This breakdown in rule of law is unfortunate. Ideally, this would be handled by, in order of desirability:
- Flock decision-makers and customers holding ethics as a priority, and not taking the actions they are due to sense of duty, community, morals etc
- Peer pressure resulting in ostracization of Flock execs and decision makers until they stop the unethical behavior
- Governments using legislation and law enforcement to prevent the cameras being used in the way they are
Below this, is citizens breaking the law to address the situation, e.g. through this destruction. It is not ideal, but it is necessary when the higher-desirability options are not working.
> It is not ideal, but it is necessary when the higher-desirability options are not working.
What has worried me for years is that Americans would not resort to this level. That things are just too comfortable at home to take that brave step into the firing lines of being on the right side of justice but the wrong side of the law.
I'm relieved to see more and more Americans causing necessary trouble. I still think that overall, Americans are deeply underreacting to the times. But that only goes as far as to be my opinion. I can't speak for them and I'm not their current king.
You won't get to the kind of change you thought you would see until food runs low and the economy stalls. The American Revolution was rare in that it didn't need to happen. The Founders were just being giant assholes (j/k). While the French Revolution just a few decades later was more status quo. A lot of starvation and poverty just pushed the population over the edge.
I would have believed that before 2020, but after COVID, I fully believe that if the food ran out, half the country would say it's a fake hoax. People would be on their death beds actually starving, and deny it was happening with their last breath.
I disagree. You can escape a disease, even during a global pandemic. And not every person that got COVID was on a ventilator or even felt that bad. Seeing the death toll statistics and even the direct effects through a screen is not visceral for many folks.
Starvation isn't avoidable and you can't ride it out. There isn't any chance that starving to death could be less severe than getting a bad flu. Nobody can avoid not eating for an extended period of time. If there is not enough food, it will affect everyone directly.
>I disagree. You can escape a disease, even during a global pandemic. And not every person that got COVID was on a ventilator or even felt that bad.
Propaganda works.
The knowledge worker class often believes their training will afford them some level of protection against it. Even then, with those warding effects, they're still susceptible. Consider further that most people in society are significantly less educated or trained in epistemological functions than they are - a large portion of society is defenseless against a liar with a megaphone.
Propaganda won't contest that starvation is occurring. It will claim that the reason for the starvation is a specific foe, internal or external e.g. It's China's fault we're starving or the immigrants have caused this food security crisis and once they're gone we'll have enough food for our own people, etc. They'll workshop and see which ones poll well, then run with the talking point that seems to perform best.
Since the government harnessing that discontent has no real desire to fix that problem, all they need to do is maintain the perception that they're the solution, while not addressing the problem itself.
Slightly off topic, but this strategy of blaming a crisis on some other cause is pervasive. It's especially useful when you are the reason for the crisis.
For example, consider climate change. Climate change causes draughts, which causes food shortages in countries heavily dependent on their agricultural sector. This, in turn, causes famine.
A certain western power will blame that country's government for mismanaging their agricultural sector instead of pointing out the unusual and dramatic weather changes contributed to the famine. This is, of course, because the western power does not publicly admit climate change is real in order to avoid taking any responsibility for their contribution to this climate change.
This post is propaganda for the idea that whenever you think that immigrants are causing a problem, you're actually incorrect and are being manipulated by some conspiracy.
> Consider further that most people in society are significantly less educated or trained in epistemological functions than [knowledge workers] are - a large portion of society is defenseless against a liar with a megaphone.
The only thing I'd add is polarization adding impetus to never seeing someone on my side as a liar, whatever they claim.
When democracy becomes a team sport, its collective intelligence lessens: perhaps the biggest hole in the US founder's future vision.
But then again, "voter" had a very different definition in their time. And I don't think you can fault them for not enshrining anti-party ranked choice et al.
>Propaganda won't contest that starvation is occurring. It will claim that the reason for the starvation is a specific foe, internal or external e.g. It's China's fault we're starving or the immigrants have caused this food security crisis and once they're gone we'll have enough food for our own people, etc. They'll workshop and see which ones poll well, then run with the talking point that seems to perform best.
I don't know if China will work. It's not halfway around the world, but that's the mentality many people have of it. They won't buy that a country on the other side if taking food from their local grocery store.
But it doesn't matter. they blame it on: everyone gets hurt. People fighting on the streets, charital servings overran, private businesses raided, governmental buildings having doors banged on (assuming the soldiers don't simply desert their duties). Then that escalates to riots and perhaps small skirmishes for remaining resources.
When you're truly hungry, nothing is beyond reproach. And I don't think America has a true famine to point to as an example. That's pretty much why it's the one thing all politicians will avoid at all cost. a famine will make a depression seem like a cloudy day.
America had a true famine; the dust bowl resulted in mass displacement, and the government took exceptional steps to create remediation programs to address the plight of those affected to maintain relations. The policies included measures that would be considered exceptional by today's standard, including the creation of a national organization to provide stock for relief organizations, buying out cattle herds above market value, other bailout measures for farmers, a massive work effort to create an erosion barrier and more. Most cultural histories indicate that these bailouts prevented widespread unrest in these communities.
You can take a look at the global hunger index; countries with less food security are certainly less stable than those that aren't, but by no means are countries like India and Pakistan undergoing constant revolution. By contrast, countries with comparatively solid food security like Egypt underwent revolution that toppled the government sparked by changes in the (comparatively affordable) price of food. Hunger itself doesn't tell the story. It's how society perceives it.
The zeitgeist matters more than whether or not everyone in society can eat, and you can change the zeitgeist with propaganda.
>When you're truly hungry, nothing is beyond reproach.
When you're truly hungry, you can't plan a revolution. Anti-government efforts are generally spearheaded by groups that are fed, connected, and have the incentive to incite rebellion. It's more Navalny and less Oliver Twist. This means that both pro and anti-government groups will be engaged in a similar recruitment effort. The two groups will have competing accounts of why the hunger is occurring, complete with different evidence regarding the magnitude of the issue, the source of the issue, etc. Hunger doesn't short circuit that process, and propaganda doesn't lose it's force because it's a more persuasive and simpler motivator than, say, discontent over tax burden shifting or some other policy point.
People largely weren't on their deathbeds with covid claiming it was a hoax either so I'm not sure how that's a relevant analogy. The response to Covid was far more disruptive to my life than the disease itself, which would obviously not be the case with starvation.
As the husband at the time of a military critical care nurse who worked local ED in a major US city and deployed to New York -- yes, there were absolutely people who denied they had COVID even as they were being intubated.
Most people tended to accept reality when their body started failing, but there were a non-zero number that refused to believe they were infected with coronavirus to the end.
Politicians and social media click farmers spouting lies do influence people, and not everyone starts with a basic understanding of biology and/or science.
People with first hand experience offering counterpoints like Dr Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi did but unfortunately their videos explaining their side of the story were conveniently removed from places your YouTube -- while conveniently leaving the videos remaining to hear the kind of stories you heard.
many people i know personally who, to this day deny covid was real, they personally knew people who died or were hospitalized and ventilated. yet they still deny it was real.
one of my family members who was in a coma for over a month and in the hospital for months still denies it was covid despite multiple doctors telling him otherwise. some people live in a very real state of denial entirely separated from reality.
sadly i’m not sure the person you replied to is too far off.
Same here. The extreme politicization of the disease, plus the social isolation, plus over reliance on inflammatory social media as one's only channel to the outside world, fully broke some people's grip on reality. Permanently for some.
> People largely weren't on their deathbeds with covid claiming it was a hoax
There were actually lots of people doing exactly this. Perhaps "largely" is the key word here but there were plenty of people dying of covid and refusing ventilators because they believed it was a conspiracy theory.
Apparently the virus was able to ruin cognitive function that people struggling to breathe thought they're fine. (Ok, it seems too convenient that the virus can do this...).
Nobody (OK, maybe a few very special people) is saying that COVID was a hoax. What is true - and one wasn't allowed to say - was that the measures intended to prevent COVID weren't very effective and did more harm than good.
Ah yes you say, another psycho. He probably eats ivermectin for breakfast and chases it with bleach. But I ask you, after a chlorinated burp: how come Africa didn't die out? Why was the death rate pretty much the same in Florida and California? Did the EU really need to buy enough vaccine for ten-plus years?
> What is true - and one wasn't allowed to say - was that the measures intended to prevent COVID weren't very effective and did more harm than good.
But yet here you are saying it. Whether it's true or not probably requires a great deal of analysis, but your self-applied "psycho" label may be accurate enough if you've managed to apply lots of cognitive biases to end up with your "truth".
I'd agree the governments overreacted in many sense, but a non BoJo/Trump-government has a duty to be overcautious rather than a flippant attitude of "So what, x% dead is acceptable". Some other rules are based on dumb science: two meters distance from each other is probably a joke, a compromise between "keep everyone at home!" (what China did when there was a breakout) and a "Keep going to the pubs!", my own theory is that if you could smell someone's cigarette smoke from 2 meters away, virus particles being exhaled from their lungs would reach you too. Later we figured out getting the virus from surfaces is very unlikely, but people were still wiping surfaces down anyway...
Because it's an airborne virus and Africa isn't 1) as connected with the world to begin with and 2) as closely concentrated as urban areas. That's before really looking into Africa's response compared to other countries.
>Why was the death rate pretty much the same in Florida and California?
Because we didn't isolate fast enough between Trump trying to claim it being a hoax early on and desperate political attempts to keep "essential workers" running business. The locality doesn't matter for an airorne virus; just that people continue to go outside and not develop herd immunity.
>Did the EU really need to buy enough vaccine for ten-plus years?
I don't have a crystal ball into 2030. But yes, people still can catch COVID in 2026. Buying only enough for 2020-2022 would be reckless.
I had the same reaction. I thought things were getting bad before COVID, but I thought that, generally, when push came to shove, sanity would prevail.
Herman Cain denied COVID's severity right up until it killed him, and them even after he died, his team was still tweeting that "looks like COVID isn't as bad as the mainstream media made it out to be." When I saw that people were literally willing to die to "own the libs", I knew shared reality was toast.
Could also say that over half the population finding such ridiculous mandates justifiable: lockdowns and demands that employers enforce vaccination compliance for all employees, ordoned non democratically by a senile; in a country with constitutional rights likely meant we would not see activists engaging in vandalism anytime soon.
>> I would have believed that before 2020, but after COVID, I fully believe that if the food ran out, half the country would say it's a fake hoax. People would be on their death beds actually starving, and deny it was happening with their last breath.
We're in a K-Shaped Economy right now and half the folks will deny there is any K and insist everything is amazing.
Well one of those is already on the fast tracking to happening (economy stalling).
Unfortunately, I don't have much faith that people will turn against the administration during any kind of major depression/food scarcity. I foresee people turning against each other for survival instead.
The American and French revolutions originated in the middle classes. The poor are often indifferent to politics because they're focused on survival. The middle classes, who own things they don't want to lose and have free time to aspire for more, are the ones who start revolutions. The poor only came in after being whipped up by the interested parties, and don't necessarily join the revolutionary side.
> The American and French revolutions originated in the middle classes.
I don't know about the american revolution, but that's wrong for the french revolution.
I'll link to french wikipédia pages since they are far better on the subject.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89tats_g%C3%A9n%C3%A9raux_...
Here we can see the first National Assembly was half nobility and clergy.
The third estate was the other half.
Were the middle class, but what people think of middle class today, doesn't apply to what it was back then.
> The bourgeoisie are a class of business owners, merchants and wealthy people, in general, which emerged in the Late Middle Ages, originally as a " middle class" between the peasantry and aristocracy. They are traditionally contrasted with the proletariat by their wealth, political power, and education, as well as their access to and control of cultural, social, and financial capital.
Yes, the proletariat has been brainwashed and convinced that they're the middle class, while the middle classes have become the new aristocracy. The disappearance of hereditary nobility and rise of liberalism (which brings along separation of church and state, which removes the power of the clergy) made the old distinctions less useful, so we have the modern lower (proletariat), middle (skilled workers), and upper (bourgeois) classes.
Three critical differences the American Revolution had: (1) the middle class had some extremely well educated people, (2) the communication technology among the colonies was pretty fast whereas the comms between the colonies and the British rule across the Atlantic was slow, and (3) the empire tried to clamp down on the colonies ability to export to any market other than the mother country, killing lots of profit which previously made those markets strong.
It's like when management does something stupid and then engineering works overtime to keeps the system working. Of course management learns nothing and all outside observers don't even notice something went wrong.
There is a limit to how much engineers working overtime can do to offset management stupidity and when you reach the limit the bottom falls out. Of course then everybody blames the engineers...
It's being heavily supported a bubble. We'll see how resilient it is when that pops. As it is, the average person's finances and future prospects are getting worse all the time regardless of whatever the stock market is doing.
Yes, tbh I would not have thought that you could take a sledgehammer to the economy as if you're say Elon Musk buying a communications platform and yet, here we are, 1 year in and we're still hanging on.
> Quite impressive just how resilient it seems to be.
I watched a few analyses on this and it really comes down to faith.
I really wish it weren't kidding. The resistance against this economic downturn comes a large part due to conservative skewing financiers who believe "Trump won't let the economy crash". And that faith somehow keeps people pushing their chips in in times where they'd have probably long pulled out of Biden.
2025-6 will truly be a "vibe-cession" in so many ways.
Interestingly y'all Americans pay much more tax now than you did to England back in the day. Turns out King George was right, and it was just about changing who the tax was paid to.
It's also rare to just "discover" an entire continent that is basically free for the taking since Europeans annihilated native populations through disease and technological superiority.
Much of what makes America unique is tied to this essentially once in a generation event that will never happen again on this planet, a contingent confluence of Earth's parallel geographic and biological evolution... it's fairly easy to rebel or become a superpower when other powers have to contend with peer conflicts right on their borders. A break with England was inevitable why take orders from people an ocean away in the age of sail?
It's worse than that; within a few generations our linguistic and biological systems will begin to diverge under conditions with little cross-pollination and different selective pressures. We will become aliens in the sci-fi sense very rapidly if we attempt to create a foundation-like diaspora of settlements.
I think the skepticism warrants more work than that. Darwin's finches are an entry-level concept to learn when learning about biochemistry and genetics. Separate planets would act to separate groups into distinct genetic populations which would then have different selection pressures put upon them. Even without selection pressure, genetic drift in both populations would result in differences compounding over time.
Humans aren't the endpoint of evolution. Something will come after us, and if we're spread out on a ton of planets, there would need to be explicit counteracting forces (genetic modification, tremendous volumes of interstellar human travel, etc.) to make sure whatever comes after us is uniform among our interstellar backyard.
Not really a secret. The slogan was "No taxation without representation" not "no taxation."
The degree to which legislation in the US is bought by big companies and rarely reflects democratic desires we may be in another "no taxation without representation" era.
Even if the needs of the American people weren't being ignored over the wishes of corporations and the ultra-wealthy in terms of numbers alone we have less representation than ever before because the number of people who are supposed to represent us hasn't kept up with the growing population.
Throw a constitutional conventions so that the slave owners could get their votes in (not the slaves, of course, though the owners should get to vote FOR them).
I understand that the civil war was about a lot of things, but the precipitating issue was slavery. Slavers should be obliterated by war if they aren't willing to give up their slaves unconditionally.
Slavery destroyed the roman republic just like it destroyed the American republic. Slavery and republican government are fundamentally incompatible because it devalues the labor and vote of the citizen. Instead of ending slavery the civil war simply made everyone a slave to the government. No longer did the government need to compromise, they could simply do whatever they wished by force.
Today millions of new wage slaves flood into the country to further devalue the citizens labor and vote.
> "Instead of ending slavery the civil war simply made everyone a slave to the government."
Look, I hate the elites as much as anyone and bemoan their outsized power over regular citizens, but to compare literal chattel slavery to the post-civil war U.S. is wild. Actual, real life, slavery was a deeply integrated part of their culture. Our democracy has a ton of problems, to be sure, but I find it very hard to blame that on the civil war.
Think about how it was in a state like North Carolina in the 1850's where they were building textile mills which could add great value to the cotton before it was shipped.
This was enough of a threat to Northern manufacturing without their factories having to compete with unpaid labor. They were not happy campers, they had always been making way more money per ton of cotton in the well-established Northern textile mills than the plantations had ever been. And banking it just in case.
In the factory it would be a lot higher-skilled labor than down on the farm, it was still unpaid but never without cost. A dollar would go a long way back then but everything was still relative. Imagine that $10000 was the annual cost of having the labor in a factory without any wages. Accommodations, family support, infrastructure and things like that are what makes this total.
1859 rolls around and the guy in the green visor adds it up and shakes his head, "sheesh it's $11000 this year, when is it going to end?"
War comes & goes eventually, slaves are freed like they should/could have been the whole time, the dust settles and after a year of actually paying wages for the first time to laborers, the guy in the green visor about drops out of his seat because his total labor cost is now $15000. All he can say is "when is it going to end?" Where have we heard that before?
Same thing with the guy in the bank in New York whose employer had been raking it in from all their investments in Southern companies. It just wasn't the same and never was going to be that way again.
It is convoluted but very few people recognize this as well as you do, regardless of how obvious it is:
>war simply made everyone a slave
The same thing in my message, from almost the reverse point of view, how the way some factory-working slaves were turned into employees by the same war in the 19th century.
What's the difference anyway?
The difference between wage slave and fully-owned has been based mainly on freedom-of-movement and payment for labor, which have always been big enough to destroy a republic.
But not big enough for any difference in tasks or financial considerations to be the major thing for something like a government or corporation.
In some ways not much more modern than the Romans.
For the elites, they have always benefited most from a majority of subjects whose wages, if wages were involved, were not that much more significant than zero when it comes to the bottom line.
I know what you mean but there were so many other possible outcomes that would have resulted in banishment of slavery from North America just as well.
If the southern agricultural states didn't want to be with the free states in the Union any more anyway, it might have been the only opportunity to withdraw without a war.
Individually, without a confederacy, which instead quickly amounted to a large vengeful adversary where there didn't have to be.
It would have been a tough decision for each state to make, under non-emergency conditions, whether they wanted to remain with the country that possessed Wall Street or not.
After all it was Wall Street companies who were often financing the plantations to begin with, before stock traders escalated to funding the slave trade once its human cargo became more lucrative than most.
As it turned out, besides all the death & destruction suffered by all states, Washington itself went into such deep debt to Wall Street in order to fully vanquish the Confederate States, that it set the stage for untenable "permanent" debt where the lenders never got paid back real well for so many decades.
Wall Street has possessed Washington ever since.
Otherwise there would never have been a FED as we know it.
We need to change it to 'no representation without taxation' and ban lobbyists for any industry/company/interest that doesn't pay an equal percentage of their income as the average 'taxed on labor' American.
No, lobbying should be banned even if they pay tax. The only way corporations should have access to representation is by having their role formally defined by an amendment to the Constitution. As in, this government is formed by citizens who have these rights, and corporations that have these rights. Make it official and open, not the subversive manipulation where we act like they aren't there.
Just like how all we had to do to shut down Guantanamo Bay was vote for President Obama, right? So glad that that worked out. By and large, our institutions are not democratic, in that they are not responsive to 'popular opinion'; while there are certain arenas where, for one reason or another, the will of the majority does sway the day (e.g. the influence of scandals on individual elected officials), by and large most things are decided by non-democratic factors like business interests and large donors, and the media just works to get people on-side with whatever comes out of that.
To quote a well-known study on the topic: “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”
Not closing Guantanamo is, unfortunately, an example of democracy working. Public support for closing it has never been anything close to a majority. Obama got elected despite, not because, of that promise. Congress blocking his attempts to do so was a reflection of the will of the people, even if perhaps coincidentally.
This is ahistoric. No-one ever said we had to "just vote for Obama" to close Guantanamo Bay.
Frankly, Obama _tried_ to close Guantanamo Bay. He significantly shrunk the population of inmates, but it was ultimately Congress, and the courts that prevented the closure
Obama spent a huge amount of time and political capital trying to clean up Bush's messes.
Obama only tried to close Guantanamo by moving the prisoners to the United States, which is arguably worse than having them in Guantanamo. It would mean that you could hold prisoners in the United States indefinitely without trial.
What he should have done was give the prisoners fair trials or release them.
Having prisoners in the US is a lot more hassle and subject to scrutiny than keeping them tucked away on some out of bounds military prison where few have access to, which was probably the reason to put prisoners there in the first place. Anything could be done to prisoners on Guantanamo, including torture.
What he’s saying is that you need to vote with a consistent message. Voting for Bush, then voting for Obama, then voting for Trump is unlikely to make any lasting change
That’s the separation of powers at work, which is desirable. Congress has to (and can) do it. Obama, unlike Trump, would sometimes back down when he met the edges of executive authority. That’s how it should be.
I wanted Gitmo closed, but I don’t want it closed in a way that further expands the executive branch by once again nibbling at the edges of another branch’s authority.
Plenty of countries that are well-run democracies don’t have separation of powers between the legislature and the executive — the UK is one of many examples.
Separation between the executive and the judiciary is important, but separation from the legislature doesn’t really seem to be.
Even among countries that do have such a separation, the US is unique in making it so difficult for the legislature to pass anything, which IMO is the most serious flaw in its system. The permanent deadlock is what creates such a temptation for the executive to circumvent the rule of law and try to seize power wherever it can.
At ~all times for a long period of time during Gitmos operation, there was at least one (revolving) prisoner that no nation on earth would take. I think that was the biggest challenge for someone who actually wanted to close gitmo, to close it. Not clear where you would put them that wouldn't be yet another prison.
I guess now that the US has normalized relations with the Taliban, maybe they'll end up sending them to them, not sure who else will take the last ones.
They should stand trial in a US court, and if they’re acquitted, they should be set free, like anyone else. That’s a pretty fundamental principle of the rule of law.
If they’re indeed innocent and can’t be deported because nobody will take them, then they have to be allowed to stay in the US. That’s unfortunate but not really their fault given that the US brought them into its jurisdiction against their will in the first place.
It seems transparently unfair to capture someone and then keep them forever because nobody else wants them.
A lot of them were captured for things like simply having an F91W watch and also being proximal or familial to a terrorist. They were initially wanted but then once 'cleared' the problem became once accused as a terrorist no country on earth wanted to take them even if they were cleared as likely innocent.
Obviously it was also politically infeasible to admit them into the general US.
They were able to slow down the inevitable trajectory, they did nothing to reverse course. Doing anything different would be too "radical" for Obama or Biden.
The trajectory in question was pretty well laid out in Bush’s Patriot act. If the Democratic Party at any point wanted to reverse course they would have opposed the initial legislation (like the general public did), and subsequently championed a policy which abandons it and corrects for the harm it caused.
I think you vastly undersell how much of the US voters supported extreme measures in reaction to Sept 11.
There was a social panic to “protect us against terrorism” at pretty much any cost. It was easy for the party in power to demonize the resistance to the power grab and nobody except Libertarians had a coherence response.
I don‘t think it really matters how much people supported these extreme actions. This policy was clearly wrong. The general public mounted a much more significant opposition against this policy then the Democratic party did. Some members of the Democratic party did some opposition, but the party as a whole clearly did not oppose this, and therefor it was never truly on the ballots.
To be clear, I personally don‘t think stuff like this should ever be on the ballot in any democracy. Human rights are not up for election, they should simply be granted, and any policy which seeks to deny people human rights should be rejected by any of the country’s democratic institutions (such as courts, labor unions, the press, etc.)
> I don‘t think it really matters how much people supported these extreme actions. This policy was clearly wrong.
This is wrong and ignorant of how we select elected representatives. They have no incentive to do “what is right” and all of the incentives to do “what is popular”. The representatives who stood up against the Patriot Act, the surveillance state, “you’re either with us or either the terrorists”, etc were unable to hold any control in Congress.
The reason we have stereotypes of politicians as lying, greasy, corrupt used car salesmen is because their incentives align with those qualities.
I am exclusively discussing the _is_, not the _ought_ (which is where I would agree with you)
If politicians did what was popular, the USA would have a public health system a long time ago. They just pretend and do things they're paid to support, that's it.
I was stating an opinion, not a fact, and I was interpreting history according to that opinion. That is I am arguing for a certain historical framework from which I judge historical moments.
I also don‘t think mine is a widely unpopular opinion either. That scholars of democracy and human rights agree that a democracy should not be able to vote them selves into a dictatorship, that human rights are worth something more than what can be ousted by a popular demand. So I don’t think this is an unreasonable historical framework, from which I judge the actors of this history of.
Not sure if you are aware but we rarely directly get to vote on these things. You vote for a representative and hope they vote in a way that serves your interests. But now, we have omnibus bills. And it's 50/50 loaded with things we want and things we don't. The same bill that funds Pre-K will also have a section to fund a kitten shredding machine. But if you vote against it all voters will hear is how you don't want to fund education.
The omnibus bills aren’t blackmail, as much as a symptom of the failure of Congress to be able to do what it is supposed to: debate.
There is 1 funding bill per year which only requires a 50% vote instead of a 60% / 67% to pass that all other spending bills require.
Every member with a goal tries to attach it to the big annual funding bill. The bill becomes so large that nobody likes the bill as a whole, but everybody has something in it they will defend.
And the old filtering process (committees which recommend the content of bills) are dominated by majority party leadership. This is maybe the closest symptom to blackmail.
I‘m not (yet) a citizen of the USA, but I’ve lived there for a while. As I understand it, there is hardly any political opposition in this country. I would actually describe it as a controlled opposition. A lot of people here tend to think the only role of the opposition is to run the right candidate and win the next election. As such, there is no real resistance when the majority government oversteps their boundaries.
To make matters worse, labor unions are equally politically inactive, and most often their only political moves are endorsing candidates. When they do voice support for or opposition against bills, those bills are often stuff related to their industry, and seldom do they actually oppose an over reaching government by threatening general strikes etc.
The press here is also very right leaning. All the big media are owned by capitalist conglomerates and as such most people never hear real challenges to the capitalist power structure. As long as the government class acts favorable to the capitalist interest, then the press has aligning interest, and is thus heavily incentivized to never challenge the government to much.
> To make matters worse, labor unions are equally politically inactive, and most often their only political moves are endorsing candidates.
This isn’t true, UAW almost got Biden to transfer wealth directly from taxpayers to them via the union made EV credit bonus, laundered through government motors
IIRC FDR pioneered the contemporary use of this to ram through progressive legislation, in particular social security by essentially packaging it up so the needy would get nothing in other programs if social security wasn't passed.
Though I wouldn't be surprised if the idea goes back to Roman times.
In many cases, the decision to install Flock cameras have been made by city councils and sheriffs' offices. So it very much depends on local candidates.
On the broader topic, I'm not sure that just voting is the way that we'll get out of this mess, but I think a large part of the problem is how our focus on wider, national issues has eroded the interest in the local. So people seem to be most disenfranchised from the level of politics where they can actually have the most influence, both by voting and direct action (protests, calls, etc).
The local government officials in charge of allowing these to be installed.
It also represents an opportunity for upstarts. If you want to get into local politics, this is a single issue that will unit voters and bring them in.
We had a city councilperson elected on the sole issue of replacing the purple street lights. She won decisively and her entire campaign was literally signs everywhere promising to fix the purple streetlights. (yes, they were fixed).
Seattle voted for Katie Wilson as mayor partly because she seemed to oppose surveillance cameras. She now seems to have changed her mind is is speaking in favor of them.
Badger your city council, work with like-minded residents in a way that can credibly threaten their re-elections, find and support privacy-conscious candidates who won't sign-onto Flock's agenda, create ads based on council meetings when councilors support surveillance in a way most voters will reject. Put their quotes on billboard with their picture, etc
Ok, you do all that work at home and manage to block flock in your area. It doesn’t matter because the next city over where you work installed them so you get tracked anyway.
Then 2 years later a new city council gets elected and they install flock cameras in your city too. You can never get rid of them because it already passed and nobody wants to relitigate the same thing every couple of years.
> You can never get rid of them because it already passed and nobody wants to relitigate the same thing every couple of years.
Those who care about their privacy should relitigate at every opportunity. "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance"; if you're not willing to fight for it, you will lose it, and deservedly so. Those who give up in advance are beyond fucked, because they'll have to take whatever is sent their way.
Our city voted out the cameras so the feds just installed flock cameras on every bit of federal property in and near town, plus they're at private places like hardware stores.
We turned over seats on our city council for the first time in decades and the new, "liberal" council members voted with the rest, unanimously, to install more Flock cameras.
Your voting system is shit. It results in a two party state. If one party fails to present a coherent offering and the other one is infiltrated by nut jobs then the system breaks down. After all, if it was such a good system, why didn’t you impose it on Germany and Japan when you won WW2? (This comment is politically neutral; who the incoherents and the nut jobs are are left to the reader’s discretion)
Unfortunately, studies undertaken by MIT over a decade ago show that when it comes to law writing and passing, voters have no statistically measurable input at the federal level. (Since citizens united)
It’s all just identity politics. I will say that Trump has proven the exception to this rule, enacting a whole lot of policy that circumvents the law and has real effects. (And is likely mostly unconstitutional if actually put to the test)
So while locally, voting can be powerful, it’s mostly bread and circuses at the federal level since regulatory capture is bipartisan.
It shouldn't be a surprise that a willingness to violate the law works quickly when congress is unwilling to do anything to stop it. The ability for the law and constitution to be ignored when all three branches of government collude to do exactly that is a huge weakness in the system
Seconded. Democracy is the only transcendental political system: you can have any ideology you want (so be careful or you'll be voting only once). To survive, it depends on civic spirit - i.e. participation. Democracy always collapses into authoritarianism eventually. Then (if you want it bad enough), you have to claw it back, slowly and painfully. All just as Plato foresaw.
It really bothers me that so few people in the modern West understand just how lucky they are. If you didn't have the control you already have over your government, you'd be fighting for it.
Every time I hear this I cringe, whether this subject or any other. The people did vote and this is what they got - not necessarily what they specifically voted for. Different people hold things in different importance. Flock security cameras (or similar) generally don't even get noticed by the people voting on taxes, guns, abortions, etc.
Besides, establishment Democrats aren’t exactly for the common man, they’re just not as cartoonishly evil as the Republicans. Democrats would likely still be in favor of Flock cameras.
The age old tactic of vilification. It's easy to overlook all the nuances on all sides; it's a whole spectrum with plenty of overlap.
My hope in the US is that folks at least take the time to evaluate their options and/or candidates; voting a straight ticket just because someone calls themselves something can lead to undesirable outcomes.
Not to mention that most of the most upending, consequential changes and events in America were not only not voted on, but were wildly opposed by the populace, yet were imposed anyways and today, after decades of government “education”, people vigorously support and defend those tyrannical impositions.
Voting doesn't work as well when there's billions of dollars being spent to influence the votes to make billionaires richer, while the working class that could vote against it is too busy working 3 part time jobs just to survive.
There is a lot of truth in this but I'm not convinced sortition is going to work either.
But what you could do is vote with a string attached and a penalty for being recalled that is going to make people think twice about running for office if their aim is to pull some kind of stunt. The 'you give me four years unconditionally' thing doesn't seem to work at all.
I've been mulling over a system where there's a legislative body composed of citizens picked through sortition and another legislative body that's elected like normal legislative bodies of today.
The twist on that body however is that voting is mandatory and ballots have a non of the above option on them. If a super majority (say 60-75%) vote none of the above the election is a do-over with all the people on the ballot being uneligable to run for that seat for say 5-10 years.
I like the idea, but I worry about choosing random members of the public when so many people are unprepared for it. Any kind of government made up of "the people" requires that those people be literate, educated, and informed. With things the way they are today I'd worry that your secondary elected legislative body would end up doing everything and you'd either end up with a figurehead who'd be out of their depth and ineffectual or one being used/manipulated.
I could also envision an endless cycle of elections with 75%+ of the population voting "none of the above" because of issues like "Not my personal favorite candidate" or "eats the wrong mustard" or "I hate the idea of government"
That's super-interesting experiment, but I wouldn't start it in such a large country as USA.
Why won't humanity test it on a smaller scale?
In Belgium (Ostbelgien) the German-speaking community has a permanent sortition-based Citizens’ Council wired into the parliamentary process; In Ireland they've already run national, randomly selected Citizens’ Assemblies on high-stakes constitutional topics.
These are basically production prototypes - maybe we should ask ourselves why they don't push it further?
The US is a semi-democracy, notably due to its hyper-polarized two party system that completely forbids (in the 2020s) any crossing of party lines for compromise.
The single biggest improvement to American society would be to implement multi-member districts for legislature, OR to implement STAR voting - any kind of system that promotes the existence of more parties, more political candidates, to break the two party cycle.
Far too many people fail to vote or research candidates due to how shitty our democracy is. Far too few candidates exist as a blend of values, and we are stuck with "every liberal policy" vs. "every conservative policy".
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To that end, it seems the cities that are banning Flock for proper privacy reasons are all in liberal states and cities. Conservative/moderate areas seem a lot less engaged on the topic. "That's just how it goes, of course government is going to tread on us, what can be done about it".
I think more people would bother with voting if they felt their vote mattered, but between the two party system (where both options suck), the gerrymandered distracting, and other voter suppression tactics people have been conditioned to feel powerless over the outcome of elections.
I'm entirely unsurprised if the majority of places taking a stand against flock cameras are liberal. From what I've seen conservatives tend to fetishize police and punishment. There's a lot of boot-licking going on for a group of people who posture as being rebels and anti-government, but I think there's also an assumption that only (or mainly) "others" will be targeted and punished. To the extent that it's true, I sure wouldn't expect it to stay that way.
This argument was viable 20 years ago, but we are way, way beyond “both options suck” at this point. It’s more like “one option sucks and the other option is absolutely catastrophic — also, the second option may be the last choice you ever get”.
On the contrary I think Americans are reacting about the same as any other set of people would react. There are always going to be people who, as long as their personal lives are stable, they are not going to do anything to put that stability at risk. America is also huge enough that even if one part of the country is having a crisis, millions of fellow citizens will not hear of it or have any 2nd, 3rd or 4th hand connection to the matter.
But also if a small portion of Americans disparately plan to do stuff like sabotage surveillance camera, it's still newsworthy.
The only people whose lives are stable in this economy are the ultra wealthy. Even those who we would normally consider "middle class" are a couple of medical emergencies away from financial ruin. Whole classes of jobs are disappearing.
Let’s be clear though - it’s not that Americans are clinging to some deep stability that brings them comfort or relaxation, it’s that they’re on the edge already. The vast vast majority of people are barely able to afford the basics of life, while we’re bombarded with an ever more shameless wealthy elite’s privileges.
Politics is like water boiling - it’s just going to be little bubbles at first but all of a sudden it will start to really rumble.
Is that really the case? It seems to me that the vast majority in the US can fairly easily afford a fair bit of material luxury, mostly because material luxuries have become incredibly cheap (by historical standards).
The trouble is at least in the high population areas (AFAICT) a huge swath of "average" people seem to be stuck living life on a paycheck-to-paycheck basis, renting, no prospect of property ownership, minimal to zero retirement savings, no realistic way to afford children, etc. Not abnormal by historic or global standards but very abnormal when compared to the past ~150 years of US history.
"Among the 37 percent of adults who would not have covered a $400 expense completely with cash or its equivalent, most would pay some other way, although some said that they would be unable to pay the expense at all. For those who could cover the expenses another way, the most common approach was to use a credit card and then carry a balance, and many indicated they would use multiple approaches. However, 13 percent of all adults said they would be unable to pay the expense by any means (table 21), unchanged from 2022 and 2023 but up from 11 percent in 2021"
An informative data point. To provide some context regarding my earlier comment, a brand new full size memory foam mattress can be had for less than $200 shipped in the continental US. A computer capable of playing modern AAA video games can be had for less than $400. Material luxuries in the modern day are cheap to an almost absurd degree.
I think maybe we need a new CPI metric for HCOL areas that takes the form of a ratio. Something along the lines of midrange laptops per studio apartment month.
I wouldn't call these material luxuries, just like big screen TVs are no longer a luxury. Being able to visit a doctor or a dentist on the other hand...
By "luxury" I mean approximately "anything beyond bare survival". My point is that the vast majority of material possessions have become absurdly cheap by historic standards. However that doesn't preclude severe societal dysfunction (housing, children, retirement, or as you note doctors and dentists).
Thank you for clarifying. It is true that many of such possessions have become incredibly cheap (and therefore affordable) especially when it comes to media consumption and other forms of escapism, but they do very little to address our fundamental needs (physical safety & health, financial security, emotional stability).
True luxuries (not having to worry, not having to waste time) are increasingly out of reach for most people.
Stuff is cheap, but basic security is expensive. Everyone pints to the stuff, but income vs rent and asset prices has only gone up and up!
Buying housing is utterly unaffordable for a very, very large percentage of young people even educated professionals in in-demand fields. Covering expenses is awful. That famous Emirati quote of “my father had a camel, I have a Land Rover, my son will have a Lamborghini, his son will have a Land Rover, his son will have a camel” - our parents had the Lamborghinis. The majority of my generation (milllenials) are worse off than their parents. Very few have kids because they can’t afford to have them. There are exceptions everywhere but if you just listen or see the culture it is a given that our future is fucked unless something radical changes - income inequality is the highest it’s EVER BEEN. Higher than the time of the French Revolution. Higher than the “Gilded age”.
It’s foolish to think that people are okay or that nothing will come politically of this. Go look out the window in any major city, the stark differences are there for anyone’s eyes to see.
I can only hope what people will decide make trouble about is also what I consider necessary. If we could all agreed what was necessary to make trouble about there wouldn't be nearly as much to be making trouble over. It's a very double edged sword which does not necessarily do a very good job at bringing any more clarity of what the moral path was to the country.
That would be an incredibly risky escalation, and it would be a stupid ultimatum to issue.
The people, or even states, could escalate in response. The worst case is escalating to violence; ICE isn’t trained, equipped, or numerous to deal with deploying into a violently hostile area. The army could, but then we’re in full blown civil war.
A more realistic middle ground is that it pushes people or states into nonviolent non-compliance by eg refusing to pay federal taxes. Frankly if California and New York alone stopped paying federal taxes the system would probably crumble.
I agree. The amount of cameras and tracking has gotten out of control. If America actually becomes an "authoritarian" country (seems almost likely) I imagine all these Flock pics with other data mining techniques will be used to send Communist Progressives to reeducation camp.
America is an authoritarian country for decades now.
It first dawned on me when i visited NYC some 30 years ago. I stepped over some arbitrary yellow line I wasn't supposed to - the uniformed cop that noticed that went from 0 to 100 in 0.1 second and behaved as if I just pulled a gun. Zero time to reflect and assume I might have made a legitimate mistake. Since then I've visited U.S. >150 times, and in my experience it was always thus in the U.S. - the law enforcement is on hair trigger and the populace has seemingly grown used to it and considers this behaviour normal. Geez.
(Go live in any northern european country for comparison. Any interaction with law enforcement is almost certainly going to be pleasant, cordial, and uniformed police typically does not rely on threats of violance for authority).
NYC police seem insane lmao. For some reason various precinct accounts have made it into my social media feed, and the last time I saw the they were bragging about stealing some old ladies less lethal defense weapon.
> The amount of cameras and tracking has gotten out of control.
The UK looks at the use of cameras and feels threatened for its Nanny State title. We Yanks have laughed at that name while the water around us slowly came to a boil.
Some cities and/or states have banned the use of cameras at stop lights to issue tickets. Not really sure what caused that to happen, except the cynic in me thinks some politician received a ticket in the mail from one of the cameras.
Mass unemployment would/will be the catalyst to mass uprising. All of the fuel is in place (ICE, Epstein, rising costs of everything, unaffordable housing, general lack of hope and faith in the government, etc.) High unemployment numbers will be the spark that sets it all ablaze.
General strike! Close the ports, close the airports, steal dozers and park them on railroad tracks, teachers on the streets in front of their schools to protect their students, blockade the grocery distribution centers, so that the shelves go bare, just stop everything, everywhere.
When it hurts the billionaires, they will tell their politicians to invoke the 25th.
It's the only way, we've lost our democracy, but we still have economic power.
Disrupting basic functions of the economy will hurt ordinary people a lot more than it will hurt billionaires.
Also under these conditions of food distribution and transportation being actively disrupted, why would anyone be at school? Huge numbers of American schools are unsafe and unpleasant places for kids to be in ordinary times, and a massive disruption to ordinary life is not going to make that situation any better.
Is it not literally true that he is calling for action from the populace without doing it? You all can only lift a finger to downvote a literal call to action lmao
>You? Only people that politically agree with you?
the next sentence after they mention "necessary trouble" is literally:
"But that only goes as far as to be my opinion."
they are just stating their opinion.
everyone decides when the time for "necessary trouble" is individually, based on their accumulated experience, opinion, etc. no arbiter required, just a critical mass of people with aligning opinions.
Who was the arbiter of the trouble necessary for gay rights?
Who was the arbiter of the trouble necessary for civil rights?
Who was the arbiter of the trouble necessary for womens' rights?
Who was the arbiter of the trouble necessary for the rights of handicapped people?
Indigenous people?
Immigrants?
American society was created for the benefit of straight white Christian men alone. Every right held by any other group, every ounce of political power, every bit of basic human dignity, has had to be taken by force of "necessary trouble." There is no "arbiter." How could there be? An arbiter presupposes an objective moral ideal and a just society, neither of which we have. In the end, America can only be trusted to live up to its principles at the point of a gun.
While points 1 and 2 are indeed desirable, point 3 should be moot given we have a constitutional right to privacy and freedom from unreasonable search and seizures.
The combination of ubiquitous scanners, poor data controls on commercially owned date, and law enforcement access without proper warrants compounds to a situation that for many rational people would fail the test of being fair play under the Fourth Amendment. For similar reasons, for example, it has been held by the Supreme Court that installing a GPS tracker on a vehicle and monitoring it long-term without a warrant is a 4A violation (US v Jones). Similar cases have held that warrants are needed for cellphone location tracking.
So far, however, courts have not held Flock to the same standard -- or have at least held that Flock's data does not rise to the same standard.
I personally think this is a mistake and is a first-order reason we have this problem, and would prefer the matter to stop there rather than rely on ethics. (Relying on ethics brought us pollution in rivers, PFAS and Perc in the ground, and so on.)
Given the state of politics and the recent behavior of the Supreme Court, however, I would not hold my breath for this to change soon.
Having lived or spent time in a lot of 3rd world shitholes, including a civil war, I've only really felt freedom in places with lawless lack of government, never places with 'rule of law' -- that always gets twisted for the elite.
Of course the same happens in lawless regions, but power is fractured enough, there is a limit on power they can wield against the populace, as the opposing factions ultimately are a check on any one side oppressing the population to leave. They can't man machine guns at all the 'borders' and ultimately corruption becomes cheap enough that it is accessible to the common person which arguably provides more power to the common man than representative democracy does.
I think this element of factions in competition was part of the original genius of the '50' states with the very minimal federal government. But the consolidation of federal power and loss of the teeth of the 10th amendment and expansion of various clauses in the constitution means there is now no escape and very few remaining checks.
This is a personal preference and not some universal axiom.
Living under a tyrant at least tends to provide predictability and stability of a sort. The kind of violence that exists in a lawless society tends not to exist. State sanctioned violence, sure, but that's more often than not targeted.
Basically, given the choice of Somalia or North Korea, there will be a diversity of opinions as to which someone prefers. I'm not saying I prefer one to the other, just that "Somalia" is not an objectively correct choice.
As a note on Somalia: Somalia outside the state-like entities (Somaliland, Puntland, Al-Shaabab caliphate, and FGS / federally controlled somalia) is governed by xeer law.
It's actually not lawless, it just uses a decentralized (polycentric) legal system that is poorly understood by westerners. They've had better outcomes under this system than under democratic government of FGS, which led to all or nothing tribalism influences coming into office.
This is sort of a distinction without a difference.
Any long-running human society will over time crystallize into some structure that resembles having a legal system. When people say a place is "lawless" it doesn't mean someone can just murder their neighbor in broad daylight for no reason, and all the other neighbors just shrug and say "well, gee, darn, I guess there was no law against that".
The real meaning behind the original comment I replied to is that in both the lawless and tyrannical governments, it really comes down to "might makes right". In the "lawless" society, anyone can gain might and use violence against others if they have accumulated enough power. In the tyrannical society, the State has gained this power and uses is capriciously and unpredictably.
The question is really "would you rather the main source of potential violence against you be the armies and police of a dictator, or would you rather have to deal with your local warlord, while having the potential to become your local warlord?".
In a country like the US with a fairly democratic process at various levels of government, this just means that people with some strong opinions can subject the rest of the citizens to their desires. This is the universal veto on societal order. We can see that the desire for governments to "live in fear of the governed" usually rapidly disappears when people start destroying water lines and power lines. After all, 'the governed' and 'the government' are the same people just with different factions distributed in power.
A government that can't do anything to police unions is also the government living in fear of the governed. A government that can't rein in (say) PG&E is also a government living in fear of the governed. When political representatives are shot by a right-wing anti-abortion terrorist that is also (and perhaps even more viscerally so) a government living in fear of the governed. And I'm certainly not 100% okay with this.
> In a country like the US with a fairly democratic process at various levels of government
How can you look at the current state of affair and say this with a straight face... It's a mafia, they're all millionaires, they're all friends, thay all go to the same schools, they all work for the government and instantly bounce to lobby for the private sector, they all use their insider knowledge to profit, &c. Only someone who went through the American education system can believe the US is anywhere close to what you described, it's a farce
The thing about that is the governments who most fear the governed are often extremely draconian. I actually do not think that it is constructive and it is precisely that fear that is driving things like voter suppression in the US.
You are unfortunately, for whatever your reasons you have, barking up the wrong tree. The people already made a law, the supreme law in fact, called the Constitution.
In fact the capital criminals in this matter are the people violating and betraying that supreme law; the politicians, sheriffs, city councils, and even the YC funders behind Flock, etc.
It is in fact not even just violating the supreme law, but though that betrayal, it is in fact also treason.
I was confused by the "barking up the wrong tree" opener because the parent commenter was not contradicting that line of thinking either. Though destroying property is not going to get anyone anywhere, that I can agree with if that's GP's point.
All of this presumes that residents in municipalities with ALPRs don't want them used the way they are. That's not true! These things are broadly pretty popular among a broad set of residents.
I am in favor of them. There is no expectation of privacy in the public setting. I can record anyone on a public street w/o their permission.
If these license plate cameras are making the streets safer and helping to reduce crime, why not? Sure there may be some mis-uses here and there, but for the most part they seem to be working and in places where they are deployed, crime is being reduced.
They're only popular because people are routinely lied to. We see this same issue time and time again in "free markets".
If you tell people this will help stop crime and that's it, everyone and their mama is gonna say yes.
If you tell people the truth, that police don't really care to look at the data and this surveillance is going to be used to target innocent people for unrelated "crimes" on the taxpayers dollar, then everyone would say no.
This is also why 99% of surveys are broken. You can get people to agree to literally anything if you just lie a little. After all, Adolf Hitler got elected by promising to fix the German economy and, in a way, he did.
In what way are voters in these municipalities being lied to? We got logs of all the searches, and incident reports of every time they were used to curb another vehicle. We know how well they did (or didn't, in our case) worked.
I don't know what "surveys" have to do with this. Voters voted on it; it was a campaign issue in our trustee election.
The lie comes from the intentionality. Voters are told the intention of these tools are to prevent crime, but that's not true. The intention is enrich a select few and expand the surveillance state, chilling dissent and empowering authoritians.
Once again, we look at Adolf Hitler. He told voters his intention behind power was helping the German people, but that was not true. That was just a tool he used to grab said power.
We see this with a lot of things in the US. The intention behind giving ICE tens of billions of dollars and a license to kill and ignore due process is "your protection". But that's not true.
You might say we don't actually know anyone's intention, and that is technically true. But I prefer not to play stupid, and even if you're correct, it's not worth the risk.
These things bring huge amounts of risk with them. Even if everyone involved is perfectly benevolent, which I don't think even a child could believe, there's no guarantee it will stay that way. We are building out infrastructure that practically begs to be abused. And when you say it's okay, you're essentially saying you believe everyone will stay good forever. That's quite bold, no?
When phrased that way, your position does not seem reasonable. You have to understand, this is how some people see it, and when you understand that perspective, you can understand what you're actually asking for.
How is flock cameras existing, a breakdown in the rule of law? As far as I know they are not technically breaking any laws, even though I disagree with their use in principle.
Some might think it is somehow a Fourth Amendment violation, but I'm pretty sure it has already been ruled on enough times now that there is no expectation of privacy on government-owned roads, except for what's inside your car.
If the law "if you shoot an arrow with no mind to it's direction or destination existed you are guilty of negligence and liability of any damages" existed and then guns where invented you can argue either that the law needs to be updated or that case law will follow the spirit of the law and establish that it also applies to guns. If you are prescriptive and do not believe in the spirit of the law then a new law would have to cover the case of guns. Many would say there is a breakdown in the rule of law if it turned out people could just fire those guns willy nilly and the arrow law did not apply to them.
Similarly if there is a law that says the government can't build cameras everywhere to track you 24/7 without a warrant then post facto get a warrant to justify the prior tracking. Many people believe there is a breakdown in the rule of law when The government can pay someone else who has built cameras everywhere to track you 24/7 without a warrant then post facto get a warrant to justify the prior tracking.
Dan Carlin, on his Common Sense podcast several years ago, said something that really stuck with me (and he probably was paraphrasing it from someone else).
Society is like a pressure cooker, with built-in safety release valves to prevent the pressure from getting too high. If your solution to the safety release is to block off the valves, with authoritarian surveillance, draconian laws, and lack of justice for the elites committing crimes, it just moves it somewhere else. Block off too many, and it explodes.
When laws no longer serve the people and you have a lawless government doing whatever it wants, they are merely strongly worded suggestions. We give laws their power so I don't think this government realizes just how poorly things look with the DOJ now and how little trust there is for anything coming out of the federal government.
I view this breakdown in law similar to the marijuana situation. It’s kind of a villainous administration, green lighting villainous things. The law doesn’t hold water in this case. The people have to do something drastic to get that across.
We either have out of control govt or civil unrest and only people who don’t know what the latter looks like cheer it on. We’re screwed unless someone unlocks the economy. Right now it’s not happening.
I mean, that's excellent wishcasting, but the reality is that current economic incentives combined with a lack of social ("cancel culture" got cancelled because "uwu too mean"), regulatory ("uwu can't hurt Capital or the rich people won't make jobs no more"), and criminal ("uwu can't hold Capital accountable for their actions when they do crimes or people will lose jobs") accountability means that this was always going to be the outcome.
More people need to understand that the system is working as designed, and the elimination of peaceful, incremental reform based on popular demand, along with mass manipulation of human emotions through media and advertising, means that this sort of resistance is the sole outcome left before devolving into naked sectarian violence.
Say what you will, but the anti-Flock camera smashers are at least doing something beyond wishcasting from a philosophical armchair in comment sections or social media threads.
Doesn't breakdown in rule of law happened when a corporation (surely) bribed local officials to install insecure surveillance devices with zero concern for the community living near them?
How many homeowners install mystery-meat Chinese cameras on their houses that feed the data God knows where? Should their homes be vandalized too for their lack of concern for the community?
Beyond any discussion of “vigilante” / “criminal” destruction of cameras, there’s a clear difference between giving domestic corporations (who act hand in glove with your local government) access to cameras on your property vs. giving foreign corporations (working hand in glove with an adversary government) access to cameras on your property.
It really comes down to whether you consider an individual’s right to privacy more important than your state’s security. Neither is really a perfect options in this case, but having the Flock camera means some part of your property is under the panopticon of local law enforcement that could arrest you (loss of privacy).
Going with chinese tech, you are probably more private in regards to your own government, but you’re probably having some negative effect on state security based on the marginal benefit of CCP surveillance/ potential malware in your network.
The dichotomy is false. People could have cameras which report to no one, but that’s less useful for all governments involved.
ok so let's just put aside chinese companies! ring is an american company, should people's ring cameras be vandalized because ring might share their data with the american government?
I have not vandalized any Ring cameras, but I have paid to replace those installed by friends and family and have those replaced shredded as part of an electronics recycling waste stream. "Think globally, act locally" sort of thing.
i don't think the people destroying flock cameras are open to the idea of going through the legal process to replace them with alternatives that have better privacy, something (maybe the fact that they currently are vandalizing them) tells me that they are just interested in vandalizing them
Flock cameras are different, they take advantage of laws that have not kept pace with technology while being colocated and operated in public spaces, to where you are forced to live in a corporate surveillance state for Flock Group's enterprise value and potential shareholder returns. And so, destruction of the devices is all that is left available to them (if their jurisdiction opts to not remove them, as many have done [1]). Somewhat silly to blame humans who want privacy (arguably a human right [2]) just so the CEO of Flock can get wealthy (and YC can get liquidity) at IPO, no?
The human is doing what you would expect the human to do when faced with limited options in an operating environment that is not favorable to them. Crime has been trending down for some time [3], Flock cameras are a business driven on fear like Shotspotter, where the results are questionable at best and you're selling to the unsophisticated.
i've never found this type of "humans were left with no alternative" argument in defense of destruction of property convincing, some of the things that separates humans from other animals is the concept of private/public property, rule of law, etc, you know? there are alternatives, contrary to the alarmism found online the US is very far from actual dictatorships where people have close to 0 way of achieving change through the legal system, immediately jumping to violence without an imminent threat is something i'd expect from lower primates, not from homo sapiens.
You're free to your opinion. Property is just property, it is nothing special. Rule of law is highly dynamic and a shared delusion. Damaging or destruction of property is not violence, it is a property crime at best. In the scope of Flock, it is well documented as having been misused, illegally in many cases, by law enforcement and those with access to its systems [1] [2] [3].
> there are alternatives
This does not consistently appear to be the case in the US unfortunately.
> Damaging or destruction of property is not violence.
you wouldn't consider someone vandalizing your home or the infrastructure in your neighborhood to be violence? of course it is violence, an attack on the place i live (whether that's limited to just my home or to the larger community i live in) is an attack on me
is it not violence to, for example, burn down a business where people work in if you do it at a time where no one is around to get immediately hurt as a consequence? can i not call the financial damage caused both to the workers and the owners of that place violence?
I fail to see the equivalence between taking out a surveillance camera that is violating people's privacy with the other things that you list. Arguing like that is simply not going to work.
the person i replied to made a broad "destroying property is not violence" claim, the scope of the conversation is more than just that
also, i consider a security camera in a place i live to be security infrastructure, you should not be able to come into a place and do act like a vigilante imposing your view on what should and should not be recorded through force, if you have a problem with the way things work you should try to work within the law
again, this is what separates civilization from chaos
> you wouldn't consider someone vandalizing your home or the infrastructure in your neighborhood to be violence?
Very obviously not. Words have meaning. You are misusing words to garner emotional support for your preferred political position.
Burning down anything (including a business) is arson. Not violence. It only becomes violence if people are present and at imminent risk of physical harm.
Financial damage is not violence. Speech is not violence. Please take your doublespeak back to reddit; it doesn't belong on HN.
I agree with your basic position, but most definitions of the word violence that I could find included the notion of: destroying things with intent to intimidate through fear of harm, threats such as brandishing weapons, and so on. It's not as simple as 'you didn't touch me so you didn't do violence' - and it makes sense when you consider the case of robbery at gunpoint.
That being said - the destruction of flock cameras is in no way violence. No one sees that and takes it as a threat of harm - at least no one acting in an honest way.
Isn't that the difference between a threat of violence as opposed to violence? Which is directly adjacent and thus treated similarly by the law.
Brandishing a gun at someone is a threat that you'll shoot them but, importantly, is not the same thing as actually making good on the threat. (From the victim's perspective the distinction is rather important.)
how did you jump from property damage and arson to speech? non sequitur much? financial damage absolutely can be violence, you can ruin someone's life if you take away their job by burning down the place they work at and it could lead to something horrific like them taking their own lives or not being able to pay for their medication or not be able to pay for their child's education, etc as a direct consequence of your act of destroying that place. destroying infrastructure people rely on to stay healthy/safe/economically stable/etc should be considered by civilized people as a violent attack on them, you cannot pretend that disrupting someone's livelihood is not at all related to attacking their liberty and/or life
a case where you can argue speech can be violence would be a verbal threat to hurt or kill someone, but that has nothing to do with what we're talking about, i don't know why you're bringing up speech, are you trying to say that destroying these cameras is a form of expressing freedom of speech? (not accusing you of this btw, just genuinely curious what you meant by that)
> how did you jump from property damage and arson to speech?
I included speech as an example, the same as your bringing up property damage, arson, and financial damage. It seemed relevant given the general shape of what you were expressing.
Someone being driven to suicide or unable to pay for medication is not an example of violence. It might be many things but violence is most certainly not one of them.
> you cannot pretend that disrupting someone's livelihood is not at all related to attacking their liberty and/or life
Indeed it is _related_ but that does not magically make it "violence". Violence is direct physical harm. Not indirect and not anything other than physical.
> a case where you can argue speech can be violence
Speech is _never_ violence. That's about as close to definitionally impossible as you can get. (Here's a fun related observation: violent rhetoric is not itself violent.)
Respectfully, you seem to be having extreme difficulty comprehending the fact that words have meaning. It's impossible to engage in meaningful discussion with someone who either can't or won't conduct themselves in accordance with that fact.
Your first example, no. That is a threat of violence and is illegal literally everywhere (even in the US). However it does not become "violence" until you commit a physical act.
Your second example is inciting public panic. Again, not violence. And again, illegal literally everywhere (at least AFAIK).
> serious physical harm that's resulting directly from your action
That's the thing, the panic was the direct result. The physical harm was indirect. Once again, words have meanings.
Perhaps you should seek to learn more about the law. You might find that, in addition to words having meaning, society has been dealing with "problematic" behaviors for as long as it has existed and is honestly pretty well equipped for it in general. These things have been catalogued extensively. Referring to everything as "violence" is no better than labeling every other crime "terrorism".
> you wouldn't consider someone vandalizing your home or the infrastructure in your neighborhood to be violence? of course it is violence, an attack on the place i live (whether that's limited to just my home or to the larger community i live in) is an attack on me
No, I file an insurance claim and move on with my life. It is just property, and almost all property can be trivially replaced. Your property is not you. It is just property. We simply see the world differently, that's all. Good luck to you.
I'll personally send my DNA and weekly blood work straight to Xi Jinping address and pay for postage myself before letting my own government spy my every moves. Thés risks of anything bad happening are much lower
As long as they're not pointed at the street that should be fine. If they are pointed at the street then, depending on where you live, that may not be acceptable.
Well, not in the US since filming in public is (at least AFAIK) constitutionally protected. It's weird though, somehow two party consent for audio recording (even in public) seems to be accepted by the courts. Although it's entirely possible that I have a misunderstanding.
It is actually kind of hard to look this up: I get lots of search results about the right to record police being protected constitutionally. And the lack of an inherent right to privacy, when in public. But, this doesn’t seem to preclude a locality from creating a law that disallows recording of public locations, right? You may not have a constitutional right to safe air, but as far as I know states can pass their own environmental regulations…
> Should their homes be vandalized too for their lack of concern for the community?
If enough people can be convinced that those cameras are somehow helping Trump, you’ll find a lot of people in here and Reddit saying “yes”, I’ll imagine. Before this we had people vandalizing Teslas because of Elon.
The real breakdown in the rule of law occurred when the US Supreme Court made the specious decision that amoral business entities (corporations) had the same rights in a democracy as citizens.
All this shit flows downhill from Citizens United.
Supreme Court decisions are not a deterministic process like you get with code. Justices twist and contradict precedents to suit their ideological goals all the time; these days they don't even try to hide it much. The Citizens United decision wasn't something that had to happen, it was a deliberate choice by conservatives.
My guess is the vast majority of the 80,000 or whatever cameras are uncontested politically. Local board meetings for most towns are boring and quiet affairs, and those are also the most effective venue for these concerns.
If you are a taxpayer in a local jurisdiction with Flock cameras and you want them removed, show up to every single meeting and maximize use of public comment time.
Local government is a place individuals can actually be extremely effective but also almost nobody ever actually does.
> It is not ideal, but it is necessary when the higher-desirability options are not working.
You are simply imposing your own views on others. Just because you disagree with Flock doesn't give you the right to destroy license plate readers that my tax dollars paid for. Who appointed you king?
Peer pressure is apparently not even effective in getting billionaires who could easily hire whatever variety of escort they want from having sex with trafficked children, so I'm not sure in what world it's supposed to stop the billionaires from installing cameras.
FWIW the "rule of law" is a reference to the idea that the law should be applied equally to everyone regardless of their position in society, and has nothing to do with the crime rate.
No. Catching murderers (for example) is a basic function of the justice system. Of course the US justice system does have many flaws and in some ways much worse lately, but compare with Somalia or Haiti and you'll see that there's quite a long way down. It could get much worse.
It's not about crime rate or "many crimes" still being taken seriously, it's the fact that we all know now that there are certain crimes that, depending on where you are and who is in charge, simply don't count. Furthermore, depending on where you are and who is in charge, the authority may simply choose to not adhere to the law whatsoever.
What other social issues should be solved with vigilante justice?
I don't like all this surveillance stuff, but Flock is just the tip of the iceberg and "direct action" against Flock is just as likely to backfire as it is to lead to changes. More importantly, once you give folks moral license to do this stuff it's hard to contain the scope of their activity.
>What other social issues should be solved with vigilante justice?
Everything you said is true, but I suspect, also irrelevant, because options short of vigilante justice aren't going to be seen by the public as viable for much longer (if they're even seen so now). America's social contract is breaking, and existing institutions make it clear, daily, that they will strengthen that trend rather than reverse it. And as JFK said, 'Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.' That doesn't make the violence laudable, or even desirable. It is simply inevitable without seemingly impossible positive change from an establishment that is hostile to such.
This is a nice description (i.e "where is the limit on this type of action?") of a reason why this approach is low on the list, and why ideally we would solve it with one of the other options.
You don't want to give people "moral license" to do this broadly, but we've hit a point where there are no options available that don't have downsides. Stated another way: Taking no action can also be unethical.
Man, I really emphasize with this, and that immediately raises my "motivated reasoning" hakles. There's a lot of people in America with deeply held views that I strongly disagree with, and I would be very worried if they began taking matters into their own hands; to pick a hopefully-uncontroversial example, bombing abortion clinics. They, too, would say "to take no action is also unethical". The purpose of society is to arbitrate these kinds of disputes...
I agree but will point out that abortion is an example of policing activity that does not affect oneself. Adding an additional clause reflecting that aspect seems to fix many of the issues that might concern you.
For me, Flock installing these cameras and other people taking them down are two sides of the same coin. One group puts cameras up in public without people's knowledge or permission, the other group takes cameras down without people's knowledge or permission. I find it kind of beautiful, like the ebb and flow of the tide.
I believe in surveillance, but Flock is just the tip of the iceberg and rolling out mass public surveillance is just as likely to backfire as it is to lead to changes. More importantly, once you give folks moral license to do this stuff it’s hard to contain the scope of their activity.
the threat of vigilante mob justice is required for the law to work. its the tension that makes sure the rich and powerful want to stay involved, and be held accountable by it, rather than skipping over it and making it irrelevant.
the threat has to be credible, which is where things like this, and luigi are quite valuable
Those aren't the problem, it's any "free" mobile app in the App Store or Play Store with an advertising SDK (which is almost all of them) that uses your location to "keep your weather forecast up-to-date" but also provide data brokers with your location...
Sure, and—setting aside the issues with all the millions of smart phone users who can't properly consent to these apps and their permissions because they don't have the knowledge to know what they're actually consenting to—the great thing is that I can choose not to install these apps. And I don't!
I don't have the same choice with cameras everywhere that feed into a company with a security team run by donkeys and that provides minimal to no oversight to the government bodies using the camera data to do an end run around the fourth amendment.
Uh... it's also the cell phone companies that triangulate every powered phone at all times and provide that info to data brokers, police departments, and intelligence agencies.
my point is people are freaking out about Flock but everyone has a tracking device in their pocket at all times, and people absolutely love Ring doorbell cameras (ok maybe not you, I get it).
It seems incongruous to me that people are willing to recognize the benefits that these tools provide law enforcement at solving crimes but when it comes to Flock cameras somehow things are totally different. They're just cameras with really good software, and law enforcement likes them because it makes their jobs easier.
A phone provides the individual with tangible benefits. It only tracks the individual. The individual is always free to opt out.
A ring doorbell camera provides the individual with tangible benefits. It is installed by the individual on personal property. It does however typically capture some amount of public space which I think is problematic.
Government run centralized surveillance does not provide the individual with tangible benefits. It almost exclusively captures public spaces (that's usually the entire point of the exercise after all). It generally is not realistic to opt out short of being denied access to any surveilled public spaces. If that happens to include the majority of roads near your home then I guess you'll want to look into moving.
Most phones have a cellular modem in it, and as long as it is on and functioning normally, even without a valid SIM, it can still be tracked by any provider or person/group/government controlling that provider, even triangulated to a more precise location, 24/7.
At this point, I wouldn't be surprised if FB bought raw data from the providers just to see if they could aggregate it into their shadow profiles. Whatever the cost of buying that data, it wouldn't mean anything to a corp that prints money. Yes, this is pure tin foil hat level conspiracy nonsense, but it goes to show how little I think of FB
I've done this recently. It's only been six weeks so not sure if I'll keep it up, but I have felt very little pain. I put my sim back in my iPhone the other day when I needed an Uber to go to the vet after reading that recently taxis in my city have been denying people with pets even if you tell them you have one when ordering. Sim went right back in my flip phone when I got home and I actually experienced some relief as I did it.
Ring doorbells and ALPRs are a meme compared to what we've already deployed domestically. I've seen the Houston police department fly wide area surveillance aircraft all day over certain parts of town. The capabilities of some of these systems are almost unbelievable.
I strongly recommend not breaking the law until you've fully considered the omniscient demigod threat model. You never know who is watching and what their capabilities might be.
This, honestly. I used to get so angry when the US subjected foreigners to treatment that no human with morals would consider, but then I noticed that, without fail, almost every thing the US did to foreigners gets done to US citizens eventually, either by foreign governments or by the US government itself. The only thing that I haven't seen yet are drone killings on US soil, but I suspect that too is only a matter of time.
Like it or not, we're all stuck on the same boat. Normalizing the abuse and mistreatment of some parts of the world means normalizing it for everyone.
Recent: Across the US, people are dismantling and destroying Flock surveillance cameras (bloodinthemachine.com) | 456 points by latexr 2 days ago | 293 comments | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47095134
Kind of weird all of those people weren't all up in arms about it before the whole ice thing, why would you be mad that they're tracking somebody else but not mad that they have been slurping up data about your movements and habits this whole time, then monetizing said data by selling it to industries like insurance companies etc.
all of these people didnt even know these cameras existed until recently. even this weekend, was talking to a few friends and they had never heard of them. I think they wanted to just sort of sneak them in under the radar and all the current ICE stuff has created more scrutiny and public knowledge about surveillance in general.
It's weird due to the complete lack of second order thinking the majority of people seem to have.
You can scream up and down about how building such things is a horrible idea because it can one day be used for evil, and folks will either yawn or call you paranoid or worse.
Then the thing actually gets (very lightly) abused/used for something folks don't like and omg it's an emergency no one could have ever predicted! And oh look - it's often times far too late to do a damn thing about it other than surface level 'fixes' that are nothing of the sort.
It gets very frustrating living in such a society, but it might simply be the way humans are wired. If it's not in your face and actively a major problem to you in the moment, it's simply not a concern.
I mean you're not wrong, but let's not shy away from the usual pattern we see on here where the YC-brain sees a camera, a cloud dashboard, and a monthly SaaS fee and immediately calls it "the future," then acts blindsided when people notice they funded a suburban panopticon. Every time it is the same script, and then six months later everybody is pretending nobody could have foreseen the obvious abuse case.
It's weird because one of the main selling points for the principled position against surveillance is your inability to control which use-cases are allowed.
The way to avoid masked gestapo thugs is to ensure that not even your preferred leaders are able to create them.
1. Most people weren't aware before the whole ICE thing. I think I only started seeing flock trend on HN a few weeks before the ICE incidents, and it only stood out to me because I had a friend who worked for a company called Flock Freight that has nothing to do with the surveillance state.
2. What you mentioned sucks. But it's hard to get the public to care about things that don't directly affect them and their day to day lives. My wife somehow browses the internet without an ad blocker even though I've told her that they track you and are basically malware, but knowing that doesn't change her browsing habits or make her even want to use an ad blocker, even if the ads are hostile to her experience.
3. Once the ICE thing came to light, suddenly people were like, wait, they can use this information to deport us or kill us? That's not OK.
Huh? even if you knew and understood the scope of it before (I’d say a vast majority did not and thought they were just red light cameras), it is not very hard to understand that when you see the people in masks without badges snatching your neighbors haphazardly and with specious reasons that you might make a chunk of that majority look at the cameras more skeptically and maybe, just maybe wonder if that technology could be turned against you too.
Until recently very few people could articulate the real risk this tech posed, now you can literally see it play out (depending where you live)
1. They didn't know about it. It's only recently that there have been popular youtube videos on the topic. Critical mass can take time.
2. Before "the whole ice thing" there wasn't a team of masked brownshirts terrorising communities and using all available technology they could access in order to undertake said terrorising. That these cameras are part of that available technology, the timing ain't weird at all. In fact, it was pretty predictable.
But, yes, should have been up in arms beforehand, but likely the knowledge and visceral demonstration of the effects were not known. Visceral demonstration does pretty heavy lifting.
It seems to me that throwing bad data into the Flock system is far more effective than breaking a few commodity electronic devices.
Figure out how to put an LCD in front of many of the ALPR cameras and play a slideshow of car images of license plates that exist almost exclusively in different geolocations. Make the Flock data so noisy that it becomes useless.
The easier fix seems like doxxing politicians and embarrassing them until they protect all of their constituents against things like this. We got a small modicum of privacy with the Video Privacy Protection Act [0] after Bork's video rental history was going to be released.
I imagine there is a process in place to allow cities / states / communities to place the cameras on polls. If Vegas somehow got around public comment process to put these on poles, then what would stop any random company from requesting to put their own camera there? Like lets say a motivated individual went through some process to put a camera on a pole someplace near somebody that would definitely make the govt official / flock exec etc nervous, what is stopping them? It sounds an awful lot like Flock is basically going to town's and saying "we will put up a bunch of cameras in a bunch of places" probably based upon algorithm's etc. How do they decide where these get put, who gets to decide that? Why can't any random company request to put up a camera on a random power pole? After they give the map to the govt officials, do they get a chance to say "oh this one by my house, can you move that?"
I certainly agree about the lack of shame - but even if you destroyed all of the Flock cameras (and any other public traffic cams) you're still left with no actual protection for your private data.
There's more of us then there are of them - so their wealth can't protect them from everything. They can and do buy privacy so there must be something worth protecting that the masses can expose using their same methods.
Many in this administration are the lowest, least educated parts of their respective societies. They don’t have shame. You cannot shame them because this is literally their only way to make money.
If shame were a motivator for this administration or the current grifter class, neither of these things would exist to the current Armageddon-level they currently do. That is to say, completely agree with your take here. There are plenty of government-entity examples of this, but my favorite I've seen recently was a video montage of Elon saying annually, like clockwork, that sully autonomous driving would be here in 2-3 years for the last 12 years or so. If these people had shame, he wouldn't be doing that, as an example.
> Merchant reports instances of broken and smashed Flock cameras in La Mesa, California, just weeks after the city council approved the continuation of Flock cameras deployed in the city, despite a clear majority of attendees favoring their shutdown.
I wonder how resistant the cameras are to strong handheld lasers. I suppose they could harden them against some common wavelengths with filters, but that'd affect the image clarity in normal use.
I have worked with watt class lasers before and I implore you not to do this. Even if it's tempting. Most places where there are surveillance cameras are places where there are also people, and unless you want to hand out OD5 goggles to everyone in eyeshot... a pellet gun would be safer.
My friend in college did an internship on high frequency, short pulse beams (I wanna say violet and picosecond? Which I still think was exotic at the time).
Most of his work was dealing with and accounting for reflections that left the machine. If you have a prism that’s sending 95% of the light where you want it to go, when it’s a multi watt laser you can’t just let that 5% go wherever it wants. You will blind someone. So his job was getting black bodies in all the right spots to absorb the lost light.
His safety goggles looked like even more expensive Oakleys of that era and they were (much more expensive).
Unrelated, but I really want to take the opportunity:
How can one know what is dangerous for the eyes or not? Years ago I got an "IR illuminator" (from aliexpress, probably) that I wanted to use with my raspberrypi NoIR camera, for fun. Say filming myself during the night to see how much I move while sleeping, or making my own wildlife camera trap.
But I was scared that it could be dangerous and never used it (I tested it in an empty room, but that was it).
Is there a safe way for a hobbyist to get an IR illuminator and be sure that I won't make somebody blind with it?
Is it just a bunch of IR LEDs? Surface mount or through-hole? What's the module power rating? What's the power supply power rating? Are there any secondary optics like lenses over the LEDs? Is there a diffuser of some kind?
If it's a cluster of garden variety through-hole LEDs with domed tops (like you would see on a TV remote), they're necessarily low power on account of having poor thermal performance.
Another way to tell is if nothing gets warm at all. It's pretty hard to hurt someone with an emitter that both doesn't have a focusing optic and doesn't get warm.
Let me be clear - you're still responsible for verifying the safety of your stuff, and I am in no way assuring you that the device you have is benign, because I can't do that without inspecting it directly.
> Let me be clear - you're still responsible for verifying the safety of your stuff
Obviously yeah. I was just wondering if there were known rules like "these wavelengths under this power are fine for humans and wildlife, even if they put the LEDs right in front of their eyes", and also if you have an array of such IR LEDs, how they cumulate.
And curious about things like: if I don't see it, can it hurt my retina?
I probably will never do it: I wouldn't want to blind a fox just because I wanted to make my own wildlife camera :).
Invisible wavelengths can absolutely hurt your retina, but as wavelengths go farther beyond visible, your eye begins to not focus them properly on the retina, so the risks change. E.g. with 1550nm IR (common in telecom, sometimes in LIDAR) the risk of eye damage is to the surface of the eye rather than to the retina. Short wavelengths like UV will be absorbed by the lens at near-UV, and then eventually just be absorbed at the surface at shorter wavelengths.
I think it would be a cool exercise to figure out how much optical power you would see at, idk, 5cm from your illuminator. I assume it's a shortwave IR close to visible light, so you can assume it will focus like visible light, more or less.
Ideally you'd use an optical power meter but you could get a first pass by looking at the circuit and seeing how many mW pass through each LED, applying a conservatively high efficiency factor of W_optical/W_electrical, projecting that into a radiated cone for each LED and multiplying the power received on a dilated pupil sized spot at 5cm by the number of emitters.
Then you have to work out what the irradiance at the retina is once the light is focused. The hazard criteria include a time factor, so you'll have to decide if you/foxes would like to stare directly into the beam for 10 seconds? Or for the entire duration of your meditation session.
i went down a rabbit hole doing max permissible exposure calcs for the light you linked and basically i personally wouldn't worry about it. the energy is low and distributed among many emitters. by the time you're far enough away from the light to focus on it, you're receiving max a couple hundred microwatts/cm^2 at the cornea from each led.
I don't know if you ever write blog posts or anything like that, but I would love to see explanations about how you made those estimations. I honestly wouldn't know how to even start :-).
IR illuminators are not lasers. Their purpose is to cast light across a broad area, not to deliver it all to one point. They should not be harmful to vision.
> Most places where there are surveillance cameras are places where there are also people
I assume you're concerned about reflections from the camera lens or housing? In my mind, the archetypal camera is mounted on a nice tall pole, silhouetted against open sky, and painted matte black.
> watt class lasers
Surely those would be excessive for someone attacking the sensor, unless they want to remotely sear some graffiti by burning away paint.
Please do not encourage people to go shining bright lasers at small targets from long distances right next to busy roads.
This is a nerd fantasy thing, but it's a really bad idea. It's hard to hit a tiny lens from a distance and it only takes one slip of the hand to shine it straight into traffic or someone walking down the sidewalk.
Lol that's almost literally the cheapest possible option. You can get these for $3-4 (on a board and with a mipi cable and everything) from China - I have a dozen in a box that I bought to test out a camera array idea before shelling out for nicer sensors.
The best part is seeing someone tear a Flock camera apart, see the camera, and immediately go slap it on their 3D printer and hook it into their Pi and just have it work out of the box ;)
America is really now two Americas. The divide between traditional freedoms and neo-authoritarianism is getting wider. But America is so large that even the minority (just) that believes in freedom is still 167 million people. Even if only a small percentage of that number, from either side of the divide, believes in violent activism, things are going to get worse before they get better.
It just depends on if you're on the up portion of the K or the down stick. The larger picture might show an increase but if you split the data apart one leg is actually declining while the other is growing.
while an important consideration, I'm sure there are many on the up side of the k-economy that don't believe that persistent surveillance is warranted or ethical.
This is the most important comment here. There is a future reckoning to be had between the radical authoritarian fringe and normal Americans who do not want to live in an open air prison. The conflict is completley preventable, and makes a less safe place to live for us all.
There isn't a radical authoritarian fringe in the US. There are multiple, competing radical authoritarian perspectives in the US, and I wouldn't be surprised if the sum of them constituted a majority.
They disagree on the authority, not the methods, and help the two institutional parties cooperate to destroy civil liberties by accusing their counterparts of abusing ("weaponizing") civil rights to commit crimes, spy for foreign governments, and/or abuse children.
America is converting into a radical authoritarian state, yes, but they're not a "fringe". They are, by a small margin, the dominant faction in the US. Popular vote counts prove it.
The best way defeat MAGA is to fracture their coalition, which requires understanding its various constituencies. The “MAGA Hardliners” at the forefront of this fascist movement are only 29% of his support:
The back and forth between "the Left" and "the Right" seems to actually be about who gets to run the prison instead of whether we should run a nation like one.
So one one hand we have Nazi ideas[1] being platformed by the ruling political party which has barely disguised its support for ethnically cleansing the country of all non-white people[2]. And on the other hand we have radical democratic socialist candidates proposing stabilized rent[3]. What am I missing here?
The main cases I've seen against people on the left (non-exclusive) are:
- Lots of them in Epstein files
- Mass importations of unchecked non-citizens
- Trying harder to look cool to Europe vs helping Americans
- Overregulation (things like California Coastal Commission)
- Massive fraud (LA -> SF bullet train, tens of billions for "homelessness" that don't go towards homeless at all, building permits, etc)
- Antifa burning down 3rd party businesses for reasons unknown
- Attempts to squash 1st amendment, particularly on gender
Since you linked sites like the Guardian and Atlantic, I figured the bar was low enough that you can just google any of these points and find an opinionated piece of similar quality.
The bubble I refer to is the fact that seemingly all you see is the bad on one side and good on the other. As easy as you claim one side are Nazis trying to kill off non-whites, the people on the other side claim the left is trying to force movie/music propaganda to eradicate all white people. Both sides have millions of posts from terminally online people wildly claiming outrageous things. Both "sides" have bad people. If you can't agree to that, you are in a bubble or just lying.
Forcing other people to use desired pronouns, requiring new signs on all single-stall bathrooms. You'll have to Google it, you're not going to get a great argument/stance from me personally. I don't dive much deeper than the headlines/parts of my feeds where these are thrust upon me.
Especially when it comes to ethnic cleansing, peoples' terminally online claims don't factor in from any side; this isn't about partisans or discourse. We are talking about official government policy and statements. This is substantiated, without any constitutional precedent, and extremely dangerous.
The equivalent actions on the left that you posed, increasing non-white representation in media, a) is not government policy and b) is fair assuming proportional representation for the existing 1 out of 3 non-white Americans. And the actual Biden policy allowing what you call "non-citizens" to enter the US is simply the international treaty for asylum seekers; these are all people going through the immigration system.
Regarding my sources, ESIWeb is a European think-tank that rigorously and objectively evaluates claims. The Atlantic and The Guardian are respected for their journalism world-wide. These aren't op-eds; I have been following this story for a while and choose my sources carefully.
There are a few other dubious items on your list--e.g., "Antifa" which doesn't represent mainstream Democrats, isn't an organization, and hasn't been linked to "burning down businesses". Epstein? At least a dozen people in this administration are implicated, with Trump being one of the principal pedophiles. "Massive corruption"? The list would be too long for this message if we got into the Trump administration.
It's the knee-jerk reactions to "look at the other side!" that makes me think you're in a bubble. Also your references to certain small groups on the right-side spectrum as the whole while claiming (rightly) that other small groups on the left-side don't represent the mainstream. I was just trying to give you a few examples as a starting point for research since you seem to be completely oblivious to them, I am not here to argue with you or back them up.
Guy, you're talking about groups that comprise social discourse whereas I'm talking only and specifically about the concrete policies and practices enacted by the Trump regime. The counter-examples you provided are not parallel mappings.
That's cool, keep talking about it I guess. Why you're expecting me to provide "parallel mappings" is totally beyond me. You're in a bubble because although you seem great at researching one side, you seemingly cannot apply those same skills for the other. You just want a dopamine win from discarding whatever I say based upon whatever moral framework you've set up in your head that's gotten you to this point.
As your net worth increases, the concern about what you have to lose from a personal safety perspective skyrockets. You start becoming far more paranoid and seeing crime everywhere. Tech CEOs and billionaires will build the dystopian panopticon society 100 times out of 100 because they don't care about other people, they just want to feel safe. If that means mass surveillance for the rest of the world, so be it.
If you don't believe me, just look at the CCP. It already happened there.
Being anti-crime doesn't mean lacking compassion. Crimes have victims, and reducing crime results in fewer of them. Poor people don't want to be victims any more than rich people do.
Downvotes are a good sign you made someone think about their own internal biases and they didn't like it. So they lash out in the only way the know how. Pathetic and weak.
Someone in the thread linked a teardown showing these use a ~$4 OV5647 Arducam sensor on what's essentially a Raspberry Pi. The real vandalism isn't the people with hammers — it's charging municipalities six figures for a trail camera with a cellular modem and a pitch deck.
Where are you finding those sensors for $4? I think the main selling point is that they're set+forget and solar powered, with all the "software magic" happening in the cloud.
Sure, the extra stuff like LTE modem, battery, solar panels, casing, etc, costs a whole lot more money, but these things clearly are built cheap. The optics and imaging sensor is a joke compared to real, proper cameras.
I am an American and I am doing something about it. Co-founded a company that manufactures privacy-centric, on-prem video monitoring devices. No cloud.
I support what you're doing, but I'd like to point out that everybody cares about ethics at the start...
> We are committed to protecting human privacy and mitigating bias in policing with the development of best-in-class technology rooted in ethical design, which unites civilians and public servants in pursuit of a safer, more equitable society.
I see your point, and I've seen people reevaluate their priorities when presented with a life altering sum of money (or with a court subpoena).
And that's one of the reasons we made it architecturally impossible for someone to access the data externally. The user decides how and where to send the data.
If I was someone on the run, then I would just get a fake license plate. They record plates on the interstates as well. Also, they have cameras and presumably can alert of a certain make and model + color car trailer on AI near a last seen area. Only way to bypass that is by swapping cars or getting a really generic popular car.
https://deflock.org/map provides a crowd sourced map showing the known locations of flock cameras for anyone interested in knowing where Big Brother is watching.
That title is so weird. I thought there are camera that are watching groups of birds. I know the company name is what it is but even more so it would be important to make the title clear. Not the whole world can keep up with all silly things happening in the US and now that flock surveillance can be anything but birds.
Car culture in general is an abomination to civil rights. You are tracked by the government, forced to shell out money to predatory insurance companies, and can basically be illegally searched and seized at any point on the roadway. I hope that chinese e-bikes/e-motos will get good enough to where I can use them as my primary form of transport.
I'm wondering if there are technical solutions to counter this extreme surveillance. I know there are some articles of clothing that kind of mess with some cameras but there must be some other technical ways to mess with the data or make it less usable (and hence avoid physical destruction of property)
There are always technical solutions but the feasibility and challenges of mass adoption generally makes policy more desirable for security and privacy:
it's wild to me that Americand accept a private company plastering their town with surveillance cameras, given you know, everything
Additionally, that you draw the line at sharing that juicy data with law enforcement. I mean sure, yeah, but even before that, sharing essentially all your movement data with some company because...?
We don't accept that? Our civil liberties have been infringed upon by neoliberals and oligarchs for the last 100+ years, starting with Lincoln with income tax and FDR with social security into the mess we have today.
I'm sure they'd charge the municipalities and private entities for those replacements one way or another, which ultimately decreases the reliability and value proposition of their product.
the damage is showing that Flock, from an objective technology point of view, is really quite much more limited in terms of its efficacy than its sellers are leading the buyers to believe.
what good is their platform if it is easily defeated by a guy with a ladder and a hammer?
"Ah, see, criminals hate Flock cameras. We'll send you a replacement for free, but you should buy two more and point it at that one so you can catch the bastard next time." is how I imagine that goes.
Speaking only for areas near where I live, it was in response to a persistent uptick in home invasions. Police can't be everywhere at once, and LPR cameras flag stolen cars and mismatched plates that thieves like to use.
Some are installed by private entities. Home Depot installs Flock cameras in their parking lots.
I assume their primary use case is combating organized retail theft rings, as companies like Target spend a great deal on this problem (to include famously having their own accredited crime lab).
looking at deflock.org, in our town there are a few in Home Depot and Lowe's parking lots; I guess it's reasonable for a business to have a camera in their parking lot to prevent theft, that's not particularly new; the problem is that Flock has been selling that data for other purposes (ICE).
Cameras on the street is another matter altogether. Should not be allowed unless the citizens of the town vote to allow it.
Harvest data and let the techno fascist state that is slowly emerging figure out a use case later. For potential scenarios: if you like sci fi you can watch minority report, if you like history you can look at central Europe around 1930
Maybe I'm just getting old but I dislike these implicit call to destructive action articles, even if I don't like the surveillance. It is not incumbent upon the public to destroy surveillance cameras, and it's probably a bad sign for society if they are. If you destroy one of these cameras you will probably be arrested, and it will ruin your life. We can elect officials who oppose these cameras, and encouraging people to destroy city property is not the move.
A lot of the people doing it would probably agree that it's a bad sign that it's necessary. And further that most elections have become a false choice, and aren't effective, as they're so far removed from the changes necessary.
I'm with you on the AI slop but your complaint on this post just sounds like bootlicking.
I would say that anarchist-style direct action against mass surveillance pretty much embodies the classic hacker ethos going back many decades at this point.
I think it's nuts how nobody seemed to care about this mass surveillance tool until it fell into the hands of the red party. "Just keep electing the blue party" is not a convincing security posture.
unlike most Asian countries, individual freedom is the foundation on which American society has been built; it's why many people migrated to the US over the past 250 years
LPRs are absolutely mass surveillance when used without proper legal restraints
the legal restraints are the big difference between regular police, who operate without very specific boundaries to protect individual rights -- and ICE, who can do whatever they want with impunity. That's what separates "police" from "Gestapo".
Because we in america tend to value individual liberties in a way that others don't. And yes of course LPR is mass surveillance. Cars should not even have to be registered.
maybe we didn't care as much because we didn't have gangs of armed Gestapo-like thugs roaming the streets and abusing or killing people, ripping families apart, unaccountable to the law, and spending billions to build new concentration camps; with this camera data being sold to said secret police.
so, yeah, the stakes are different now. and if the "blue party" was the one pulling this shit I'd be just as mad
This is really bad for all the reasons that people have mentioned (vigilante "justice" never is a good thing) but people have a misplaced understanding of right and wrong here. Flock cameras have helped solve some major crimes, and people will be glad to have this technology around if they are ever a victim.
Police states are great at solving major crimes. And when those are sufficiently solved, to justify their continued existence, they have to solve lesser crimes, repeating until you need enough surveillance to ensure no one's flushing their toilet improperly.
Police states are like autoimmune diseases under the hygiene hypothesis. They'll keep ramping up their sensitivity until they're attacking everything, even when it's benign.
Flock cameras can be helpful in all sorts of crimes. They've been used to solve everything from kidnappings to minor property damage.
There obviously isn't a future without crime. This is just a tool to make it easier for police to do their job and deter criminals somewhat, but that is probably marginal.
There will always be kidnappings, there will always be property damage. Having technology available to make it easier to solve those crimes seems obvious to me.
Yes, I can see how they would be helpful in solving crimes down to minor property damage.
I do not want to live in a society where police are watching everything I do in the name of solving minor property damage. "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" is bullshit. I don't do anything illegal in my bathroom, but I do not wish to have a camera in there, even if it could solve a hypothetical crime.
Why not? Don't you want to stop all the crimes happening in bathrooms too? That would be a logical step if privacy is always an acceptable tradeoff for security (or at least the illusion thereof).
The difference is that public streets are public spaces. You necessarily have a limited expectation of privacy in public spaces. The government likewise already deploys cameras in public places to maintain a reasonable level of order on them.
If you want to put a camera in your personal toilet you absolutely can.
"Public" is not a blanket excuse for constant surveillance in a space. I do not have an expectation of being surveilled in public and it's not acceptable to normalize it.
"That it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape, than that one innocent Person should suffer, is a Maxim that has been long & generally approv’d"
The amount of damage these cameras have caused is totally disproportional to whatever meager benefit they may have wrought. These are antisocial machines.
Dude my car was literally jacked up and had the catalytic convertor chopped off in a parking with flock cameras at a hotel before, def never got caught, and according to the hotel security footage they parked right next to my car, got out and did everything real fast. Plus most people using cars to commit heinous crimes are usually stolen and ditched right after anyways, people who use their own car to commit crimes usually end up being lower level crimes like organized retail theft, drugs, etc, you know stuff id rather not trade privacy for security over.
yeah surveillance doesn't mean secure. A few weeks ago there was a solid 10-15 second run of automatic weapons fire on my street in an intersection. I do a lot of shooting and i could tell from the concussion it couldn't have been more than a couple hundred feet from my bedroom window. My neighbors turned in all their camera footage with recordings of two cars and the gunfire to a detective. When i asked them what happens next the detective just said in an annoyed voice "well i'll ask someone to check around..". Like it was plainly obvious he had zero interest at all.
edit: I live in Dallas so, although we sometimes hear gunshots when the Cowboys score a touchdown, i'm not in an active war zone.
I'm in Dallas as well, and I hear gun shots daily. New Years/4th July absolutely sound like a war zone. I found a slug next to my trash can after a 4th celebration a couple of years ago. Not a shell, the actual slug. I keep it on my desk as a reminder. My fur babies are not allowed outside on those nights.
curious to know where you are in Dallas if you don't mind. I'm in Oak Cliff in the Winnetka Heights neighborhood. This past New Years and July 4th were especially bad, people were double parked on I30 on the bridge to downtown, and the gunfire and fireworks were nonstop. DPD has basically given up, there's going to be a tragedy on day and everyone is going to be like "how could have this have happened!?".
I’m in far east Dallas just north of pleasant grove.
Everyone that shoots their gun like that have come to the conclusion they vastly outnumber the police and know they are very unlikely to have anything happen. The cops are just holding their breath that nobody else recognizes this too
My confusion stems from the fact that mass surveillance is already pretty normal in major cities. Your face is on a dozen cameras anytime you walk through the grocery store. Your precise location is pinged off cell towers multiple times a day. I understand specific qualms with Flock as a company and how they manage the data, but this libertarian demand for total privacy in public spaces has been long lost and the beef with Flock in particular doesn’t even scratch the surface.
Edit: And I don’t even know how to have good faith conversations about this topic in these spaces, because the hive mind has decided that anything but absolute outrage is untenable. I’m getting downvoted for sharing my opinion.
If you think USA has mass surveillance you haven't been to Asia (South Korea, Taiwan, China, Singapore, Etc).
I can drive down highways in most cities in the USA without my license plate being read (Flock isn't on highways). Also Flock as integrated mostly just records license plates. It's not recording video 24/7.
I actually touched on this in another comment below yours, using Asia as a specific example. Our crime rates are also much higher than those countries.
But while our surveillance is not as widespread as other developed nations, it is still quite commonplace. There are cameras everywhere and recording license plates seems like such a tiny and justifiable expansion.
People in the US also get angry at speed cameras or red light cameras, yet I personally think both are very rational things to want in busy areas!
We already have mass surveillance, and yet we still have major crimes. It's not working, and I see no reason to believe that removing more freedom will lead to having safer streets. Why are we giving up liberty and getting nothing in return? That's an excellent reason to protest against adding more surveillance.
Our public surveillance is actually limited relative to other developed countries because it makes people here uncomfortable for cultural reasons. You’ll also note that our crime rates are pretty high, especially relative to the surveillance happy countries in East Asia.
Regardless, I’m happy to take a results oriented approach here. Does tracking license plates make it easier to catch criminals? Does it make it easier to track stolen vehicles? I suspect cities wouldn’t be signing these expensive contracts if they didn’t see any benefits.
And finally, surveillance of public spaces is not inherently at odds with personal freedoms. Your mobility is not restricted at all, your core rights have not been touched. And you are always welcome to go live in the woods off the grid.
I firmly believe that living in dense urban areas with millions of others requires a reasonably limited expectation of privacy in public spaces.
Commonplace does not mean acceptable. Flock is new, and so it is an easier target for concentrated action. Also, Flock seems to be a centralized clearinghouse for surveillance data on a different scale than your local grocer's CCTV system.
This comment is so naive and full of banalities I don't even know what to say, open a few history and philosophy books, these topics have been at the center of many deep and interesting debates over at least two thousands years and your take isn't even high-school level comprehension of the subject. If the end goal of societies was to stop crime we'd have achieved that a long time ago
This breakdown in rule of law is unfortunate. Ideally, this would be handled by, in order of desirability:
Below this, is citizens breaking the law to address the situation, e.g. through this destruction. It is not ideal, but it is necessary when the higher-desirability options are not working.> It is not ideal, but it is necessary when the higher-desirability options are not working.
What has worried me for years is that Americans would not resort to this level. That things are just too comfortable at home to take that brave step into the firing lines of being on the right side of justice but the wrong side of the law.
I'm relieved to see more and more Americans causing necessary trouble. I still think that overall, Americans are deeply underreacting to the times. But that only goes as far as to be my opinion. I can't speak for them and I'm not their current king.
You won't get to the kind of change you thought you would see until food runs low and the economy stalls. The American Revolution was rare in that it didn't need to happen. The Founders were just being giant assholes (j/k). While the French Revolution just a few decades later was more status quo. A lot of starvation and poverty just pushed the population over the edge.
I would have believed that before 2020, but after COVID, I fully believe that if the food ran out, half the country would say it's a fake hoax. People would be on their death beds actually starving, and deny it was happening with their last breath.
I disagree. You can escape a disease, even during a global pandemic. And not every person that got COVID was on a ventilator or even felt that bad. Seeing the death toll statistics and even the direct effects through a screen is not visceral for many folks.
Starvation isn't avoidable and you can't ride it out. There isn't any chance that starving to death could be less severe than getting a bad flu. Nobody can avoid not eating for an extended period of time. If there is not enough food, it will affect everyone directly.
>I disagree. You can escape a disease, even during a global pandemic. And not every person that got COVID was on a ventilator or even felt that bad.
Propaganda works.
The knowledge worker class often believes their training will afford them some level of protection against it. Even then, with those warding effects, they're still susceptible. Consider further that most people in society are significantly less educated or trained in epistemological functions than they are - a large portion of society is defenseless against a liar with a megaphone.
Propaganda won't contest that starvation is occurring. It will claim that the reason for the starvation is a specific foe, internal or external e.g. It's China's fault we're starving or the immigrants have caused this food security crisis and once they're gone we'll have enough food for our own people, etc. They'll workshop and see which ones poll well, then run with the talking point that seems to perform best.
Since the government harnessing that discontent has no real desire to fix that problem, all they need to do is maintain the perception that they're the solution, while not addressing the problem itself.
Slightly off topic, but this strategy of blaming a crisis on some other cause is pervasive. It's especially useful when you are the reason for the crisis.
For example, consider climate change. Climate change causes draughts, which causes food shortages in countries heavily dependent on their agricultural sector. This, in turn, causes famine.
A certain western power will blame that country's government for mismanaging their agricultural sector instead of pointing out the unusual and dramatic weather changes contributed to the famine. This is, of course, because the western power does not publicly admit climate change is real in order to avoid taking any responsibility for their contribution to this climate change.
This post is propaganda for the idea that whenever you think that immigrants are causing a problem, you're actually incorrect and are being manipulated by some conspiracy.
No, the post made its point pretty clearly:
> Consider further that most people in society are significantly less educated or trained in epistemological functions than [knowledge workers] are - a large portion of society is defenseless against a liar with a megaphone.
The only thing I'd add is polarization adding impetus to never seeing someone on my side as a liar, whatever they claim.
When democracy becomes a team sport, its collective intelligence lessens: perhaps the biggest hole in the US founder's future vision.
But then again, "voter" had a very different definition in their time. And I don't think you can fault them for not enshrining anti-party ranked choice et al.
>Propaganda won't contest that starvation is occurring. It will claim that the reason for the starvation is a specific foe, internal or external e.g. It's China's fault we're starving or the immigrants have caused this food security crisis and once they're gone we'll have enough food for our own people, etc. They'll workshop and see which ones poll well, then run with the talking point that seems to perform best.
I don't know if China will work. It's not halfway around the world, but that's the mentality many people have of it. They won't buy that a country on the other side if taking food from their local grocery store.
But it doesn't matter. they blame it on: everyone gets hurt. People fighting on the streets, charital servings overran, private businesses raided, governmental buildings having doors banged on (assuming the soldiers don't simply desert their duties). Then that escalates to riots and perhaps small skirmishes for remaining resources.
When you're truly hungry, nothing is beyond reproach. And I don't think America has a true famine to point to as an example. That's pretty much why it's the one thing all politicians will avoid at all cost. a famine will make a depression seem like a cloudy day.
America had a true famine; the dust bowl resulted in mass displacement, and the government took exceptional steps to create remediation programs to address the plight of those affected to maintain relations. The policies included measures that would be considered exceptional by today's standard, including the creation of a national organization to provide stock for relief organizations, buying out cattle herds above market value, other bailout measures for farmers, a massive work effort to create an erosion barrier and more. Most cultural histories indicate that these bailouts prevented widespread unrest in these communities.
You can take a look at the global hunger index; countries with less food security are certainly less stable than those that aren't, but by no means are countries like India and Pakistan undergoing constant revolution. By contrast, countries with comparatively solid food security like Egypt underwent revolution that toppled the government sparked by changes in the (comparatively affordable) price of food. Hunger itself doesn't tell the story. It's how society perceives it.
The zeitgeist matters more than whether or not everyone in society can eat, and you can change the zeitgeist with propaganda.
>When you're truly hungry, nothing is beyond reproach.
When you're truly hungry, you can't plan a revolution. Anti-government efforts are generally spearheaded by groups that are fed, connected, and have the incentive to incite rebellion. It's more Navalny and less Oliver Twist. This means that both pro and anti-government groups will be engaged in a similar recruitment effort. The two groups will have competing accounts of why the hunger is occurring, complete with different evidence regarding the magnitude of the issue, the source of the issue, etc. Hunger doesn't short circuit that process, and propaganda doesn't lose it's force because it's a more persuasive and simpler motivator than, say, discontent over tax burden shifting or some other policy point.
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People largely weren't on their deathbeds with covid claiming it was a hoax either so I'm not sure how that's a relevant analogy. The response to Covid was far more disruptive to my life than the disease itself, which would obviously not be the case with starvation.
> weren't on their deathbeds with covid claiming it was a hoax
Have you treated many patients with COVID? I’ve heard the opposite of your claim from those who have.
As the husband at the time of a military critical care nurse who worked local ED in a major US city and deployed to New York -- yes, there were absolutely people who denied they had COVID even as they were being intubated.
Most people tended to accept reality when their body started failing, but there were a non-zero number that refused to believe they were infected with coronavirus to the end.
Politicians and social media click farmers spouting lies do influence people, and not everyone starts with a basic understanding of biology and/or science.
People with first hand experience offering counterpoints like Dr Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi did but unfortunately their videos explaining their side of the story were conveniently removed from places your YouTube -- while conveniently leaving the videos remaining to hear the kind of stories you heard.
Step back a moment and ask yourself,
“How exactly would Dr Dan Erickson know if someone else’s patient said this?”
There was massive regional differences in how different parts of the country and even different parts of the same state responded to COVID.
Was this a yes or a no?
The issue was their extrapolation of their local keyhole perception to the entire country.
Flawed in many ways: https://www.acep.org/corona/COVID-19-alert/covid-19-articles...
many people i know personally who, to this day deny covid was real, they personally knew people who died or were hospitalized and ventilated. yet they still deny it was real.
one of my family members who was in a coma for over a month and in the hospital for months still denies it was covid despite multiple doctors telling him otherwise. some people live in a very real state of denial entirely separated from reality.
sadly i’m not sure the person you replied to is too far off.
Same here. The extreme politicization of the disease, plus the social isolation, plus over reliance on inflammatory social media as one's only channel to the outside world, fully broke some people's grip on reality. Permanently for some.
> People largely weren't on their deathbeds with covid claiming it was a hoax
There were actually lots of people doing exactly this. Perhaps "largely" is the key word here but there were plenty of people dying of covid and refusing ventilators because they believed it was a conspiracy theory.
Apparently the virus was able to ruin cognitive function that people struggling to breathe thought they're fine. (Ok, it seems too convenient that the virus can do this...).
Nobody (OK, maybe a few very special people) is saying that COVID was a hoax. What is true - and one wasn't allowed to say - was that the measures intended to prevent COVID weren't very effective and did more harm than good.
Ah yes you say, another psycho. He probably eats ivermectin for breakfast and chases it with bleach. But I ask you, after a chlorinated burp: how come Africa didn't die out? Why was the death rate pretty much the same in Florida and California? Did the EU really need to buy enough vaccine for ten-plus years?
> What is true - and one wasn't allowed to say - was that the measures intended to prevent COVID weren't very effective and did more harm than good.
But yet here you are saying it. Whether it's true or not probably requires a great deal of analysis, but your self-applied "psycho" label may be accurate enough if you've managed to apply lots of cognitive biases to end up with your "truth".
I'd agree the governments overreacted in many sense, but a non BoJo/Trump-government has a duty to be overcautious rather than a flippant attitude of "So what, x% dead is acceptable". Some other rules are based on dumb science: two meters distance from each other is probably a joke, a compromise between "keep everyone at home!" (what China did when there was a breakout) and a "Keep going to the pubs!", my own theory is that if you could smell someone's cigarette smoke from 2 meters away, virus particles being exhaled from their lungs would reach you too. Later we figured out getting the virus from surfaces is very unlikely, but people were still wiping surfaces down anyway...
>Later we figured out getting the virus from surfaces is very unlikely, but people were still wiping surfaces down anyway...
I'd say that's still a good thing. Surfaces can get so dirty, so I'm glad COVID made people more aware of properly clearning their surfaces.
>how come Africa didn't die out?
Because it's an airborne virus and Africa isn't 1) as connected with the world to begin with and 2) as closely concentrated as urban areas. That's before really looking into Africa's response compared to other countries.
>Why was the death rate pretty much the same in Florida and California?
Because we didn't isolate fast enough between Trump trying to claim it being a hoax early on and desperate political attempts to keep "essential workers" running business. The locality doesn't matter for an airorne virus; just that people continue to go outside and not develop herd immunity.
>Did the EU really need to buy enough vaccine for ten-plus years?
I don't have a crystal ball into 2030. But yes, people still can catch COVID in 2026. Buying only enough for 2020-2022 would be reckless.
Any other questions?
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I had the same reaction. I thought things were getting bad before COVID, but I thought that, generally, when push came to shove, sanity would prevail.
Herman Cain denied COVID's severity right up until it killed him, and them even after he died, his team was still tweeting that "looks like COVID isn't as bad as the mainstream media made it out to be." When I saw that people were literally willing to die to "own the libs", I knew shared reality was toast.
Could also say that over half the population finding such ridiculous mandates justifiable: lockdowns and demands that employers enforce vaccination compliance for all employees, ordoned non democratically by a senile; in a country with constitutional rights likely meant we would not see activists engaging in vandalism anytime soon.
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I was probably one of "you". My comment is simply calling out the liberticide episode we attended rather quietly.
After 2025, I don't think y'all get to say it's libertcide to wear a mask, sorry.
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>> I would have believed that before 2020, but after COVID, I fully believe that if the food ran out, half the country would say it's a fake hoax. People would be on their death beds actually starving, and deny it was happening with their last breath.
We're in a K-Shaped Economy right now and half the folks will deny there is any K and insist everything is amazing.
> until food runs low and the economy stalls.
Well one of those is already on the fast tracking to happening (economy stalling).
Unfortunately, I don't have much faith that people will turn against the administration during any kind of major depression/food scarcity. I foresee people turning against each other for survival instead.
The American and French revolutions originated in the middle classes. The poor are often indifferent to politics because they're focused on survival. The middle classes, who own things they don't want to lose and have free time to aspire for more, are the ones who start revolutions. The poor only came in after being whipped up by the interested parties, and don't necessarily join the revolutionary side.
> The American and French revolutions originated in the middle classes.
I don't know about the american revolution, but that's wrong for the french revolution. I'll link to french wikipédia pages since they are far better on the subject. https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89tats_g%C3%A9n%C3%A9raux_... Here we can see the first National Assembly was half nobility and clergy. The third estate was the other half.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiers_%C3%A9tat > Par ailleurs, les députés du tiers état aux états généraux représentaient essentiellement la bourgeoisie[2].
Which indicate that the majority of the third estate representative were bourgeois.
> Which indicate that the majority of the third estate representative were bourgeois.
The bourgeois are the middle class.
Were the middle class, but what people think of middle class today, doesn't apply to what it was back then.
> The bourgeoisie are a class of business owners, merchants and wealthy people, in general, which emerged in the Late Middle Ages, originally as a " middle class" between the peasantry and aristocracy. They are traditionally contrasted with the proletariat by their wealth, political power, and education, as well as their access to and control of cultural, social, and financial capital.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourgeoisie
Today the meaning of bourgeoisie, still applies to "business owners, merchants and wealthy people", but is now seen as upper class.
Yes, the proletariat has been brainwashed and convinced that they're the middle class, while the middle classes have become the new aristocracy. The disappearance of hereditary nobility and rise of liberalism (which brings along separation of church and state, which removes the power of the clergy) made the old distinctions less useful, so we have the modern lower (proletariat), middle (skilled workers), and upper (bourgeois) classes.
Three critical differences the American Revolution had: (1) the middle class had some extremely well educated people, (2) the communication technology among the colonies was pretty fast whereas the comms between the colonies and the British rule across the Atlantic was slow, and (3) the empire tried to clamp down on the colonies ability to export to any market other than the mother country, killing lots of profit which previously made those markets strong.
(4) the British navy was busy raiding the carribean for prize money and abandoned the army in america.
I recommend the book "The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution and the Fate of the Empire"
> You won't get to the kind of change you thought you would see until food runs low and the economy stalls.
These are no longer impossibles.
Boy is he trying on the latter. Quite impressive just how resilient it seems to be.
It's like when management does something stupid and then engineering works overtime to keeps the system working. Of course management learns nothing and all outside observers don't even notice something went wrong.
There is a limit to how much engineers working overtime can do to offset management stupidity and when you reach the limit the bottom falls out. Of course then everybody blames the engineers...
It's being heavily supported a bubble. We'll see how resilient it is when that pops. As it is, the average person's finances and future prospects are getting worse all the time regardless of whatever the stock market is doing.
Yes, tbh I would not have thought that you could take a sledgehammer to the economy as if you're say Elon Musk buying a communications platform and yet, here we are, 1 year in and we're still hanging on.
But I wouldn't bet on another three of these.
It will pop just in time to put the blame on the liberal that wants to slightly tax the rich and improve the quality of life of working people.
> Quite impressive just how resilient it seems to be.
I watched a few analyses on this and it really comes down to faith.
I really wish it weren't kidding. The resistance against this economic downturn comes a large part due to conservative skewing financiers who believe "Trump won't let the economy crash". And that faith somehow keeps people pushing their chips in in times where they'd have probably long pulled out of Biden.
2025-6 will truly be a "vibe-cession" in so many ways.
"There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy."
- Alfred Henry Lewis
> The American Revolution was rare in that it didn't need to happen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proclamation_of_Rebellion
Interestingly y'all Americans pay much more tax now than you did to England back in the day. Turns out King George was right, and it was just about changing who the tax was paid to.
It's also rare to just "discover" an entire continent that is basically free for the taking since Europeans annihilated native populations through disease and technological superiority.
Much of what makes America unique is tied to this essentially once in a generation event that will never happen again on this planet, a contingent confluence of Earth's parallel geographic and biological evolution... it's fairly easy to rebel or become a superpower when other powers have to contend with peer conflicts right on their borders. A break with England was inevitable why take orders from people an ocean away in the age of sail?
That's one of the core plot points in The Mars Trilogy - Why take orders from people on another planet in the age of sub-light-speed space travel?
It's worse than that; within a few generations our linguistic and biological systems will begin to diverge under conditions with little cross-pollination and different selective pressures. We will become aliens in the sci-fi sense very rapidly if we attempt to create a foundation-like diaspora of settlements.
That was explored in Stephenson's Seveneves
This sounds like lysenkoism.
I think the skepticism warrants more work than that. Darwin's finches are an entry-level concept to learn when learning about biochemistry and genetics. Separate planets would act to separate groups into distinct genetic populations which would then have different selection pressures put upon them. Even without selection pressure, genetic drift in both populations would result in differences compounding over time.
Humans aren't the endpoint of evolution. Something will come after us, and if we're spread out on a ton of planets, there would need to be explicit counteracting forces (genetic modification, tremendous volumes of interstellar human travel, etc.) to make sure whatever comes after us is uniform among our interstellar backyard.
Most genetic drift happens during 'bottleneck' periods where >80% of the population dies due to selective pressure.
The US also got its own stock market.
Back then most taxes went to Britain.
Now they go to Bezos
Where there’s an opportunity to be the 1%, folks will find a way to be the 1%
What's the difference? Render unto Caesar, right?
Not really a secret. The slogan was "No taxation without representation" not "no taxation."
The degree to which legislation in the US is bought by big companies and rarely reflects democratic desires we may be in another "no taxation without representation" era.
Even if the needs of the American people weren't being ignored over the wishes of corporations and the ultra-wealthy in terms of numbers alone we have less representation than ever before because the number of people who are supposed to represent us hasn't kept up with the growing population.
America ended in 1861 when the era of political bargains transitioned to the era of the government and the subjects.
with 20/20 hindsight it would have been a whole lot better to throw a Constitutional Convention rather than have a civil war.
It had already intentionally been forgotten how well that worked the first time.
But without a war you'd be expected to preserve the republic and then how could you concentrate power for yourself.
Throw a constitutional conventions so that the slave owners could get their votes in (not the slaves, of course, though the owners should get to vote FOR them).
I understand that the civil war was about a lot of things, but the precipitating issue was slavery. Slavers should be obliterated by war if they aren't willing to give up their slaves unconditionally.
Slavery destroyed the roman republic just like it destroyed the American republic. Slavery and republican government are fundamentally incompatible because it devalues the labor and vote of the citizen. Instead of ending slavery the civil war simply made everyone a slave to the government. No longer did the government need to compromise, they could simply do whatever they wished by force.
Today millions of new wage slaves flood into the country to further devalue the citizens labor and vote.
> "Instead of ending slavery the civil war simply made everyone a slave to the government."
Look, I hate the elites as much as anyone and bemoan their outsized power over regular citizens, but to compare literal chattel slavery to the post-civil war U.S. is wild. Actual, real life, slavery was a deeply integrated part of their culture. Our democracy has a ton of problems, to be sure, but I find it very hard to blame that on the civil war.
Good observation.
Think about how it was in a state like North Carolina in the 1850's where they were building textile mills which could add great value to the cotton before it was shipped.
This was enough of a threat to Northern manufacturing without their factories having to compete with unpaid labor. They were not happy campers, they had always been making way more money per ton of cotton in the well-established Northern textile mills than the plantations had ever been. And banking it just in case.
In the factory it would be a lot higher-skilled labor than down on the farm, it was still unpaid but never without cost. A dollar would go a long way back then but everything was still relative. Imagine that $10000 was the annual cost of having the labor in a factory without any wages. Accommodations, family support, infrastructure and things like that are what makes this total.
1859 rolls around and the guy in the green visor adds it up and shakes his head, "sheesh it's $11000 this year, when is it going to end?"
War comes & goes eventually, slaves are freed like they should/could have been the whole time, the dust settles and after a year of actually paying wages for the first time to laborers, the guy in the green visor about drops out of his seat because his total labor cost is now $15000. All he can say is "when is it going to end?" Where have we heard that before?
Same thing with the guy in the bank in New York whose employer had been raking it in from all their investments in Southern companies. It just wasn't the same and never was going to be that way again.
At least not exactly.
I don't understand the point you're trying to make.
It is convoluted but very few people recognize this as well as you do, regardless of how obvious it is:
>war simply made everyone a slave
The same thing in my message, from almost the reverse point of view, how the way some factory-working slaves were turned into employees by the same war in the 19th century.
What's the difference anyway?
The difference between wage slave and fully-owned has been based mainly on freedom-of-movement and payment for labor, which have always been big enough to destroy a republic.
But not big enough for any difference in tasks or financial considerations to be the major thing for something like a government or corporation.
In some ways not much more modern than the Romans.
For the elites, they have always benefited most from a majority of subjects whose wages, if wages were involved, were not that much more significant than zero when it comes to the bottom line.
I know what you mean but there were so many other possible outcomes that would have resulted in banishment of slavery from North America just as well.
If the southern agricultural states didn't want to be with the free states in the Union any more anyway, it might have been the only opportunity to withdraw without a war.
Individually, without a confederacy, which instead quickly amounted to a large vengeful adversary where there didn't have to be.
It would have been a tough decision for each state to make, under non-emergency conditions, whether they wanted to remain with the country that possessed Wall Street or not.
After all it was Wall Street companies who were often financing the plantations to begin with, before stock traders escalated to funding the slave trade once its human cargo became more lucrative than most.
As it turned out, besides all the death & destruction suffered by all states, Washington itself went into such deep debt to Wall Street in order to fully vanquish the Confederate States, that it set the stage for untenable "permanent" debt where the lenders never got paid back real well for so many decades.
Wall Street has possessed Washington ever since.
Otherwise there would never have been a FED as we know it.
Do you feel represented?
We need to change it to 'no representation without taxation' and ban lobbyists for any industry/company/interest that doesn't pay an equal percentage of their income as the average 'taxed on labor' American.
No, lobbying should be banned even if they pay tax. The only way corporations should have access to representation is by having their role formally defined by an amendment to the Constitution. As in, this government is formed by citizens who have these rights, and corporations that have these rights. Make it official and open, not the subversive manipulation where we act like they aren't there.
What confuses me is that no revolution is required. All we had to do to avoid this was to vote. Voting would still (probably) work.
Just like how all we had to do to shut down Guantanamo Bay was vote for President Obama, right? So glad that that worked out. By and large, our institutions are not democratic, in that they are not responsive to 'popular opinion'; while there are certain arenas where, for one reason or another, the will of the majority does sway the day (e.g. the influence of scandals on individual elected officials), by and large most things are decided by non-democratic factors like business interests and large donors, and the media just works to get people on-side with whatever comes out of that.
To quote a well-known study on the topic: “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”
(Gilens & Page, Perspectives in Politics)
Not closing Guantanamo is, unfortunately, an example of democracy working. Public support for closing it has never been anything close to a majority. Obama got elected despite, not because, of that promise. Congress blocking his attempts to do so was a reflection of the will of the people, even if perhaps coincidentally.
This is ahistoric. No-one ever said we had to "just vote for Obama" to close Guantanamo Bay.
Frankly, Obama _tried_ to close Guantanamo Bay. He significantly shrunk the population of inmates, but it was ultimately Congress, and the courts that prevented the closure
Obama spent a huge amount of time and political capital trying to clean up Bush's messes.
Obama only tried to close Guantanamo by moving the prisoners to the United States, which is arguably worse than having them in Guantanamo. It would mean that you could hold prisoners in the United States indefinitely without trial. What he should have done was give the prisoners fair trials or release them.
Having prisoners in the US is a lot more hassle and subject to scrutiny than keeping them tucked away on some out of bounds military prison where few have access to, which was probably the reason to put prisoners there in the first place. Anything could be done to prisoners on Guantanamo, including torture.
You're supporting the point of the person you responded to.
One vote isn't enough. Just Obama was insufficient when congress was not sufficiently aligned.
But I have no power to vote for anyone but the president, two senators and one representative.
What he’s saying is that you need to vote with a consistent message. Voting for Bush, then voting for Obama, then voting for Trump is unlikely to make any lasting change
That’s the separation of powers at work, which is desirable. Congress has to (and can) do it. Obama, unlike Trump, would sometimes back down when he met the edges of executive authority. That’s how it should be.
I wanted Gitmo closed, but I don’t want it closed in a way that further expands the executive branch by once again nibbling at the edges of another branch’s authority.
Plenty of countries that are well-run democracies don’t have separation of powers between the legislature and the executive — the UK is one of many examples.
Separation between the executive and the judiciary is important, but separation from the legislature doesn’t really seem to be.
Even among countries that do have such a separation, the US is unique in making it so difficult for the legislature to pass anything, which IMO is the most serious flaw in its system. The permanent deadlock is what creates such a temptation for the executive to circumvent the rule of law and try to seize power wherever it can.
All wannabe dictators complain about not having enough power to save the country. I am not referring specifically to the US.
Historically it hasn't generally been this difficult to pass anything.
At ~all times for a long period of time during Gitmos operation, there was at least one (revolving) prisoner that no nation on earth would take. I think that was the biggest challenge for someone who actually wanted to close gitmo, to close it. Not clear where you would put them that wouldn't be yet another prison.
I guess now that the US has normalized relations with the Taliban, maybe they'll end up sending them to them, not sure who else will take the last ones.
They should stand trial in a US court, and if they’re acquitted, they should be set free, like anyone else. That’s a pretty fundamental principle of the rule of law.
If they’re indeed innocent and can’t be deported because nobody will take them, then they have to be allowed to stay in the US. That’s unfortunate but not really their fault given that the US brought them into its jurisdiction against their will in the first place.
It seems transparently unfair to capture someone and then keep them forever because nobody else wants them.
If we didn’t want them then why did we capture them?
A lot of them were captured for things like simply having an F91W watch and also being proximal or familial to a terrorist. They were initially wanted but then once 'cleared' the problem became once accused as a terrorist no country on earth wanted to take them even if they were cleared as likely innocent.
Obviously it was also politically infeasible to admit them into the general US.
No, they refuted their strawman.
This is far too nihilist.
Obama and Biden both led to meaningful policy improvements and they were far more stable than the current admin.
They were able to slow down the inevitable trajectory, they did nothing to reverse course. Doing anything different would be too "radical" for Obama or Biden.
The trajectory in question was pretty well laid out in Bush’s Patriot act. If the Democratic Party at any point wanted to reverse course they would have opposed the initial legislation (like the general public did), and subsequently championed a policy which abandons it and corrects for the harm it caused.
That did not happen, quite the contrary in fact.
I think you vastly undersell how much of the US voters supported extreme measures in reaction to Sept 11.
There was a social panic to “protect us against terrorism” at pretty much any cost. It was easy for the party in power to demonize the resistance to the power grab and nobody except Libertarians had a coherence response.
I don‘t think it really matters how much people supported these extreme actions. This policy was clearly wrong. The general public mounted a much more significant opposition against this policy then the Democratic party did. Some members of the Democratic party did some opposition, but the party as a whole clearly did not oppose this, and therefor it was never truly on the ballots.
To be clear, I personally don‘t think stuff like this should ever be on the ballot in any democracy. Human rights are not up for election, they should simply be granted, and any policy which seeks to deny people human rights should be rejected by any of the country’s democratic institutions (such as courts, labor unions, the press, etc.)
> I don‘t think it really matters how much people supported these extreme actions. This policy was clearly wrong.
This is wrong and ignorant of how we select elected representatives. They have no incentive to do “what is right” and all of the incentives to do “what is popular”. The representatives who stood up against the Patriot Act, the surveillance state, “you’re either with us or either the terrorists”, etc were unable to hold any control in Congress.
The reason we have stereotypes of politicians as lying, greasy, corrupt used car salesmen is because their incentives align with those qualities.
I am exclusively discussing the _is_, not the _ought_ (which is where I would agree with you)
If politicians did what was popular, the USA would have a public health system a long time ago. They just pretend and do things they're paid to support, that's it.
I was stating an opinion, not a fact, and I was interpreting history according to that opinion. That is I am arguing for a certain historical framework from which I judge historical moments.
I also don‘t think mine is a widely unpopular opinion either. That scholars of democracy and human rights agree that a democracy should not be able to vote them selves into a dictatorship, that human rights are worth something more than what can be ousted by a popular demand. So I don’t think this is an unreasonable historical framework, from which I judge the actors of this history of.
Not sure if you are aware but we rarely directly get to vote on these things. You vote for a representative and hope they vote in a way that serves your interests. But now, we have omnibus bills. And it's 50/50 loaded with things we want and things we don't. The same bill that funds Pre-K will also have a section to fund a kitten shredding machine. But if you vote against it all voters will hear is how you don't want to fund education.
I do not live in the USA, but my understanding of those omnibus bills is that they are government blackmail of its people.
I remember being horrified the first time I heard this was legal in the USA.
How can the US citizens accept such a brutal denying of good governance is beyond me.
The omnibus bills aren’t blackmail, as much as a symptom of the failure of Congress to be able to do what it is supposed to: debate.
There is 1 funding bill per year which only requires a 50% vote instead of a 60% / 67% to pass that all other spending bills require.
Every member with a goal tries to attach it to the big annual funding bill. The bill becomes so large that nobody likes the bill as a whole, but everybody has something in it they will defend.
And the old filtering process (committees which recommend the content of bills) are dominated by majority party leadership. This is maybe the closest symptom to blackmail.
I‘m not (yet) a citizen of the USA, but I’ve lived there for a while. As I understand it, there is hardly any political opposition in this country. I would actually describe it as a controlled opposition. A lot of people here tend to think the only role of the opposition is to run the right candidate and win the next election. As such, there is no real resistance when the majority government oversteps their boundaries.
To make matters worse, labor unions are equally politically inactive, and most often their only political moves are endorsing candidates. When they do voice support for or opposition against bills, those bills are often stuff related to their industry, and seldom do they actually oppose an over reaching government by threatening general strikes etc.
The press here is also very right leaning. All the big media are owned by capitalist conglomerates and as such most people never hear real challenges to the capitalist power structure. As long as the government class acts favorable to the capitalist interest, then the press has aligning interest, and is thus heavily incentivized to never challenge the government to much.
> To make matters worse, labor unions are equally politically inactive, and most often their only political moves are endorsing candidates.
This isn’t true, UAW almost got Biden to transfer wealth directly from taxpayers to them via the union made EV credit bonus, laundered through government motors
It wouldn’t have mattered because the Horowitz Foundation donated them to avoid governance and regulations.
IIRC FDR pioneered the contemporary use of this to ram through progressive legislation, in particular social security by essentially packaging it up so the needy would get nothing in other programs if social security wasn't passed.
Though I wouldn't be surprised if the idea goes back to Roman times.
Who can I vote for that will stop flock cameras from being installed?
In many cases, the decision to install Flock cameras have been made by city councils and sheriffs' offices. So it very much depends on local candidates.
On the broader topic, I'm not sure that just voting is the way that we'll get out of this mess, but I think a large part of the problem is how our focus on wider, national issues has eroded the interest in the local. So people seem to be most disenfranchised from the level of politics where they can actually have the most influence, both by voting and direct action (protests, calls, etc).
The local government officials in charge of allowing these to be installed.
It also represents an opportunity for upstarts. If you want to get into local politics, this is a single issue that will unit voters and bring them in.
We had a city councilperson elected on the sole issue of replacing the purple street lights. She won decisively and her entire campaign was literally signs everywhere promising to fix the purple streetlights. (yes, they were fixed).
Seattle voted for Katie Wilson as mayor partly because she seemed to oppose surveillance cameras. She now seems to have changed her mind is is speaking in favor of them.
According to [1] Seattle doesn’t use Flock and Wilson hasn’t taken a stand either way, even on the campaign trail.
[1]: https://www.theburnerseattle.com/post/mayor-elect-wilson-won...
Badger your city council, work with like-minded residents in a way that can credibly threaten their re-elections, find and support privacy-conscious candidates who won't sign-onto Flock's agenda, create ads based on council meetings when councilors support surveillance in a way most voters will reject. Put their quotes on billboard with their picture, etc
Ok, you do all that work at home and manage to block flock in your area. It doesn’t matter because the next city over where you work installed them so you get tracked anyway.
Then 2 years later a new city council gets elected and they install flock cameras in your city too. You can never get rid of them because it already passed and nobody wants to relitigate the same thing every couple of years.
Local politics does not work here.
> You can never get rid of them because it already passed and nobody wants to relitigate the same thing every couple of years.
Those who care about their privacy should relitigate at every opportunity. "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance"; if you're not willing to fight for it, you will lose it, and deservedly so. Those who give up in advance are beyond fucked, because they'll have to take whatever is sent their way.
Our city voted out the cameras so the feds just installed flock cameras on every bit of federal property in and near town, plus they're at private places like hardware stores.
Opponents too can escalate to the next rung: perhaps a county-level retail tax on all retailers hosting ALPRs.
Either that or getting creative with well-directed, statically charged aerosolized oil droplets.
Exactly. This is not a local politics problem.
We turned over seats on our city council for the first time in decades and the new, "liberal" council members voted with the rest, unanimously, to install more Flock cameras.
Your mayor and city council and maybe local judges and sheriff.
I don't think that's all we (assuming you're USA) had to do or need to do going forward. Voting is "necessary but not sufficient" as the quote goes.
Your voting system is shit. It results in a two party state. If one party fails to present a coherent offering and the other one is infiltrated by nut jobs then the system breaks down. After all, if it was such a good system, why didn’t you impose it on Germany and Japan when you won WW2? (This comment is politically neutral; who the incoherents and the nut jobs are are left to the reader’s discretion)
"...Are left to the reader's discretion" has an unintended right discretion bias. I would say down-to-earth "... Are up to your discretion"
Unfortunately, studies undertaken by MIT over a decade ago show that when it comes to law writing and passing, voters have no statistically measurable input at the federal level. (Since citizens united)
It’s all just identity politics. I will say that Trump has proven the exception to this rule, enacting a whole lot of policy that circumvents the law and has real effects. (And is likely mostly unconstitutional if actually put to the test)
So while locally, voting can be powerful, it’s mostly bread and circuses at the federal level since regulatory capture is bipartisan.
It shouldn't be a surprise that a willingness to violate the law works quickly when congress is unwilling to do anything to stop it. The ability for the law and constitution to be ignored when all three branches of government collude to do exactly that is a huge weakness in the system
I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.
Seconded. Democracy is the only transcendental political system: you can have any ideology you want (so be careful or you'll be voting only once). To survive, it depends on civic spirit - i.e. participation. Democracy always collapses into authoritarianism eventually. Then (if you want it bad enough), you have to claw it back, slowly and painfully. All just as Plato foresaw.
It really bothers me that so few people in the modern West understand just how lucky they are. If you didn't have the control you already have over your government, you'd be fighting for it.
"All we had to do to avoid this was to vote."
Every time I hear this I cringe, whether this subject or any other. The people did vote and this is what they got - not necessarily what they specifically voted for. Different people hold things in different importance. Flock security cameras (or similar) generally don't even get noticed by the people voting on taxes, guns, abortions, etc.
Besides, establishment Democrats aren’t exactly for the common man, they’re just not as cartoonishly evil as the Republicans. Democrats would likely still be in favor of Flock cameras.
The age old tactic of vilification. It's easy to overlook all the nuances on all sides; it's a whole spectrum with plenty of overlap.
My hope in the US is that folks at least take the time to evaluate their options and/or candidates; voting a straight ticket just because someone calls themselves something can lead to undesirable outcomes.
Not to mention that most of the most upending, consequential changes and events in America were not only not voted on, but were wildly opposed by the populace, yet were imposed anyways and today, after decades of government “education”, people vigorously support and defend those tyrannical impositions.
Voting doesn't work as well when there's billions of dollars being spent to influence the votes to make billionaires richer, while the working class that could vote against it is too busy working 3 part time jobs just to survive.
This is why I'm in favor of sortition instead of voting.
The majority of random people don't have combination of desire, corruption, sophistication, and political experience to pull off this kind of bribery.
Virtually every elected politician does.
~Everything about the election process selects for the worst kinds of people.
There is a lot of truth in this but I'm not convinced sortition is going to work either.
But what you could do is vote with a string attached and a penalty for being recalled that is going to make people think twice about running for office if their aim is to pull some kind of stunt. The 'you give me four years unconditionally' thing doesn't seem to work at all.
I've been mulling over a system where there's a legislative body composed of citizens picked through sortition and another legislative body that's elected like normal legislative bodies of today.
The twist on that body however is that voting is mandatory and ballots have a non of the above option on them. If a super majority (say 60-75%) vote none of the above the election is a do-over with all the people on the ballot being uneligable to run for that seat for say 5-10 years.
I like the idea, but I worry about choosing random members of the public when so many people are unprepared for it. Any kind of government made up of "the people" requires that those people be literate, educated, and informed. With things the way they are today I'd worry that your secondary elected legislative body would end up doing everything and you'd either end up with a figurehead who'd be out of their depth and ineffectual or one being used/manipulated.
I could also envision an endless cycle of elections with 75%+ of the population voting "none of the above" because of issues like "Not my personal favorite candidate" or "eats the wrong mustard" or "I hate the idea of government"
Nice one, that might actually work. But it will be hard to explain to the electorate.
That's super-interesting experiment, but I wouldn't start it in such a large country as USA. Why won't humanity test it on a smaller scale?
In Belgium (Ostbelgien) the German-speaking community has a permanent sortition-based Citizens’ Council wired into the parliamentary process; In Ireland they've already run national, randomly selected Citizens’ Assemblies on high-stakes constitutional topics.
These are basically production prototypes - maybe we should ask ourselves why they don't push it further?
[flagged]
The amorality was not in plain sight, if your only source of news is Fox News or Breitbart or Twitter.
The US is a semi-democracy, notably due to its hyper-polarized two party system that completely forbids (in the 2020s) any crossing of party lines for compromise.
The single biggest improvement to American society would be to implement multi-member districts for legislature, OR to implement STAR voting - any kind of system that promotes the existence of more parties, more political candidates, to break the two party cycle.
Far too many people fail to vote or research candidates due to how shitty our democracy is. Far too few candidates exist as a blend of values, and we are stuck with "every liberal policy" vs. "every conservative policy".
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To that end, it seems the cities that are banning Flock for proper privacy reasons are all in liberal states and cities. Conservative/moderate areas seem a lot less engaged on the topic. "That's just how it goes, of course government is going to tread on us, what can be done about it".
I think more people would bother with voting if they felt their vote mattered, but between the two party system (where both options suck), the gerrymandered distracting, and other voter suppression tactics people have been conditioned to feel powerless over the outcome of elections.
I'm entirely unsurprised if the majority of places taking a stand against flock cameras are liberal. From what I've seen conservatives tend to fetishize police and punishment. There's a lot of boot-licking going on for a group of people who posture as being rebels and anti-government, but I think there's also an assumption that only (or mainly) "others" will be targeted and punished. To the extent that it's true, I sure wouldn't expect it to stay that way.
This argument was viable 20 years ago, but we are way, way beyond “both options suck” at this point. It’s more like “one option sucks and the other option is absolutely catastrophic — also, the second option may be the last choice you ever get”.
On the contrary I think Americans are reacting about the same as any other set of people would react. There are always going to be people who, as long as their personal lives are stable, they are not going to do anything to put that stability at risk. America is also huge enough that even if one part of the country is having a crisis, millions of fellow citizens will not hear of it or have any 2nd, 3rd or 4th hand connection to the matter.
But also if a small portion of Americans disparately plan to do stuff like sabotage surveillance camera, it's still newsworthy.
The only people whose lives are stable in this economy are the ultra wealthy. Even those who we would normally consider "middle class" are a couple of medical emergencies away from financial ruin. Whole classes of jobs are disappearing.
Let’s be clear though - it’s not that Americans are clinging to some deep stability that brings them comfort or relaxation, it’s that they’re on the edge already. The vast vast majority of people are barely able to afford the basics of life, while we’re bombarded with an ever more shameless wealthy elite’s privileges.
Politics is like water boiling - it’s just going to be little bubbles at first but all of a sudden it will start to really rumble.
Is that really the case? It seems to me that the vast majority in the US can fairly easily afford a fair bit of material luxury, mostly because material luxuries have become incredibly cheap (by historical standards).
The trouble is at least in the high population areas (AFAICT) a huge swath of "average" people seem to be stuck living life on a paycheck-to-paycheck basis, renting, no prospect of property ownership, minimal to zero retirement savings, no realistic way to afford children, etc. Not abnormal by historic or global standards but very abnormal when compared to the past ~150 years of US history.
"Among the 37 percent of adults who would not have covered a $400 expense completely with cash or its equivalent, most would pay some other way, although some said that they would be unable to pay the expense at all. For those who could cover the expenses another way, the most common approach was to use a credit card and then carry a balance, and many indicated they would use multiple approaches. However, 13 percent of all adults said they would be unable to pay the expense by any means (table 21), unchanged from 2022 and 2023 but up from 11 percent in 2021"
https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2025-economic-we...
An informative data point. To provide some context regarding my earlier comment, a brand new full size memory foam mattress can be had for less than $200 shipped in the continental US. A computer capable of playing modern AAA video games can be had for less than $400. Material luxuries in the modern day are cheap to an almost absurd degree.
I think maybe we need a new CPI metric for HCOL areas that takes the form of a ratio. Something along the lines of midrange laptops per studio apartment month.
I wouldn't call these material luxuries, just like big screen TVs are no longer a luxury. Being able to visit a doctor or a dentist on the other hand...
By "luxury" I mean approximately "anything beyond bare survival". My point is that the vast majority of material possessions have become absurdly cheap by historic standards. However that doesn't preclude severe societal dysfunction (housing, children, retirement, or as you note doctors and dentists).
Thank you for clarifying. It is true that many of such possessions have become incredibly cheap (and therefore affordable) especially when it comes to media consumption and other forms of escapism, but they do very little to address our fundamental needs (physical safety & health, financial security, emotional stability).
True luxuries (not having to worry, not having to waste time) are increasingly out of reach for most people.
Stuff is cheap, but basic security is expensive. Everyone pints to the stuff, but income vs rent and asset prices has only gone up and up!
Buying housing is utterly unaffordable for a very, very large percentage of young people even educated professionals in in-demand fields. Covering expenses is awful. That famous Emirati quote of “my father had a camel, I have a Land Rover, my son will have a Lamborghini, his son will have a Land Rover, his son will have a camel” - our parents had the Lamborghinis. The majority of my generation (milllenials) are worse off than their parents. Very few have kids because they can’t afford to have them. There are exceptions everywhere but if you just listen or see the culture it is a given that our future is fucked unless something radical changes - income inequality is the highest it’s EVER BEEN. Higher than the time of the French Revolution. Higher than the “Gilded age”.
It’s foolish to think that people are okay or that nothing will come politically of this. Go look out the window in any major city, the stark differences are there for anyone’s eyes to see.
You mean like South Korea? Thailand? Peru? Nepal?
I can only hope what people will decide make trouble about is also what I consider necessary. If we could all agreed what was necessary to make trouble about there wouldn't be nearly as much to be making trouble over. It's a very double edged sword which does not necessarily do a very good job at bringing any more clarity of what the moral path was to the country.
You're fortunate if you live in a community where cameras in public spaces is in the top 20 concerns.
The other day in Kansas City some lady set fire to a warehouse that was being sought for purchase by ICE. They are on video and quite nonchalant.
> What has worried me for years is that Americans would not resort to this level.
They'll stop once the police (or ICE, more likely) start dishing out horrific punishments for it.
That would be an incredibly risky escalation, and it would be a stupid ultimatum to issue.
The people, or even states, could escalate in response. The worst case is escalating to violence; ICE isn’t trained, equipped, or numerous to deal with deploying into a violently hostile area. The army could, but then we’re in full blown civil war.
A more realistic middle ground is that it pushes people or states into nonviolent non-compliance by eg refusing to pay federal taxes. Frankly if California and New York alone stopped paying federal taxes the system would probably crumble.
ICE isn't trained for anything, they're just proud boys in tacticool gear. But the point of them is not to be effective, it's to cause headlines.
That's not how the political reality of exacting mostly voluntary compliance from the masses works.
Yeah because that works out really well in history!
Right? The French know how to riot.
I agree. The amount of cameras and tracking has gotten out of control. If America actually becomes an "authoritarian" country (seems almost likely) I imagine all these Flock pics with other data mining techniques will be used to send Communist Progressives to reeducation camp.
America is an authoritarian country for decades now.
It first dawned on me when i visited NYC some 30 years ago. I stepped over some arbitrary yellow line I wasn't supposed to - the uniformed cop that noticed that went from 0 to 100 in 0.1 second and behaved as if I just pulled a gun. Zero time to reflect and assume I might have made a legitimate mistake. Since then I've visited U.S. >150 times, and in my experience it was always thus in the U.S. - the law enforcement is on hair trigger and the populace has seemingly grown used to it and considers this behaviour normal. Geez.
(Go live in any northern european country for comparison. Any interaction with law enforcement is almost certainly going to be pleasant, cordial, and uniformed police typically does not rely on threats of violance for authority).
America is not NYC. NYC is proud of its police-state apparatus. Most of the rest of the country is very different.
NYC police seem insane lmao. For some reason various precinct accounts have made it into my social media feed, and the last time I saw the they were bragging about stealing some old ladies less lethal defense weapon.
> The amount of cameras and tracking has gotten out of control.
The UK looks at the use of cameras and feels threatened for its Nanny State title. We Yanks have laughed at that name while the water around us slowly came to a boil.
Some cities and/or states have banned the use of cameras at stop lights to issue tickets. Not really sure what caused that to happen, except the cynic in me thinks some politician received a ticket in the mail from one of the cameras.
Mass unemployment would/will be the catalyst to mass uprising. All of the fuel is in place (ICE, Epstein, rising costs of everything, unaffordable housing, general lack of hope and faith in the government, etc.) High unemployment numbers will be the spark that sets it all ablaze.
> I still think that overall, Americans are deeply underreacting to the times.
To put things in perspective, the whole humankind, as in 99.99% of population, is utterly underreacting.
General strike! Close the ports, close the airports, steal dozers and park them on railroad tracks, teachers on the streets in front of their schools to protect their students, blockade the grocery distribution centers, so that the shelves go bare, just stop everything, everywhere.
When it hurts the billionaires, they will tell their politicians to invoke the 25th.
It's the only way, we've lost our democracy, but we still have economic power.
Disrupting basic functions of the economy will hurt ordinary people a lot more than it will hurt billionaires.
Also under these conditions of food distribution and transportation being actively disrupted, why would anyone be at school? Huge numbers of American schools are unsafe and unpleasant places for kids to be in ordinary times, and a massive disruption to ordinary life is not going to make that situation any better.
Get out there and be the change you want to see, king
I don't get the sarcasm here.. Instead of sniping with snark (see HN rules, please) post your better take.
Is it not literally true that he is calling for action from the populace without doing it? You all can only lift a finger to downvote a literal call to action lmao
Who is the arbiter of "necessarily trouble"? You? Only people that politically agree with you?
>You? Only people that politically agree with you?
the next sentence after they mention "necessary trouble" is literally:
"But that only goes as far as to be my opinion."
they are just stating their opinion.
everyone decides when the time for "necessary trouble" is individually, based on their accumulated experience, opinion, etc. no arbiter required, just a critical mass of people with aligning opinions.
Who was the arbiter of the trouble necessary for gay rights? Who was the arbiter of the trouble necessary for civil rights? Who was the arbiter of the trouble necessary for womens' rights? Who was the arbiter of the trouble necessary for the rights of handicapped people? Indigenous people? Immigrants?
American society was created for the benefit of straight white Christian men alone. Every right held by any other group, every ounce of political power, every bit of basic human dignity, has had to be taken by force of "necessary trouble." There is no "arbiter." How could there be? An arbiter presupposes an objective moral ideal and a just society, neither of which we have. In the end, America can only be trusted to live up to its principles at the point of a gun.
While points 1 and 2 are indeed desirable, point 3 should be moot given we have a constitutional right to privacy and freedom from unreasonable search and seizures.
The combination of ubiquitous scanners, poor data controls on commercially owned date, and law enforcement access without proper warrants compounds to a situation that for many rational people would fail the test of being fair play under the Fourth Amendment. For similar reasons, for example, it has been held by the Supreme Court that installing a GPS tracker on a vehicle and monitoring it long-term without a warrant is a 4A violation (US v Jones). Similar cases have held that warrants are needed for cellphone location tracking.
So far, however, courts have not held Flock to the same standard -- or have at least held that Flock's data does not rise to the same standard.
I personally think this is a mistake and is a first-order reason we have this problem, and would prefer the matter to stop there rather than rely on ethics. (Relying on ethics brought us pollution in rivers, PFAS and Perc in the ground, and so on.)
Given the state of politics and the recent behavior of the Supreme Court, however, I would not hold my breath for this to change soon.
> This breakdown in rule of law is unfortunate.
Yearly reminder to read:
https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/kurz-the-discourse-of-vol...
This is excellent, I second your suggestion for everyone to read this.
i'm not a fan of lawlessness but on the other hand, i'm 100% ok with the government living in fear of the governed.
Lawlessness is superior to the law of the tyrant.
Having lived or spent time in a lot of 3rd world shitholes, including a civil war, I've only really felt freedom in places with lawless lack of government, never places with 'rule of law' -- that always gets twisted for the elite.
Of course the same happens in lawless regions, but power is fractured enough, there is a limit on power they can wield against the populace, as the opposing factions ultimately are a check on any one side oppressing the population to leave. They can't man machine guns at all the 'borders' and ultimately corruption becomes cheap enough that it is accessible to the common person which arguably provides more power to the common man than representative democracy does.
I think this element of factions in competition was part of the original genius of the '50' states with the very minimal federal government. But the consolidation of federal power and loss of the teeth of the 10th amendment and expansion of various clauses in the constitution means there is now no escape and very few remaining checks.
This is a personal preference and not some universal axiom.
Living under a tyrant at least tends to provide predictability and stability of a sort. The kind of violence that exists in a lawless society tends not to exist. State sanctioned violence, sure, but that's more often than not targeted.
Basically, given the choice of Somalia or North Korea, there will be a diversity of opinions as to which someone prefers. I'm not saying I prefer one to the other, just that "Somalia" is not an objectively correct choice.
As a note on Somalia: Somalia outside the state-like entities (Somaliland, Puntland, Al-Shaabab caliphate, and FGS / federally controlled somalia) is governed by xeer law.
It's actually not lawless, it just uses a decentralized (polycentric) legal system that is poorly understood by westerners. They've had better outcomes under this system than under democratic government of FGS, which led to all or nothing tribalism influences coming into office.
This is sort of a distinction without a difference.
Any long-running human society will over time crystallize into some structure that resembles having a legal system. When people say a place is "lawless" it doesn't mean someone can just murder their neighbor in broad daylight for no reason, and all the other neighbors just shrug and say "well, gee, darn, I guess there was no law against that".
The real meaning behind the original comment I replied to is that in both the lawless and tyrannical governments, it really comes down to "might makes right". In the "lawless" society, anyone can gain might and use violence against others if they have accumulated enough power. In the tyrannical society, the State has gained this power and uses is capriciously and unpredictably.
The question is really "would you rather the main source of potential violence against you be the armies and police of a dictator, or would you rather have to deal with your local warlord, while having the potential to become your local warlord?".
In a country like the US with a fairly democratic process at various levels of government, this just means that people with some strong opinions can subject the rest of the citizens to their desires. This is the universal veto on societal order. We can see that the desire for governments to "live in fear of the governed" usually rapidly disappears when people start destroying water lines and power lines. After all, 'the governed' and 'the government' are the same people just with different factions distributed in power.
A government that can't do anything to police unions is also the government living in fear of the governed. A government that can't rein in (say) PG&E is also a government living in fear of the governed. When political representatives are shot by a right-wing anti-abortion terrorist that is also (and perhaps even more viscerally so) a government living in fear of the governed. And I'm certainly not 100% okay with this.
> In a country like the US with a fairly democratic process at various levels of government
How can you look at the current state of affair and say this with a straight face... It's a mafia, they're all millionaires, they're all friends, thay all go to the same schools, they all work for the government and instantly bounce to lobby for the private sector, they all use their insider knowledge to profit, &c. Only someone who went through the American education system can believe the US is anywhere close to what you described, it's a farce
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The thing about that is the governments who most fear the governed are often extremely draconian. I actually do not think that it is constructive and it is precisely that fear that is driving things like voter suppression in the US.
You are unfortunately, for whatever your reasons you have, barking up the wrong tree. The people already made a law, the supreme law in fact, called the Constitution.
In fact the capital criminals in this matter are the people violating and betraying that supreme law; the politicians, sheriffs, city councils, and even the YC funders behind Flock, etc.
It is in fact not even just violating the supreme law, but though that betrayal, it is in fact also treason.
Where in the Constitution does it require us to give up our privacy to private companies with little oversight? Seems like there's contention here.
https://journals.law.unc.edu/ncjolt/blogs/under-surveillance...
The person you replied to is saying usage Flock is violating the constitution.
I was confused by the "barking up the wrong tree" opener because the parent commenter was not contradicting that line of thinking either. Though destroying property is not going to get anyone anywhere, that I can agree with if that's GP's point.
> destroying property is not going to get anyone anywhere
I seem to remember something about tea in Boston having a different outcome.
All of this presumes that residents in municipalities with ALPRs don't want them used the way they are. That's not true! These things are broadly pretty popular among a broad set of residents.
I am in favor of them. There is no expectation of privacy in the public setting. I can record anyone on a public street w/o their permission. If these license plate cameras are making the streets safer and helping to reduce crime, why not? Sure there may be some mis-uses here and there, but for the most part they seem to be working and in places where they are deployed, crime is being reduced.
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They're only popular because people are routinely lied to. We see this same issue time and time again in "free markets".
If you tell people this will help stop crime and that's it, everyone and their mama is gonna say yes.
If you tell people the truth, that police don't really care to look at the data and this surveillance is going to be used to target innocent people for unrelated "crimes" on the taxpayers dollar, then everyone would say no.
This is also why 99% of surveys are broken. You can get people to agree to literally anything if you just lie a little. After all, Adolf Hitler got elected by promising to fix the German economy and, in a way, he did.
In what way are voters in these municipalities being lied to? We got logs of all the searches, and incident reports of every time they were used to curb another vehicle. We know how well they did (or didn't, in our case) worked.
I don't know what "surveys" have to do with this. Voters voted on it; it was a campaign issue in our trustee election.
The lie comes from the intentionality. Voters are told the intention of these tools are to prevent crime, but that's not true. The intention is enrich a select few and expand the surveillance state, chilling dissent and empowering authoritians.
Once again, we look at Adolf Hitler. He told voters his intention behind power was helping the German people, but that was not true. That was just a tool he used to grab said power.
We see this with a lot of things in the US. The intention behind giving ICE tens of billions of dollars and a license to kill and ignore due process is "your protection". But that's not true.
You might say we don't actually know anyone's intention, and that is technically true. But I prefer not to play stupid, and even if you're correct, it's not worth the risk.
These things bring huge amounts of risk with them. Even if everyone involved is perfectly benevolent, which I don't think even a child could believe, there's no guarantee it will stay that way. We are building out infrastructure that practically begs to be abused. And when you say it's okay, you're essentially saying you believe everyone will stay good forever. That's quite bold, no?
When phrased that way, your position does not seem reasonable. You have to understand, this is how some people see it, and when you understand that perspective, you can understand what you're actually asking for.
People who rape, murder, and eat children run the country and face no hint of repurcussion. There never was rule of law. Only the appearance of it.
Rape is clearly in the Epstein files.
Murder is implied in the Epstein files with an email about burying girls on the property.
Eating sounds like an unhelpful exaggeration, unless I missed a major news story.
> Eating sounds like an unhelpful exaggeration, unless I missed a major news story.
There's a bunch of mentions of "jerky" in the files, some people have taken it to mean eating people.
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How is flock cameras existing, a breakdown in the rule of law? As far as I know they are not technically breaking any laws, even though I disagree with their use in principle.
Some might think it is somehow a Fourth Amendment violation, but I'm pretty sure it has already been ruled on enough times now that there is no expectation of privacy on government-owned roads, except for what's inside your car.
If the law "if you shoot an arrow with no mind to it's direction or destination existed you are guilty of negligence and liability of any damages" existed and then guns where invented you can argue either that the law needs to be updated or that case law will follow the spirit of the law and establish that it also applies to guns. If you are prescriptive and do not believe in the spirit of the law then a new law would have to cover the case of guns. Many would say there is a breakdown in the rule of law if it turned out people could just fire those guns willy nilly and the arrow law did not apply to them.
Similarly if there is a law that says the government can't build cameras everywhere to track you 24/7 without a warrant then post facto get a warrant to justify the prior tracking. Many people believe there is a breakdown in the rule of law when The government can pay someone else who has built cameras everywhere to track you 24/7 without a warrant then post facto get a warrant to justify the prior tracking.
Flock would not exist if they held ethics as a priority. It's The Panopticon from the well known book The Panopticon is Unethical
Dan Carlin, on his Common Sense podcast several years ago, said something that really stuck with me (and he probably was paraphrasing it from someone else).
Society is like a pressure cooker, with built-in safety release valves to prevent the pressure from getting too high. If your solution to the safety release is to block off the valves, with authoritarian surveillance, draconian laws, and lack of justice for the elites committing crimes, it just moves it somewhere else. Block off too many, and it explodes.
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable.”
- JFK
When laws no longer serve the people and you have a lawless government doing whatever it wants, they are merely strongly worded suggestions. We give laws their power so I don't think this government realizes just how poorly things look with the DOJ now and how little trust there is for anything coming out of the federal government.
One has not only a legal, but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.
If I were American I don't think the above mechanism would have any chance of still working to be honest.
And I don't think respecting the law still matters when the lawmakers are so evil.
I applaud the people destroying these cameras. It's not violence against people, it's just property.
The higher-desirability options are practically only theoretical in many contexts. See also the United Healthcare CEO killing.
I view this breakdown in law similar to the marijuana situation. It’s kind of a villainous administration, green lighting villainous things. The law doesn’t hold water in this case. The people have to do something drastic to get that across.
We either have out of control govt or civil unrest and only people who don’t know what the latter looks like cheer it on. We’re screwed unless someone unlocks the economy. Right now it’s not happening.
I mean, that's excellent wishcasting, but the reality is that current economic incentives combined with a lack of social ("cancel culture" got cancelled because "uwu too mean"), regulatory ("uwu can't hurt Capital or the rich people won't make jobs no more"), and criminal ("uwu can't hold Capital accountable for their actions when they do crimes or people will lose jobs") accountability means that this was always going to be the outcome.
More people need to understand that the system is working as designed, and the elimination of peaceful, incremental reform based on popular demand, along with mass manipulation of human emotions through media and advertising, means that this sort of resistance is the sole outcome left before devolving into naked sectarian violence.
Say what you will, but the anti-Flock camera smashers are at least doing something beyond wishcasting from a philosophical armchair in comment sections or social media threads.
Guess Flock cameras don't solve quite as many crimes as they claim. Surveillance heal they self.
All those behaviours are consequences of direct civil disobedience, unrest and rebellion - not alternatives.
Would someone please think of the rule of law?! :'((((
> This breakdown in rule of law is unfortunate.
Doesn't breakdown in rule of law happened when a corporation (surely) bribed local officials to install insecure surveillance devices with zero concern for the community living near them?
How many homeowners install mystery-meat Chinese cameras on their houses that feed the data God knows where? Should their homes be vandalized too for their lack of concern for the community?
Beyond any discussion of “vigilante” / “criminal” destruction of cameras, there’s a clear difference between giving domestic corporations (who act hand in glove with your local government) access to cameras on your property vs. giving foreign corporations (working hand in glove with an adversary government) access to cameras on your property.
It really comes down to whether you consider an individual’s right to privacy more important than your state’s security. Neither is really a perfect options in this case, but having the Flock camera means some part of your property is under the panopticon of local law enforcement that could arrest you (loss of privacy).
Going with chinese tech, you are probably more private in regards to your own government, but you’re probably having some negative effect on state security based on the marginal benefit of CCP surveillance/ potential malware in your network.
The dichotomy is false. People could have cameras which report to no one, but that’s less useful for all governments involved.
ok so let's just put aside chinese companies! ring is an american company, should people's ring cameras be vandalized because ring might share their data with the american government?
I have not vandalized any Ring cameras, but I have paid to replace those installed by friends and family and have those replaced shredded as part of an electronics recycling waste stream. "Think globally, act locally" sort of thing.
i don't think the people destroying flock cameras are open to the idea of going through the legal process to replace them with alternatives that have better privacy, something (maybe the fact that they currently are vandalizing them) tells me that they are just interested in vandalizing them
Flock cameras are different, they take advantage of laws that have not kept pace with technology while being colocated and operated in public spaces, to where you are forced to live in a corporate surveillance state for Flock Group's enterprise value and potential shareholder returns. And so, destruction of the devices is all that is left available to them (if their jurisdiction opts to not remove them, as many have done [1]). Somewhat silly to blame humans who want privacy (arguably a human right [2]) just so the CEO of Flock can get wealthy (and YC can get liquidity) at IPO, no?
The human is doing what you would expect the human to do when faced with limited options in an operating environment that is not favorable to them. Crime has been trending down for some time [3], Flock cameras are a business driven on fear like Shotspotter, where the results are questionable at best and you're selling to the unsophisticated.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2026/02/17/nx-s1-5612825/flock-contracts...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_privacy
[3] https://time.com/7357500/crime-homicide-rate-violent-propert... | https://archive.today/vMACL
i've never found this type of "humans were left with no alternative" argument in defense of destruction of property convincing, some of the things that separates humans from other animals is the concept of private/public property, rule of law, etc, you know? there are alternatives, contrary to the alarmism found online the US is very far from actual dictatorships where people have close to 0 way of achieving change through the legal system, immediately jumping to violence without an imminent threat is something i'd expect from lower primates, not from homo sapiens.
How are they 'immediately jumping to violence'? This surveillance debate has been going on for years.
You're free to your opinion. Property is just property, it is nothing special. Rule of law is highly dynamic and a shared delusion. Damaging or destruction of property is not violence, it is a property crime at best. In the scope of Flock, it is well documented as having been misused, illegally in many cases, by law enforcement and those with access to its systems [1] [2] [3].
> there are alternatives
This does not consistently appear to be the case in the US unfortunately.
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/12/effs-investigations-ex...
[2] https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/flock-roundup
[3] https://www.google.com/search?q=flock+misuse
> Damaging or destruction of property is not violence.
you wouldn't consider someone vandalizing your home or the infrastructure in your neighborhood to be violence? of course it is violence, an attack on the place i live (whether that's limited to just my home or to the larger community i live in) is an attack on me
is it not violence to, for example, burn down a business where people work in if you do it at a time where no one is around to get immediately hurt as a consequence? can i not call the financial damage caused both to the workers and the owners of that place violence?
I fail to see the equivalence between taking out a surveillance camera that is violating people's privacy with the other things that you list. Arguing like that is simply not going to work.
the person i replied to made a broad "destroying property is not violence" claim, the scope of the conversation is more than just that
also, i consider a security camera in a place i live to be security infrastructure, you should not be able to come into a place and do act like a vigilante imposing your view on what should and should not be recorded through force, if you have a problem with the way things work you should try to work within the law
again, this is what separates civilization from chaos
It is clear that they were in no way making that claim in the context that you put it in, that's on you, not on them.
are you sure? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47129267 they seem to disagree
> you wouldn't consider someone vandalizing your home or the infrastructure in your neighborhood to be violence?
Very obviously not. Words have meaning. You are misusing words to garner emotional support for your preferred political position.
Burning down anything (including a business) is arson. Not violence. It only becomes violence if people are present and at imminent risk of physical harm.
Financial damage is not violence. Speech is not violence. Please take your doublespeak back to reddit; it doesn't belong on HN.
I agree with your basic position, but most definitions of the word violence that I could find included the notion of: destroying things with intent to intimidate through fear of harm, threats such as brandishing weapons, and so on. It's not as simple as 'you didn't touch me so you didn't do violence' - and it makes sense when you consider the case of robbery at gunpoint.
That being said - the destruction of flock cameras is in no way violence. No one sees that and takes it as a threat of harm - at least no one acting in an honest way.
Isn't that the difference between a threat of violence as opposed to violence? Which is directly adjacent and thus treated similarly by the law.
Brandishing a gun at someone is a threat that you'll shoot them but, importantly, is not the same thing as actually making good on the threat. (From the victim's perspective the distinction is rather important.)
how did you jump from property damage and arson to speech? non sequitur much? financial damage absolutely can be violence, you can ruin someone's life if you take away their job by burning down the place they work at and it could lead to something horrific like them taking their own lives or not being able to pay for their medication or not be able to pay for their child's education, etc as a direct consequence of your act of destroying that place. destroying infrastructure people rely on to stay healthy/safe/economically stable/etc should be considered by civilized people as a violent attack on them, you cannot pretend that disrupting someone's livelihood is not at all related to attacking their liberty and/or life
a case where you can argue speech can be violence would be a verbal threat to hurt or kill someone, but that has nothing to do with what we're talking about, i don't know why you're bringing up speech, are you trying to say that destroying these cameras is a form of expressing freedom of speech? (not accusing you of this btw, just genuinely curious what you meant by that)
> how did you jump from property damage and arson to speech?
I included speech as an example, the same as your bringing up property damage, arson, and financial damage. It seemed relevant given the general shape of what you were expressing.
Someone being driven to suicide or unable to pay for medication is not an example of violence. It might be many things but violence is most certainly not one of them.
> you cannot pretend that disrupting someone's livelihood is not at all related to attacking their liberty and/or life
Indeed it is _related_ but that does not magically make it "violence". Violence is direct physical harm. Not indirect and not anything other than physical.
> a case where you can argue speech can be violence
Speech is _never_ violence. That's about as close to definitionally impossible as you can get. (Here's a fun related observation: violent rhetoric is not itself violent.)
Respectfully, you seem to be having extreme difficulty comprehending the fact that words have meaning. It's impossible to engage in meaningful discussion with someone who either can't or won't conduct themselves in accordance with that fact.
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Your first example, no. That is a threat of violence and is illegal literally everywhere (even in the US). However it does not become "violence" until you commit a physical act.
Your second example is inciting public panic. Again, not violence. And again, illegal literally everywhere (at least AFAIK).
> serious physical harm that's resulting directly from your action
That's the thing, the panic was the direct result. The physical harm was indirect. Once again, words have meanings.
Perhaps you should seek to learn more about the law. You might find that, in addition to words having meaning, society has been dealing with "problematic" behaviors for as long as it has existed and is honestly pretty well equipped for it in general. These things have been catalogued extensively. Referring to everything as "violence" is no better than labeling every other crime "terrorism".
oh, so now you care about what the law says again? remind me, what does the law say about destroying Flock cameras?
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> you wouldn't consider someone vandalizing your home or the infrastructure in your neighborhood to be violence? of course it is violence, an attack on the place i live (whether that's limited to just my home or to the larger community i live in) is an attack on me
No, I file an insurance claim and move on with my life. It is just property, and almost all property can be trivially replaced. Your property is not you. It is just property. We simply see the world differently, that's all. Good luck to you.
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I'll personally send my DNA and weekly blood work straight to Xi Jinping address and pay for postage myself before letting my own government spy my every moves. Thés risks of anything bad happening are much lower
As long as they're not pointed at the street that should be fine. If they are pointed at the street then, depending on where you live, that may not be acceptable.
Far cry difference between that and the mass dragnet and centralized surveillance of entire communities at tap for agencies/police/fed.
Rather, a community could pass a law to prevent persistent filming of public locations—why not, right?
Well, not in the US since filming in public is (at least AFAIK) constitutionally protected. It's weird though, somehow two party consent for audio recording (even in public) seems to be accepted by the courts. Although it's entirely possible that I have a misunderstanding.
It is actually kind of hard to look this up: I get lots of search results about the right to record police being protected constitutionally. And the lack of an inherent right to privacy, when in public. But, this doesn’t seem to preclude a locality from creating a law that disallows recording of public locations, right? You may not have a constitutional right to safe air, but as far as I know states can pass their own environmental regulations…
(All US specific)
> Should their homes be vandalized too for their lack of concern for the community?
If enough people can be convinced that those cameras are somehow helping Trump, you’ll find a lot of people in here and Reddit saying “yes”, I’ll imagine. Before this we had people vandalizing Teslas because of Elon.
yes.
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Sometimes I envy the simplicity of the mental worlds some people apparently occupy
The real breakdown in the rule of law occurred when the US Supreme Court made the specious decision that amoral business entities (corporations) had the same rights in a democracy as citizens.
All this shit flows downhill from Citizens United.
You must be very young? These issues predate 2010 by millennia.
Citizens United was just the inevitable outgrowth of Buckley v. Valeo 50 years ago, declaring that money == speech.
That was the wellspring of all this shit.
Supreme Court decisions are not a deterministic process like you get with code. Justices twist and contradict precedents to suit their ideological goals all the time; these days they don't even try to hide it much. The Citizens United decision wasn't something that had to happen, it was a deliberate choice by conservatives.
My guess is the vast majority of the 80,000 or whatever cameras are uncontested politically. Local board meetings for most towns are boring and quiet affairs, and those are also the most effective venue for these concerns.
If you are a taxpayer in a local jurisdiction with Flock cameras and you want them removed, show up to every single meeting and maximize use of public comment time.
Local government is a place individuals can actually be extremely effective but also almost nobody ever actually does.
> It is not ideal, but it is necessary when the higher-desirability options are not working.
You are simply imposing your own views on others. Just because you disagree with Flock doesn't give you the right to destroy license plate readers that my tax dollars paid for. Who appointed you king?
Nobody said he had the right, he explicitly does not have the right, that's what makes it civil disobedience.
And civil disobedience is basically necessary to have a functioning society long term.
Who appointed anyone king? Neither Trump nor Flock are kings, both should be challenged, violently if necessary.
I think you already jumped to far. You can't break the law when the law is broken by every other tier of society.
Sorry, try again!
Peer pressure is apparently not even effective in getting billionaires who could easily hire whatever variety of escort they want from having sex with trafficked children, so I'm not sure in what world it's supposed to stop the billionaires from installing cameras.
Yes unfortunate, but sometimes necessary
Wait until the governance fails to the point data centers start getting burned down
Rule of law is long gone, neither party has any interest in it, it's more of a guideline of law now.
Doomer vibes are common, but meanwhile, state and local justice systems continue to prosecute many crimes and crime is on a downward trend [1].
[1] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/record-low-crime-rates-are-...
FWIW the "rule of law" is a reference to the idea that the law should be applied equally to everyone regardless of their position in society, and has nothing to do with the crime rate.
https://www.uscourts.gov/educational-resources/educational-a...
No. Catching murderers (for example) is a basic function of the justice system. Of course the US justice system does have many flaws and in some ways much worse lately, but compare with Somalia or Haiti and you'll see that there's quite a long way down. It could get much worse.
That's still not what rule of law means. The person you're replying to is correct.
Prosecuting the working class, sure.
It's not about crime rate or "many crimes" still being taken seriously, it's the fact that we all know now that there are certain crimes that, depending on where you are and who is in charge, simply don't count. Furthermore, depending on where you are and who is in charge, the authority may simply choose to not adhere to the law whatsoever.
Are you really both-sides-ing this?
Yeah I am actually, I'm tired of carrying water for people who openly hate me.
Don’t both sides this. Explicitly point out that the GOP is many orders of magnitude worse.
When it comes to property damage?
Who was leading the push on drug "decriminalization"?
complete non-sequiter. legalization would solve many of our problems, and if done 20-25 years ago, have taken care of that cartel issue down south.
You mean weed?
What other social issues should be solved with vigilante justice?
I don't like all this surveillance stuff, but Flock is just the tip of the iceberg and "direct action" against Flock is just as likely to backfire as it is to lead to changes. More importantly, once you give folks moral license to do this stuff it's hard to contain the scope of their activity.
>What other social issues should be solved with vigilante justice?
Everything you said is true, but I suspect, also irrelevant, because options short of vigilante justice aren't going to be seen by the public as viable for much longer (if they're even seen so now). America's social contract is breaking, and existing institutions make it clear, daily, that they will strengthen that trend rather than reverse it. And as JFK said, 'Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.' That doesn't make the violence laudable, or even desirable. It is simply inevitable without seemingly impossible positive change from an establishment that is hostile to such.
This is a nice description (i.e "where is the limit on this type of action?") of a reason why this approach is low on the list, and why ideally we would solve it with one of the other options.
You don't want to give people "moral license" to do this broadly, but we've hit a point where there are no options available that don't have downsides. Stated another way: Taking no action can also be unethical.
Man, I really emphasize with this, and that immediately raises my "motivated reasoning" hakles. There's a lot of people in America with deeply held views that I strongly disagree with, and I would be very worried if they began taking matters into their own hands; to pick a hopefully-uncontroversial example, bombing abortion clinics. They, too, would say "to take no action is also unethical". The purpose of society is to arbitrate these kinds of disputes...
I agree but will point out that abortion is an example of policing activity that does not affect oneself. Adding an additional clause reflecting that aspect seems to fix many of the issues that might concern you.
For me, Flock installing these cameras and other people taking them down are two sides of the same coin. One group puts cameras up in public without people's knowledge or permission, the other group takes cameras down without people's knowledge or permission. I find it kind of beautiful, like the ebb and flow of the tide.
Consider the converse of your statement
I believe in surveillance, but Flock is just the tip of the iceberg and rolling out mass public surveillance is just as likely to backfire as it is to lead to changes. More importantly, once you give folks moral license to do this stuff it’s hard to contain the scope of their activity.
the threat of vigilante mob justice is required for the law to work. its the tension that makes sure the rich and powerful want to stay involved, and be held accountable by it, rather than skipping over it and making it irrelevant.
the threat has to be credible, which is where things like this, and luigi are quite valuable
> While some communities are calling on their cities to end their contracts with Flock, others are taking matters into their own hands.
This is absolutely the right thing to do.
Remove and smash the cellular modem in your car while you are at it.
The cellular modem is usually on a dedicated fuse. No need for violence unless smashing it would be satisfying.
I took a look at the schematics for the two fuse boxes in my 2023 Chevrolet and _could not tell which/if any_ fuse was dedicated to a cellular modem.
This was in regards to: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2025/01/...
On my 2016 Chevy volt there was a daughterboard on the center console board that was for the modem.
Same here. I am driving a 25 Kia and have tried to little success to find that modem.
This may help:
https://www.kianiroforum.com/threads/how-to-remove-head-unit...
In my experience it usually isn't. I would say a dedicated fuse is a rare feature on only some models of some makes.
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And PUNCH NAZIS!
yeah, go ahead and punch your nearest ICE officer :^)
People gleefully speed running Weimar Germany’s normalization of political violence will never cease to be amazing to me.
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and for good measure get rid of the tracking device in your pocket that you willingly use all day to send your location to facebook, X, tiktok, etc.
> and for good measure get rid of the tracking device in your pocket that you willingly use all day to send your location to facebook, X, tiktok, etc.
I don't have facebook, X, or tiktok installed on my phone.
Those aren't the problem, it's any "free" mobile app in the App Store or Play Store with an advertising SDK (which is almost all of them) that uses your location to "keep your weather forecast up-to-date" but also provide data brokers with your location...
https://darkanswers.com/how-your-location-is-sold-to-adverti...
Sure, and—setting aside the issues with all the millions of smart phone users who can't properly consent to these apps and their permissions because they don't have the knowledge to know what they're actually consenting to—the great thing is that I can choose not to install these apps. And I don't!
I don't have the same choice with cameras everywhere that feed into a company with a security team run by donkeys and that provides minimal to no oversight to the government bodies using the camera data to do an end run around the fourth amendment.
Uh... it's also the cell phone companies that triangulate every powered phone at all times and provide that info to data brokers, police departments, and intelligence agencies.
my point is people are freaking out about Flock but everyone has a tracking device in their pocket at all times, and people absolutely love Ring doorbell cameras (ok maybe not you, I get it).
It seems incongruous to me that people are willing to recognize the benefits that these tools provide law enforcement at solving crimes but when it comes to Flock cameras somehow things are totally different. They're just cameras with really good software, and law enforcement likes them because it makes their jobs easier.
A phone provides the individual with tangible benefits. It only tracks the individual. The individual is always free to opt out.
A ring doorbell camera provides the individual with tangible benefits. It is installed by the individual on personal property. It does however typically capture some amount of public space which I think is problematic.
Government run centralized surveillance does not provide the individual with tangible benefits. It almost exclusively captures public spaces (that's usually the entire point of the exercise after all). It generally is not realistic to opt out short of being denied access to any surveilled public spaces. If that happens to include the majority of roads near your home then I guess you'll want to look into moving.
Most phones have a cellular modem in it, and as long as it is on and functioning normally, even without a valid SIM, it can still be tracked by any provider or person/group/government controlling that provider, even triangulated to a more precise location, 24/7.
Some of these sites, if not all, allegedly keep a profile on you regardless of if you've ever had an account with them or not.
Your phone very likely runs on an OS created by Apple or Google.
Same thing here. I don't use that malware at all.
At this point, I wouldn't be surprised if FB bought raw data from the providers just to see if they could aggregate it into their shadow profiles. Whatever the cost of buying that data, it wouldn't mean anything to a corp that prints money. Yes, this is pure tin foil hat level conspiracy nonsense, but it goes to show how little I think of FB
Disconnect its modem
Thank you for letting us know.
I've done this recently. It's only been six weeks so not sure if I'll keep it up, but I have felt very little pain. I put my sim back in my iPhone the other day when I needed an Uber to go to the vet after reading that recently taxis in my city have been denying people with pets even if you tell them you have one when ordering. Sim went right back in my flip phone when I got home and I actually experienced some relief as I did it.
Enjoy your portable physical SIM while you can, they are absolutely coming for it
You think so? As in we'll only be able to buy Apples and Androids?
I just want a hot NSA rep. Is that too much to ask?
These kinds of headlines always read like wishful thinking on the author's part more than a real trend
Until they get so expensive and there is so much pushback that cities end their contracts with them which seems to be the goal here.
Some of the "news" items these days read more like suggestions.
Ring doorbells and ALPRs are a meme compared to what we've already deployed domestically. I've seen the Houston police department fly wide area surveillance aircraft all day over certain parts of town. The capabilities of some of these systems are almost unbelievable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide-area_motion_imagery
I strongly recommend not breaking the law until you've fully considered the omniscient demigod threat model. You never know who is watching and what their capabilities might be.
See also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARGUS-IS
https://www.extremetech.com/defense/146909-darpa-shows-off-1...
Tech deployed to distant lands will eventually be turned on the empire's own.
This, honestly. I used to get so angry when the US subjected foreigners to treatment that no human with morals would consider, but then I noticed that, without fail, almost every thing the US did to foreigners gets done to US citizens eventually, either by foreign governments or by the US government itself. The only thing that I haven't seen yet are drone killings on US soil, but I suspect that too is only a matter of time.
Like it or not, we're all stuck on the same boat. Normalizing the abuse and mistreatment of some parts of the world means normalizing it for everyone.
Recent: Across the US, people are dismantling and destroying Flock surveillance cameras (bloodinthemachine.com) | 456 points by latexr 2 days ago | 293 comments | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47095134
Kind of weird all of those people weren't all up in arms about it before the whole ice thing, why would you be mad that they're tracking somebody else but not mad that they have been slurping up data about your movements and habits this whole time, then monetizing said data by selling it to industries like insurance companies etc.
all of these people didnt even know these cameras existed until recently. even this weekend, was talking to a few friends and they had never heard of them. I think they wanted to just sort of sneak them in under the radar and all the current ICE stuff has created more scrutiny and public knowledge about surveillance in general.
how is it weird for you exactly? we didn't have masked gestapo thugs before.
It's weird due to the complete lack of second order thinking the majority of people seem to have.
You can scream up and down about how building such things is a horrible idea because it can one day be used for evil, and folks will either yawn or call you paranoid or worse.
Then the thing actually gets (very lightly) abused/used for something folks don't like and omg it's an emergency no one could have ever predicted! And oh look - it's often times far too late to do a damn thing about it other than surface level 'fixes' that are nothing of the sort.
It gets very frustrating living in such a society, but it might simply be the way humans are wired. If it's not in your face and actively a major problem to you in the moment, it's simply not a concern.
I mean you're not wrong, but let's not shy away from the usual pattern we see on here where the YC-brain sees a camera, a cloud dashboard, and a monthly SaaS fee and immediately calls it "the future," then acts blindsided when people notice they funded a suburban panopticon. Every time it is the same script, and then six months later everybody is pretending nobody could have foreseen the obvious abuse case.
I was always anti-IoT for this exact reason.
It's weird because one of the main selling points for the principled position against surveillance is your inability to control which use-cases are allowed.
The way to avoid masked gestapo thugs is to ensure that not even your preferred leaders are able to create them.
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They should leave it to traditional law enforcement.
Some interesting data on ICE and CBP: https://www.doomsdayscenario.co/p/accountability-for-ice-and...
It's kinda like clearing the table by throwing everything in the trash.
Licking the boot now won't keep it off your neck in the future.
the "IC" in "ICE" stands for "Law", apparently
first they came for etc etc
1. Most people weren't aware before the whole ICE thing. I think I only started seeing flock trend on HN a few weeks before the ICE incidents, and it only stood out to me because I had a friend who worked for a company called Flock Freight that has nothing to do with the surveillance state.
2. What you mentioned sucks. But it's hard to get the public to care about things that don't directly affect them and their day to day lives. My wife somehow browses the internet without an ad blocker even though I've told her that they track you and are basically malware, but knowing that doesn't change her browsing habits or make her even want to use an ad blocker, even if the ads are hostile to her experience.
3. Once the ICE thing came to light, suddenly people were like, wait, they can use this information to deport us or kill us? That's not OK.
Huh? even if you knew and understood the scope of it before (I’d say a vast majority did not and thought they were just red light cameras), it is not very hard to understand that when you see the people in masks without badges snatching your neighbors haphazardly and with specious reasons that you might make a chunk of that majority look at the cameras more skeptically and maybe, just maybe wonder if that technology could be turned against you too.
Until recently very few people could articulate the real risk this tech posed, now you can literally see it play out (depending where you live)
> Kind of weird all of those people weren't all up in arms about it before the whole ice thing
They weren't being used to build concentration camps before.
Not weird for potentially two reasons:
1. They didn't know about it. It's only recently that there have been popular youtube videos on the topic. Critical mass can take time.
2. Before "the whole ice thing" there wasn't a team of masked brownshirts terrorising communities and using all available technology they could access in order to undertake said terrorising. That these cameras are part of that available technology, the timing ain't weird at all. In fact, it was pretty predictable.
But, yes, should have been up in arms beforehand, but likely the knowledge and visceral demonstration of the effects were not known. Visceral demonstration does pretty heavy lifting.
You should be glad they came around instead of lamenting why it didn’t happen earlier
I don't think OP is glad people came around on it
It seems to me that throwing bad data into the Flock system is far more effective than breaking a few commodity electronic devices.
Figure out how to put an LCD in front of many of the ALPR cameras and play a slideshow of car images of license plates that exist almost exclusively in different geolocations. Make the Flock data so noisy that it becomes useless.
The easier fix seems like doxxing politicians and embarrassing them until they protect all of their constituents against things like this. We got a small modicum of privacy with the Video Privacy Protection Act [0] after Bork's video rental history was going to be released.
[0] https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=video+r...
I imagine there is a process in place to allow cities / states / communities to place the cameras on polls. If Vegas somehow got around public comment process to put these on poles, then what would stop any random company from requesting to put their own camera there? Like lets say a motivated individual went through some process to put a camera on a pole someplace near somebody that would definitely make the govt official / flock exec etc nervous, what is stopping them? It sounds an awful lot like Flock is basically going to town's and saying "we will put up a bunch of cameras in a bunch of places" probably based upon algorithm's etc. How do they decide where these get put, who gets to decide that? Why can't any random company request to put up a camera on a random power pole? After they give the map to the govt officials, do they get a chance to say "oh this one by my house, can you move that?"
I'm not sure that public comment can stop the city council from doing what they want in the end.
This is the sort of thing that should be put to a city referendum.
The cities pay Flock to put cameras on city-owned poles because the city administrators want Flock and cops and ICE to have this data.
> Why can't any random company request to put up a camera on a random power pole?
Not owning the pole is usually the show stopper
That's not easier, and they don't have shame. They're proud of becoming wealthy.
I certainly agree about the lack of shame - but even if you destroyed all of the Flock cameras (and any other public traffic cams) you're still left with no actual protection for your private data.
There's more of us then there are of them - so their wealth can't protect them from everything. They can and do buy privacy so there must be something worth protecting that the masses can expose using their same methods.
Many in this administration are the lowest, least educated parts of their respective societies. They don’t have shame. You cannot shame them because this is literally their only way to make money.
If shame were a motivator for this administration or the current grifter class, neither of these things would exist to the current Armageddon-level they currently do. That is to say, completely agree with your take here. There are plenty of government-entity examples of this, but my favorite I've seen recently was a video montage of Elon saying annually, like clockwork, that sully autonomous driving would be here in 2-3 years for the last 12 years or so. If these people had shame, he wouldn't be doing that, as an example.
Curious to see the link to him saying that back in 2014, didn't realize he'd been saying it for quite that long!
> Merchant reports instances of broken and smashed Flock cameras in La Mesa, California, just weeks after the city council approved the continuation of Flock cameras deployed in the city, despite a clear majority of attendees favoring their shutdown.
Well who could've seen that coming.
> broken and smashed Flock cameras
I wonder how resistant the cameras are to strong handheld lasers. I suppose they could harden them against some common wavelengths with filters, but that'd affect the image clarity in normal use.
I have worked with watt class lasers before and I implore you not to do this. Even if it's tempting. Most places where there are surveillance cameras are places where there are also people, and unless you want to hand out OD5 goggles to everyone in eyeshot... a pellet gun would be safer.
My friend in college did an internship on high frequency, short pulse beams (I wanna say violet and picosecond? Which I still think was exotic at the time).
Most of his work was dealing with and accounting for reflections that left the machine. If you have a prism that’s sending 95% of the light where you want it to go, when it’s a multi watt laser you can’t just let that 5% go wherever it wants. You will blind someone. So his job was getting black bodies in all the right spots to absorb the lost light.
His safety goggles looked like even more expensive Oakleys of that era and they were (much more expensive).
The amount of safety when working with lasers is ridiculous. And for a good reason, you can get permanent eye damage faster than the blink of an eye.
Please, don't play with lasers. At all. Even supposedly "safe" lasers can output far more light than expected.
Not to mention the ones that have peaks in invisible parts of the spectrum.
Another friend’s favorite saying is, “do not look into laser with remaining eye.”
Unrelated, but I really want to take the opportunity:
How can one know what is dangerous for the eyes or not? Years ago I got an "IR illuminator" (from aliexpress, probably) that I wanted to use with my raspberrypi NoIR camera, for fun. Say filming myself during the night to see how much I move while sleeping, or making my own wildlife camera trap.
But I was scared that it could be dangerous and never used it (I tested it in an empty room, but that was it).
Is there a safe way for a hobbyist to get an IR illuminator and be sure that I won't make somebody blind with it?
Is it just a bunch of IR LEDs? Surface mount or through-hole? What's the module power rating? What's the power supply power rating? Are there any secondary optics like lenses over the LEDs? Is there a diffuser of some kind?
If it's a cluster of garden variety through-hole LEDs with domed tops (like you would see on a TV remote), they're necessarily low power on account of having poor thermal performance.
Another way to tell is if nothing gets warm at all. It's pretty hard to hurt someone with an emitter that both doesn't have a focusing optic and doesn't get warm.
Let me be clear - you're still responsible for verifying the safety of your stuff, and I am in no way assuring you that the device you have is benign, because I can't do that without inspecting it directly.
Yeah, let's say something like this: https://www.instructables.com/DIY-IR-Infrared-Illuminator-Ni...
> Let me be clear - you're still responsible for verifying the safety of your stuff
Obviously yeah. I was just wondering if there were known rules like "these wavelengths under this power are fine for humans and wildlife, even if they put the LEDs right in front of their eyes", and also if you have an array of such IR LEDs, how they cumulate.
And curious about things like: if I don't see it, can it hurt my retina?
I probably will never do it: I wouldn't want to blind a fox just because I wanted to make my own wildlife camera :).
Invisible wavelengths can absolutely hurt your retina, but as wavelengths go farther beyond visible, your eye begins to not focus them properly on the retina, so the risks change. E.g. with 1550nm IR (common in telecom, sometimes in LIDAR) the risk of eye damage is to the surface of the eye rather than to the retina. Short wavelengths like UV will be absorbed by the lens at near-UV, and then eventually just be absorbed at the surface at shorter wavelengths.
I think it would be a cool exercise to figure out how much optical power you would see at, idk, 5cm from your illuminator. I assume it's a shortwave IR close to visible light, so you can assume it will focus like visible light, more or less.
Ideally you'd use an optical power meter but you could get a first pass by looking at the circuit and seeing how many mW pass through each LED, applying a conservatively high efficiency factor of W_optical/W_electrical, projecting that into a radiated cone for each LED and multiplying the power received on a dilated pupil sized spot at 5cm by the number of emitters.
Then you have to work out what the irradiance at the retina is once the light is focused. The hazard criteria include a time factor, so you'll have to decide if you/foxes would like to stare directly into the beam for 10 seconds? Or for the entire duration of your meditation session.
Very interesting, thanks a lot!
I assume CCTV surveillance cameras are usually fine because people cannot go and stare at it from very close then :-).
i went down a rabbit hole doing max permissible exposure calcs for the light you linked and basically i personally wouldn't worry about it. the energy is low and distributed among many emitters. by the time you're far enough away from the light to focus on it, you're receiving max a couple hundred microwatts/cm^2 at the cornea from each led.
I don't know if you ever write blog posts or anything like that, but I would love to see explanations about how you made those estimations. I honestly wouldn't know how to even start :-).
Buy from a reputable dealer. I don’t buy batteries, lasers, or items I ingest from locations lacking any repercussions.
IR illuminators are not lasers. Their purpose is to cast light across a broad area, not to deliver it all to one point. They should not be harmful to vision.
> Most places where there are surveillance cameras are places where there are also people
I assume you're concerned about reflections from the camera lens or housing? In my mind, the archetypal camera is mounted on a nice tall pole, silhouetted against open sky, and painted matte black.
> watt class lasers
Surely those would be excessive for someone attacking the sensor, unless they want to remotely sear some graffiti by burning away paint.
Hitting the lens at an oblique angle won’t fry the sensor though? You have to get close to the cone of visibility which is then within the bloom area.
Please do not encourage people to go shining bright lasers at small targets from long distances right next to busy roads.
This is a nerd fantasy thing, but it's a really bad idea. It's hard to hit a tiny lens from a distance and it only takes one slip of the hand to shine it straight into traffic or someone walking down the sidewalk.
Last I recall they’re just a crappy 5 megapixel Arducam camera module based on teardowns.
https://www.cehrp.org/dissection-of-flock-safety-camera/
https://www.arducam.com/product/arducam-ov5647-noir-camera-b...
Lol that's almost literally the cheapest possible option. You can get these for $3-4 (on a board and with a mipi cable and everything) from China - I have a dozen in a box that I bought to test out a camera array idea before shelling out for nicer sensors.
The best part is seeing someone tear a Flock camera apart, see the camera, and immediately go slap it on their 3D printer and hook it into their Pi and just have it work out of the box ;)
Maybe pick up one [1] and experiment with it. If I had some spare change I would love to grab one just to hack it.
[1] https://www.ebay.com/itm/297938376075
Do not do this.
Comments in the sub-$200 LiDAR thread suggested those would play merry havoc with a camera too.
America is really now two Americas. The divide between traditional freedoms and neo-authoritarianism is getting wider. But America is so large that even the minority (just) that believes in freedom is still 167 million people. Even if only a small percentage of that number, from either side of the divide, believes in violent activism, things are going to get worse before they get better.
They talk about a K shaped recovery in economics.
It just depends on if you're on the up portion of the K or the down stick. The larger picture might show an increase but if you split the data apart one leg is actually declining while the other is growing.
while an important consideration, I'm sure there are many on the up side of the k-economy that don't believe that persistent surveillance is warranted or ethical.
They will fall in line as property crime increases.
This is the most important comment here. There is a future reckoning to be had between the radical authoritarian fringe and normal Americans who do not want to live in an open air prison. The conflict is completley preventable, and makes a less safe place to live for us all.
There isn't a radical authoritarian fringe in the US. There are multiple, competing radical authoritarian perspectives in the US, and I wouldn't be surprised if the sum of them constituted a majority.
They disagree on the authority, not the methods, and help the two institutional parties cooperate to destroy civil liberties by accusing their counterparts of abusing ("weaponizing") civil rights to commit crimes, spy for foreign governments, and/or abuse children.
America is converting into a radical authoritarian state, yes, but they're not a "fringe". They are, by a small margin, the dominant faction in the US. Popular vote counts prove it.
Unfortunately this country has literacy and education problems, and many voters were plainly ignorant of what they were voting for.
They were literally taking tourist photos in front of the "Alligator Alcatraz" sign. [1][2][3]
They knew what they were voting for. The cruelty (and the authoritarianism) is the point.
1. https://theday.com/photo-single/1006536/?mode=team
2. https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/people-take-pi...
3. https://www.wusf.org/courts-law/2025-12-22/attorneys-urge-ju...
The best way defeat MAGA is to fracture their coalition, which requires understanding its various constituencies. The “MAGA Hardliners” at the forefront of this fascist movement are only 29% of his support:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/01/trump-roles-sup...
Currently, his approval rating is hovering in the mid to high 30s, which tracks.
We should spend our energy on the people who can be convinced; don’t get discouraged by thinking they’re all the same.
The back and forth between "the Left" and "the Right" seems to actually be about who gets to run the prison instead of whether we should run a nation like one.
The right has become so untenable that the only viable defense of it is a bad faith distraction tactic to pretend that it's comparable to the left.
You're in a bubble. It's not wholly a bad faith distraction tactic, and denying wrongdoing by anyone flying the "left" banner is a scary thought.
So one one hand we have Nazi ideas[1] being platformed by the ruling political party which has barely disguised its support for ethnically cleansing the country of all non-white people[2]. And on the other hand we have radical democratic socialist candidates proposing stabilized rent[3]. What am I missing here?
1. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/04/republican-part...
2. https://www.esiweb.org/newsletter/100-million-expulsions-pro...
3. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/06/europe-zohra...
The main cases I've seen against people on the left (non-exclusive) are:
- Lots of them in Epstein files
- Mass importations of unchecked non-citizens
- Trying harder to look cool to Europe vs helping Americans
- Overregulation (things like California Coastal Commission)
- Massive fraud (LA -> SF bullet train, tens of billions for "homelessness" that don't go towards homeless at all, building permits, etc)
- Antifa burning down 3rd party businesses for reasons unknown
- Attempts to squash 1st amendment, particularly on gender
Since you linked sites like the Guardian and Atlantic, I figured the bar was low enough that you can just google any of these points and find an opinionated piece of similar quality.
The bubble I refer to is the fact that seemingly all you see is the bad on one side and good on the other. As easy as you claim one side are Nazis trying to kill off non-whites, the people on the other side claim the left is trying to force movie/music propaganda to eradicate all white people. Both sides have millions of posts from terminally online people wildly claiming outrageous things. Both "sides" have bad people. If you can't agree to that, you are in a bubble or just lying.
> - Attempts to squash 1st amendment, particularly on gender
explain yourself
Forcing other people to use desired pronouns, requiring new signs on all single-stall bathrooms. You'll have to Google it, you're not going to get a great argument/stance from me personally. I don't dive much deeper than the headlines/parts of my feeds where these are thrust upon me.
Especially when it comes to ethnic cleansing, peoples' terminally online claims don't factor in from any side; this isn't about partisans or discourse. We are talking about official government policy and statements. This is substantiated, without any constitutional precedent, and extremely dangerous.
The equivalent actions on the left that you posed, increasing non-white representation in media, a) is not government policy and b) is fair assuming proportional representation for the existing 1 out of 3 non-white Americans. And the actual Biden policy allowing what you call "non-citizens" to enter the US is simply the international treaty for asylum seekers; these are all people going through the immigration system.
Regarding my sources, ESIWeb is a European think-tank that rigorously and objectively evaluates claims. The Atlantic and The Guardian are respected for their journalism world-wide. These aren't op-eds; I have been following this story for a while and choose my sources carefully.
There are a few other dubious items on your list--e.g., "Antifa" which doesn't represent mainstream Democrats, isn't an organization, and hasn't been linked to "burning down businesses". Epstein? At least a dozen people in this administration are implicated, with Trump being one of the principal pedophiles. "Massive corruption"? The list would be too long for this message if we got into the Trump administration.
It's the knee-jerk reactions to "look at the other side!" that makes me think you're in a bubble. Also your references to certain small groups on the right-side spectrum as the whole while claiming (rightly) that other small groups on the left-side don't represent the mainstream. I was just trying to give you a few examples as a starting point for research since you seem to be completely oblivious to them, I am not here to argue with you or back them up.
Guy, you're talking about groups that comprise social discourse whereas I'm talking only and specifically about the concrete policies and practices enacted by the Trump regime. The counter-examples you provided are not parallel mappings.
That's cool, keep talking about it I guess. Why you're expecting me to provide "parallel mappings" is totally beyond me. You're in a bubble because although you seem great at researching one side, you seemingly cannot apply those same skills for the other. You just want a dopamine win from discarding whatever I say based upon whatever moral framework you've set up in your head that's gotten you to this point.
As your net worth increases, the concern about what you have to lose from a personal safety perspective skyrockets. You start becoming far more paranoid and seeing crime everywhere. Tech CEOs and billionaires will build the dystopian panopticon society 100 times out of 100 because they don't care about other people, they just want to feel safe. If that means mass surveillance for the rest of the world, so be it.
If you don't believe me, just look at the CCP. It already happened there.
Being anti-crime doesn't mean lacking compassion. Crimes have victims, and reducing crime results in fewer of them. Poor people don't want to be victims any more than rich people do.
Building the panopticon does not reduce crime.
Hidden aristocracy.
Trump won the election with less than 50% of the popular vote. He has never enjoyed an approval rating equal to or higher than 50%.
Verify your claims before spreading them. https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/elections/2024
Site says he won the election with less than 50% of the popular vote.
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Yeah, it doesn't seem productive to paint this as a partisan issue
Your assumptions are probably reflective of my downvotes, but I choose my words carefully.
Downvotes are a good sign you made someone think about their own internal biases and they didn't like it. So they lash out in the only way the know how. Pathetic and weak.
No one said the Democrats are pro-freedom. Both parties are authoritarian. One is just less effective.
Someone in the thread linked a teardown showing these use a ~$4 OV5647 Arducam sensor on what's essentially a Raspberry Pi. The real vandalism isn't the people with hammers — it's charging municipalities six figures for a trail camera with a cellular modem and a pitch deck.
Where are you finding those sensors for $4? I think the main selling point is that they're set+forget and solar powered, with all the "software magic" happening in the cloud.
The sensors are very cheap:
https://www.arducam.com/arducam-ov5647-standard-raspberry-pi...
If you want a fancy one with a lens and an IR cut filter it'll run you a grand total of $35:
https://www.arducam.com/arducam-ov5647-noir-camera-board-w-m...
Sure, the extra stuff like LTE modem, battery, solar panels, casing, etc, costs a whole lot more money, but these things clearly are built cheap. The optics and imaging sensor is a joke compared to real, proper cameras.
“You can’t put a price on safety”
When it comes to privacy violations, Ring and Nest aren't much better - but at least people have a choice whether or not to install them.
Nest: video was recovered from 'residual data located in backend systems' even though there was no active subscription.
Ring: employees accessing people's videos.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/05/...
I am an American and I am doing something about it. Co-founded a company that manufactures privacy-centric, on-prem video monitoring devices. No cloud.
I support what you're doing, but I'd like to point out that everybody cares about ethics at the start...
> We are committed to protecting human privacy and mitigating bias in policing with the development of best-in-class technology rooted in ethical design, which unites civilians and public servants in pursuit of a safer, more equitable society.
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety
I see your point, and I've seen people reevaluate their priorities when presented with a life altering sum of money (or with a court subpoena).
And that's one of the reasons we made it architecturally impossible for someone to access the data externally. The user decides how and where to send the data.
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47095134
Here's a decent map of Flock installations for those interested in doing field research:
https://banishbigbrother.com/flock-camera-map/
If I was someone on the run, then I would just get a fake license plate. They record plates on the interstates as well. Also, they have cameras and presumably can alert of a certain make and model + color car trailer on AI near a last seen area. Only way to bypass that is by swapping cars or getting a really generic popular car.
Don't forget about the facial recognition any time you go through a toll booth
Could someone explain how they are doing this, safely and without detection or damage to municipal property?
https://deflock.org/map provides a crowd sourced map showing the known locations of flock cameras for anyone interested in knowing where Big Brother is watching.
That title is so weird. I thought there are camera that are watching groups of birds. I know the company name is what it is but even more so it would be important to make the title clear. Not the whole world can keep up with all silly things happening in the US and now that flock surveillance can be anything but birds.
All they had to do was not air a very expensive superbowl commercial
Are you thinking of the Ring camera commercial or did I miss a flock one during the same Superbowl?
The commercial was essentially announcing their partnership with Flock
Car culture in general is an abomination to civil rights. You are tracked by the government, forced to shell out money to predatory insurance companies, and can basically be illegally searched and seized at any point on the roadway. I hope that chinese e-bikes/e-motos will get good enough to where I can use them as my primary form of transport.
I'm wondering if there are technical solutions to counter this extreme surveillance. I know there are some articles of clothing that kind of mess with some cameras but there must be some other technical ways to mess with the data or make it less usable (and hence avoid physical destruction of property)
There are always technical solutions but the feasibility and challenges of mass adoption generally makes policy more desirable for security and privacy:
https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2020/02/technologis...
it's wild to me that Americand accept a private company plastering their town with surveillance cameras, given you know, everything
Additionally, that you draw the line at sharing that juicy data with law enforcement. I mean sure, yeah, but even before that, sharing essentially all your movement data with some company because...?
We don't accept that? Our civil liberties have been infringed upon by neoliberals and oligarchs for the last 100+ years, starting with Lincoln with income tax and FDR with social security into the mess we have today.
Doesn’t that just mean Flock makes more money from making replacements?
I'm sure they'd charge the municipalities and private entities for those replacements one way or another, which ultimately decreases the reliability and value proposition of their product.
the damage is showing that Flock, from an objective technology point of view, is really quite much more limited in terms of its efficacy than its sellers are leading the buyers to believe.
what good is their platform if it is easily defeated by a guy with a ladder and a hammer?
All paid for by taxpayers because a few extremists have appointed themselves kings
They're supposed to serve you, not the other way, and you're supposed to start chopping heads off when they abuse the power you gave them.
"Ah, see, criminals hate Flock cameras. We'll send you a replacement for free, but you should buy two more and point it at that one so you can catch the bastard next time." is how I imagine that goes.
Yet everybody is happy giving plaid and therefore palintir there entire financial history and future data
It's funny how some banks even disallow you from copy-pasting your routing and account numbers to make it harder to manually set up payments that way
Which banks do that?
I don't remember, but Chase used to until a couple of years ago
Whataboutism isn't helpful, or relevant.
Good. Flock deserves it. So, do all big tech companies that have been "move fast break things"
now it's the public's turn to "move fast break things"
good.
Why were those installed in the first place?
Speaking only for areas near where I live, it was in response to a persistent uptick in home invasions. Police can't be everywhere at once, and LPR cameras flag stolen cars and mismatched plates that thieves like to use.
Some are installed by private entities. Home Depot installs Flock cameras in their parking lots.
I assume their primary use case is combating organized retail theft rings, as companies like Target spend a great deal on this problem (to include famously having their own accredited crime lab).
looking at deflock.org, in our town there are a few in Home Depot and Lowe's parking lots; I guess it's reasonable for a business to have a camera in their parking lot to prevent theft, that's not particularly new; the problem is that Flock has been selling that data for other purposes (ICE).
Cameras on the street is another matter altogether. Should not be allowed unless the citizens of the town vote to allow it.
Harvest data and let the techno fascist state that is slowly emerging figure out a use case later. For potential scenarios: if you like sci fi you can watch minority report, if you like history you can look at central Europe around 1930
This is my America. Bravo.
God Bless America
That's some nice guillotine energy going on here on this unflagged topic. You surprise me, HN.
A little direct action a day, keeps the fascists away
Maybe I'm just getting old but I dislike these implicit call to destructive action articles, even if I don't like the surveillance. It is not incumbent upon the public to destroy surveillance cameras, and it's probably a bad sign for society if they are. If you destroy one of these cameras you will probably be arrested, and it will ruin your life. We can elect officials who oppose these cameras, and encouraging people to destroy city property is not the move.
A lot of the people doing it would probably agree that it's a bad sign that it's necessary. And further that most elections have become a false choice, and aren't effective, as they're so far removed from the changes necessary.
Oh no.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPQFF0oqsto
Good.
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I'm with you on the AI slop but your complaint on this post just sounds like bootlicking.
I would say that anarchist-style direct action against mass surveillance pretty much embodies the classic hacker ethos going back many decades at this point.
"lick the boot and accept every degenerate technology without any question or you're AnTiFa"
Ok buddy
And yet I’m the one getting flagged.
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I think it's nuts how nobody seemed to care about this mass surveillance tool until it fell into the hands of the red party. "Just keep electing the blue party" is not a convincing security posture.
License plate readers are hardly mass surveillance.
Why is no one in democratic countries complaining about mass surveillance?
And I mean real cameras (not license plate readers) recording 24/7?
I'm talking about UK, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, etc.
unlike most Asian countries, individual freedom is the foundation on which American society has been built; it's why many people migrated to the US over the past 250 years
LPRs are absolutely mass surveillance when used without proper legal restraints
the legal restraints are the big difference between regular police, who operate without very specific boundaries to protect individual rights -- and ICE, who can do whatever they want with impunity. That's what separates "police" from "Gestapo".
Because we in america tend to value individual liberties in a way that others don't. And yes of course LPR is mass surveillance. Cars should not even have to be registered.
They shouldn't even have license plates?? That leads to 0 accountibility.
Would you like the government driving around in government vehicles doing hit and runs and having zero accountability?
Or criminals for that matter?
maybe we didn't care as much because we didn't have gangs of armed Gestapo-like thugs roaming the streets and abusing or killing people, ripping families apart, unaccountable to the law, and spending billions to build new concentration camps; with this camera data being sold to said secret police.
so, yeah, the stakes are different now. and if the "blue party" was the one pulling this shit I'd be just as mad
Waow (based based based)
This is really bad for all the reasons that people have mentioned (vigilante "justice" never is a good thing) but people have a misplaced understanding of right and wrong here. Flock cameras have helped solve some major crimes, and people will be glad to have this technology around if they are ever a victim.
Police states are great at solving major crimes. And when those are sufficiently solved, to justify their continued existence, they have to solve lesser crimes, repeating until you need enough surveillance to ensure no one's flushing their toilet improperly.
Police states are like autoimmune diseases under the hygiene hypothesis. They'll keep ramping up their sensitivity until they're attacking everything, even when it's benign.
Flock cameras can be helpful in all sorts of crimes. They've been used to solve everything from kidnappings to minor property damage.
There obviously isn't a future without crime. This is just a tool to make it easier for police to do their job and deter criminals somewhat, but that is probably marginal.
There will always be kidnappings, there will always be property damage. Having technology available to make it easier to solve those crimes seems obvious to me.
Yes, I can see how they would be helpful in solving crimes down to minor property damage.
I do not want to live in a society where police are watching everything I do in the name of solving minor property damage. "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" is bullshit. I don't do anything illegal in my bathroom, but I do not wish to have a camera in there, even if it could solve a hypothetical crime.
They aren't watching you in the bathroom. They are recording cars on public streets and analyzing the footage.
Why not? Don't you want to stop all the crimes happening in bathrooms too? That would be a logical step if privacy is always an acceptable tradeoff for security (or at least the illusion thereof).
The difference is that public streets are public spaces. You necessarily have a limited expectation of privacy in public spaces. The government likewise already deploys cameras in public places to maintain a reasonable level of order on them.
If you want to put a camera in your personal toilet you absolutely can.
"Public" is not a blanket excuse for constant surveillance in a space. I do not have an expectation of being surveilled in public and it's not acceptable to normalize it.
I think most opposing Flock have considered and rejected the bargain of trading their freedom for security in this case.
There are other ways to sacrifice your privacy for a sense of safety that doesn't impose your 'understanding of right and wrong' on the entire public.
>have a misplaced understanding of right and wrong here.
"Could I be making wrong assumptions? No I'm a hacker, it must be everyone else who is wrong."
"That it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape, than that one innocent Person should suffer, is a Maxim that has been long & generally approv’d"
The amount of damage these cameras have caused is totally disproportional to whatever meager benefit they may have wrought. These are antisocial machines.
Dude my car was literally jacked up and had the catalytic convertor chopped off in a parking with flock cameras at a hotel before, def never got caught, and according to the hotel security footage they parked right next to my car, got out and did everything real fast. Plus most people using cars to commit heinous crimes are usually stolen and ditched right after anyways, people who use their own car to commit crimes usually end up being lower level crimes like organized retail theft, drugs, etc, you know stuff id rather not trade privacy for security over.
yeah surveillance doesn't mean secure. A few weeks ago there was a solid 10-15 second run of automatic weapons fire on my street in an intersection. I do a lot of shooting and i could tell from the concussion it couldn't have been more than a couple hundred feet from my bedroom window. My neighbors turned in all their camera footage with recordings of two cars and the gunfire to a detective. When i asked them what happens next the detective just said in an annoyed voice "well i'll ask someone to check around..". Like it was plainly obvious he had zero interest at all.
edit: I live in Dallas so, although we sometimes hear gunshots when the Cowboys score a touchdown, i'm not in an active war zone.
I'm in Dallas as well, and I hear gun shots daily. New Years/4th July absolutely sound like a war zone. I found a slug next to my trash can after a 4th celebration a couple of years ago. Not a shell, the actual slug. I keep it on my desk as a reminder. My fur babies are not allowed outside on those nights.
curious to know where you are in Dallas if you don't mind. I'm in Oak Cliff in the Winnetka Heights neighborhood. This past New Years and July 4th were especially bad, people were double parked on I30 on the bridge to downtown, and the gunfire and fireworks were nonstop. DPD has basically given up, there's going to be a tragedy on day and everyone is going to be like "how could have this have happened!?".
I’m in far east Dallas just north of pleasant grove.
Everyone that shoots their gun like that have come to the conclusion they vastly outnumber the police and know they are very unlikely to have anything happen. The cops are just holding their breath that nobody else recognizes this too
> although we sometimes hear gunshots when the Cowboys score a touchdown
Must be pretty quiet all year 'round then.
All fun and good until whatever you are comes under the scrutiny of the police state.
Always nice to hear from someone completely immune to miscarriages of justice.
My confusion stems from the fact that mass surveillance is already pretty normal in major cities. Your face is on a dozen cameras anytime you walk through the grocery store. Your precise location is pinged off cell towers multiple times a day. I understand specific qualms with Flock as a company and how they manage the data, but this libertarian demand for total privacy in public spaces has been long lost and the beef with Flock in particular doesn’t even scratch the surface.
Edit: And I don’t even know how to have good faith conversations about this topic in these spaces, because the hive mind has decided that anything but absolute outrage is untenable. I’m getting downvoted for sharing my opinion.
If you think USA has mass surveillance you haven't been to Asia (South Korea, Taiwan, China, Singapore, Etc).
I can drive down highways in most cities in the USA without my license plate being read (Flock isn't on highways). Also Flock as integrated mostly just records license plates. It's not recording video 24/7.
I actually touched on this in another comment below yours, using Asia as a specific example. Our crime rates are also much higher than those countries.
But while our surveillance is not as widespread as other developed nations, it is still quite commonplace. There are cameras everywhere and recording license plates seems like such a tiny and justifiable expansion.
People in the US also get angry at speed cameras or red light cameras, yet I personally think both are very rational things to want in busy areas!
We already have mass surveillance, and yet we still have major crimes. It's not working, and I see no reason to believe that removing more freedom will lead to having safer streets. Why are we giving up liberty and getting nothing in return? That's an excellent reason to protest against adding more surveillance.
Our public surveillance is actually limited relative to other developed countries because it makes people here uncomfortable for cultural reasons. You’ll also note that our crime rates are pretty high, especially relative to the surveillance happy countries in East Asia.
Regardless, I’m happy to take a results oriented approach here. Does tracking license plates make it easier to catch criminals? Does it make it easier to track stolen vehicles? I suspect cities wouldn’t be signing these expensive contracts if they didn’t see any benefits.
And finally, surveillance of public spaces is not inherently at odds with personal freedoms. Your mobility is not restricted at all, your core rights have not been touched. And you are always welcome to go live in the woods off the grid.
I firmly believe that living in dense urban areas with millions of others requires a reasonably limited expectation of privacy in public spaces.
Commonplace does not mean acceptable. Flock is new, and so it is an easier target for concentrated action. Also, Flock seems to be a centralized clearinghouse for surveillance data on a different scale than your local grocer's CCTV system.
This comment is so naive and full of banalities I don't even know what to say, open a few history and philosophy books, these topics have been at the center of many deep and interesting debates over at least two thousands years and your take isn't even high-school level comprehension of the subject. If the end goal of societies was to stop crime we'd have achieved that a long time ago