Unfortunately, this involves a massive degree of trust to believe. And I simply dont believe that there's regulation and enforcement of any of this.
Why would anyone believe that these "forbidden things" are actually prevented? There is no evidence besides occasional anecdotal outings of police doing searches that the only get caught doing after way long after.
So they can use words like "strict" all they want. The system doesnt work that way and neither do the people operating it. Just lipservice.
This argument consistently comes up in techie circles when it comes to regulating or outlawing, well, just about anything, and it really gets my goat.
Making something illegal is the prerequisite to enforcement. These are separate parts of the government. You can't build enforcement infrastructure around something that isn't yet illegal! You don't even know what that would look like until you know what the laws you're enforcing are. Enforcement is the goal of these processes, the laws are the foundation from which enforcement stems.
It is true that simply putting a law down doesn't mean the problem is solved. But solving these problems doesn't happen all at once, so there's no reason to criticize the first step for not being a leap to the finish line.
Well sure, making things illegal is better than letting things be illegal, but the current government gets away with a lot of illegal shit so the skepticism is warranted.
I think what people want is just tearing all of the cameras down. Law enforcement had their chance to prove flock cameras were good. They proved to be poor stewards for the technology. Now get them the fuck off our streets.
So in the second push add a periodic audit requirement. In the third push mandate unmodifiable firmware and certain physical anti-tamper features. At some point circumventing the law using the existing infrastructure becomes similarly difficult to installing all new infrastructure.
The problem is, these "consecutive pushes" for reform rarely happen in practice and get silently shelved. That's how it went in Germany with a lot of things, anywhere from the Hartz IV reforms two decades ago all the way through the half-finished cannabis legalisation - and we have four years of legislative periods, while the US House is reelected every two years which leaves just one year (if not less) of productive work time.
Or it's just a flood of comments trying to take the moral high ground without actually helping in any way the cause. I'll call it pure aura farming or something, because I totally fail to see how constant bickering about any fixes is actually doing any fixing. Yes, I'm irritated.
Third party audits should be part of the enforcement. And even then, those third parties should be vetted and have full daylight as to ownership, conflicts of interest, etc.
The precursor to a service being taken offline is that it is made illegal. This law would prevent someone from selling the service as a tracker for everyone. When a warrant comes in, it will start tracking the plate. Right now, it is possible to track all plates for all time. That kind of service should not be allowed.
Unfortunately that's up to a judge to decide and they don't need to introduce illegally retained data in court for parallel construction. Nor are courts an issue when they decide to share/sell this data to everyone under the sun, because it will be nearly impossible to figure out who they gave/shared it with, and the damage is already done regardless.
I think if your threat model is "the government is constantly lying and deceiving you", you've already lost. I'm not saying you're wrong – it seems a correct observation about the US – but you have bigger problems then.
That being said: how about the New Hampshire law plus a provision for independent audits?
This assumes flock is just doing ALPR and it’s obvious from police statements and stolen flock camera data dumps they are well beyond that now, onto facial recognition.
The govt has been steadily eroding privacy and our rights (carnivore reading email, bulk collection of phone metadata, all internet traffic with x-keyscore, stingrays, etc etc etc) and using terrorism as the boogeyman when often it’s just wrong think that will put you in the sights. None of this needed warrants, all of it illegal by a plain reading of the 4th amendment. If a constitutional amendment won’t protect you, a state law is basically toilet paper.
That mitigates one specific problem with Flock, and not entirely. Firstly, as long as any jackass can fill out a form and set a "hit," they can still target and stalk people.
And ALPR is only one method that Flock uses. Their pan-tilt-zoom offerings are specifically meant to target pedestrians. They have facial recognition (and I've heard gait as well) and sniff for Bluetooth and other things to try to fingerprint devices.
It needs to be illegal to collect video for later facial recognition analysis as well.
If it's not removed from the device, why does it matter if it's three minutes or three milliseconds. With something longer (3 days) people could drive up and pull the records?
It's a low effort politically charged reddit style drive by remark that adds nothing to the discussion. Whether or not it's factually accurate or on topic is irrelevant.
I don't understand why people are only talking about the ALPR aspect of Flock and similar devices. When the company does it it feels like they're trying to minimize the collection.
I believe I've seen claims the are recording Bluetooth MACs of passing devices, and I've definitely seen that they're also detecting people on the camera feed.
I have a Watchy, a kit "smartwatch" built around an ESP32, that now runs firmware that listens for Axon/Taser and Flock bluetooth and wifi prefixes, and vibrates on my wrist when it detects them.
Also, 10 or 15 years back, I wrote an Android app to do ALPR on the live camera view with the phone in a holder that let it see out he windscreen. I collected licence plates by spending an hour or so every few days over a few weeks sitting at cafes that had a good view of the marked and unmarked cars arriving and leaving the three major police stations nearby. It did work, but the camera in the Galaxy S3 and S4s I had to try it on couldn't get images good enough for OCR until the cop car was so close it wasn't useful... I contemplated experimenting with a drone camera gimbal when I was building and flying camera drones around 2014/2015, possibly using one of those clip on telephoto lens's that were common back then - but by then I'd ditched the car and I didn't figure I;d be able to build that to work on any of my motorcycles.
I'm in the middle, cameras can be useful in a crowded society as we see with body cams on cops. The can show truth really well, helping innocent people also, but there needs to be serious guard rails and criminal ramifications for misuse by users and companies itself so this is treated very seriously.
I am different in that I would be fine with these BUT only if there is super strict guardrails with real consequences for misuse:
- Super strict rules around information storage and access.
- Ensuring access can only be for an active investigation where there is direct reason to look for a name, face, number plate etc.
- Ensure there is reasonable crime threshold for use so cops don't have the right to track someone because they jay walked or something frivolous to justify use.
- Add a requirement any person looked up then they must be informed within ~6 months with reasons why (or a judge warranted delay every 6 months).
- Legal use only and the data can never be sold for general commercialisation.
- Require human verification of hit if police are going to take action on data so there is clear ownership of incorrect actions.
- Some level of data deletion, after a year type thing.
With something down that route, and naturally more than my quick comment, I feel it could balance benefit vs cost. Without real guardrails and consequences it's openeing a risky path for totalitarianism misuse.
How does it determine a "hit"? By making a query to a database? Then there is a log of the request anyway. Even if the database is on a local laptop there are application logs.
It's not the imagery that's really important, it's tracking the who+when+where.
If we're talking about license plate numbers, it seems fairly reasonable to just have the device download the entire target list.
Longest plates are 8 chars. It seems exceedingly unlikely that the target list is longer than 1,000,000 plates. They all use characters that fit in a single UTF-8 code point. So 8mb initial download, and very small incremental updates.
Likely much more power efficient than sending every plate over the network, and would use considerably less bandwidth over a couple months.
---
Is that how they do it? No freaking clue.
But it seems like a very solvable problem, with correctly aligned incentives (ex - it's both cheaper and more private to NOT send the plate over the net, vs sending the list to the device).
The scale is the issue, for me. Having several small-time, disjointed ooerations doing ocr doesn't threaten the general population as much as having eyes everywhere taking notes of who is where at any given time.
The power the flock infrastructure has to target people is unprecedented in the US. And the kind of power I would never want anyone to wield.
Why do you think it is now an issue? Flock is a private company where other traffic cameras I'm familiar with were not. Those were problematic and in my state they were deemed not legal and removed. The other type of cameras I'm not a fan of are the ones for the toll roads. They take shots of license plates even if you have a tag. I don't know if they are searchable by law enforcement, but I have no reason to think they are not.
Any camera system that can be used to track people even if that's not the sole purpose is problematic, but when the entire purpose of the camera is tracking people then it is especially egregious. It's not a problem now, but they've turned the knob to an 11.
The first sentence of the law addresses your concern. Even as a non lawyer I can see that your “loophole” does not exist unless I have seriously misunderstood that sentence. There is a link to the law’s text in the post you are commenting on if you care to read it.
This is such a classic software developer's fallacy. Law is not code that is executed by society. The program called society is also orders of magnitude more complicated than the most complicated program you've ever worked with.
If you accept the consequences in American politics of the slippery slope, the chilling effect, and inalienable rights, then you cannot condone any limited version of a technology which still serves the same perverse underlying purpose of subjugation and control.
Exactly. Laws get followed when there are likely adverse consequences from not following them. We don't need huge punishments, we need likely punishments.
I can see some nuance to this one. Flock is intended to be searchable by law enforcement, not Joe Average. Tracking cops and then publishing that information is not exactly the same as turning Flock back on the Flockers.
I think the best solution is to just say nobody can do this, including the government. Or that if we allow things like Flock to exist, then we'd need actual legislation that tightens considerably how available the data is to be searched, and what approvals are necessary to access it.
The obvious next step, otherwise, is for someone to start OpenALPRMap and we all get to suffer together.
> Flock is intended to be searchable by law enforcement, not Joe Average.
Isn't Flock's alleged legality predicated on the principle that there is no "reasonable expectation of privacy" in public? I don't see why that would change depending on whether it's "Joe Average" or a police officer at the controls---IIUC I'm allowed to capture images, video, etc. of people in public just as much as cops are.
Agreed that these systems simply need to be banned.
This is exactly what the YouTuber was trying to illustrate - the whole legal justification of Flock cameras is that it's equated to someone sitting down in the location and writing down license plate numbers.
Yes except the analogy is better served as trillions of people watching, relaying license plates instantly, with other trillions of people doing pattern matching and math calculations to figure out where each license plate will be tomorrow.
There's a sometimes fine distinction between "reasonable expectation of privacy" and stalking or harassment. Not that it's applicable in this case because courts have generally made the bar against police officers very high.
That is not very many cases considering there are millions of stalkers in the US alone. That is like saying police shouldn't have cars since they sometimes kill people in car accidents.
To me, it's like a bad shoot. How many unarmed, completely innocent black guys would you be able to shoot because a less than qualified officer "thought his apartment was hers" for instance?
I obviously don't know, but I'm betting the black community, at least in my country (USA), wouldn't countenance anywhere even close to 81 black guys getting shot over nothing like that before we'd hear from them.
I had no idea it was 81. That's a level at which it makes me genuinely wonder why there aren't more protests?
There's way too many departments out there being run like frat houses. This is serious work. You got woman problems you can't separate from the job? Get out, or your leadership should be running you out in a well run department.
Youtube has a lot of videos of British "police auditors" who go to stand near police stations to take videos, get police attention and hilarity ensues. It's worth watching a few of them to get the taste.
We have the same auditors in the states, except that the auditors in the states who do this are often detained illegally by the police, then sue and win, and get paid out of taxpayer dollars with no repercussions for the police whatsoever who acted illegally. One guy in particular I know who used to do this went by TheBattousai or similar name and I believe went through this cycle 2 or 3 times with various police agencies. Not exactly hilarity here
The American cases are indeed not funny, because the American police are not only incompetent, but also aggressive, violent and are trigger-happy. The UK police are incompetent, but at least not murderous, therefore the situation is often hilarious.
I've long thought (but not deeply enough to find a hole in it) that constitutional violations need to carry severe criminal penalties. Not just a "don't do that", a payout from the tax coffers, or dismissal of evidence but hard jail time.
You’d think something would have to give at some point. But as you say the police have very little incentive change since they bear little to no consequence for egregious behavior.
US vs Carpenter might apply here. Just because you have no reasonable expectation of privacy doesn’t mean that therefore the state may execute total surveillance over a person
You're correct, and also the pushback to these needs to be less a concern of privacy (though they are) and more an infringement on freedom of movement. There is no expectation of broad strokes "privacy" in public, that's true. However what flock is effectively doing would be considered stalking by any other execution method, and the way they're getting around that is because they're stalking everyone at the same time and calling it surveillance instead.
If you attach a GPS to your wife's car without her knowledge, you can (and should) be prosecuted. Flock cameras collect the same data (rough location of a vehicle) and they just do it for every single vehicle passing their sensor. Then, through analysis of that massive dataset, you can now effectively stalk anyone, in the past, for the cost of a database search.
And I have no interest in the distinction between Joe Average and LEOs. That's about 6 months of training, and we have an absolute avalanche of evidence of how LEOs are:
* Prone to unnecessary violence (google 40% cops)
* Are ALREADY abusing this system to stalk wives, girlfriends, exes of the two formers, or just people when they're fucking bored
The clear solution is to ban it, but our Government has both a financial and power stake in keeping people surveilled, which is why I'm a huge fan of how many people are just destroying these things at scale.
Agreed, how many times does the public have to be burned before "storing vast amounts of detailed, identifying information" will be banned. Not to be too hyperbolic, but to speak their language, shouldn't keeping this database of American's movements be considered a national security threat.
> And I have no interest in the distinction between Joe Average and LEOs. That's about 6 months of training
This simply isn't a reasonable position to hold. Either we maintain a restricted class of people with authority that exceeds the authority of regular people, or everyone in society has the same level of authority (be that the level of police now, the level of regular people now, or somewhere in between). But the latter scenario is obviously worse, even taking into account occasional abuses by those in the restricted class.
You might as easily say that the only difference between Joe Average and a surgeon is X years of medical school.
You're right of course. Given they have special privileges of authority that Joe Average doesn't have, they should have even _less_ of an expectation of privacy in public.
That already happens though, typical policemen are much more tracked by the police than even criminals are so they have the least privacy in every scenario. You never get more privacy in the same situation if you were an on duty cop instead of a civilian.
Not quite the same. Attaching a GPS tracker involves physical trespass and can track a person to non-public locations. Also, collecting data does not restrict one’s freedom of moment. Nor is it stalking. Stalking is a pattern of conduct designed to intimidate or inflict emotional distress. Flock may facilitate staking, but it is not stalking itself. If knowing that someone else knows you were at a particular location at a particular time causes you distress, you have issues. Do you flee from every other car that sees on the road?
> Stalking is a pattern of conduct designed to intimidate or inflict emotional distress.
I don't think you could get out of stalking charge by just being so good at stalking that person affected didn't detect it, assuming you get detected at some point for some reason.
> Not quite the same. Attaching a GPS tracker involves physical trespass
Why does that matter? If your car is in public, do you not have any right to it's privacy either?
> and can track a person to non-public locations.
... what does that even mean? All locations are public, because by definition, locations only exist in public. What location have you been to that permits no one to see you arrive and later leave?
> Also, collecting data does not restrict one’s freedom of moment.
I mean, if that data can be used to imprison you, I think it's just matters of gradation whether you consider that true or false.
> Nor is it stalking. Stalking is a pattern of conduct designed to intimidate or inflict emotional distress.
But it clearly is. It's both a way to dragnet the public from doing illicit things, and it's deployed with a common selling point of reducing crime. You can say that instilling emotional distress in criminals is good but that also means you're doing that to at least some amount of the public.
> If knowing that someone else knows you were at a particular location at a particular time causes you distress, you have issues.
I do have issues! I have issues with my country being turned into a surveillance state because dipshits already worth more money than I will ever see in my lifetime need even more money. Yes I have issues with that.
> Do you flee from every other car that sees on the road?
As a woman, I've several times in my life had the experience of being followed by a car and not going my usual direct route home for fear of my safety. So not every car certainly, but if one was, I dunno, following close enough to get my license plate? Yeah I probably would try and "flee" that car.
> Isn't that like saying that guns may be legal but later use of those guns may not be?
Guns are legal but murder is not, so ... yes?
It makes sense to me that recording public activity may be legal but publishing those videos would not be (for example name-and-likeness copyrights).
Or that you'd need a warrant to search those videos and issuing a warrant comes with a one-time key that decrypts the search parameters you specified in advance to get the warrant.
In the US, photographing and recording police are first amendment-protected activities.
Likewise, the fourth amendement doesn't forbid a police officer from recording someone in public, because there's no expectation of privacy when out in public.
The courts have found that legally, one officer recording one person is no different from a large-scale, automated surveillance system recording everyone.
Well, that argument goes both ways. If the scale and automation don't make a difference, they don't make a difference.
Given that this is Canada, the first and fourth amendments don't come into the discussion.
Canada's rights are in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and they aren't absolute.
Part 1, Section 1.
The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.
Subject to that, we get Section 2.
Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms:
(a) freedom of conscience and religion;
(b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication;
I think this just highlights that a law, as written, isn't everything.
Say one country has this type of "feel-good document," but it's consistently interpreted by powerful courts as a strong protection, and the government generally leaves people alone due to democratic norms. Another country has a strict and absolute constitution, but courts in practice don't interpret it as such, or people are more frequently harassed when criticising the government. Where would you feel more comfortable speaking your mind, and which document is more useful for protecting freedoms?
I'm not making a specific claim about any real countries, though I would say that freedoms are not strictly worse-protected in Canada than in the US. I'm only stating that a law or other document in and of itself can't protect anything - government and society need to respect it.
Democracy is about more than just elections, and freedom is about more than just laws.
Au contraire, taking rights as if they're defined absolutely means that conflicts between them cannot be resolved equitably, but rather only binary-axiomatically. In this US, this plays out as most natural rights being undermined through inescapable interactions with corpos, with the justification that you've "voluntarily" agreed that you will not exercise your right. There are some exceptions of course (eg Pruneyard v. Robins), but they're more like exceptions that prove the rule.
US courts giving insane leeway to corporations in what a contract can include has nothing to do with whether rights are defined absolutely or not. The exact same scenario could play out if the voluntarily waived rights were reasonably limited rather than unlimited.
> could play out if the voluntarily waived rights were reasonably limited rather than unlimited
My point revolves around the unlimitedness of the other right that is being used to override the first right in question. A large part of that "insane leeway" is exactly due to the corpos' rights being taken as unlimited/absolute - note how the argument in Pruneyard was trying to use property rights to override free speech rights.
But sure, rather than tweaking the conception of rights, we could instead target reform at reigning in the "rights" of corpos - they are merely whole-cloth creations of government, after all. But I suspect we'd still hit corner cases with sufficient power imbalances between individuals (say a small-time landlord and their tenant, with the landlord attempting to curtail the tenant's speech).
There is nothing in Canadian Charter of Rights that prevents corporations' rights to be taken as unlimited. Section 1's phrase "subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified" makes it very easy - the judge just has to say that any limits would be unreasonable, and voila, rights are now unlimited. And overriding rights of individuals is just as easy - the judge only has to say that limiting them is justified, and bam, rights are limited.
At least with American system, they actually have to come up with an opposing right that's in conflict with the one they're limiting. In Canada, any right can be limited even without any conflicts.
I would think the natural follow on would be that police have a relative expectation to be photographed and recorded by the public, their actions being public record - they're acting on behalf of the government, FOIA and all that sort of thing applies, right?
Isn't this effectively outsourcing body cams? The frequent stated reason for lack of which is "we would but our department can't afford it :'( anyway check out this new armored vehicle we bought!"
"Tracking" on duty cops doesn't seem unusual, though I think a different argument could be made for their off duty time.
* Edit: this is Canada, so my feelings likely don't apply to their laws.
While this doesn't apply to Canada, an American law professor (who leans very conservative politically) has argued that the public has the right to record the police doing their jobs, based on the due-process clause of the U.S. Constitution rather than on the First Amendment. (EDIT to clarify: he's not arguing that there isn't a First Amendment right to record the police, he's saying that besides the First Amendment, the due-process clause also gives citizens a right to record the police doing their jobs). You can read the 2012 paper "A Due Process Right to Record the Police" at https://ir.law.utk.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1460&cont...
I have only skimmed the paper myself, so if it contains any mistakes I'm likely to have missed them. But his argument seems good to me.
I believe the American Supreme Court explicitly ruled against that in the past ~10 or so years. Except it was one GPS tracker on one car, done without a warrant.
I don't know why that decision, explicitly founded on "making warrantless surveillance too easy violates the intent of warrants" is being used as toilet paper.
> The courts have found that legally, one officer recording one person is no different from a large-scale, automated surveillance system recording everyone.
That is not the case. It hasn't been truly tested, and there are very strong hints in SCOTUS's previous opinions that scale dramatically changes the equation for them.
Of course SCOTUS is currently much more amenable to the idea of changing their mind, so who knows how it'd actually hit, but it's far from decided law in the US.
For one example, Sotomayer's concurrence in US v. Jones (2012)
> Awareness that the Government may be watching chills associational and expressive freedoms. And the Government’s unrestrained power to assemble data that reveal private aspects of identity is susceptible to abuse. The net result is that GPS monitoring—by making available at a relatively low cost such a substantial quantum of intimate information about any person whom the Government, in its unfettered discretion, chooses to track—may “alter the relationship between citizen and government in a way that is inimical to democratic society.” United States v. Cuevas-Perez, 640 F. 3d 272, 285 (CA7 2011) (Flaum, J., concurring).
> I would take these attributes of GPS monitoring into account when considering the existence of a reasonable societal expectation of privacy in the sum of one’s public movements. I would ask whether people reasonably expect that their movements will be recorded and aggregated in a manner that enables the Government to ascertain, more or less at will, their political and religious beliefs, sexual habits, and so on. I do not regard as dispositive the fact that the Government might obtain the fruits of GPS monitoring through lawful conventional surveillance techniques. See Kyllo, 533 U. S., at 35, n. 2; ante, at 11 (leaving open the possibility that duplicating traditional surveillance “through electronic means, without an accompanying trespass, is an unconstitutional invasion of privacy”). I would also consider the appropriateness of entrusting to the Executive, in the absence of any oversight from a coordinate branch, a tool so amenable to misuse, especially in light of the Fourth Amendment’s goal to curb arbitrary exercises of police power to and prevent “a too permeating police surveillance,” United States v. Di Re, 332 U. S. 581, 595 (1948).*
> The courts have found that legally, one officer recording one person is no different from a large-scale, automated surveillance system recording everyone.
If you're talking about US courts, then no. If they had, then we wouldn't see -for example- SCOTUS ruling that "geofence warrants" were searches that require Fourth Amendment analysis, rather than being equivalent to picking up a recording of events that happened in plain sight. We also wouldn't see at least one Federal judge openly noting that the judges that cite US vs. Knotts really need to read the entire opinion, rather than just the bit that agrees with what is convenient for them.
US v. Knotts is the forty-year-old case that is the source of the "You've no right to privacy when you're on public roads" idea that both people and judges have been parroting for quite a while now. In addition to establishing that principle, it also considered a possible future where the electronic surveillance that -at the time-
* had to be manually installed into cargo destined for the target's vehicle
* was only capable of tracking a single target vehicle
would become sufficiently advanced as to permit 24/7 dragnet surveillance... at which time, courts would need to reconsider what was just and right in light of such dreadfully advanced mass surveillance capabilities.
Pages 28 (starting at section C.) through 38 of this judge's opinion and order [0] are good reading... it can be hard to tell, but the judge really takes other judges who rely on Knotts but clearly haven't actually read it to task. If you have a half hour free, you should really read the whole thing.
> Flock is intended to be searchable by law enforcement, not Joe Average.
Oh - this had me in stitches.
Juxtaposing "law enforcement" and "Joe Average" in that way is entertaining for Australians, as "Joe Average" is literally one of the entry requirements for law enforcement.
It's a minimum of academically average, but no worse.
> Applicants must meet minimum academic eligibility and satisfy English language proficiency requirements for entry into the ADAP program.
Academic Eligibility
Year 12 HSC (minimum ATAR 50 or equivalent); or other equivalent qualifications such as:
AQF Certificate III
Certificate IV
Diploma
Advanced Diploma
Bachelor or higher degree
vocational experience
bridging/preparatory courses (UPPAP)
para-professional, and
other post-secondary qualifications
"When the government fears the people there is liberty; when the people fear the government there is tyranny."
-- Thomas Jefferson
Filming cops in public is a legitimate activity protected by the Constitution, according to the Supreme Court. Using a nationwide surveillance network to track people not suspected of any crime and without a warrant is not.
If Flock is specifically for law enforcement then it is a cut and dry violation of the 4th amendment. Case closed.
However, they are simply commissioned by law enforcement and law enforcement are just one of any number of customers. There is either an expectation of privacy or there isn't. This case highlights this exactly.
US vs carpenter might apply here, just because there is data in a private corporations possession doesn’t necessarily entitle the police to access it without a warrant.
Flock do more than just ALPRs. and have done for a while now. I'm not sure why people keep pointing to the ALPRs while remaining silent on actual facial recognition and tracking.
That's trying to unbake the cake. This technology will not go away. The powerful will use it in secret; and sometimes the less powerful too.
I'd rather see surveillance first pointed towards government leaders, and then once the government is highly surveilled, then maybe we can trust the government to surveil everyone else.
I don't know. My idea here isn't very realistic. It's not going to happen (though we should still try), so maybe just outlawing all of it would be more realistic.
I concur, but let's be real here, surveilling the government is a non starter, 99% of HN will be screaming bloody murder when someone makes an app to tell jobsites when to have break time based on where the unmarked Ford Explorer that probably has the OSHA guy in it is.
People have no principals and no stomach for giving up a little bit of state jackboot applied on those they hate exchange for it not being applied on those they don't.
It doesn't seem all that different. Cops use these cameras to stalk ex-girlfriends, target political foes, and perv on the public at large. The public watching them hardly seems worse.
I do agree that we just shouldn't have this kind of mass-surveillance in general, and I think that's kind of the point of this particular endeavor.
> I can see some nuance to this one. Flock is intended to be searchable by law enforcement, not Joe Average.
I feel that's like saying there's "nuance" when the police choose to pull someone over because--unlike the other car--they didn't have a "I Donated To Cops" license plate.
Yes, it's technically a difference, but if it matters then the police are abusing their power to play favorites.
> I feel that's like saying there's "nuance" when the police choose to pull someone over because--unlike the other car--they didn't have a "I Donated To Cops" license plate.
That's not unusual at all. Here is New York parking enforcement ticketing cars who are not participating in a specific activity, while disregarding other double-parked cars that are participating. He even explicitly states that the policy is to allow double parked cars, so long as the driver participates in the desired activity:
If you’re driving a publicly funded vehicle we can know where you are and what you’re doing. Seems straightforward.
We should be able to subpoena the GPS records of the car’s location as well - or potentially FOIA that information. Sunlight is good. The opposite should only be done by going through a metric ton of hoops. Otherwise you end up… where we are now.
Why do you equate government and the honorable Joe Average? The government works at the pleasure of the Joe Average, so it's natural that the said Joe is interested to watch how his servants perform their duties - after all, he elected them to do that and pays them for that. At the same time Joe might be not interested for his lowly servants to keep tabs on him - that's none of their business, after all they don't compensate him for that information, so why shouldn't we have cameras to watch the police while completely denying them to use cameras to watch us?
99% of law enforcement are suppose to be "average joes" though. They do not have some special Citizen Plus status. Anything cops can do to the people the people should be able to do to the cops.
> I can see some nuance to this one. Flock is intended to be searchable by law enforcement, not Joe Average. Tracking cops and then publishing that information is not exactly the same as turning Flock back on the Flockers.
The fine article mentions that 3% of the queries against the database are from local law enforcement.
Cops usually are worse than average Joe on many negative statistics (domestic abuse, etc), and that's not even factoring in how numbers are skewed by the well established thin blue line.
It's safer to give your info to average joe population than cops.
I would feel better if only cops didn't have access to see me on flock cameras and cops had to request footage through a public reddit or something.
This is all a bit of a joke sure, but less than police access to flock cams is.
Under the American theory of government, Cops tracking people without warrant is the same amount of lawful as people tracking cops without warrant, in fact, the former is more restricted.
The only nuance possible here is either that the government is more trustworthy than the average person (rather than less, as has been repeatedly proven), or that the police deserve special immunity in their activities (rather than needing closer scrutiny, as has been repeatedly proven as well). Either that, or that Flock is somehow a more trustworthy steward of the data, in terms of controlling access by agencies and individuals. It's also been proven that they're not, though, so that can't be either. IMO, this entire thing is just stupid hypocrisy.
> Flock is intended to be searchable by law enforcement, not Joe Average
Joe Average would be charged by Flock per search, and could only afford to stalk his ex wife a couple of times via Flock, because it would get expensive soon.
This was in Canada so I don't know if the same laws apply. In the US the justification for this tracking without a warrant is that you are in public. That same justification allows for filming police in the public.
The intent of Flock in the US at least was just to use technology to get around the 4th amendment.
The police shouldn't be allowed to use automated tools like this without a warrant.
Perhaps some officially recognized oversight committee could "track cops" licitly for good reasons. But I see no reason for random citizens (especially these self-appointed idiot "citizen auditors") to know what police are up to, where they are, what they are seeing or saying at every moment of the day.
Think this through, please. Municipal police work is not "national security" level, but it still requires discretion. Leaking activity information to adversaries on the ground would be detrimental to their operations. At the very least, police run into emergencies, intimate partner issues, lots of violence, and generally see all the bad stuff. If someone like me were looking over their shoulder, that would be profoundly unjust to victims and a betrayal of public trust in the discretion and privacy that police offer to us on a regular basis. I have no reason. You've got no reason. Nearly nobody has any reason, except champing at the bit to catch them out at some transgression, so they can post it to social media and foment outrage and rebellion.
I don't want to see through their eyes nor hear through their ears. I believe that this propensity to DV and other crime is precisely because cops and their families are legitimately, profoundly, traumatized by the hazards of vocation, and when everyone's mental health is fragile, who's going to bear the brunt of the trauma, and how are they going to cope with that in a reasonable, even superhuman fashion?
It is not an uncommon tactic to lure or bait police (and/or Fire, EMT, Paramedics) into traps or mere distractions, so that some organized group can carry out something much worse without the heat breathing down their necks. Now all the local gangs are "tracking cops" and they know how effective those moves are. They all have heads-up just before the cops arrive to bust them. This is how you want to "track cops" constantly? Why have protest groups become so small and far-flung in recent years? Why aren't they turning up en masse in a single location to march and picket? Because a distributed protest also distributes first-responders, and dilutes response times and strengths. And "tracking the cops" becomes easier.
They are mostly not secret agents. They are not slipping through the streets under cloaks of invisibility or cones of silence. Even unmarked cars are fairly noticeable if you're experienced. The insignia, the lights and sirens, the uniforms are meant to get noticed and stand out. But are you going to "track cops" right into their precinct offices and cars? Their radio channels and comms were not always encrypted or private, but eventually they had the tech, and they had it up-to-here with all the prying ears and busybodies trying to second-guess them.
Police just sitting in their squad car looking at a computer display is not for public consumption. Police inventory of weapons and ammunition, and tallying of shots fired, and who fired them when: that is not public information. Police offering a towel or a garment to a nude woman who's just been raped: why do you want to "track cops", again?
Flock has the rights of a private citizen. Police accessing flock cameras is like asking you for the security camera footage from the camera on your house.
I'm not sure how it is in Canada, but my understanding in the US is that data gathered by a public (government) entity (the police) is just that... public. And we've seen that play out in some cities where people asked for a copy of their town's Flock data, and everyone got all surprised pikachu on them because it turns out that's legal, and suddenly the government doesn't want to collect that data anymore.
What nuance though? Did everyone give the state permission to sniff after them? Because I did not. And I am almost certain a majority would not be ok with it either. There is a reason people hate flock sniffers.
When the people turn it around and sniff on cops, why is that then any different suddenly?
> we'd need actual legislation
Can the people do legislation? It's always some judges and politicians who form a clique at the end of the day.
Why is nothing being done about this? This is 1984 we were laughing about. USA laughed at China when they did the same, but when USA is doing the same people are not outraged shooting those down, painting over them. Am I missing something?
Destroying 450 out of 130,000, ie 0.3%, is not sufficient to resist the imposition of a surveillance state. Americans pretty clearly do not care for freedom as much as they yap about.
Just the part where you're supposed to be doing something about it, otherwise don't you think it's a bit hypocritical to call out others for doing the same thing?
So it still scans Bluetooth as explained in other comments here. Someone needs to build an easy to install faraday cage around it, something universal that can be easily installed on cameras that have been ordered to be removed.
Apologies. I'm mixing up this story with another story where I read the court ordered Flock to disassemble the cameras, and they left it in place for quite a long time so the state put a bag over it, but it was still collecting data via Bluetooth.
Because "1984" is one of those books that people pretend to have read so that they can use the word "Orwellian" to talk about surveillance they personally don't like while excusing the sort that's convenient or economically expedient for them.
(For what it's worth I haven't read ~half of the books on my shelf. "Simulacra and Simulation" is mocking me from across the room)
ends up a good % of the US population is in favor of fascism. Same reason we elected orange mango man, same reason ICE is running around shooting people and imprisoning America citizens.
Someone should build OpenFlock which only tracks and makes public movement of city council members who voted for Flock cameras in their city. For empathy.
I remember a newspaper article where journalists dumped amd searched curbed trash of police commisioner and politicians and published their contents. Badass activism journalism.
Maybe the solution is more tech joins forces with the fourth institution
If you accept the idea that police have a monopoly on violence in civil society, then I can see where the police would be concerned about being exposed to violence from non-police actors.
> “a personal Flock surveillance camera to Flock the Flockers.”
Revenge is best when served cold!
Take this to the extreme limit: Thousands of volunteers put anti-Flock cameras on their property and their vehicles. Real time data on police cars is uploaded to the cloud. You can virtually track any cruiser on a Google Maps-like app. Next, high resolution photos are snapped of the drivers and try to ID the officer from public photos published by the very same police department. Again: As real time as possible. For full reverse police state effect: Monitor police radios using LLMs. All police stops/action immediately triggers a drone flight with 4K video of the scene. Auto request body cam footage from the stop using FOIA data requests. This would be terrifying for the police and potentially perfectly legal in the US.
I feel like this isn’t the best way to draw attention to the problem. Presumably having the police visit is what the YouTuber wanted? I’m not really sure of the lesson here but drama’s presumably the point as opposed to a side effect so it’s hard to take seriously.
Flock, at the core, isn't a public entity. They aren't a government. So they're a private entity, just like an individual, tracking who they want, when they want.
This person is doing the exact same thing as Flock, and suddenly it is a problem? Seems like a double-standard.
Biggest investors have always chosen the side of oppression. YC is no different than any other money lender. They will happily choose fascism over any kind of socialist wealth redistribution. Do not try to humanize an org that uses its wealth as a leverage to gain more wealth.
In Europe there is this radio beacon tracking device listening for emergency services radio signals (Tetra/C2000), called Target Blue[1]. This is not illegal, except apparently for in Belgium.
This is a great idea. I’ve been playing around with a cheap little SDR and seeing all these Tetra signal around. Kinda disappointing there isn’t really anything to do with them since it’s all encrypted. It’s kinda fun to see the meta data and whatnot…but this gives me some ideas!
This is government overreach. Everyone should be allowed to run a surveillance system. People should be allowed to sell biometric data to each other, to corporations, or to the government. Such a restriction is preventing so many jobs from being created.
Morbid thought: what if there was a company that sold cameras that people could attach inside their windshield that uploaded license plates and their location as they drove around, and if you participated in uploading, you get access to the database to look up license plates?
>The St. Charles County Police Department arrested six juveniles after a car stolen out of Kirkwood was located in Weldon Spring.
>The St. Charles County Police Department said the incident began when a car was stolen in Kirkwood at around 7:30 a.m. Cpl. Barry Bayles with St. Charles County police, said a license plate reader in the county identified the car at around 9:50, and a second reader spotted it at around 9:30.
I'm not familiar with privacy and filming laws in canada, but if the cops just came there and chatted with him without any arrests, warnings, citations, detainment, etc, then it isn't really different from any other random citizen knocking on your door and asking about your security camera.
Well I mean the state does have the monopoly on violence.
In a functioning state, anyway.
So yeah, of course rules are different for normal people compared with people that have a special role as assigned by the democratically legitimized system.
Technically yes, but it's not without many caveats, and often depends on what you're doing with the recordings. See https://www.freedomforum.org/recording-in-public/ for _some_ of the complexities. (Note: freedomforum.org is a US site concerned with US laws, but the incident in the main post was in Canada, so not everything is the same, but Canada also has caveats/restrictions on such recording.)
Most of those caveats are about spaces that aren't actually public, or recording audio. When it comes to pure surveillance-style video recording in actual public spaces, there's not much in the way of restrictions, and nothing where police have special privileges.
Tldr: Don't talk to the police. Another reminder - familiarize yourself with your 4th, 5th and 6th amendment rights and remember to invoke them audibly (for an example of the risk of failing to do so - see Salinas v. Texas [1]) and then shut your mouth. When possible, record every interaction. Cops will lie. Do not argue or be belligerent. Invoke your rights, record, comply with any legal orders, and never physically resist. But do not agree to talk or consent to doing so. A cop on the street is neither judge nor jury. Do not surrender your rights under the pretense of a "voluntary" or "consensual" visit.
Nothing can be more patriotic in a country that fought off a King and passed the Bill of Rights than telling an armed agent of the state without a warrant who "just wants to talk" to get off your property.
Alright HN, here’s your challenge: build an open source Flock but for cops and politicians.
Build plugins for common doorbell or surveillance systems consumers use - Ring, Ubiquiti, Frigate, whatever - and have it look for official vehicles (cops, diplomat plates, government plates, etc). When detected, publish the data to an open database searchable by the general public that includes location, time, date, direction of travel, make, model, and occupants of vehicle.
After all, if this data is really not protected by privacy laws as the cops/Flock/Axon/etc claim, then obviously it’s in our best interest to keep such a database ourselves to track those who track us. We may not have the right of way or easements or budgets to build out a network like these corporate spooks, but an open community database could cover a wide swath pretty quickly.
Surely someone out there has the time and expertise willing to take the heat for such a project.
Hell, you can already buy consumer solutions from companies like Ubiquiti that accomplish this. Just need a publishing mechanism connected to Unifi's API.
Is it that different from members of the public asking cops what intentions they have using Flock?
Seems like everyone is concerned about privacy, the only difference is that the police is more organised and has more leverage to protect themselves vs (often) fragmented public.
A city member coming to your house to ask you about your intentions for something is different from you going to city council meeting. Police, city official, elected officials etc are public servants, they work for the public. The public does not work for public servants and public servants are expected only to ask members of the public their intentions under specific circumstances (common circumstances but specific circumstances - the cops can pull you over for a number of things but they, officially cannot pull you over at random or based on you exercising your 1st amendment rights, etc).
Fantastic, I love it. (I mean the activist's work, not the cops trying to scare him into stopping.) These kinds of projects are needed to give government officials some empathetic understanding of what they're doing to the people.
Reminder for all Canadians that the entire country is a single party consent jurisdiction for recording audio conversations. If you're one of the parties to the conversation, you're not required to inform the other. CBC has used this extensively for hidden camera/hidden microphone investigations (CBC Marketplace among other shows). There's ample prior case law on it.
This is one of those emotionally satisfying stories... if you don't think about it very hard. It's symbolically rich, it fits the simplistic narratives of good vs evil we're all raised with, but this isn't a great example of a 'gotcha' moment.
Do I like Flock cameras? No. Do I like mass surveillance? No. Do I see a difference between an agent of the state doing something involving law enforcement or surveillance activities, and a private individual doing the same? Yes. You can't run around in uniform handcuffing people either.
I don't want HN'ers setting up surveillance networks anymore than I want them strapping a pistol to their hip and fighting crime. It's an asymmetry by design because the alternative is an unworkable nightmare, whereas the sad reality is that if people keep voting for people who openly spy on us, they're going to keep doing it.
Incredibly sometimes things are different because of different circumstances and the laws we've all taken part in constructing (when we bother to organize and vote of course).
You're an unregulated, unsupervised, and frankly unknown factor with no real accountability through any realistic chain of command to the results of the democratic process. However far from your imagined ideal, cops are.
Yes, and people -- including cops -- do not have an expectation of privacy in public. It is entirely legal for a private citizen to be recording the movements of cops.
Then the cops then decide to stop by his house to talk about it... that's intimidation and bullying by someone with a gun and the force of the government behind them.
Stalking, harrassment, and intimidation are illegal for you. Police can carry out these activities legally, by other names, in a controlled fashion, according to their duties and orders.
But if your tracking and recording of cops begins to verge into those categories, woe betide you going up against a judge who will find that you're interfering with law enforcement activities. Exercising your right to swing fists? That ends at the tip of the other guy's nose, remember?
They will let you, and you'll get away with plenty of it; but there's a line in the sand for you, and you stay behind it.
I'm not assuming that, and if you read up a bit you'd see my views clearly spelled out. Please engage with the topic and not who you imagine I must be for not providing you with enough of an echo of your own views.
Your “private individual” wording is carrying a lot of weight here. I wonder if Google knows where all the cops with Androids are? Or if Meta lets you bid for ad impressions from users “interested in law enforcement”
What if I wanted to record the cops to schedule my lemonade stand?
Basically, the answer to “Who gets to surveil?” is: Everyone but you
Start a site or a place where you can collect metrics and hand out cookies. Boom you're in the surveillance game. You can buy ad data, you can read census data, if you have the money it's all out there on the market. Hell if you don't have a conscience you can buy black market info.
You have to ask if you want more of that until we reach parity with Google and THE POLICE, or if you're reacting out of a sense of fairness that's taught to children.
That's an argument you could make if police had to obtain warrants to access them. But they do not, at least in the US (things might be different in Canada where this happened, but I doubt it). Instead, they rely on rulings that there is no expectation of privacy in public. By the same principle, it's perfectly valid and legal for a civilian (or group of civilians) to set up an equivalent system to track police.
As you say this is Canada, so I don't particular care what the situation is in a totally different country where this didn't happen. Even in the US it's not as though "Warrants are for suckers" is just the law of the land, you and I and millions of others have and had the chance to weigh in on that. The fact that most people don't notice or care does make that sort of thing extremely difficult and frustrating, but that's not the same as it being futile or equivalent to "Guy sets up surveillance network to make a point and get media attention."
It's funny that you say that, because in fact if you look at the companies YC has ultimately birthed, the people that come through here... that's exactly what HN'ers have done. For ad-tech, for fun, for metrics, for AI companies, for the government and contractors.
Who do you think does all of this if not a bunch of people in the world of tech who mostly act as mercenaries?
> I don't want HN'ers setting up surveillance networks anymore than I want them strapping a pistol to their hip and fighting crime.
In exactly equal measure: I don't want cops setting up surveillance networks any more than I want HN'ers doing it (less so, actually). So this post, bringing attention to that issue, is good, imo.
As long as random joe dropout with a badge from boss hogg can do it, and vc-backed visionary mr misanthrope can do it, so can the rest of the people. Cops and corps are only special to the degree that We The People want them to be. And speaking for the plurality of We The People [0]: we do not want them to be special in this way.
"Raising awareness" is a scam, especially in this context on this site. Not a single person here is unaware of surveillance as a topic, that's no a serious idea. Again a simplistic model that "If A can do B, B can do A" is how children see the world. Different roles comes with different levels of accountability and oversight. Arguing for more or different oversight? Arguing to vote against mass surveillance measures and the politicians who support them? Organizing as a community? ALL GOOD.
Stunts for attention so that libertarians on HN can get a smugrection? Nah.
Your reply is mostly insults and shallow dismissals, so I don't see any reason to meaningfully respond to those parts. I'll check back later to see if you've edited insults out and substance in.
As for your separate ideas of community organization: good on you for spearheading that. The world could use more yous doing that, too. If there are any specific asks you have of the community to help you there, HN is full of capable folks.
There's a certain magical hypocrisy in accusing others of shallow dismissals while you dismiss them and tell them to re-write. Setting that aside "raising awareness" isn't a serious idea, it's a single step in a process that many have decided is the endpoint of a process. You see it in how people attempt to imitate protest movements of prior generations by skipping the local organization, boycotting, solidarity, and instead skip to the Big March. Or worse organizations like the Susan G. Koman foundation that simply turned "raising awareness" into an end in and of itself.
Of course the worst of those are still doing something, perhaps not something maximally effective, but something nonetheless. Tragically on the internet people don't even attempt that, they skip straight to the scolding, posturing, ideological competition and recruitment phases of a movement. The result is what we see here, individuals sharing their often ill-informed opinion (still valid of course, although not worth much) based on an ideological leaning they've never meaningfully interrogated.
Fortunately this site is full of serious people willing to engage with a topic beyond the performative, and don't feel the need to engage in condescension and lofty dismissals. Lets never talk again.
We can watch them, as is evidenced by the fact that he is watching them. Misrepresenting the police response as preventing his actions is clearly not true. Characterizing a polite conversation as "slavery" is disrespectful to people worldwide actually experiencing slavery.
Preventing, no. But it was certainly a form of intimidation, even if (and I'm being very charitable here) they didn't intend it that way.
Cops coming to your door to ask, in a disapproving manner, why you're doing something... well, that's not a friendly visit from the people with guns who are allowed to deprive you of your freedom.
They're just most probable tokens. Either most probable to exist after the previous set of tokens, or most probable to get a specific outcome.
I am being sarcastic of course, as HN has still to some degree managed to avoid this, but even HN is struggling. The rest of "social media" operates exactly like that.
Flock isn't "the government". This is an interesting conversation because often Flock is a circumvention to the police not being able to do these things.
Why deal with annoying oversight and restrictive governance and audits and usage monitoring when you can just offload it to a private company and stalk women without restraint?
Technically, it is home users volunteering data to a cloud provider, that then mines the disclosed data as a service for any creep.
It would be a constitutional matter, and the city would lose in court given precedent lawsuits... if police used direct surveillance to follow people around even on public property where there was no expectation of privacy. Sue, and remember to vote. =3
So the cops visited and talked to him, but didn't pursue any charges or issue any warnings. He was free to pursue his project (so far).
>“One of [the officers] took the time to specifically mention how scary it would be for them, because people would be able to find out where they lived, when they got on their shift and what they were doing throughout the day, and that that type of powerful information could put them personally at risk [from] any bad apples that might want to track them down.”
I know we're supposed to distill everything down to a "them vs us" mentality. But cops have been tracked down and killed by people using apps like Waze so it's not a completely unwarranted fear.
This also isn't an apples and oranges situation. A Flock database isn't public - police have access but at least ostensibly have oversight from the legal system. That's a much different set of concerns than the "UNO reverse card" the TikToker is trying to make it to be.
Police cars are painted differently to make them visible. They are public information. Police stations are visible. Cops addresses are not made public.
Police visiting a home is form of intimidation. That's not something to brush off.
Oh you haven't seen the all-white decals on white cruisers with no top lights? Or the decals that are visible only when you're directly in line with the cruiser? There was an undercover Mitsubishi Lancer back in my home town. They aren't always so up front.
What's interesting is that I've seen a noticeable uptick in ordinary cars being camouflaged, in quasi-legal ways. Dark tinted windows all over, plenty of license-plate cloaking techniques, and a new one which is probably specifically anti-AI/anti-Flock: people are cloaking or concealing their hood ornaments: that is, the unique logo of the maker of their vehicle. An idle pastime of mine has always been car ID, so it's interesting to be a little more challenged when I see a hood ornament that's encased in a tinted shield, and I still need to correctly guess the make/model of the vehicle.
Gemini tells me it's 100% legal everywhere in the USA, to swap, modify, or conceal vehicle branding on privately-owned vehicles.
This is paired with a rather alarming but "more harmless than it appears" fad where people modify their "exhaust tune" to sound like backfire/gunshots. And they drive past all night long. I hear them everywhere. I had an LLM chat about it, and it's really something people deliberately do. I feel it is mostly to spam people with these percussive noises so that we get fatigued with them, so that "Shotspotter" is spammed with false positives, and so that boomer Karens fatigue the cops in turn with calling in "gunshots heard" when there were no gunshots at all. If you get so fatigued with hearing car exhaust backfires all night, you'll probably be duly surprised, and unlikely/unable to promptly react, when a real drive-by shooting goes down.
>I feel it is mostly to spam people with these percussive noises so that we get fatigued with them, so that "Shotspotter" is spammed with false positives, and so that boomer Karens fatigue the cops in turn with calling in "gunshots heard" when there were no gunshots at all. If you get so fatigued with hearing car exhaust backfires all night, you'll probably be duly surprised, and unlikely/unable to promptly react, when a real drive-by shooting goes down.
I like it even more when you put it like that, lol
I live where we both have the kind of people with the machine gun tune on their car and we have real gunshots. It's actually pretty obvious which is which. The cars aren't that bad. You don't notice them unless they're "novel" like misfiring or a grossly out of round semi trailer tire or something.
In my case, IIRC, once like 15-20 years ago for some paperwork that needs an adress verified by the police, or something like that. I don't remember if it was for me or my wife. I don't remember the details.
It's funny, reading that list, it all gives me an instinctual "less-nice neighborhood I wouldn't want to live in" vibe. But I'm sure it's perfectly normal for people who live in more exciting places.
>But cops have been tracked down and killed by people using apps like Waze so it's not a completely unwarranted fear.
Sure, but you haven't made the case for why the fear is anyone else's problem. If a person is too scared to be a cop there's an easy fix: stop being a cop. Unfortunately, regular citizens who can't afford to up and move to a country that has civil rights (that is, most of them) don't have the same recourse.
I think your critique of police here is orthogonal to the privacy discussion, which affects everyone:
Imagine the danger and legitimate fear a stalking victim would face if there was a public real-time tracker for any license plate query you can imagine.
Hundreds of people have been tracked down and killed with flock cameras unnecessarily. The police routinely escalate interactions as a matter of procedure until they end in shootings.
On average over 1000 people are killed by police each year. A police officer is by far the most dangerous person you'll likely interact with on a day to day basis.
> Hundreds of people have been tracked down and killed with flock cameras unnecessarily.
This is not a real datapoint. We quite a few cases of wrongful stops or arrests, but there is only one case where it escalated to physical damage (Brandon Upchurch).
Only about 10% of officer involved shootings come from traffic stops, which is what we're talking about when we're talking about Flock license plate readers.
> But cops have been tracked down and killed by people using apps like Waze so it's not a completely unwarranted fear.
Has this actually happened, or is it something you made up? Because I found articles with police spokesmen saying it _could_ happen, but nothing suggesting it has.
It was reported to have happened but got thrown out in courts, so who knows? From the police's perspective it probably doesn't matter if it was proven or not.
Police are heavily indoctrinated as part of their training to be very paranoid, and are usually required to read up on (or watch) footage of every officer who dies in duty. So it should be no surprise that they are incredibly reactionary on this stuff.
Regardless of whether app assisted or not, actual ambush or unprovoked attack is actually very rare (only 5 cases last year).
> cops have been tracked down and killed by people using apps like Waze
Do you have a source for that? I can only find 2 examples vaguely similar but neither are really what that statement claims. Specifically one of them was just cops making stuff up about wayze which was factually incorrect.
> police have access but at least ostensibly have oversight from the legal system
We've already seen plenty of examples of cops tracking ex-wives and such similar abuses with no real accountability - nobody's lost their job over it
Cops know exactly what they do when they show up like this, it's meant to intimidate, there are also plenty of cases where cops have repeatedly crossed the line harassing citizens breaking no laws, it's disgusting
I think it's fair, however I probably should've said something like "the vast majority of misuses are not being checked, and the vast majority of cops abusing the system havent and wont be disciplined accordingly"
What a BS take. Do a cursory google search and you'll find many abuses of the Flock cameras. There is no oversight. How incredibly ironic:
>One of [the officers] took the time to specifically mention how scary it would be for them, because people would be able to find out where they lived, when they got on their shift and what they were doing throughout the day, and that that type of powerful information could put them personally at risk [from] any bad apples that might want to track them down.
This is the exact reason Flock cameras shouldn't exist. Hell even you know how there is no oversight otherwise you wouldn't have used the word "ostensibly" with italics.
BTW did you just gloss over how they came to his home to intimidate him? Cops SHOULD be tracked because American cops are simply the worst bullies on the planet.
So the cops showed up to intimidate a law-abiding citizen for doing something they don’t like, but were not feeling bold enough to rough him up or cart him off to jail on some made-up charge. Yay.
Cops are (supposed to be) public servants. Risk is part of the job. If they don’t like it, they are free to pursue a different career.
In Georgia, a police chief was found to have tracked his ex-girlfriend and her teenage daughter approximately 600 times.
In Texas, a sheriff's deputy utilized Flock ALPRs to locate a woman at the behest of her abusive partner.
Marin County Sheriff’s Office was sharing the sensitive location data of millions of drivers with out-of-state agencies and federal authorities, explicitly including ICE and CBP, circumventing California law.
So, yes, it's messed up that cops' fears are warranted, in your eyes, but not private citizens'.
> He was free to pursue his project
No, being intimidated by uniformed officers is not being "free".
Flock and ALPR usage is solved in USA if every state adopts New Hampshire's law:
* Illegal to collect every plate for later analysis
* Must delete "non hit" plate images within 3 minutes
* Strict forbidden to upload "non hit" camera imagery off the device
I would add that it should also require a warrant to access the ALPR data, but it's a great start.
https://gc.nh.gov/rsa/html/XXI/261/261-75-b.htm?utm_source=c...
Unfortunately, this involves a massive degree of trust to believe. And I simply dont believe that there's regulation and enforcement of any of this.
Why would anyone believe that these "forbidden things" are actually prevented? There is no evidence besides occasional anecdotal outings of police doing searches that the only get caught doing after way long after.
So they can use words like "strict" all they want. The system doesnt work that way and neither do the people operating it. Just lipservice.
This argument consistently comes up in techie circles when it comes to regulating or outlawing, well, just about anything, and it really gets my goat.
Making something illegal is the prerequisite to enforcement. These are separate parts of the government. You can't build enforcement infrastructure around something that isn't yet illegal! You don't even know what that would look like until you know what the laws you're enforcing are. Enforcement is the goal of these processes, the laws are the foundation from which enforcement stems.
It is true that simply putting a law down doesn't mean the problem is solved. But solving these problems doesn't happen all at once, so there's no reason to criticize the first step for not being a leap to the finish line.
Well sure, making things illegal is better than letting things be illegal, but the current government gets away with a lot of illegal shit so the skepticism is warranted.
I think what people want is just tearing all of the cameras down. Law enforcement had their chance to prove flock cameras were good. They proved to be poor stewards for the technology. Now get them the fuck off our streets.
Even if it's enforced, you're one terrorist attack or child kidnapping case + PR campaign away from it being changed.
So in the second push add a periodic audit requirement. In the third push mandate unmodifiable firmware and certain physical anti-tamper features. At some point circumventing the law using the existing infrastructure becomes similarly difficult to installing all new infrastructure.
The problem is, these "consecutive pushes" for reform rarely happen in practice and get silently shelved. That's how it went in Germany with a lot of things, anywhere from the Hartz IV reforms two decades ago all the way through the half-finished cannabis legalisation - and we have four years of legislative periods, while the US House is reelected every two years which leaves just one year (if not less) of productive work time.
Or it's just a flood of comments trying to take the moral high ground without actually helping in any way the cause. I'll call it pure aura farming or something, because I totally fail to see how constant bickering about any fixes is actually doing any fixing. Yes, I'm irritated.
Third party audits should be part of the enforcement. And even then, those third parties should be vetted and have full daylight as to ownership, conflicts of interest, etc.
The precursor to a service being taken offline is that it is made illegal. This law would prevent someone from selling the service as a tracker for everyone. When a warrant comes in, it will start tracking the plate. Right now, it is possible to track all plates for all time. That kind of service should not be allowed.
Right. Also once it's installed , rules might change unnoticed. It's difficult to enforce long term and requires very high degree of trust.
we could require remote attestation so that the cameras can be independently verified by anyone to be doing only whst they claim to be.
Well for one thing it's presumably illegal to use illegally retained data in court.
Unfortunately that's up to a judge to decide and they don't need to introduce illegally retained data in court for parallel construction. Nor are courts an issue when they decide to share/sell this data to everyone under the sun, because it will be nearly impossible to figure out who they gave/shared it with, and the damage is already done regardless.
Isn't stalking already illegal? Isn't this stalking? Or facilitating it, at least.
I think if your threat model is "the government is constantly lying and deceiving you", you've already lost. I'm not saying you're wrong – it seems a correct observation about the US – but you have bigger problems then.
That being said: how about the New Hampshire law plus a provision for independent audits?
This assumes flock is just doing ALPR and it’s obvious from police statements and stolen flock camera data dumps they are well beyond that now, onto facial recognition.
The govt has been steadily eroding privacy and our rights (carnivore reading email, bulk collection of phone metadata, all internet traffic with x-keyscore, stingrays, etc etc etc) and using terrorism as the boogeyman when often it’s just wrong think that will put you in the sights. None of this needed warrants, all of it illegal by a plain reading of the 4th amendment. If a constitutional amendment won’t protect you, a state law is basically toilet paper.
That mitigates one specific problem with Flock, and not entirely. Firstly, as long as any jackass can fill out a form and set a "hit," they can still target and stalk people.
And ALPR is only one method that Flock uses. Their pan-tilt-zoom offerings are specifically meant to target pedestrians. They have facial recognition (and I've heard gait as well) and sniff for Bluetooth and other things to try to fingerprint devices.
It needs to be illegal to collect video for later facial recognition analysis as well.
Should be:
* Illegal to collect every plate for later analysis
* Must delete "non hit" plate images within 3 MILLISECONDS
* Strict forbidden to upload "non hit" camera imagery to NON-VOLATILE STORAGE.
* "HIT" LIST MUST BE CRYPTOGRAPHICALLY SIGNED & ENCRYPTED BY WARRANT KEY ONLY JUDGE HAS ACCESS TO.
If it's not removed from the device, why does it matter if it's three minutes or three milliseconds. With something longer (3 days) people could drive up and pull the records?
In before a founder/business/conservative/libertrian complains that regulation "kills innovation".
Please keep this community away from reddit style comments.
That’s a factual perspective.
Listen to Marc Andreessen, he’s a funder of Flock and a passionate advocate of that position.
It's a low effort politically charged reddit style drive by remark that adds nothing to the discussion. Whether or not it's factually accurate or on topic is irrelevant.
> politically charged
Well... Flock only has themselves to blame for it getting politically charged.
I don't understand why people are only talking about the ALPR aspect of Flock and similar devices. When the company does it it feels like they're trying to minimize the collection.
I believe I've seen claims the are recording Bluetooth MACs of passing devices, and I've definitely seen that they're also detecting people on the camera feed.
I have a Watchy, a kit "smartwatch" built around an ESP32, that now runs firmware that listens for Axon/Taser and Flock bluetooth and wifi prefixes, and vibrates on my wrist when it detects them.
Also, 10 or 15 years back, I wrote an Android app to do ALPR on the live camera view with the phone in a holder that let it see out he windscreen. I collected licence plates by spending an hour or so every few days over a few weeks sitting at cafes that had a good view of the marked and unmarked cars arriving and leaving the three major police stations nearby. It did work, but the camera in the Galaxy S3 and S4s I had to try it on couldn't get images good enough for OCR until the cop car was so close it wasn't useful... I contemplated experimenting with a drone camera gimbal when I was building and flying camera drones around 2014/2015, possibly using one of those clip on telephoto lens's that were common back then - but by then I'd ditched the car and I didn't figure I;d be able to build that to work on any of my motorcycles.
Didn't theGoogs set precedence that recording location of MACs and SSID type information long ago?
Mr. Cat, You ran a stop sign ten years ago so now you're on our watchlist for suspicious persons.
I'm in the middle, cameras can be useful in a crowded society as we see with body cams on cops. The can show truth really well, helping innocent people also, but there needs to be serious guard rails and criminal ramifications for misuse by users and companies itself so this is treated very seriously.
I am different in that I would be fine with these BUT only if there is super strict guardrails with real consequences for misuse:
- Super strict rules around information storage and access. - Ensuring access can only be for an active investigation where there is direct reason to look for a name, face, number plate etc.
- Ensure there is reasonable crime threshold for use so cops don't have the right to track someone because they jay walked or something frivolous to justify use.
- Add a requirement any person looked up then they must be informed within ~6 months with reasons why (or a judge warranted delay every 6 months).
- Legal use only and the data can never be sold for general commercialisation.
- Require human verification of hit if police are going to take action on data so there is clear ownership of incorrect actions.
- Some level of data deletion, after a year type thing.
With something down that route, and naturally more than my quick comment, I feel it could balance benefit vs cost. Without real guardrails and consequences it's openeing a risky path for totalitarianism misuse.
How does it determine a "hit"? By making a query to a database? Then there is a log of the request anyway. Even if the database is on a local laptop there are application logs.
It's not the imagery that's really important, it's tracking the who+when+where.
If we're talking about license plate numbers, it seems fairly reasonable to just have the device download the entire target list.
Longest plates are 8 chars. It seems exceedingly unlikely that the target list is longer than 1,000,000 plates. They all use characters that fit in a single UTF-8 code point. So 8mb initial download, and very small incremental updates.
Likely much more power efficient than sending every plate over the network, and would use considerably less bandwidth over a couple months.
---
Is that how they do it? No freaking clue.
But it seems like a very solvable problem, with correctly aligned incentives (ex - it's both cheaper and more private to NOT send the plate over the net, vs sending the list to the device).
Not even 8MB, can use a hash so it's only 1MB. Collisions aren't a problem because some human still has to check the image against the hit.
In a past life, I worked with LPRs operate this way in police cars. That was over a decade ago, the devices were pretty powerful even then.
OpenCV made it easy
Why are they so concerned about an image and not the obtained data in any format like OCR generated text?
i dont understand why this is now an issue and any public facing camera that does OCR isn't
The scale is the issue, for me. Having several small-time, disjointed ooerations doing ocr doesn't threaten the general population as much as having eyes everywhere taking notes of who is where at any given time.
The power the flock infrastructure has to target people is unprecedented in the US. And the kind of power I would never want anyone to wield.
Why do you think it is now an issue? Flock is a private company where other traffic cameras I'm familiar with were not. Those were problematic and in my state they were deemed not legal and removed. The other type of cameras I'm not a fan of are the ones for the toll roads. They take shots of license plates even if you have a tag. I don't know if they are searchable by law enforcement, but I have no reason to think they are not.
Any camera system that can be used to track people even if that's not the sole purpose is problematic, but when the entire purpose of the camera is tracking people then it is especially egregious. It's not a problem now, but they've turned the knob to an 11.
Seems to be a huge loop-hole: It doesn't seem to prohibit a private company from operating a ALPR system...?
The first sentence of the law addresses your concern. Even as a non lawyer I can see that your “loophole” does not exist unless I have seriously misunderstood that sentence. There is a link to the law’s text in the post you are commenting on if you care to read it.
This is such a classic software developer's fallacy. Law is not code that is executed by society. The program called society is also orders of magnitude more complicated than the most complicated program you've ever worked with.
If you accept the consequences in American politics of the slippery slope, the chilling effect, and inalienable rights, then you cannot condone any limited version of a technology which still serves the same perverse underlying purpose of subjugation and control.
Many laws constricting police activity and related to data collected by police go ignored.
Many laws are ignored. The solution is not no laws.
The point is that we should just prohibit the cameras entirely, not play this game where we make rules about their use which will be ignored
Rules about their use will be ignored but rules about installing them won’t. Makes sense.
Less so when it costs prosecutions. Cops collectively spend quite a long while reading people their Maranda warning for example.
Exactly. Laws get followed when there are likely adverse consequences from not following them. We don't need huge punishments, we need likely punishments.
illegally collected evidence is usually grounds for inadmission
New Hampshire is a staunchly Libertarian state, but man it has some good ideas
Live free or die
Or die because your neighbor refused to vaccinate
This is a joke right
so you are saying vaccines dont work?
Everyone I know that has gotten Covid also routinely gets the vaccination. So, yes?
The problems come from right libertarians. Left libertarians are great.
The difference between a left libertarian and a right libertarian is the first day at work
New Hampshire is a staunchly Libertarian state, so it has some good ideas
FIFY
A co-worker of mine lives nearby and he finds it ironic they do not have recreational cannabis.
You can live free, but the state needs that booze revenue.
I can see some nuance to this one. Flock is intended to be searchable by law enforcement, not Joe Average. Tracking cops and then publishing that information is not exactly the same as turning Flock back on the Flockers.
I think the best solution is to just say nobody can do this, including the government. Or that if we allow things like Flock to exist, then we'd need actual legislation that tightens considerably how available the data is to be searched, and what approvals are necessary to access it.
The obvious next step, otherwise, is for someone to start OpenALPRMap and we all get to suffer together.
> Flock is intended to be searchable by law enforcement, not Joe Average.
Isn't Flock's alleged legality predicated on the principle that there is no "reasonable expectation of privacy" in public? I don't see why that would change depending on whether it's "Joe Average" or a police officer at the controls---IIUC I'm allowed to capture images, video, etc. of people in public just as much as cops are.
Agreed that these systems simply need to be banned.
This is exactly what the YouTuber was trying to illustrate - the whole legal justification of Flock cameras is that it's equated to someone sitting down in the location and writing down license plate numbers.
The Youtuber is in Canada which may have a different legal underpinning for Flock than the US.
Yes except the analogy is better served as trillions of people watching, relaying license plates instantly, with other trillions of people doing pattern matching and math calculations to figure out where each license plate will be tomorrow.
This is exactly what the YouTuber was trying to illustrate
There's a sometimes fine distinction between "reasonable expectation of privacy" and stalking or harassment. Not that it's applicable in this case because courts have generally made the bar against police officers very high.
And police officers have repeatedly stalked and harassed the public via flock access.
There's a list of 81 known instances of police stalking romantic interests, sometimes querying Flock hundreds of times: https://ij.org/police-have-reportedly-used-license-plate-rea...
Some of the cases involve sexual assault and kidnapping as well.
And obviously those are just the ones who got caught.
That is not very many cases considering there are millions of stalkers in the US alone. That is like saying police shouldn't have cars since they sometimes kill people in car accidents.
That actually sounds like a lot.
To me, it's like a bad shoot. How many unarmed, completely innocent black guys would you be able to shoot because a less than qualified officer "thought his apartment was hers" for instance?
I obviously don't know, but I'm betting the black community, at least in my country (USA), wouldn't countenance anywhere even close to 81 black guys getting shot over nothing like that before we'd hear from them.
I had no idea it was 81. That's a level at which it makes me genuinely wonder why there aren't more protests?
There's way too many departments out there being run like frat houses. This is serious work. You got woman problems you can't separate from the job? Get out, or your leadership should be running you out in a well run department.
Youtube has a lot of videos of British "police auditors" who go to stand near police stations to take videos, get police attention and hilarity ensues. It's worth watching a few of them to get the taste.
We have the same auditors in the states, except that the auditors in the states who do this are often detained illegally by the police, then sue and win, and get paid out of taxpayer dollars with no repercussions for the police whatsoever who acted illegally. One guy in particular I know who used to do this went by TheBattousai or similar name and I believe went through this cycle 2 or 3 times with various police agencies. Not exactly hilarity here
The American cases are indeed not funny, because the American police are not only incompetent, but also aggressive, violent and are trigger-happy. The UK police are incompetent, but at least not murderous, therefore the situation is often hilarious.
I've long thought (but not deeply enough to find a hole in it) that constitutional violations need to carry severe criminal penalties. Not just a "don't do that", a payout from the tax coffers, or dismissal of evidence but hard jail time.
You’d think something would have to give at some point. But as you say the police have very little incentive change since they bear little to no consequence for egregious behavior.
American police have a tendency to use their unions to hold their cities hostage, not to simply lobby for better pay/conditions for their officers.
Part of this is refusing to ever accept accountability for their actions, either individually or collectively.
Can someone spread this among the poor and homeless as a good way to make a bunch of money without needing qualifications?
US vs Carpenter might apply here. Just because you have no reasonable expectation of privacy doesn’t mean that therefore the state may execute total surveillance over a person
You're correct, and also the pushback to these needs to be less a concern of privacy (though they are) and more an infringement on freedom of movement. There is no expectation of broad strokes "privacy" in public, that's true. However what flock is effectively doing would be considered stalking by any other execution method, and the way they're getting around that is because they're stalking everyone at the same time and calling it surveillance instead.
If you attach a GPS to your wife's car without her knowledge, you can (and should) be prosecuted. Flock cameras collect the same data (rough location of a vehicle) and they just do it for every single vehicle passing their sensor. Then, through analysis of that massive dataset, you can now effectively stalk anyone, in the past, for the cost of a database search.
And I have no interest in the distinction between Joe Average and LEOs. That's about 6 months of training, and we have an absolute avalanche of evidence of how LEOs are:
* Prone to unnecessary violence (google 40% cops)
* Are ALREADY abusing this system to stalk wives, girlfriends, exes of the two formers, or just people when they're fucking bored
The clear solution is to ban it, but our Government has both a financial and power stake in keeping people surveilled, which is why I'm a huge fan of how many people are just destroying these things at scale.
Agreed, how many times does the public have to be burned before "storing vast amounts of detailed, identifying information" will be banned. Not to be too hyperbolic, but to speak their language, shouldn't keeping this database of American's movements be considered a national security threat.
It’s designed to blunt rebellion. Flock has hockey-sticked in the last 18 months. DOJ is providing a ton of funding to buy these through block grants.
> And I have no interest in the distinction between Joe Average and LEOs. That's about 6 months of training
This simply isn't a reasonable position to hold. Either we maintain a restricted class of people with authority that exceeds the authority of regular people, or everyone in society has the same level of authority (be that the level of police now, the level of regular people now, or somewhere in between). But the latter scenario is obviously worse, even taking into account occasional abuses by those in the restricted class.
You might as easily say that the only difference between Joe Average and a surgeon is X years of medical school.
You're right of course. Given they have special privileges of authority that Joe Average doesn't have, they should have even _less_ of an expectation of privacy in public.
That already happens though, typical policemen are much more tracked by the police than even criminals are so they have the least privacy in every scenario. You never get more privacy in the same situation if you were an on duty cop instead of a civilian.
Not quite the same. Attaching a GPS tracker involves physical trespass and can track a person to non-public locations. Also, collecting data does not restrict one’s freedom of moment. Nor is it stalking. Stalking is a pattern of conduct designed to intimidate or inflict emotional distress. Flock may facilitate staking, but it is not stalking itself. If knowing that someone else knows you were at a particular location at a particular time causes you distress, you have issues. Do you flee from every other car that sees on the road?
> Stalking is a pattern of conduct designed to intimidate or inflict emotional distress.
I don't think you could get out of stalking charge by just being so good at stalking that person affected didn't detect it, assuming you get detected at some point for some reason.
> Not quite the same. Attaching a GPS tracker involves physical trespass
Why does that matter? If your car is in public, do you not have any right to it's privacy either?
> and can track a person to non-public locations.
... what does that even mean? All locations are public, because by definition, locations only exist in public. What location have you been to that permits no one to see you arrive and later leave?
> Also, collecting data does not restrict one’s freedom of moment.
I mean, if that data can be used to imprison you, I think it's just matters of gradation whether you consider that true or false.
> Nor is it stalking. Stalking is a pattern of conduct designed to intimidate or inflict emotional distress.
But it clearly is. It's both a way to dragnet the public from doing illicit things, and it's deployed with a common selling point of reducing crime. You can say that instilling emotional distress in criminals is good but that also means you're doing that to at least some amount of the public.
> If knowing that someone else knows you were at a particular location at a particular time causes you distress, you have issues.
I do have issues! I have issues with my country being turned into a surveillance state because dipshits already worth more money than I will ever see in my lifetime need even more money. Yes I have issues with that.
> Do you flee from every other car that sees on the road?
As a woman, I've several times in my life had the experience of being followed by a car and not going my usual direct route home for fear of my safety. So not every car certainly, but if one was, I dunno, following close enough to get my license plate? Yeah I probably would try and "flee" that car.
Jesus man. Don’t choke on the leather.
The recording may be allowed but later use of that data may not be. For example if it was being used to aid criminals to commit crimes.
Is Flock equally liable for criminal use of its data by law enforcement officers?
Edit: Flock is/was breaking California state law by allowing outside partners to illegally access data collected in California.
If they were intentionally helping commit crimes then yes they should be tried as accomplishes.
Isn't that like saying that guns may be legal but later use of those guns may not be?
> Isn't that like saying that guns may be legal but later use of those guns may not be?
Guns are legal but murder is not, so ... yes?
It makes sense to me that recording public activity may be legal but publishing those videos would not be (for example name-and-likeness copyrights).
Or that you'd need a warrant to search those videos and issuing a warrant comes with a one-time key that decrypts the search parameters you specified in advance to get the warrant.
That’s a completely logical and true statement… I can own a gun but I can’t threaten your life with it.
In the US, photographing and recording police are first amendment-protected activities.
Likewise, the fourth amendement doesn't forbid a police officer from recording someone in public, because there's no expectation of privacy when out in public.
The courts have found that legally, one officer recording one person is no different from a large-scale, automated surveillance system recording everyone.
Well, that argument goes both ways. If the scale and automation don't make a difference, they don't make a difference.
Given that this is Canada, the first and fourth amendments don't come into the discussion.
Canada's rights are in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and they aren't absolute.
Part 1, Section 1.
The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.
Subject to that, we get Section 2.
Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms:
(a) freedom of conscience and religion;
(b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication;
(c) freedom of peaceful assembly; and
(d) freedom of association.
Section 1 is literally just "ignore everything below this section".
If they're not absolute, they're not rights. It's a feel-good document that protects jack shit.
I think this just highlights that a law, as written, isn't everything.
Say one country has this type of "feel-good document," but it's consistently interpreted by powerful courts as a strong protection, and the government generally leaves people alone due to democratic norms. Another country has a strict and absolute constitution, but courts in practice don't interpret it as such, or people are more frequently harassed when criticising the government. Where would you feel more comfortable speaking your mind, and which document is more useful for protecting freedoms?
I'm not making a specific claim about any real countries, though I would say that freedoms are not strictly worse-protected in Canada than in the US. I'm only stating that a law or other document in and of itself can't protect anything - government and society need to respect it.
Democracy is about more than just elections, and freedom is about more than just laws.
You're right.
Of course that's the same everywhere else, including the US, meaning it's not worth pointing out.
Au contraire, taking rights as if they're defined absolutely means that conflicts between them cannot be resolved equitably, but rather only binary-axiomatically. In this US, this plays out as most natural rights being undermined through inescapable interactions with corpos, with the justification that you've "voluntarily" agreed that you will not exercise your right. There are some exceptions of course (eg Pruneyard v. Robins), but they're more like exceptions that prove the rule.
US courts giving insane leeway to corporations in what a contract can include has nothing to do with whether rights are defined absolutely or not. The exact same scenario could play out if the voluntarily waived rights were reasonably limited rather than unlimited.
> could play out if the voluntarily waived rights were reasonably limited rather than unlimited
My point revolves around the unlimitedness of the other right that is being used to override the first right in question. A large part of that "insane leeway" is exactly due to the corpos' rights being taken as unlimited/absolute - note how the argument in Pruneyard was trying to use property rights to override free speech rights.
But sure, rather than tweaking the conception of rights, we could instead target reform at reigning in the "rights" of corpos - they are merely whole-cloth creations of government, after all. But I suspect we'd still hit corner cases with sufficient power imbalances between individuals (say a small-time landlord and their tenant, with the landlord attempting to curtail the tenant's speech).
There is nothing in Canadian Charter of Rights that prevents corporations' rights to be taken as unlimited. Section 1's phrase "subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified" makes it very easy - the judge just has to say that any limits would be unreasonable, and voila, rights are now unlimited. And overriding rights of individuals is just as easy - the judge only has to say that limiting them is justified, and bam, rights are limited.
At least with American system, they actually have to come up with an opposing right that's in conflict with the one they're limiting. In Canada, any right can be limited even without any conflicts.
I would think the natural follow on would be that police have a relative expectation to be photographed and recorded by the public, their actions being public record - they're acting on behalf of the government, FOIA and all that sort of thing applies, right?
Isn't this effectively outsourcing body cams? The frequent stated reason for lack of which is "we would but our department can't afford it :'( anyway check out this new armored vehicle we bought!"
"Tracking" on duty cops doesn't seem unusual, though I think a different argument could be made for their off duty time.
* Edit: this is Canada, so my feelings likely don't apply to their laws.
While this doesn't apply to Canada, an American law professor (who leans very conservative politically) has argued that the public has the right to record the police doing their jobs, based on the due-process clause of the U.S. Constitution rather than on the First Amendment. (EDIT to clarify: he's not arguing that there isn't a First Amendment right to record the police, he's saying that besides the First Amendment, the due-process clause also gives citizens a right to record the police doing their jobs). You can read the 2012 paper "A Due Process Right to Record the Police" at https://ir.law.utk.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1460&cont...
I have only skimmed the paper myself, so if it contains any mistakes I'm likely to have missed them. But his argument seems good to me.
> Isn't this effectively outsourcing body cams?
I think its equivalent to putting a tracker in everyone's car and giving the police access to it.
Surveillance is also firmly in pre-crime territory. People being stalked when they haven't (yet) done a crime.
I believe the American Supreme Court explicitly ruled against that in the past ~10 or so years. Except it was one GPS tracker on one car, done without a warrant.
I don't know why that decision, explicitly founded on "making warrantless surveillance too easy violates the intent of warrants" is being used as toilet paper.
But in the inverse, right? It's like putting a tracker on every cop's car and giving the public access to it.
You're right--I was addressing Flock (et al) at scale, which is what I'm more worried about.
> The courts have found that legally, one officer recording one person is no different from a large-scale, automated surveillance system recording everyone.
That is not the case. It hasn't been truly tested, and there are very strong hints in SCOTUS's previous opinions that scale dramatically changes the equation for them.
Of course SCOTUS is currently much more amenable to the idea of changing their mind, so who knows how it'd actually hit, but it's far from decided law in the US.
For one example, Sotomayer's concurrence in US v. Jones (2012)
> Awareness that the Government may be watching chills associational and expressive freedoms. And the Government’s unrestrained power to assemble data that reveal private aspects of identity is susceptible to abuse. The net result is that GPS monitoring—by making available at a relatively low cost such a substantial quantum of intimate information about any person whom the Government, in its unfettered discretion, chooses to track—may “alter the relationship between citizen and government in a way that is inimical to democratic society.” United States v. Cuevas-Perez, 640 F. 3d 272, 285 (CA7 2011) (Flaum, J., concurring).
> I would take these attributes of GPS monitoring into account when considering the existence of a reasonable societal expectation of privacy in the sum of one’s public movements. I would ask whether people reasonably expect that their movements will be recorded and aggregated in a manner that enables the Government to ascertain, more or less at will, their political and religious beliefs, sexual habits, and so on. I do not regard as dispositive the fact that the Government might obtain the fruits of GPS monitoring through lawful conventional surveillance techniques. See Kyllo, 533 U. S., at 35, n. 2; ante, at 11 (leaving open the possibility that duplicating traditional surveillance “through electronic means, without an accompanying trespass, is an unconstitutional invasion of privacy”). I would also consider the appropriateness of entrusting to the Executive, in the absence of any oversight from a coordinate branch, a tool so amenable to misuse, especially in light of the Fourth Amendment’s goal to curb arbitrary exercises of police power to and prevent “a too permeating police surveillance,” United States v. Di Re, 332 U. S. 581, 595 (1948).*
The case you’re commenting on took place in Brampton. The Charter is slightly more nuanced on this topic than the American Bill of Rights.
> The courts have found that legally, one officer recording one person is no different from a large-scale, automated surveillance system recording everyone.
If you're talking about US courts, then no. If they had, then we wouldn't see -for example- SCOTUS ruling that "geofence warrants" were searches that require Fourth Amendment analysis, rather than being equivalent to picking up a recording of events that happened in plain sight. We also wouldn't see at least one Federal judge openly noting that the judges that cite US vs. Knotts really need to read the entire opinion, rather than just the bit that agrees with what is convenient for them.
US v. Knotts is the forty-year-old case that is the source of the "You've no right to privacy when you're on public roads" idea that both people and judges have been parroting for quite a while now. In addition to establishing that principle, it also considered a possible future where the electronic surveillance that -at the time-
* had to be manually installed into cargo destined for the target's vehicle
* was only capable of tracking a single target vehicle
would become sufficiently advanced as to permit 24/7 dragnet surveillance... at which time, courts would need to reconsider what was just and right in light of such dreadfully advanced mass surveillance capabilities.
Pages 28 (starting at section C.) through 38 of this judge's opinion and order [0] are good reading... it can be hard to tell, but the judge really takes other judges who rely on Knotts but clearly haven't actually read it to task. If you have a half hour free, you should really read the whole thing.
[0] <https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.oknd.76...>
> Flock is intended to be searchable by law enforcement, not Joe Average.
Oh - this had me in stitches.
Juxtaposing "law enforcement" and "Joe Average" in that way is entertaining for Australians, as "Joe Average" is literally one of the entry requirements for law enforcement.
From https://www.police.nsw.gov.au/recruitment/application_proces... :
"Academic Eligibility Year 12 HSC (minimum ATAR 50 or equivalent)"
"ATAR 50" is Australian for "of your high school cohort, half of them did better than you."
Do they prevent people from being cops if they’re too smart in Aus similar to the US?
It's a minimum of academically average, but no worse.
> Applicants must meet minimum academic eligibility and satisfy English language proficiency requirements for entry into the ADAP program. Academic Eligibility
Year 12 HSC (minimum ATAR 50 or equivalent); or other equivalent qualifications such as:
"When the government fears the people there is liberty; when the people fear the government there is tyranny." -- Thomas Jefferson
Filming cops in public is a legitimate activity protected by the Constitution, according to the Supreme Court. Using a nationwide surveillance network to track people not suspected of any crime and without a warrant is not.
If Flock is specifically for law enforcement then it is a cut and dry violation of the 4th amendment. Case closed.
However, they are simply commissioned by law enforcement and law enforcement are just one of any number of customers. There is either an expectation of privacy or there isn't. This case highlights this exactly.
US vs carpenter might apply here, just because there is data in a private corporations possession doesn’t necessarily entitle the police to access it without a warrant.
It is identifying a fleet vehicle, not their person.
Flock do more than just ALPRs. and have done for a while now. I'm not sure why people keep pointing to the ALPRs while remaining silent on actual facial recognition and tracking.
That's trying to unbake the cake. This technology will not go away. The powerful will use it in secret; and sometimes the less powerful too.
I'd rather see surveillance first pointed towards government leaders, and then once the government is highly surveilled, then maybe we can trust the government to surveil everyone else.
I don't know. My idea here isn't very realistic. It's not going to happen (though we should still try), so maybe just outlawing all of it would be more realistic.
I concur, but let's be real here, surveilling the government is a non starter, 99% of HN will be screaming bloody murder when someone makes an app to tell jobsites when to have break time based on where the unmarked Ford Explorer that probably has the OSHA guy in it is.
People have no principals and no stomach for giving up a little bit of state jackboot applied on those they hate exchange for it not being applied on those they don't.
It doesn't seem all that different. Cops use these cameras to stalk ex-girlfriends, target political foes, and perv on the public at large. The public watching them hardly seems worse.
I do agree that we just shouldn't have this kind of mass-surveillance in general, and I think that's kind of the point of this particular endeavor.
> I can see some nuance to this one. Flock is intended to be searchable by law enforcement, not Joe Average.
I feel that's like saying there's "nuance" when the police choose to pull someone over because--unlike the other car--they didn't have a "I Donated To Cops" license plate.
Yes, it's technically a difference, but if it matters then the police are abusing their power to play favorites.
https://m.youtube.com/shorts/J7yJfhsuJls
For the moment, let's put aside the difference between (A) harassment for a non-offense versus (B) biased enforcement of an offense.
Are you implying that the bias is OK in both cases, or that is is bad in both cases?
I am implying neither. I am repeating the policy as stated by the enforcement officer.
We know it's not unusual. That's the whole issue here.
What's the desired activity?
> Flock is intended to be searchable by law enforcement, not Joe Average.
If cops may neither too smart (legally [1]) nor too dumb hopefully (they presumably dress themselves) then who exactly is left but Joe average?
[1] https://abcnews.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/story...
If you’re driving a publicly funded vehicle we can know where you are and what you’re doing. Seems straightforward.
We should be able to subpoena the GPS records of the car’s location as well - or potentially FOIA that information. Sunlight is good. The opposite should only be done by going through a metric ton of hoops. Otherwise you end up… where we are now.
Why do you equate government and the honorable Joe Average? The government works at the pleasure of the Joe Average, so it's natural that the said Joe is interested to watch how his servants perform their duties - after all, he elected them to do that and pays them for that. At the same time Joe might be not interested for his lowly servants to keep tabs on him - that's none of their business, after all they don't compensate him for that information, so why shouldn't we have cameras to watch the police while completely denying them to use cameras to watch us?
> Flock is intended to be searchable by law enforcement, not Joe Average.
Let’s pretend that police will only use the footage for good. No one else has access? That seems unlikely.
The IT department? Flock employees? Contractors? Managers?
> The obvious next step, otherwise, is for someone to start OpenALPRMap and we all get to suffer together.
Start a company that does ALPR and facial recognition, but narrowly targeting politicians.
99% of law enforcement are suppose to be "average joes" though. They do not have some special Citizen Plus status. Anything cops can do to the people the people should be able to do to the cops.
cops are Joe Average with badges and a higher rate of spousal abuse.
https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/26/us/flock-kentucky-police-offi...
I see no issue with tracking and monitoring public servants, just how public servants see no issue with tracking and monitoring the public.
Cops usually are worse than average Joe on many negative statistics (domestic abuse, etc), and that's not even factoring in how numbers are skewed by the well established thin blue line.
It's safer to give your info to average joe population than cops.
I would feel better if only cops didn't have access to see me on flock cameras and cops had to request footage through a public reddit or something.
This is all a bit of a joke sure, but less than police access to flock cams is.
You could FOIA their cameras every week, cops have no privacy
Under the American theory of government, Cops tracking people without warrant is the same amount of lawful as people tracking cops without warrant, in fact, the former is more restricted.
The only nuance possible here is either that the government is more trustworthy than the average person (rather than less, as has been repeatedly proven), or that the police deserve special immunity in their activities (rather than needing closer scrutiny, as has been repeatedly proven as well). Either that, or that Flock is somehow a more trustworthy steward of the data, in terms of controlling access by agencies and individuals. It's also been proven that they're not, though, so that can't be either. IMO, this entire thing is just stupid hypocrisy.
Flock being only accessible to people who are statistically more likely to beat their wives doesn't make me like it more
> Flock is intended to be searchable by law enforcement, not Joe Average
Joe Average would be charged by Flock per search, and could only afford to stalk his ex wife a couple of times via Flock, because it would get expensive soon.
Police officers can stalk their exes over 2000 times: https://edition.cnn.com/2026/08/26/us/flock-kentucky-police-...
Unfortunately, Joe Average knows a cop willing to sell their Flock credentials on the dark web so Joe can perform nationwide searches of his ex-wife.
You have to assume it’s not just used by sworn law enforcement officers, especially when Flock’s own civilian employees have abused it.
Well, actually mostly Average Joes become cops. As a matter of fact those Average Joes stalked on random people with 'LOL' in reason column.
This was in Canada so I don't know if the same laws apply. In the US the justification for this tracking without a warrant is that you are in public. That same justification allows for filming police in the public.
The intent of Flock in the US at least was just to use technology to get around the 4th amendment.
The police shouldn't be allowed to use automated tools like this without a warrant.
It’s completely reasonable that citizens should have access to this data, tracking cops is exactly the type of use case this technology is good for.
Perhaps some officially recognized oversight committee could "track cops" licitly for good reasons. But I see no reason for random citizens (especially these self-appointed idiot "citizen auditors") to know what police are up to, where they are, what they are seeing or saying at every moment of the day.
Think this through, please. Municipal police work is not "national security" level, but it still requires discretion. Leaking activity information to adversaries on the ground would be detrimental to their operations. At the very least, police run into emergencies, intimate partner issues, lots of violence, and generally see all the bad stuff. If someone like me were looking over their shoulder, that would be profoundly unjust to victims and a betrayal of public trust in the discretion and privacy that police offer to us on a regular basis. I have no reason. You've got no reason. Nearly nobody has any reason, except champing at the bit to catch them out at some transgression, so they can post it to social media and foment outrage and rebellion.
I don't want to see through their eyes nor hear through their ears. I believe that this propensity to DV and other crime is precisely because cops and their families are legitimately, profoundly, traumatized by the hazards of vocation, and when everyone's mental health is fragile, who's going to bear the brunt of the trauma, and how are they going to cope with that in a reasonable, even superhuman fashion?
It is not an uncommon tactic to lure or bait police (and/or Fire, EMT, Paramedics) into traps or mere distractions, so that some organized group can carry out something much worse without the heat breathing down their necks. Now all the local gangs are "tracking cops" and they know how effective those moves are. They all have heads-up just before the cops arrive to bust them. This is how you want to "track cops" constantly? Why have protest groups become so small and far-flung in recent years? Why aren't they turning up en masse in a single location to march and picket? Because a distributed protest also distributes first-responders, and dilutes response times and strengths. And "tracking the cops" becomes easier.
They are mostly not secret agents. They are not slipping through the streets under cloaks of invisibility or cones of silence. Even unmarked cars are fairly noticeable if you're experienced. The insignia, the lights and sirens, the uniforms are meant to get noticed and stand out. But are you going to "track cops" right into their precinct offices and cars? Their radio channels and comms were not always encrypted or private, but eventually they had the tech, and they had it up-to-here with all the prying ears and busybodies trying to second-guess them.
Police just sitting in their squad car looking at a computer display is not for public consumption. Police inventory of weapons and ammunition, and tallying of shots fired, and who fired them when: that is not public information. Police offering a towel or a garment to a nude woman who's just been raped: why do you want to "track cops", again?
Flock has the rights of a private citizen. Police accessing flock cameras is like asking you for the security camera footage from the camera on your house.
I'm not sure how it is in Canada, but my understanding in the US is that data gathered by a public (government) entity (the police) is just that... public. And we've seen that play out in some cities where people asked for a copy of their town's Flock data, and everyone got all surprised pikachu on them because it turns out that's legal, and suddenly the government doesn't want to collect that data anymore.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance
https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=snPDoXl9ZPs&si=mxrTyJpsBrZ...
What nuance though? Did everyone give the state permission to sniff after them? Because I did not. And I am almost certain a majority would not be ok with it either. There is a reason people hate flock sniffers.
When the people turn it around and sniff on cops, why is that then any different suddenly?
> we'd need actual legislation
Can the people do legislation? It's always some judges and politicians who form a clique at the end of the day.
There's no nuance because the power imbalance and overall context very obviously makes them fundamentally incomparable. What a weasel word
> Flock is intended to be searchable by law enforcement, not Joe Average
Then why can Lowes and Home Depot buy their own units, place them across properties that aren't theirs and search them nationwide?
Because it’s not just for law enforcement, anyone can buy it.
https://www.flocksafety.com/
bro we have PRISM what are you talking about?
Why is nothing being done about this? This is 1984 we were laughing about. USA laughed at China when they did the same, but when USA is doing the same people are not outraged shooting those down, painting over them. Am I missing something?
people are in fact,
>> tracking locations of flock cameras (https://deflock.org/)
>> destroying/removing them (https://flockstats.org/)
>> litigating their use (https://www.aclu.org/campaigns-initiatives/get-the-flock-out)
What specific response from the general public would you like that it's arguably already happening?
> destroying/removing them (https://flockstats.org/)
Destroying 450 out of 130,000, ie 0.3%, is not sufficient to resist the imposition of a surveillance state. Americans pretty clearly do not care for freedom as much as they yap about.
Voting out those representatives that allowed flock cameras in their cities.
it seems that single issue voters are rare, and that political access is monopolized by the already powerful
Maybe i'm in a bubble but seems like disapproval of Israel and its actions are uniting the right and left. Lets see what happens.
> Am I missing something?
Just the part where you're supposed to be doing something about it, otherwise don't you think it's a bit hypocritical to call out others for doing the same thing?
I drove past one with a literal American flag planted on it today so maybe we are taking back the Homeland alas?
It was a beautiful thing.
The state ordered the cameras removed but they left the posts, someone stuck a flag inside the old post.
https://postimg.cc/q6vSQ01V
So it still scans Bluetooth as explained in other comments here. Someone needs to build an easy to install faraday cage around it, something universal that can be easily installed on cameras that have been ordered to be removed.
It was actually removed though. But they left the pole up and someone saw an opportunity to place the flag.
Apologies. I'm mixing up this story with another story where I read the court ordered Flock to disassemble the cameras, and they left it in place for quite a long time so the state put a bag over it, but it was still collecting data via Bluetooth.
This happened in Canada
Because "1984" is one of those books that people pretend to have read so that they can use the word "Orwellian" to talk about surveillance they personally don't like while excusing the sort that's convenient or economically expedient for them.
(For what it's worth I haven't read ~half of the books on my shelf. "Simulacra and Simulation" is mocking me from across the room)
1984 is a tiny paperback that's very accessible and probably takes a couple hours to read?
It’s about 330 pages and average reader reads one page/minute, so 6.5 hours, on average
It's not like 1984 has a feel-good ending that's like "yes, fight the power, you will be successful and not ruin your own life quixotically."
I do think there is value in fighting the power... but 1984 is not a book that depicts such a choice working out well.
People aren't pretending, they just like the word.
> USA laughed at China when they did the same
Why invoke China? The UK did this long before China.
The scenario is distinctly different: in one scenario the government had "control" over it and in the other a private corporation has "control".
> Am I missing something?
Yes you missed something big. A little too excited to get in the America dig, didn’t even bother reading the article to realize it happened in Canada.
ends up a good % of the US population is in favor of fascism. Same reason we elected orange mango man, same reason ICE is running around shooting people and imprisoning America citizens.
Someone should build OpenFlock which only tracks and makes public movement of city council members who voted for Flock cameras in their city. For empathy.
I remember a newspaper article where journalists dumped amd searched curbed trash of police commisioner and politicians and published their contents. Badass activism journalism.
Maybe the solution is more tech joins forces with the fourth institution
If you accept the idea that police have a monopoly on violence in civil society, then I can see where the police would be concerned about being exposed to violence from non-police actors.
Take this to the extreme limit: Thousands of volunteers put anti-Flock cameras on their property and their vehicles. Real time data on police cars is uploaded to the cloud. You can virtually track any cruiser on a Google Maps-like app. Next, high resolution photos are snapped of the drivers and try to ID the officer from public photos published by the very same police department. Again: As real time as possible. For full reverse police state effect: Monitor police radios using LLMs. All police stops/action immediately triggers a drone flight with 4K video of the scene. Auto request body cam footage from the stop using FOIA data requests. This would be terrifying for the police and potentially perfectly legal in the US.
I called it a few days ago[1][2]:
> Balance of power. Not only can the cops watch you - you can watch them.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49995885
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49995811
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49995932
[2] As did many others, of course.
If the police have nothing to hide then they've nothing to fear from this.
It’s Canada, silly to expect the same standard of civil rights as their southern neighbors.
God I hope we (Canada) never drop to such a low standard for civil rights as our southern neighbours.
/s
I feel like this isn’t the best way to draw attention to the problem. Presumably having the police visit is what the YouTuber wanted? I’m not really sure of the lesson here but drama’s presumably the point as opposed to a side effect so it’s hard to take seriously.
Can you explain your thinking?
Flock, at the core, isn't a public entity. They aren't a government. So they're a private entity, just like an individual, tracking who they want, when they want.
This person is doing the exact same thing as Flock, and suddenly it is a problem? Seems like a double-standard.
It should be mentioned that Flock is a YC company.
I like Dan G, Paul G, Gary T and all the lads but this is a fuck up. YC are supposed to be disruptive not borderline Stasi.
Biggest investors have always chosen the side of oppression. YC is no different than any other money lender. They will happily choose fascism over any kind of socialist wealth redistribution. Do not try to humanize an org that uses its wealth as a leverage to gain more wealth.
How many police have visited flock executives to ask them why they're doing what they're doing?
You feel that greater attention is typically paid online to undramatic things?
risky move to talk to cops at your door without a lawyer present, although i am not sure how different it is in canada
The police are like vampires. So long as you don't invite them, they can't come in. (with some exceptions of course, but that's not as pithy)
In Europe there is this radio beacon tracking device listening for emergency services radio signals (Tetra/C2000), called Target Blue[1]. This is not illegal, except apparently for in Belgium.
[1] https://blu-eye.eu/en
This is a great idea. I’ve been playing around with a cheap little SDR and seeing all these Tetra signal around. Kinda disappointing there isn’t really anything to do with them since it’s all encrypted. It’s kinda fun to see the meta data and whatnot…but this gives me some ideas!
A decentralized p2p impossible to delete/sanction software to track cops would be good.
Blockchain comes to mind. But what incentive miners will have to mine new blocks of information if it’s not money?
This is government overreach. Everyone should be allowed to run a surveillance system. People should be allowed to sell biometric data to each other, to corporations, or to the government. Such a restriction is preventing so many jobs from being created.
If anyone is allowed to do this, everyone should be allowed to do this. Which is to say that no one should be allowed to do this.
Why should no one be allowed to do this? If photons are landing on my property, they belong to me.
Private security cameras aren't the issue here at all.
People are mostly objecting to government misuse of security tech to accelerate unconstitutional enforcement.
Flock cameras are private security cameras.
those photons are a violation of the NAP!
Is this sarcasm?
Morbid thought: what if there was a company that sold cameras that people could attach inside their windshield that uploaded license plates and their location as they drove around, and if you participated in uploading, you get access to the database to look up license plates?
It's very good satire.
>The St. Charles County Police Department arrested six juveniles after a car stolen out of Kirkwood was located in Weldon Spring.
>The St. Charles County Police Department said the incident began when a car was stolen in Kirkwood at around 7:30 a.m. Cpl. Barry Bayles with St. Charles County police, said a license plate reader in the county identified the car at around 9:50, and a second reader spotted it at around 9:30.
https://www.ksdk.com/article/news/crime/6-minors-arrested-ca...
Ah yes, a random irrelevant anecdote that doesn't prove anything
Far more relevant than all the assumptions made in all the responses here
People with power will find it easy and tempting to use that power to defend their interests.
This is why you have to codify in law accountability and oversight.
They don't like getting a taste of their own medicine now, do they?
I'm not familiar with privacy and filming laws in canada, but if the cops just came there and chatted with him without any arrests, warnings, citations, detainment, etc, then it isn't really different from any other random citizen knocking on your door and asking about your security camera.
Tracking for thee but not for me
Well I mean the state does have the monopoly on violence.
In a functioning state, anyway.
So yeah, of course rules are different for normal people compared with people that have a special role as assigned by the democratically legitimized system.
Nice pithy statement, but police are able to do _many_ things that the general public aren't allowed to do, in order to do their jobs.
I'm not saying flock is good or anything like that, but arguing against it because the public can't do what the police can isn't a good argument.
But using cameras in public spaces is something the general public is allowed to do.
Technically yes, but it's not without many caveats, and often depends on what you're doing with the recordings. See https://www.freedomforum.org/recording-in-public/ for _some_ of the complexities. (Note: freedomforum.org is a US site concerned with US laws, but the incident in the main post was in Canada, so not everything is the same, but Canada also has caveats/restrictions on such recording.)
Most of those caveats are about spaces that aren't actually public, or recording audio. When it comes to pure surveillance-style video recording in actual public spaces, there's not much in the way of restrictions, and nothing where police have special privileges.
Reminder from a lawyer (and a cop in the audience) presenting at a law school: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE
Tldr: Don't talk to the police. Another reminder - familiarize yourself with your 4th, 5th and 6th amendment rights and remember to invoke them audibly (for an example of the risk of failing to do so - see Salinas v. Texas [1]) and then shut your mouth. When possible, record every interaction. Cops will lie. Do not argue or be belligerent. Invoke your rights, record, comply with any legal orders, and never physically resist. But do not agree to talk or consent to doing so. A cop on the street is neither judge nor jury. Do not surrender your rights under the pretense of a "voluntary" or "consensual" visit.
Nothing can be more patriotic in a country that fought off a King and passed the Bill of Rights than telling an armed agent of the state without a warrant who "just wants to talk" to get off your property.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salinas_v._Texas
Sounds like there should be some laws in place that governs both the police and civilian surveillance. But alas
Alright HN, here’s your challenge: build an open source Flock but for cops and politicians.
Build plugins for common doorbell or surveillance systems consumers use - Ring, Ubiquiti, Frigate, whatever - and have it look for official vehicles (cops, diplomat plates, government plates, etc). When detected, publish the data to an open database searchable by the general public that includes location, time, date, direction of travel, make, model, and occupants of vehicle.
After all, if this data is really not protected by privacy laws as the cops/Flock/Axon/etc claim, then obviously it’s in our best interest to keep such a database ourselves to track those who track us. We may not have the right of way or easements or budgets to build out a network like these corporate spooks, but an open community database could cover a wide swath pretty quickly.
Surely someone out there has the time and expertise willing to take the heat for such a project.
Hell, you can already buy consumer solutions from companies like Ubiquiti that accomplish this. Just need a publishing mechanism connected to Unifi's API.
https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/physical-security-nvr/pr...
https://store.ui.com/us/en/products/uvc-ai-lpr
https://help.ui.com/hc/en-us/articles/360058867233-UniFi-Pro...
Is it that different from members of the public asking cops what intentions they have using Flock? Seems like everyone is concerned about privacy, the only difference is that the police is more organised and has more leverage to protect themselves vs (often) fragmented public.
Yes, it is.
A city member coming to your house to ask you about your intentions for something is different from you going to city council meeting. Police, city official, elected officials etc are public servants, they work for the public. The public does not work for public servants and public servants are expected only to ask members of the public their intentions under specific circumstances (common circumstances but specific circumstances - the cops can pull you over for a number of things but they, officially cannot pull you over at random or based on you exercising your 1st amendment rights, etc).
"It would be scary if someone could track where you live and when you leave for work." Yes. That's the point...
Fantastic, I love it. (I mean the activist's work, not the cops trying to scare him into stopping.) These kinds of projects are needed to give government officials some empathetic understanding of what they're doing to the people.
Keep up the good work!
Reminder for all Canadians that the entire country is a single party consent jurisdiction for recording audio conversations. If you're one of the parties to the conversation, you're not required to inform the other. CBC has used this extensively for hidden camera/hidden microphone investigations (CBC Marketplace among other shows). There's ample prior case law on it.
That was in Canada (Peel, Ontario) not in the US just for context and for people not reading the article
It was, but he talks about Flock-related situations in the US a lot in the video.
Rookie mistake. Need to start a religion first, then you can do whatever you want if you call it righteous.
This is one of those emotionally satisfying stories... if you don't think about it very hard. It's symbolically rich, it fits the simplistic narratives of good vs evil we're all raised with, but this isn't a great example of a 'gotcha' moment.
Do I like Flock cameras? No. Do I like mass surveillance? No. Do I see a difference between an agent of the state doing something involving law enforcement or surveillance activities, and a private individual doing the same? Yes. You can't run around in uniform handcuffing people either.
I don't want HN'ers setting up surveillance networks anymore than I want them strapping a pistol to their hip and fighting crime. It's an asymmetry by design because the alternative is an unworkable nightmare, whereas the sad reality is that if people keep voting for people who openly spy on us, they're going to keep doing it.
"You have no expectation of privacy in public, citizen."
"Officer, do you have any expectation of privacy in public?"
"That's different."
Incredibly sometimes things are different because of different circumstances and the laws we've all taken part in constructing (when we bother to organize and vote of course).
You're an unregulated, unsupervised, and frankly unknown factor with no real accountability through any realistic chain of command to the results of the democratic process. However far from your imagined ideal, cops are.
Yes, and people -- including cops -- do not have an expectation of privacy in public. It is entirely legal for a private citizen to be recording the movements of cops.
Then the cops then decide to stop by his house to talk about it... that's intimidation and bullying by someone with a gun and the force of the government behind them.
No, no, no.
Stalking, harrassment, and intimidation are illegal for you. Police can carry out these activities legally, by other names, in a controlled fashion, according to their duties and orders.
But if your tracking and recording of cops begins to verge into those categories, woe betide you going up against a judge who will find that you're interfering with law enforcement activities. Exercising your right to swing fists? That ends at the tip of the other guy's nose, remember?
They will let you, and you'll get away with plenty of it; but there's a line in the sand for you, and you stay behind it.
There's some public interest in noting and publishing observations of police (they appeared to be working while they were being paid, for instance).
The same is at least less true for private citizens that are not being accused of a crime.
Why are you assuming that the rest of us are fine with mass surveillance and authoritarianism? Are you a rationalist?
I'm not assuming that, and if you read up a bit you'd see my views clearly spelled out. Please engage with the topic and not who you imagine I must be for not providing you with enough of an echo of your own views.
Your “private individual” wording is carrying a lot of weight here. I wonder if Google knows where all the cops with Androids are? Or if Meta lets you bid for ad impressions from users “interested in law enforcement”
What if I wanted to record the cops to schedule my lemonade stand?
Basically, the answer to “Who gets to surveil?” is: Everyone but you
Start a site or a place where you can collect metrics and hand out cookies. Boom you're in the surveillance game. You can buy ad data, you can read census data, if you have the money it's all out there on the market. Hell if you don't have a conscience you can buy black market info.
You have to ask if you want more of that until we reach parity with Google and THE POLICE, or if you're reacting out of a sense of fairness that's taught to children.
That's an argument you could make if police had to obtain warrants to access them. But they do not, at least in the US (things might be different in Canada where this happened, but I doubt it). Instead, they rely on rulings that there is no expectation of privacy in public. By the same principle, it's perfectly valid and legal for a civilian (or group of civilians) to set up an equivalent system to track police.
As you say this is Canada, so I don't particular care what the situation is in a totally different country where this didn't happen. Even in the US it's not as though "Warrants are for suckers" is just the law of the land, you and I and millions of others have and had the chance to weigh in on that. The fact that most people don't notice or care does make that sort of thing extremely difficult and frustrating, but that's not the same as it being futile or equivalent to "Guy sets up surveillance network to make a point and get media attention."
I mean, the entire point of this project was to make a statement about mass surveillance and make the government feel uncomfortable about it.
You don't actually have to worry about "HN'ers setting up surveillance networks".
It's funny that you say that, because in fact if you look at the companies YC has ultimately birthed, the people that come through here... that's exactly what HN'ers have done. For ad-tech, for fun, for metrics, for AI companies, for the government and contractors.
Who do you think does all of this if not a bunch of people in the world of tech who mostly act as mercenaries?
> I don't want HN'ers setting up surveillance networks anymore than I want them strapping a pistol to their hip and fighting crime.
In exactly equal measure: I don't want cops setting up surveillance networks any more than I want HN'ers doing it (less so, actually). So this post, bringing attention to that issue, is good, imo.
As long as random joe dropout with a badge from boss hogg can do it, and vc-backed visionary mr misanthrope can do it, so can the rest of the people. Cops and corps are only special to the degree that We The People want them to be. And speaking for the plurality of We The People [0]: we do not want them to be special in this way.
0 – https://www.reuters.com/world/us/who-likes-flock-ai-cameras-...
"Raising awareness" is a scam, especially in this context on this site. Not a single person here is unaware of surveillance as a topic, that's no a serious idea. Again a simplistic model that "If A can do B, B can do A" is how children see the world. Different roles comes with different levels of accountability and oversight. Arguing for more or different oversight? Arguing to vote against mass surveillance measures and the politicians who support them? Organizing as a community? ALL GOOD.
Stunts for attention so that libertarians on HN can get a smugrection? Nah.
> a scam
> no a serious idea
> a simplistic model
> how children see the world
> stunts for attention
Your reply is mostly insults and shallow dismissals, so I don't see any reason to meaningfully respond to those parts. I'll check back later to see if you've edited insults out and substance in.
As for your separate ideas of community organization: good on you for spearheading that. The world could use more yous doing that, too. If there are any specific asks you have of the community to help you there, HN is full of capable folks.
There's a certain magical hypocrisy in accusing others of shallow dismissals while you dismiss them and tell them to re-write. Setting that aside "raising awareness" isn't a serious idea, it's a single step in a process that many have decided is the endpoint of a process. You see it in how people attempt to imitate protest movements of prior generations by skipping the local organization, boycotting, solidarity, and instead skip to the Big March. Or worse organizations like the Susan G. Koman foundation that simply turned "raising awareness" into an end in and of itself.
Of course the worst of those are still doing something, perhaps not something maximally effective, but something nonetheless. Tragically on the internet people don't even attempt that, they skip straight to the scolding, posturing, ideological competition and recruitment phases of a movement. The result is what we see here, individuals sharing their often ill-informed opinion (still valid of course, although not worth much) based on an ideological leaning they've never meaningfully interrogated.
Fortunately this site is full of serious people willing to engage with a topic beyond the performative, and don't feel the need to engage in condescension and lofty dismissals. Lets never talk again.
So they can watch us - but we can not watch them.
At which point is this called slavery?
We can watch them, as is evidenced by the fact that he is watching them. Misrepresenting the police response as preventing his actions is clearly not true. Characterizing a polite conversation as "slavery" is disrespectful to people worldwide actually experiencing slavery.
Preventing, no. But it was certainly a form of intimidation, even if (and I'm being very charitable here) they didn't intend it that way.
Cops coming to your door to ask, in a disapproving manner, why you're doing something... well, that's not a friendly visit from the people with guns who are allowed to deprive you of your freedom.
Words have meanings
Not in 2026 they don't.
They're just most probable tokens. Either most probable to exist after the previous set of tokens, or most probable to get a specific outcome.
I am being sarcastic of course, as HN has still to some degree managed to avoid this, but even HN is struggling. The rest of "social media" operates exactly like that.
YouTuber is shocked to find out that the government is legally able to do things that you, a private citizen, cannot do.
What he did was not illegal and he was not charged. Four cops came to his house to intimidate him but left when it did not work
this is not a good summary of the video
The YouTuber just forgot that they need more subscribers to unlock those perks.
You gain those at iirc 10 million or so? Even comes with a decorative plate for your wall.
Goverement has monopoly to use violence against own citizens. Legally. Why opposite is illegal?
Flock isn't "the government". This is an interesting conversation because often Flock is a circumvention to the police not being able to do these things.
Why deal with annoying oversight and restrictive governance and audits and usage monitoring when you can just offload it to a private company and stalk women without restraint?
Cops, like everyone, have no "reasonable expectation of privacy." Until then, they are in fact treated like everyone else.
What I saw was cops making up laws and trying to intimidate people into following them. Wouldn't be the first time.
Legal gray area is still a legal gray area...
Technically, it is home users volunteering data to a cloud provider, that then mines the disclosed data as a service for any creep.
It would be a constitutional matter, and the city would lose in court given precedent lawsuits... if police used direct surveillance to follow people around even on public property where there was no expectation of privacy. Sue, and remember to vote. =3
So the cops visited and talked to him, but didn't pursue any charges or issue any warnings. He was free to pursue his project (so far).
>“One of [the officers] took the time to specifically mention how scary it would be for them, because people would be able to find out where they lived, when they got on their shift and what they were doing throughout the day, and that that type of powerful information could put them personally at risk [from] any bad apples that might want to track them down.”
I know we're supposed to distill everything down to a "them vs us" mentality. But cops have been tracked down and killed by people using apps like Waze so it's not a completely unwarranted fear.
This also isn't an apples and oranges situation. A Flock database isn't public - police have access but at least ostensibly have oversight from the legal system. That's a much different set of concerns than the "UNO reverse card" the TikToker is trying to make it to be.
Police cars are painted differently to make them visible. They are public information. Police stations are visible. Cops addresses are not made public.
Police visiting a home is form of intimidation. That's not something to brush off.
Oh you haven't seen the all-white decals on white cruisers with no top lights? Or the decals that are visible only when you're directly in line with the cruiser? There was an undercover Mitsubishi Lancer back in my home town. They aren't always so up front.
What's interesting is that I've seen a noticeable uptick in ordinary cars being camouflaged, in quasi-legal ways. Dark tinted windows all over, plenty of license-plate cloaking techniques, and a new one which is probably specifically anti-AI/anti-Flock: people are cloaking or concealing their hood ornaments: that is, the unique logo of the maker of their vehicle. An idle pastime of mine has always been car ID, so it's interesting to be a little more challenged when I see a hood ornament that's encased in a tinted shield, and I still need to correctly guess the make/model of the vehicle.
Gemini tells me it's 100% legal everywhere in the USA, to swap, modify, or conceal vehicle branding on privately-owned vehicles.
This is paired with a rather alarming but "more harmless than it appears" fad where people modify their "exhaust tune" to sound like backfire/gunshots. And they drive past all night long. I hear them everywhere. I had an LLM chat about it, and it's really something people deliberately do. I feel it is mostly to spam people with these percussive noises so that we get fatigued with them, so that "Shotspotter" is spammed with false positives, and so that boomer Karens fatigue the cops in turn with calling in "gunshots heard" when there were no gunshots at all. If you get so fatigued with hearing car exhaust backfires all night, you'll probably be duly surprised, and unlikely/unable to promptly react, when a real drive-by shooting goes down.
>I feel it is mostly to spam people with these percussive noises so that we get fatigued with them, so that "Shotspotter" is spammed with false positives, and so that boomer Karens fatigue the cops in turn with calling in "gunshots heard" when there were no gunshots at all. If you get so fatigued with hearing car exhaust backfires all night, you'll probably be duly surprised, and unlikely/unable to promptly react, when a real drive-by shooting goes down.
I like it even more when you put it like that, lol
I live where we both have the kind of people with the machine gun tune on their car and we have real gunshots. It's actually pretty obvious which is which. The cars aren't that bad. You don't notice them unless they're "novel" like misfiring or a grossly out of round semi trailer tire or something.
> Police visiting a home is form of intimidation.
Is it though?
I live in a weird location, but it's not uncommon to get a couple of police visits for random things in a year.
I don’t live at a weird location and have had one in a decade.
Why would police visit people periodically?
- There's a traffic accident on the street nearby and they're looking for someone who witnessed it
- Altercation at a neighbor's house and they come inform us what was going on
- A neighbor called the police and they're looking for the address
- Coordinating parking for a medical incident down the road
- Welfare check on the kids because the neighbors heard screaming
Just a bunch of little stuff over the years.
For me that would be annoying.
In my case, IIRC, once like 15-20 years ago for some paperwork that needs an adress verified by the police, or something like that. I don't remember if it was for me or my wife. I don't remember the details.
In this case they came to talk about the cameras he put up.
It's funny, reading that list, it all gives me an instinctual "less-nice neighborhood I wouldn't want to live in" vibe. But I'm sure it's perfectly normal for people who live in more exciting places.
Separately, this suggests another question to explore.
Is visiting a civil servant's home a form of intimidation?
>But cops have been tracked down and killed by people using apps like Waze so it's not a completely unwarranted fear.
Sure, but you haven't made the case for why the fear is anyone else's problem. If a person is too scared to be a cop there's an easy fix: stop being a cop. Unfortunately, regular citizens who can't afford to up and move to a country that has civil rights (that is, most of them) don't have the same recourse.
> cops have been tracked down and killed by people using apps like Waze
They 100% have not actually been tracked down and killed by people using apps like Waze
I think your critique of police here is orthogonal to the privacy discussion, which affects everyone:
Imagine the danger and legitimate fear a stalking victim would face if there was a public real-time tracker for any license plate query you can imagine.
What if there was a book that listed everyone's phone numbers?
What if it also listed everyone's address and their full history of travel on all roads, ever, with a queryable interface?
So, like, cops are currently doing?
Imagine the danger and legitimate fear a stalking victim would face if their stalker is a police officer with access to Flock.
A lot of this boils down to ‘we have bad police’.
I am no fan of Flock but there is more than one problem here.
A few rotten apples do spoil the whole bunch.
Hundreds of people have been tracked down and killed with flock cameras unnecessarily. The police routinely escalate interactions as a matter of procedure until they end in shootings.
On average over 1000 people are killed by police each year. A police officer is by far the most dangerous person you'll likely interact with on a day to day basis.
Last year in the US, there were approximately 12k homicides and 191 civilians killed in interactions with the police.
Where do you get these numbers?
This says police killings are at about 1200 per year.
https://policeviolencereport.org/
I assume that the 191 is the number that weren't obviously good shoots and the 1200 is the overall number. Assuming that's true 1:6 is pretty bad IMO.
> Hundreds of people have been tracked down and killed with flock cameras unnecessarily.
This is not a real datapoint. We quite a few cases of wrongful stops or arrests, but there is only one case where it escalated to physical damage (Brandon Upchurch).
Only about 10% of officer involved shootings come from traffic stops, which is what we're talking about when we're talking about Flock license plate readers.
Your numbers aren’t far off - it was about 1200 police killings last year, 112 during traffic stops.
That is shockingly bad. Where police officers can be identified, about 10% have shot someone before.
https://policeviolencereport.org/
Flock cameras are deployed in locations that cannot monitor traffic, too.
> Hundreds of people have been tracked down and killed with flock cameras unnecessarily.
Citation needed.
> But cops have been tracked down and killed by people using apps like Waze so it's not a completely unwarranted fear.
Has this actually happened, or is it something you made up? Because I found articles with police spokesmen saying it _could_ happen, but nothing suggesting it has.
It was reported to have happened but got thrown out in courts, so who knows? From the police's perspective it probably doesn't matter if it was proven or not.
Police are heavily indoctrinated as part of their training to be very paranoid, and are usually required to read up on (or watch) footage of every officer who dies in duty. So it should be no surprise that they are incredibly reactionary on this stuff.
Regardless of whether app assisted or not, actual ambush or unprovoked attack is actually very rare (only 5 cases last year).
AFAIK every one of those "Waze police reports used to target cops for [bad thing]" stories fell apart under the slightest scrutiny.
Is there a specific (confirmed) case you're referencing?
> cops have been tracked down and killed by people using apps like Waze
Do you have a source for that? I can only find 2 examples vaguely similar but neither are really what that statement claims. Specifically one of them was just cops making stuff up about wayze which was factually incorrect.
> police have access but at least ostensibly have oversight from the legal system
We've already seen plenty of examples of cops tracking ex-wives and such similar abuses with no real accountability - nobody's lost their job over it
Cops know exactly what they do when they show up like this, it's meant to intimidate, there are also plenty of cases where cops have repeatedly crossed the line harassing citizens breaking no laws, it's disgusting
Actually... Several have. One such story: https://www.wsbtv.com/news/georgia/georgia-deputy-accused-mi...
That's a flock camera misuse story not related
>>> nobody's lost their job over it
As I said, its one story of several I'm aware of in Georgia alone where people are both losing their job over it and, in some cases, being prosecuted.
I think it's fair, however I probably should've said something like "the vast majority of misuses are not being checked, and the vast majority of cops abusing the system havent and wont be disciplined accordingly"
What a BS take. Do a cursory google search and you'll find many abuses of the Flock cameras. There is no oversight. How incredibly ironic:
>One of [the officers] took the time to specifically mention how scary it would be for them, because people would be able to find out where they lived, when they got on their shift and what they were doing throughout the day, and that that type of powerful information could put them personally at risk [from] any bad apples that might want to track them down.
This is the exact reason Flock cameras shouldn't exist. Hell even you know how there is no oversight otherwise you wouldn't have used the word "ostensibly" with italics.
BTW did you just gloss over how they came to his home to intimidate him? Cops SHOULD be tracked because American cops are simply the worst bullies on the planet.
> Do a cursory google search and you'll find many abuses of the Flock cameras. There is no oversight.
We know about them because they were caught.
> Cops SHOULD be tracked because American cops are simply the worst bullies on the planet.
Cops are tracked. Part of the reason the above were caught because their searches were logged in Flock and used against them in criminal proceedings.
But I'm not sure where you got that I am against police being tracked?
> Cops are tracked.
The body cam was faulty during the interaction.
So the cops showed up to intimidate a law-abiding citizen for doing something they don’t like, but were not feeling bold enough to rough him up or cart him off to jail on some made-up charge. Yay.
Cops are (supposed to be) public servants. Risk is part of the job. If they don’t like it, they are free to pursue a different career.
> Risk is part of the job. If they don’t like it, they are free to pursue a different career.
And that risk is heavily overblown. Cop isn't even in the top 10 most dangerous jobs: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/the-hot-button/and-the-...
A big chunk of that risk also comes from the fact that a lot of cops spend a lot of their time driving, and driving is relatively dangerous.
In Georgia, a police chief was found to have tracked his ex-girlfriend and her teenage daughter approximately 600 times.
In Texas, a sheriff's deputy utilized Flock ALPRs to locate a woman at the behest of her abusive partner.
Marin County Sheriff’s Office was sharing the sensitive location data of millions of drivers with out-of-state agencies and federal authorities, explicitly including ICE and CBP, circumventing California law.
So, yes, it's messed up that cops' fears are warranted, in your eyes, but not private citizens'.
> He was free to pursue his project
No, being intimidated by uniformed officers is not being "free".