitant to file actual paperwork to request it. But a search in Flock's interface is probably all of the same legal peril in a venue which doesn't feel as intimidating or risky to do and doesn't see the same level of human review or scrutiny.
etchalon 3 hours ago [-]
In America, yes.
Obviously in other places, no.
lazyasciiart 2 hours ago [-]
The wording he used was that it helped make arrests in 53% of cases. Nothing about whether those cases were solved, or whether the arrests were correct, or whether he's counting times where the cameras see police making an arrest and count it as 'helping'.
Avshalom 4 hours ago [-]
That's not what that says though.
>technology and professional analysts with helping detectives make arrests in 53%
"technology and analysts" "help" "make arrests" not surveillance, not convictions and only the implication that they wouldn't have made the arrest otherwise.
Like look at the example: somebody calls in an OD and a guy sees that the dude ODing matches (the clothing of) a suspect in some other crime and so they arrest him.
Once again an arrest is not a conviction but also what part of that needed/used pervasive surveillance?
ALSO a conviction is not the same thing as truth.
ALSO ALSO by basic subtraction the panopticon wasn't even helpful 47% of the time.
lazyasciiart 2 hours ago [-]
Even better, they saw a guy who was nearby the dude ODing.
Computer0 2 hours ago [-]
Historically Seattle's surveillance has been fulfilled via Axon.
mingus88 4 hours ago [-]
I have no doubt that provided a vast camera network covering every ingress and egress into a city, and every major intersection, plus a database of when and where a license plate was last seen, cops can find their suspect
It used to be that news articles would claim that the police used “CCTV from local businesses” to catch a crook. Even back then I knew this was cover for Ring, Flock and who knows what else. they just didn’t want the bad press.
At this point you don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to understand that parallel construction happens all the time. They have more tools that we know about, and they want to keep it that way.
Everyone should throw some money to 404 media. They are independent and doing the best work right now to keep these things in the public eye.
Avshalom 3 hours ago [-]
That's the thing though, I do doubt that. Surveillance that you don't need a warrant to put in front of a jury is a perfect thing to use for the ostensibly-legal construction in parallel construction.
wil421 3 hours ago [-]
Yes. Prior to flock, my city trialed LPRs attached to the local power company’s poles. In the first month, they recovered more stolen cars than any prior years total recoveries. I’ve got mixed feelings about Flock, LPRs, and what it allows people and governments to do.
I’m 100% sold on the results.
MadnessASAP 37 minutes ago [-]
Nobody is questioning the value of unconstrained mass surveillance on solving crimes.
Unfortunately it also enables a good deal of more heinous crimes against the people its supposed to protect, by the people who are supposed to be protecting them.
Gigachad 2 hours ago [-]
The problem imo is the usage and laws rather than the technology. Security cameras used for public good is good. But it needs to be heavily limited to preventing crime, with strict access logs and penalties for misuse.
superultra 35 minutes ago [-]
So, ends justifies the means. Got it.
I guess I’m old enough to remember when 99.9% of us on hacker news were…well, hackers. We valued privacy and freedom over surveillance and “results.”
I miss those days.
conception 3 hours ago [-]
Imagine if the police had the names and faces of every marcher in every protest. They too would be (are) 100% sold on the results.
3 hours ago [-]
cm2012 2 hours ago [-]
Flock doesnt scan faces, only cars.
Intermernet 15 minutes ago [-]
Flock provide more than LPRs. Check out the "Condor" cameras.
AngryData 2 hours ago [-]
So they claim. But the footage will continue to exist if somebody or themselves decide to identify faces.
rolph 4 hours ago [-]
guess what prolific career criminals do with crime cars?
they look for a car that is very similar if not exact make and model of thier stolen vehicle, then they "clone" the victims license plate with a sheet of embossment copper and a stylus, apply paint at thier shop and affix the imposter to the crime vehicle. that buggers the whole LPR thing.
they can replicate dozens of plates in a day and offer the service for contras.
Avshalom 3 hours ago [-]
That seems like a lot of effort when you can just take the license plate off and if you're really worried print off a convincing temporary license and tape in the back window.
rolph 3 hours ago [-]
its effort well worth it, and really is not a lot of effort. if you stole the plate, the theft is evident, when there are duplicates then it becomes difficult to know which one to suspect, and that also presupposes knowledge of the duplication.
you would have to realize, it is not feasible for a car to be in location 1 thenbe in location 2 many miles away in a few minutes.
the odd thing about criminals is thier effort to perpetuate crime is often far greater than getting a job, but is somehow the preferable option.
FireBeyond 3 hours ago [-]
> you would have to realize, it is not feasible for a car to be in location 1 thenbe in location 2 many miles away in a few minutes.
You say that but just last week there was a post here about how LPR claimed that the same car was in two locations in a timeframe that would have required the car to have been traveling non-stop at 160mph for 20 minutes through suburban streets, and even then authorities and proponents were defending it as plausible, or that the LPR was right, but there might just have been timing issues, or, or, or.
rolph 3 hours ago [-]
i think i saw that post, i think we're both describing what happens when someone copies plates and doppelgangs people to throw off the surveillance.
i think in this case the LPR was right, the same plate number was in two different places, the assumption of how many plates were involved needs review.
160mph for 20min through suburban streets, that kind of attracts attention, there would be a lot of complaints and witnesses if that happened
next_xibalba 1 hours ago [-]
Sure. But if we have enough surveillance cameras, we can just trace the full path of the car from the moment of theft to now. I'm reminded of Gorgon Stare [1]. Stolen cars suck. But how about murders? I'm sure all of the people who've had loved ones murdered in, say, South Chicago, might have a more positive opinion of such a system. Especially since it wouldn't have to rely on witnesses who are cowed by the threat of reprisal and anti-snitch culture.
Not really because it flags an anomaly where the same plate is found in two places that are impossibly far to reach in the time span. Then police can just pull over that plate when they see it with a 50/50 chance it's the stolen car.
The more cameras in the network the faster and more likely a duplicated plate will be spotted.
FireBeyond 3 hours ago [-]
Flock's position, statistically, is that if during the course of an investigation into a crime, a detective queries Flock, and the crime is later solved, that Flock "helped solve a crime", regardless of the merit or value of the query. "Saw a vehicle, look it up, "nope, unrelated", but still "helped solve".
Avshalom 3 hours ago [-]
Right, that's more or less my suspicion.
apothegm 4 hours ago [-]
The AI slop in that quote sure is real.
willis936 5 hours ago [-]
Check your town's website for correspondence with your state's chapter of the ACLU in regards to Flock cameras. If your police chief (not an elected official) is installing them then contact your local ACLU chapter about it. These are 4th amendment violations.
Manuel_D 5 hours ago [-]
To the contrary, little of what Flock does would be restricted by the 4th amendment. The cameras are in public, and neither the government nor individual citizens need authorization to film people in public.
Many Flock cameras are also privately owned, too.
reactordev 5 hours ago [-]
All flock cameras are privately owned, by flock. They install them at a charge per the jurisdiction that orders them and pays the subscription costs… those subscription fees allow Mr Local Law Abuser to lookup any license plate it has read, when, where, with a picture of the vehicle.
So when I put a bag over the camera, it's up to flock to remove it? I haven't stuck around to find out who shows up. Sometimes it takes a week or so, other times it's next day.
The case you linked isn't about the government filming people in public, though. Carpenter vs. US was a case about the government demanding private information about users' locations from cell service providers. By comparison, the 9th circuit concluded that the plain view doctrine means electronic license plate readers are legal :https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2020/05/04/1...
An officer doesn't need a warrant to sit at a cross section and write down license plate numbers. A device doing the same thing is also legal.
hilariously 4 hours ago [-]
Of course that's a fair interpretation, I am saying there's some tension between mass surveillance and the fourth just because its "done in public" doesn't mean it automatically escapes scrutiny now or going forward.
Manuel_D 4 hours ago [-]
No, the fact that it's recording people in public does make it escape scrutiny moving forward. In public you can be filmed by anyone - be they government or private citizens.
I find a lot of people fail to realize this, both in regards to surveillance and otherwise. Recently in my city there was a big uproar about a nudist beach that was at risk of having nudity prohibited. So a bunch of nudists went out and paraded around the beach while disrobed, some of them bringing their children with them. People sailed by and photographed many of the nudists, and put their images online. Many alleged that must be a violation of some privacy law, but no, the law in Washington (and most, perhaps all, of the US) is quite clear: if you're in public, you can be filmed and photographed. If you don't want to be filmed nude, don't go walking around naked in public.
Regardless, back to the topic at hand, the fact that Flock cameras a in public spaces does in fact mean that there's no requirement to get a warrant to use them.
caconym_ 4 hours ago [-]
> No, the fact that it's recording people in public does make it escape scrutiny moving forward. In public you can be filmed by anyone - be they government or private citizens.
This is false. While there is no strongly established precedent yet, there are certainly serious and plausible legal arguments being made that unlimited collection and collation/cross-referencing/etc. of "public" information can under certain circumstances constitute a search. It will most certainly not "escape scrutiny moving forward".
The legality of automated license plate readers has gone all the way up to the United States Court of Appeals. That's the second highest court in the country, superseded only by the Supreme Court.
This is as strong as precedent gets, short of a SCOTUS decision.
caconym_ 3 hours ago [-]
That doesn't sound like escaping scrutiny to me! Sounds like it's getting pretty thoroughly scrutinized, in fact.
> This is as stromg (sic) as precedent gets, short of a SCOTUS decision.
Another egregious misrepresentation. The courts are obviously making their rulings as narrow as possible because they know the "mosaic theory" style arguments have some merit. Look at US vs. Yang, for example, in which the court dodged the issue completely with some argument about rental car contract periods. And Schmidt v. Norfolk, which IIUC directly challenges Flock ALPRs on 4A grounds, is pending.
Lots and lots of scrutiny. Your claim that the conclusion is foregone here is obviously absurd. Even when/if it gets to SCOTUS I expect they'll write as narrow an opinion as they can get away with, in whatever direction it falls.
jollyllama 4 hours ago [-]
So what's the logical conclusion, that there will be a company with a drone following every individual in a public space at all times and that the government will pay for the data?
Manuel_D 4 hours ago [-]
The logical conclusion is that the US brings itself in line with the rest of the developed world, and realizes video cameras are useful for solving crime.
Flying drones are not required, stationary cameras are more than enough outside of specific scenarios like active pursuit.
b40d-48b2-979e 4 hours ago [-]
Considering how desperately that user is responding to every comment on this post, it seems they have a vested interest in playing blind for Flock, which makes me think they are paid by Flock.
Manuel_D 4 hours ago [-]
Lol, I should be getting paid.
But no, I just like to dispel the myths people have about their imaginary right to not be filmed in public. Whether it's by the government or by other private people.
filup 16 minutes ago [-]
Manual D, the flock system is still very new. Why are you confident a private companies monetization of public whereabouts will stay legal? There hasent really been any precedent set on this. And the system is wildly unpopular In the public eye?
normalaccess 2 hours ago [-]
And this is how freedom dies, not by the letter of the law, but by the spirit.
devindotcom 4 hours ago [-]
it's not about filming in public. it's about systematic data collection by law enforcement, using private infrastructure present by its nature in public. that's why the Carpenter decision is relevant.
Manuel_D 4 hours ago [-]
The Carpenter decision was about the US government compelling mobile data providers to hand over private use information. It's really not relevant to flock. That's why the 9th Circuit decided that automated license plate readers don't need a warrant. A cop and stand at an intersection and write down license plate numbers without a warrant. A device can do the same.
filup 10 minutes ago [-]
>A cop and stand at an intersection and write down license plate numbers without a warrant.
I dont believe you think the police force could replicate the injest of information these systems allow do you?
mingus88 4 hours ago [-]
The year is 2026 and the 4th amendment only means what the currently sitting justices say that it means, and the executive branch was literally given a pass to violate any law on the books that they want.
Manuel_D 4 hours ago [-]
The 9th circuit upheld that the police do not need warrants to operate and access data from license plate readers. The 9th Circuit isn't exactly a conservative stronghold.
mingus88 4 hours ago [-]
That’s really beside the point. It doesn’t matter what the 9th circuit or any other court says.
Our country is no longer a country of laws. Laws are only as good as they are enforced. The SCOTUS, the DOJ, the FBI, and congress have openly abdicated any constitutional responsibility to provide checks and balances to reign in the abuses we see posted to HN every day.
Hnrobert42 1 hours ago [-]
I believe they would all argue that they haven't. They would argue that the current administration is operating within the law towards ends supported, repeatedly, by their constituents.
I disagree with them, but that isn't relevant.
qmr 4 hours ago [-]
Wrong. See Carpenter v US.
Manuel_D 4 hours ago [-]
That's not applicable to Flock, though. That case pertained to the government requesting that mobile service providers give historical location data on users.
fc417fc802 2 hours ago [-]
I feel like you haven't properly thought this through. Cell towers are monitoring a public broadcast from a beacon you voluntarily carry on your person. For some reason querying that dataset requires a warrant but querying a broadly analogous dataset from the operator of a network of cameras doesn't?
More generally you're confidently making wild extrapolations from the current very limited case law without regard for either its limitations or the general temperature that can be inferred from the full opinions.
Manuel_D 2 hours ago [-]
> Cell towers are monitoring a public broadcast from a beacon you voluntarily carry on your person.
It's an encrypted broadcast, not a public broadcast. This is why the police needed to ask the mobile service providers for this data. It is not public.
> For some reason querying that dataset requires a warrant but querying a broadly analogous dataset from the operator of a network of cameras doesn't?
The data is not broadly analogous. One is encrypted radio traffic. The other is unencrypted, and you can record it yourself with a pen, paper, and the Mk I eyeball. This is why the "plain view" doctrine applies.
Again, the courts have already ruled on the use of ALPRs. The defense tried to use US vs Carpenter in US vs Yang, and the courts did not accept that argument that ALPRs are analogous to cell phone location data.
downrightmike 2 hours ago [-]
The government may not purchase services for acts it is not allowed to do itself: Pinkerton Act.
Manuel_D 57 minutes ago [-]
But the government is allowed to track people's license plates. There's nothing against the law for a police officer to stand at an intersection writing down all passing car's license plates with a pen and paper. Flock is the same thing, just much more cost efficient.
assimpleaspossi 2 hours ago [-]
Yes. Let's restrict police and take away every possible tool they can use to solve and fight crime. Not all criminals are bad criminals. They don't use Flock to spy on their ex-girlfriends but every cop in America has done it.
At least according to the internet which knows everything.
willis936 2 hours ago [-]
Don't misrepresent what others say. The 4th amendment should not be violated. I can only interpret your response as "the 4th amendment should be violated".
assimpleaspossi 2 hours ago [-]
Then you would be wrong. I'm pointing out the internet's liberal obsession with anti-police and, seemingly, pro-criminal activity. The internet likes to find fault with the police while dismissing or ignoring criminal activity. It's a horror I cannot understand. It's pure insanity.
willis936 2 hours ago [-]
Okay, then pontificate that as a top level comment. Responding to someone saying the 4th amendment should not be circumvented with a refute is a statement about the 4th amendment, not some imagined counter party.
assimpleaspossi 2 hours ago [-]
This whole thread represents the imaginary of the internet and it makes me sick. I have to get off the internet. I've spent too much time with it lately.
bobthebob 38 minutes ago [-]
I’m right here with you. This is a genuinely cool useful technology that helps solve crimes and all we get is pearl clutching.
Most people don’t give AF
throwaway74628 3 hours ago [-]
Nit: the police chief was also stalking and harassing at least one man
assimpleaspossi 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Jzush 42 minutes ago [-]
Not sure how much warrants are going to help when a judge will see a stack of requests from a police chief and just rubber stamp them all without looking. This is already a problem in places where warrants are required.
chaps 31 minutes ago [-]
With a search warrant, I can submit FOIA requests or go to the courthouse.
The fact police can go in and just look at camera footage without warrant proves your point precisely, officers have used it to stalk family members, etc.
jimt1234 3 hours ago [-]
This type of thing is definitely real. A friend of mine went on a date with an NYPD cop back in the 90s. She refused a second date, and the stalking began. It wasn't 'tech stalking', like today, but the cop started asking interrogating questions to her landlord and co-workers; she started getting weird/false parking tickets, etc. The only way she made it stop was that her cousin was a veteran with NYPD, and well, he had a little chat with the young, stalking cop. But who knows where it all would've ended up if her cousin wasn't also a cop???
connort459 3 hours ago [-]
Yeah what in the world, now imagine that nowadays with FLOCK cameras. I see that going nowhere good
assimpleaspossi 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
throwaway85825 4 hours ago [-]
When flock data was FOIAd the state just exempted the data from FOIA.
normalaccess 2 hours ago [-]
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." -- Cardinal Richelieu
Privacy protects personal dignity, not just illicit behavior. We close bathroom doors, keep journals, and have intimate conversations not because we are breaking the law, but because we value personal modesty and boundaries.
We are quickly approaching a time when we are all guilty until proven innocent by voyeuristic power-hungry psychopathic megalomaniacs who cry the old cry of "If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear"
Yes this is how freedoms are restored. Next we need a story of flock tracking a reporter or political figure. Put that 4th amendment into sharp focus.
TZubiri 55 minutes ago [-]
Big fan of court ordered warrants as a way to limit law enforcement here.
That said, warrants protect law enforcement like searching someone's house. It seems that some less intrusive powers like running someone's plate has been given to the police with lower controls.
And it makes sense right? If every judge needed to approve every potential plate check, it might be too much for daily operations.
So option A, push towards everything being protected under warrants.
Sure, option B, how about protection mechanisms that sit somewhere in the middle? For example, what if some powers were audited (sounds like they are logged already) on a probabilistic basis. What if judges could inspect some fraction of searches after the fact, and ask for justification afterwards. Of course this would have no effect on the actual search, but it would have long term effects on future searches.
Even if 1% of lesser searches are audited, I'm sure most policemen would be much more weary about using them for personal matters like stalking women.
rose-knuckle17 2 hours ago [-]
Imagine what Musk can do with all the SSA and Tax data he stole in the most blatant and underreported data heist in history.
aussieguy1234 1 hours ago [-]
Statistically, police officers are much more likely than your average person to be a perpetrator of domestic abuse
josefritzishere 5 hours ago [-]
As far as I can tell from the news, Flock is only used to commit crimes.
downrightmike 2 hours ago [-]
They silently stole $46 million secretly from Canada
mindslight 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
xnx 3 hours ago [-]
This problem is 99% cops and 1% flock.
parl_match 2 hours ago [-]
verkada (a building access systems company), had multiple incidents of stalking of employees by other employees, using their own installation in their own hq
none of them were cops
orthecreedence 42 minutes ago [-]
No? A mass surveillance apparatus is a pretty enormous problem.
kittikitti 3 hours ago [-]
Random people at your workplace likely know others with access and use it to spy on their own coworkers. I know of cases where they report the smallest details to Human Resources.
gigel82 4 hours ago [-]
Can I set up my own camera on the side of the road (in a public place) to scan people's faces and license plates, link them up to one of the many data brokers (or leaks) and use a big display to show the drivers' pictures and something like "Hey Rick Larsen, it's the 24th time we've seen you this week. We'll let our clients know there's no one home at 2930 Wetmore Avenue, Everett most weekdays between 8 and 4!", and then place them somewhere like oh, I don't know, in close proximity to a capitol building?
We can pay the regular fees that advertisers pay to have billboards up.
And if we're not allowed to do that, why is Flock?
assimpleaspossi 2 hours ago [-]
No one has the right to privacy in a public setting. That's why street photographers can roam around and take photos of anyone and publish them. Whether you can publish personally identifiable information based on that, I don't know.
Manuel_D 3 hours ago [-]
Yes, you are allowed to set up a camera, as long as you own the land you're putting the camera on or you have permission from the landowner.
Again, I'm surprised by how many people don't realize that it's legal to film people in public.
etchalon 3 hours ago [-]
You can probably do that, so long as you're doing it on property you own.
npunt 4 hours ago [-]
> Important subject
> Uses slop AI art
Fastest way to make something into a farce.
pixel_popping 4 hours ago [-]
It's genuinely triggering rage to see this on a "serious" article.
cdrnsf 4 hours ago [-]
Regular reminder that their CEO called Deflock a terrorist organization. I hope they go out of business and their cameras end up as e-waste.
I don’t see how there’s any tension between these statements. The overall occurrence of abuse can be rare while the most common form of the abuse that does occur is of officers tracking people they know.
And what is commonly rare in a country of 342 million? Prairie Grove, Illinois has 1930 people and he did this to at least 3 people according to the report. .15% of the population. If you extrapolate that out to the national population, its roughly 520k people. Or, the entire population of Sacramento, Ca, being victimized by law enforcement with a surveillance power they should never have been allowed to have.
But even that is the wrong focus. One could make the same case for rejecting police body cams because incidents of police abuse are rare, relatively speaking.
The real issue is that the platform isn't completely locked down by default with strict access control grants, monitoring, auditing, etc. Shoot I have way less access at my work to data and systems which do not have that level of sensitivity and have to go through multiple approval steps to be granted anything new.
But I guess those things don't help the sales pitches. To be fair policing the police isn't flock's job and doesn't make them money. Laws and regulations are the only real vehicles of change.
First statement minimizes the problem's impact, second argues it's still worth tackling.
Attempts to damage state power to ensure crime isn’t prosecuted will be likely met with methods that are immune to them.
Given the constraints we operate under, the ideal number of unsolved crimes is not zero and the ideal number of crimes committed using state apparatus is also not zero. So being informed that either is non-zero is not of use to decision making in my opinion.
I feel this is an _extremely_ good point, the kind that seems obvious only once you hear it. But i feel there’s an implication that could be made explicit here — we should be looking at the distribution of both apparatus-enabled-crimes and unsolved-crimes when we’re discussing this sort of thing. And if those metrics aren’t tabulated for easy access, they probably should be.
I couldn't agree more. They're two different error rates for our society and measuring them accurately would help us go to where we should be on the curve.
Edit: wow I bet this is a project that would be _way_ too difficult to vibe code with AI, with well documented data sources and what not. Sure would be a shame if somebody proved me wrong.
My opposition wouldn't change regardless but are those outcomes real?
What about a bike theft, a jacked car or a stolen parcel though?
There is a price to having information easily available to the law enforcement. There is a price to not having this information easily available to the law enforcement too.
If you for example knew that stealing had a penalty of 100% of the item value + 10% fine, with a 100% chance of getting caught, you'd never steal anything again even though the penalty is so much smaller than what it is currently in most countries. And then if you make a dumb decision as a teenager or in a lapse of judgement, it won't ruin your life.
Cops, at least where I live, don't give af about any of those crimes though. Bike gets stolen? You'll be lucky if they even show up at all, let alone do anything about it, surveillance data available or not. They largely don't even get prosecuted when caught.
The event predated Flock rollout though, so no idea if the distribution of camera sources has shifted.
Regardless though, in the end the phone location data meant a lot more than any of the camera data, which just confirmed the path from phone sources.
The city can set up its own camera for its own use. Is that really that wild of a proposal?
That whole premise of "what if lots of crime happens" -- already false.
Did you know that most places in America are at historically low crime rates in most of our lifetimes? It is garbage to say this needs deep societal focus right now. I don't give a shit about the hypothetical hurt feelings of small town cops whining that they don't have always-on spy equipment.
We do still need deep societal focus, but that's mostly around things like further getting lead out of homes and pipes.
Surveillance often doesn't directly capture crime on camera, but is rather used to identify who traveled to and from the crime scene around the time of the incident
And you're missing that, instead of specifically identifying a specific individual doing a specific thing, this network would be used to place under suspicion, investigation and possible arrest, people who's only documented action was "being somewhere."
Oh, and while your example is "committed a crime", that same network could easily be used to identity and track people who were, say, coming and going from protests. Or libraries. Or voting.
In the example above, the police wouldn't arrest every single person who entered and exited the parking lot. They'd arrest the person who walked out of the lot with your stolen luggage.
> Oh, and while your example is "committed a crime", that same network could easily be used to identity and track people who were, say, coming and going from protests
Again realize that this is legal right? https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/14/us/charlottesville-doxxin...
There's no right to have your public demonstrations off limits for recording. The whole point of a protest is to be seen. If someone is concerned that they will be associated with some group or cause because of their decision to protest, then they seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of what a protest is.
> Or voting
You realize the government already has that information? Voters literally filled out ballots and delivered it to the government. They don't need a camera to know who voted, they have the ballots.
Did you think our ballots tell the government who we were and how we voted?
Just, setting aside the rest of the idiocy of your defense here, that's ... a shocking thing to think as an adult in America.
And do explain the "idiocy" of the rest of my comment. Do you actually dispute anything I wrote? Do you think that law enforcement weren't monitoring groups like the Proud Boys, Nation of Islam, militia organizations, etc. before Flock came around?
You didn't think these cities actually own these Flock cameras, did you?
They key difference is not whether they own their cameras but the automatic data sharing with other agencies and their cameras. Arguably law enforcement does this casually on request anyways but the drastically reduced friction of an automatic system enables easy abuse.
An officer may hesitate to ask a neighboring agency for data on their girlfriend, and would likely be very hesitant to file actual paperwork to request it. But a search in Flock's interface is probably all of the same legal peril in a venue which doesn't feel as intimidating or risky to do and doesn't see the same level of human review or scrutiny.
Obviously in other places, no.
>technology and professional analysts with helping detectives make arrests in 53%
"technology and analysts" "help" "make arrests" not surveillance, not convictions and only the implication that they wouldn't have made the arrest otherwise.
Like look at the example: somebody calls in an OD and a guy sees that the dude ODing matches (the clothing of) a suspect in some other crime and so they arrest him.
Once again an arrest is not a conviction but also what part of that needed/used pervasive surveillance?
ALSO a conviction is not the same thing as truth.
ALSO ALSO by basic subtraction the panopticon wasn't even helpful 47% of the time.
It used to be that news articles would claim that the police used “CCTV from local businesses” to catch a crook. Even back then I knew this was cover for Ring, Flock and who knows what else. they just didn’t want the bad press.
At this point you don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to understand that parallel construction happens all the time. They have more tools that we know about, and they want to keep it that way.
Everyone should throw some money to 404 media. They are independent and doing the best work right now to keep these things in the public eye.
I’m 100% sold on the results.
Unfortunately it also enables a good deal of more heinous crimes against the people its supposed to protect, by the people who are supposed to be protecting them.
I guess I’m old enough to remember when 99.9% of us on hacker news were…well, hackers. We valued privacy and freedom over surveillance and “results.”
I miss those days.
they look for a car that is very similar if not exact make and model of thier stolen vehicle, then they "clone" the victims license plate with a sheet of embossment copper and a stylus, apply paint at thier shop and affix the imposter to the crime vehicle. that buggers the whole LPR thing.
they can replicate dozens of plates in a day and offer the service for contras.
you would have to realize, it is not feasible for a car to be in location 1 thenbe in location 2 many miles away in a few minutes.
the odd thing about criminals is thier effort to perpetuate crime is often far greater than getting a job, but is somehow the preferable option.
You say that but just last week there was a post here about how LPR claimed that the same car was in two locations in a timeframe that would have required the car to have been traveling non-stop at 160mph for 20 minutes through suburban streets, and even then authorities and proponents were defending it as plausible, or that the LPR was right, but there might just have been timing issues, or, or, or.
i think in this case the LPR was right, the same plate number was in two different places, the assumption of how many plates were involved needs review.
160mph for 20min through suburban streets, that kind of attracts attention, there would be a lot of complaints and witnesses if that happened
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgon_Stare
The more cameras in the network the faster and more likely a duplicated plate will be spotted.
Many Flock cameras are also privately owned, too.
https://deflock.org
You’d be surprised how many there are.
An officer doesn't need a warrant to sit at a cross section and write down license plate numbers. A device doing the same thing is also legal.
I find a lot of people fail to realize this, both in regards to surveillance and otherwise. Recently in my city there was a big uproar about a nudist beach that was at risk of having nudity prohibited. So a bunch of nudists went out and paraded around the beach while disrobed, some of them bringing their children with them. People sailed by and photographed many of the nudists, and put their images online. Many alleged that must be a violation of some privacy law, but no, the law in Washington (and most, perhaps all, of the US) is quite clear: if you're in public, you can be filmed and photographed. If you don't want to be filmed nude, don't go walking around naked in public.
Regardless, back to the topic at hand, the fact that Flock cameras a in public spaces does in fact mean that there's no requirement to get a warrant to use them.
This is false. While there is no strongly established precedent yet, there are certainly serious and plausible legal arguments being made that unlimited collection and collation/cross-referencing/etc. of "public" information can under certain circumstances constitute a search. It will most certainly not "escape scrutiny moving forward".
e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_theory_of_the_Fourth_Am...
This is as strong as precedent gets, short of a SCOTUS decision.
> This is as stromg (sic) as precedent gets, short of a SCOTUS decision.
Another egregious misrepresentation. The courts are obviously making their rulings as narrow as possible because they know the "mosaic theory" style arguments have some merit. Look at US vs. Yang, for example, in which the court dodged the issue completely with some argument about rental car contract periods. And Schmidt v. Norfolk, which IIUC directly challenges Flock ALPRs on 4A grounds, is pending.
Lots and lots of scrutiny. Your claim that the conclusion is foregone here is obviously absurd. Even when/if it gets to SCOTUS I expect they'll write as narrow an opinion as they can get away with, in whatever direction it falls.
Flying drones are not required, stationary cameras are more than enough outside of specific scenarios like active pursuit.
But no, I just like to dispel the myths people have about their imaginary right to not be filmed in public. Whether it's by the government or by other private people.
I dont believe you think the police force could replicate the injest of information these systems allow do you?
Our country is no longer a country of laws. Laws are only as good as they are enforced. The SCOTUS, the DOJ, the FBI, and congress have openly abdicated any constitutional responsibility to provide checks and balances to reign in the abuses we see posted to HN every day.
I disagree with them, but that isn't relevant.
More generally you're confidently making wild extrapolations from the current very limited case law without regard for either its limitations or the general temperature that can be inferred from the full opinions.
It's an encrypted broadcast, not a public broadcast. This is why the police needed to ask the mobile service providers for this data. It is not public.
> For some reason querying that dataset requires a warrant but querying a broadly analogous dataset from the operator of a network of cameras doesn't?
The data is not broadly analogous. One is encrypted radio traffic. The other is unencrypted, and you can record it yourself with a pen, paper, and the Mk I eyeball. This is why the "plain view" doctrine applies.
Again, the courts have already ruled on the use of ALPRs. The defense tried to use US vs Carpenter in US vs Yang, and the courts did not accept that argument that ALPRs are analogous to cell phone location data.
At least according to the internet which knows everything.
Most people don’t give AF
With flock searches, I (usually) can't because Illinois law exempts ALPR records. Here's the most egregious example I've seen: https://www.muckrock.com/foi/waukegan-11153/flock-safety-alp...
Privacy protects personal dignity, not just illicit behavior. We close bathroom doors, keep journals, and have intimate conversations not because we are breaking the law, but because we value personal modesty and boundaries.
We are quickly approaching a time when we are all guilty until proven innocent by voyeuristic power-hungry psychopathic megalomaniacs who cry the old cry of "If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Cardinal_Richelieu#Disputed
That said, warrants protect law enforcement like searching someone's house. It seems that some less intrusive powers like running someone's plate has been given to the police with lower controls.
And it makes sense right? If every judge needed to approve every potential plate check, it might be too much for daily operations.
So option A, push towards everything being protected under warrants.
Sure, option B, how about protection mechanisms that sit somewhere in the middle? For example, what if some powers were audited (sounds like they are logged already) on a probabilistic basis. What if judges could inspect some fraction of searches after the fact, and ask for justification afterwards. Of course this would have no effect on the actual search, but it would have long term effects on future searches.
Even if 1% of lesser searches are audited, I'm sure most policemen would be much more weary about using them for personal matters like stalking women.
none of them were cops
We can pay the regular fees that advertisers pay to have billboards up.
And if we're not allowed to do that, why is Flock?
Again, I'm surprised by how many people don't realize that it's legal to film people in public.
> Uses slop AI art
Fastest way to make something into a farce.