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- Hacker News
- Flock has become something like the Tantalus Field from the original Star Trek's “Mirror Mirror” episode.by JKCalhoun
- https://i.ibb.co/WWWYznHX/flock-future.png ;-)
See also: https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2019/06/06/web-of-knowledge/
by thangalin - Who is surprised by this?
what surprises me is that flock has not started a commercial service, where you can have the system surveillance anybody for a daily fee and have it compile a need report for you.
Use cases: stalk woman, collect evidence against your enemies, collect dirt for blackmail, etc. Maybe flock is already offering this, but only for the Enterprise customers and 0.1% ....
by welzel - Surely access to footage can be gated behind some sort of expedited digital court warrant?
I always think of that scene in Minority Report where 3 judges are conferenced in live when a “vision” arrived.
Because if used properly and lawfully these cameras can be useful to keep people safe. Including from the cops.
by wateralien - If you think judges who are unaccountable and regularly abuse their powers are a solution for oversight of surveillance, I have a bridge to sell you. (I don’t have a bridge.)by NetMageSCW
- In practice, the odds overwhelmingly favor abuse. And even if the "proper and lawful" version was somehow achieved, it would require constant maintenance, security, and expensive oversight that would also be at risk of degenerating back into abuse.by jonahx
- > Surely access to footage can be gated behind some sort of expedited digital court warrant?
These are police-owned cameras filming public areas. A better solution would be to require court approval to buy and vote these cameras, or where they can be pointed.
by hammock - Using minority report as an example of a good policing system is a bit unsettling.by sampullman
- You don't need a special speedy system. A regular warrant is just fine. A warrant in this case would never have been granted because there was no suspicion of wrongdoing. There's already processes for expedited search warrants outside of business hours, the problem is that warrants are simply never required to use these services.by bastawhiz
- How can we find more information about when we can refuse police requests as is mentioned here? It seems like the public needs to know about when we can legally do this. "Shayhorn's supervisor informed him shortly after the arrest that he'd, in fact, illegally stopped Jones, and he therefore could not compel Jones to produce his identification"by venusenvy47
- Really only three or four things you ought to say during a stop
“( Name and address, or license registration and insurance if in a vehicle)” -required by law pretty much everywhere.
“I’m exercising my right to silence. I will not answer questions without a lawyer”
“I do not consent to any searches”
“Am I being detained, or am I free to go”- say this one anytime you think the officer might be done with the reason he stopped you, because it “starts a clock” of unlawful extension
Pick whichever one makes the most sense at any given moment. Don’t say anything else. If the officer says you are free to go, leave.
As for what you can refuse, you really can’t during the stop. You have to fight in court. LISTEN CAREFULLY to the words of the officer and do not respond to QUESTIONS, only ORDERS. They are trained to ask you to do things that might be unlawful if they were orders, like can you step out of the car for me please, can you follow my flashlight for me, can you roll down your window all the way. If you are unclear, ask “are you ordering me, officer?”
If any part of the stop was unlawful your defense attorney can iron that out later in court (and if so, typically everything occurring after the unlawful gets thrown out)
If you want to go a step further and be polite etc, know that many police won’t give you brownie points for it, but if they ask you questions like “where are you coming from” or “where are you going” or “who are/were you with” redirect your answers only to plainly obvious facts about YOURSELF ONLY and the PRESENT time, e.g. “I am out for a drive officer”
Caveat: IANAL, this is not legal advice
Source: SWIM has extensive experience in this area
by hammock - by tostrstrudel
- It once struck me that there are way to many laws with hardcoded values. Just like in programming those values reflect situations that aren't nesasarily true anymore.
For spying on public we should have laws that scale with trust and accountability. Law enforcement can then chose to persecute their own or lose some public support and lose access to some systems. You can have a point system with different regions having different levels of access. Sometimes it might be as easy as to call the next district to ask if they can look something up. This is both humiliating and adds a layer of accountability. The office in good standing shouldn't be all that willing to stick their neck out for a shady outfit.
It's just a crude example. If enough people don't trust you with public cameras you shouldn't have access to them but the moment they do trust you you should.
Similarly you can adjust salaries to performance. If people are really doing a wonderful job it is worth rewarding them.
If your coworkers is generating some unusual amount of complaints you can talk with them. I certainly wouldn't be willing to put up with loss of tools and a pay cut because they can't behave.
by econ - Flock is the most successful and well-known company doing this, however they’re not the only one. We need to be really careful to push back against the use of this technology as a whole and not fixate only on Flock. My town doesn’t use Flock, it uses another company’s tech…it’s no better! Don’t give the politicians an out.by GiorgioG
- Does that company also have three pounds of copper in their cameras, like Flock?by edoceo
- Was just reading into this and it’s infuriating. He was recording another person’s traffic stop in a parking lot. Once the stop was done, he walks to his car. The same officer goes to his car and “pulls him over.” The vet says that you can’t pull someone over in a private parking lot, that’s not a legal stop. Doesn’t matter, he’s arrested and car towed.
He’s kept in jail for 5 hrs before being released for it not being a legal stop just like the vet said. Then that officer tracked him thru flock over 100 times for some personal vendetta.
- Infuriating, yes, but apparently getting shot for no reason is also quite popular. This sounds like the better deal.by Toutouxc
- sounds like an easy win for a prosecutor for felony stalking.
there needs to be more separation from prosecutors and cops. I know a lot of places now have prosecutors who are actively against cops, that is not what I mean.
the prosecutors are supposed to be unbiased and make decisions on evidence. we know they don't regardless of their political leaning. but that is the standard we (citizens) should hold them accountable. unfortunately there are too may bootlicking voters who just want to feel "safe" and have zero courage of their own even in the voting booth.
we need to stop giving agencies money based on stats. that is one cause to a lot of these problems. then the cops and agencies get all twisted and in a tissy when a tool that made stat pumping easier like right now the flock cameras.
by braum - Pretty cut and dried civil liberties case there
- This is disgusting, and I continue to argue that we should not excuse Flock Safety for this kind of misbehavior. They created the tech and marketed it to police departments without providing good protections against this kind of thing. Making something cheap and automatic changes how people use it. If this cop had to tail the guy around himself, maybe he wouldn't have done it.
But the far worse problem IMO is that this cop is dirty, corrupt, untrustworthy, and should be punished for stalking this man, and yet he surely will not be. Worst case, he might catch some administrative sanction or maybe be fired - he won't go to jail like he should for this misbehavior.
If you have 1 dirty cop and 100 who ignore his bad behavior, you actually have 101 dirty cops. We need a way to deal with this in our society without resorting to the absolutes of "defund the police" or "back the blue".
by aftbit - > Then that officer tracked him thru flock over 100 times for some personal vendetta.
That's not quite accurate according to the article. It was actually worse: There were over 100 searches and some of them were done by officer in question, but some were done by other officers. This was due to lieutenant's order in connection with Jones' citizen complaint. So it wasn't just one officer abusing the system.
by buzer - Cops love Flock. I'm subscribed to some of the local police department accounts in social networks, and Facebook shows me more of those across the country, and I see a lot of posts like “a serious crime happened, we tracked the car using the Flock license place reader and the suspect is now in custody”.
I think it's true that Flock indeed helps with the actual policing, no doubt about that. But it also seems like police departments across the country really try to promote the view that Flock is a good technology that helps safety, because some cities ultimately voted to disable Flock [1], and I'm sure police are just mad about this and don't want this to happen.
I can't wait until this finally reaches the Supreme court and they hopefully decide that those cameras are unconstitutional.
[1]: just a local example: https://www.mountainview.gov/Home/Components/News/News/1211/...
by ventana - When people believe they are being watched they act differently. Essentially you are coercing them. People need a reasonable sense of privacy to be able to act freely so, to me, this means that privacy is a central requirement of freedom.
There are legitimate reasons for some ability to conduct surveillance, but without a cost any surveillance method becomes mass surveillance. That cost must be human, it must scale in human time, or it turns into mass surveillance since without a human cost all it takes is one person and one button to watch one or a hundred thousand people.
Technologies like flock have no human scaling cost. They run 24/7/365 and make surveilling one person or hundreds of thousands of people as easy as pushing a button. There is no human scaling cost to them. That means that all it takes to abuse a massive portion of the population is one person and one action. The probability of abuse, abuse which harms a population as a whole, therefore approaches 100% no matter how 'good' the controls are on it. All mass surveillance technologies have this fundamental flaw. The consequence of that abuse is that people, rightfully, will believe that they are being watched, legitimately or not, 24/7/365. The harm here is clear. A society that is under mass surveillance is a society that is having its basic freedoms continuously attacked.
Mass surveillance, surveillance without a direct human cost that scales with the level of surveillance, is not compatible with any definition of 'freedom'. Or, to sum all this up, every argument about how a system like this could be made better to limit harm is a red herring because technologies like Flock have a fundamental flaw that is incompatible with any definition of a free society.
by jmward01 - How was there ever any doubt that these cameras and this access would be used in this way?
I personally blame the lack of accountability that police have in the US and the lack of public oversight into how departments operate.
by claaams - > How was there ever any doubt that these cameras and this access would be used in this way?
Strawman. I have never heard of one single ingenuous person that believed these would only be used appropriately.
The main issue is that our government has too much power as to be unstoppable.
by hammock - I personally blame Y Combinator for looking at Flock and going "Well, there is potential for abuse, but that's a risk we're willing to impose on society to make some money."by bigyabai
- There wasn't for anyone who paid attention. That "logic of surveillance" article a few years ago got it 100% correct: surveillance is immediately used against those who object to its use.by bediger4000
- I'm pretty sure license plate readers and other surveillance tech have been abused constantly in the past, but we see more articles about Flock because they have better logging & auditing compared to smaller competitors or government-owned cameras.by ggreer
- There was an audit trail for improper access using the technology and a lawsuit. How is this "lack of accountability" and "lack of public oversight"? Here are the 100 instances:
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wied.11...
by bko - Are you aware of any current country or any country throughout history that has granted the government powers like this and hasn't been abused? I think you're mistaken to blame lack of accountability and lack of public oversight. I think it's simply not possible.