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- Hacker News
- Coincidentally I was just watching this video and felt it was a pretty decent way to communicate this to old boomer city councils. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6oKX1w7k5wby whalesalad
- This video is what led to the 404 media article I shared above.by mooreds
- Great video thanks. That guy is well spoken. Always find occasional really great speakers at these meetings.
Alan McLintock comes to mind:
by Cider9986 - Our city doesn’t have them. Except there’s one in the main hospital parking lot. This reminds me to finish up that letter I meant to send to them asking how they square that with the fact any cop in Texas can peek at people coming in and out of the maternity ward in New Hampshire, given Ken Paxton a call and try to jam up someone for looking like they terminated a pregnancy.by tclancy
- I wonder how many of the people that defend Flock, Google, Facebook " etc, also are the ones that "denounce" Huaweii for spying for the Chinese government.by diego_moita
- > Their own patent describes something bigger: video analysis that can identify people, assign traits, and make real-world activity searchable.
That’s not news, and I did mention that months ago in here
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46226795
I watched few videos where the police by mistake mentioned how they tracked the cars even with no plate numbers on them.
by tamimio - I’m familiar with cities that conduct time-bounded surges of policing in reaction to specific outbreaks of criminality.
When inter-faction violence in a neighborhood escalates to the level of a murder, for example, they surge for a couple weeks. Massively increased visible patrol presence—cops on every corner—portable light towers attached to generators, to provide near-daylight-level illumination on the sidewalks and streets... a conspicuous level of “eyes on the street” that discourages retaliation and responds to residents’ heightened fear in the immediate aftermath. While at the same time being obviously temporary—not permanent measures that signal the neighborhood as structurally crime-ridden.
It’s a “fly the flag at half mast for a bit” kind of signal, not “this neighborhood is full of criminals and deserves the corresponding built environment.”
I wonder if something in that spirit might be a reasonable long-term equilibrium for things like Flock. Garbage bags over the camera poles for ordinary times, almost as a point of civic pride that the place we’ve built and maintained is safe enough not to need to use them. Pull the garbage bags off if there’s a problem—spate of auto thefts, high-profile crime, fugitive on the loose—but we demand an explanation when that happens and a concrete end point where they go back on.
by alwa - It's okay to enable mass surveillance to fight crime that's already decreasing?
The optimal amount of crime is not zero.
by Cider9986 - This sort of hyper-local protest is the way to go. Nobody wants to be surveilled.
- I do actuallyby smegma2
- Speak for yourself. I don't mind this type of surveillance personally.
- Still hyper-local but much more efficient than one retiree holding a sign in front of one camera! Kudos to all doing it nondestructively.by Barbing
- Well made website IMO. Gets to the point with plenty of easy-to-understand evidence and calls to action.by extr
- Feels like every other site that AI generates. Hard to tell what the creators believe and what is just probabilistically generated.by user102030
- This is like sending a letter to Satan asking him to please stop being a nuisance.by bronlund
- Yea, I am thoroughly unconvinced that protesting and asking nicely is really a way to implement political change. The people implementing these things and making these deals are sitting on their yachts and mansion balconies, sipping their martinis, and looking down at us little people with raised eyebrows, not caring in the slightest what we say. They are going to keep doing what they are doing, they're going to keep getting elected, they're going to keep getting appointed to their corporate boards, and they look at the protesters as just loud annoyances--if they even look at them at all.by ryandrake
- I am right up the road from Casa Grande. I run a youtube channel with 30k subs and have recently gotten VERY INTERESTED in investigating Flock/Deflock. I had no idea the cameras were everywhere.
I'll reach out anywhere on the site but feel free to get in touch here as well. I want to interview the creator and broadcast the situation in Casa Grande.
edit: emailed the address on the site. Anyone else on the east valley working on similar efforts should give me a nudge in the comments.
by joshcsimmons - Happy to report we're in touch :)by joshcsimmons
- I learned about this site from the 404 media article: https://www.404media.co/casa-grande-arizona-flock-city-counc...
An excerpt:
> “I've spent the last several months talking to people all over Casa Grande, and one thing keeps coming up: Safety. So, today I'm excited to announce a new company called Shepherd Safety,” he said. “Our mission is simple. Keep government officials and their families safe.” It would be no different than how the city monitors its citizens using Flock cameras, he said; he planned to launch satellites that would use AI to monitor “where government officials go, where they stop, who they meet with, and when they return home.”
It was satire, but drove the point home well.
by mooreds - "Politicians will be exempted from chat control"by Cider9986
- Why, what a fantastic idea! Maybe a certain trillionaire would be interested...by computably
- I do find it very funny how over the past couple of decades US has been talking about how awful Chinese government is wrt surveillance, but now doing exactly the same but through private industry contracts instead. I hold a semi-middle ground view to CCTVs/plate readers, and understand how it can deliver improved QoL to most citizens. But a bit weird how a core American "surveillance = big no no" belief was thrown out in a few years. Another proof of people just say things, but when it comes to action, you can just do stuff.
Sorry for a negative comment, but it's just an interesting observation from an outsider.
by tokioyoyo - I would guess if you really put it up to the people many wouldn't be a fan of this sort of broad warrantless surveillance (or at least want more controls or limits on it). Good luck finding a candidate that matches this and your other values in one of the two political parties you have a choice between. Also good luck effecting any political change in whatever gerrymandered district you are in. I think the US government with a more actually representative democracy would look very different.by tdb7893
- > But a bit weird how a core American "surveillance = big no no" belief was thrown out in a few years.
I can't speak for China since I'm not as familiar with that culture, but as for the US, the culture has not changed, as you can see by protest campaigns like this and many similar types of protests (e.g. public destruction of Flock cameras). The culture in the US was founded on minimal government interference based on those trying to escape persecution elsewhere at that time, and that thread is still baked into many facets of US politics.
What has changed is the state. Surveillance has been growing constantly, to much of the disapproval of those who live in the US (e.g. Edward Snowden's revelations were very damning and the revealed surveillance was very much protested against, and likewise after the Cambridge Analytica leaks). But it's a bit of boiling frog syndrome for those experiencing it: the state can grow more controlling of our lives slow enough not to be perceptible, or to spin surveillance under manipulative politics, which is for example what led to bipartisan support of the Patriot Act. This makes it difficult to stop. Technology is especially a double edged sword for making this worse.
by jameslk - I know this is preaching to the choir but from the article on the person holding the skimmer
> Police can also use the cameras to surveil protestors and stalk ex-lovers—or strangers they find attractive.
I didn't believe police actually did this until a roommate's new classmate told me her story. She has recently moved in to the neighborhood (an HOA at that). She was walking her dog one evening when a police officer who also lives in the HOA greeted her by her full legal name which she swears she never uses anywhere so the only way someone would know it was if they looked her up. She was just a roommate at this new place so her name wouldn't be in any HOA papers.
The police (or any law enforcement) really should not have access to any kind of dragnet surveillance.
They won't use technology to find our lost/stolen phones but they want even more surveillance for what?
by collabs - >They won't use technology to find our lost/stolen phones
Our local sheriff’s department used Apple’s FindMy to search for my parent’s iPad that had been stolen from their car during a smash and grab. In this case, he found it in the possession of a couple that had found it tossed on the side of the street after the thief had stripped it for cash and credit cards, but it saved them the hassle and cost of having to buy a new one.
Anyways, there’s nothing stopping PDs from searching for stolen electronics. Maybe you should talk to your local city council and ask why yours don’t?
by derektank - I was with you up until the very last line. Why do people imagine that the police are in the business of property retrieval? Once your stuff is stolen in almost all cases it's long LONG gone! Cars are sent to be broken down for parts, tools are sold to fences and so on. The typical thief isn't some mastermind who carefully holds on to what they stole, they rush to their nearest fence or dealer to trade it for what they need.
Police are there to report a crime and add that to area stats, and if the issue is more than a lone junkie then it eventually gets to a detective in whatever the local version of Robbery is.
"They didn't get my stuff back" isn't a realistic criticism, and it detracts from the many other points that are.
by EA-3167 - If something can be abused, especially with little to no accountability, it will be abused.by redundantly
- My only question is why you didn’t believe police could/would do this in the first place? My default perspective is that this is exactly what law-enforcement and other government officials would use this technology to do, especially if there are no guardrails or laws preventing them from abusing it.by moshun
- This is 10 years old, but in 2016 the Associated Press did a massive public records request for police departments across the country. Between 2013-2015, they found over 600 cases where the police department actually did an internal investigation, found this kind of misuse, didn't cover it up, and handed over the records. About half of those cases resulted in a firing, suspension, or resignation.
This is clearly an undercount, and I'm sure it's only gotten worse since 2016.
https://apnews.com/general-news-699236946e3140659fff8a2362e1...
by jubilanti