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  • Hacker News
  • And here of course.
  • "I hope our names are touching on the watchlist"
  • Everyone posting here is now on a list somewhere. Hopefully you're deanonymized sufficiently. Better hope we don't get caught up in something!
  • Glowies are panicking, summarize the situation.
  • Warm regards to GPT-6-NSA.
  • Flock OS underpins many more cameras than are visible and added by Flock directly.
    by 4d4m
  • 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?
  • 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.

  • What's going on with HN hiding this post? 84 votes in 4 hours and it's on page 3 while there are posts on page 1 that are older and have fewer votes.
  • You mean Flock Safety (YC ‘17)? :)
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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

  • I don’t know, but it seems like a magnetron gun might be a decent way to turn these off.
  • 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?

  • 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.