In Oak Park, Illinois, we ran into a rhyming version of this problem: the only control we had about what technology OPPD deployed was a spending limit ($15K, if I'm remembering right), above which they had to ask the board for an appropriation. Our pilot deployment of Flock cameras easily went underneath that limit.
I'm not reflexively anti-ALPR camera. I don't like them, but I do local politics and know what my neighbors think, and a pretty significant chunk of my neighbors --- in what is likely one of the top 10 bluest municipalities in the United States (we're the most progressive in Chicagoland, which is saying something) --- want these cameras as a response to violent crime.
But I do believe you have to run a legit process to get them deployed.
OPPD was surprised when, after attempting to graduate their pilot to a broader deployment, a minor fracas erupted at the board. I'm on Oak Park's information systems commission and, with the help of a trustee and after talking to the Board president, got "what the hell do we do about the cameras" assigned to my commission. In conjunction with our police oversight commission (but, really, just us on the nerd commission), we:
* Got General Orders put in place for Flock usage that limited it exclusively to violent crime.
* Set up a monthly usage report regime that allowed the Village to get effectiveness metrics that prevented further rollout and ultimately got the cameras shut down.
* Presented to the board and got enacted an ACLU CCOPS ordinance, which requires board approval for anything broadly construed as "surveillance technology" for policing, whether you spend $1, $100,000, or $0 on it.
Especially if you're in a suburb, where the most important units of governance are responsive to like 15,000-50,000 people, this stuff is all pretty doable if you engage in local politics. It's much trickier if you're within the city limits of a major metro (we're adjacent to Chicago, and by rights should be a part of it), but still.
I cannot imagine a scenario where I'd want those in my neighborhood. Glad you like them, but I hope they don't make it to the west suburbs where I live.
Who are you talking about who likes the cameras? It isn't me. But if you're in a suburb of Chicagoland, my guess is your neighbors like them a bunch. They won't like Flock, because of the Trump administration and ICE press around Flock, but ALPRs are commodity technology now and you'll likely roll out some other vendor, like the munis surrounding Oak Park did.
Right, you're the 2nd most liberal muni in Illinois after us. But Wilmette still has theirs, just like River Forest still has their ALPRs. I think a lot of munis will drop Flock, because of the bad PR, but they're just going to stand up no-name ALPRs.
(For people unfamiliar with Chicagoland, Oak Park borders Chicago to its west and is like our version of Park Slope, and Evanston, which houses Northwestern University, borders Chicago to the North and is like our Westchester County.)
I was pretty irritable about us cancelling our Flock contract. We did a metric fuckton of regulation on our cameras; I think we may have had the most sophisticated ALPR regulation of any ALPR in the country (granted, that's a statement about how little regulation there is of them, but still). We could have disabled our cameras but kept the contract, kept our standing as a municipality that uses Flock, and then shopped our ordinances and police general orders to the neighboring municipalities.
Instead, we performatively cancelled our contract, while remaining 4.5 square miles surrounded on all sides by totally unregulated ALPRs.
> They won't like Flock, because of the Trump administration and ICE
This tells me the population votes based on emotion and vibes rather than critical thinking. With that attitude, presenting a reasoned rebuttal doesn't stand a chance; i.e. it's okay when my team does it.
This would be a more compelling rebuttal if I hadn't just told you a story about how we obtained exactly the outcome you claim to want in our own municipality.
Almost nobody on either side of the aisle likes the government putting up cameras in their neighborhood.
It's a reflexive reaction that Americans have to the government stepping on them. They get away with digital surveillance because it's generally well-hidden, but Trump is even changing that.
I really don't think this is true. I just watched lots and lots of people in an extraordinarily liberal suburb make impassioned cases for why they wanted these things up.
This is very helpful information, thanks for sharing. Vegas is unlikely to be an outlier here, especially given the involvement of Horowitz. I expect that many cities and towns will face similar moves to do an end run around citizen's rights and knowledge.
This is all well and good, but the problem is that those systems leak left and right. No amount of politics can stop that.
Back in the day when first ALPRs went into operation (I don't remember, was it 10 or 15 years ago) it took about two weeks for the data to appear on darkweb.
Then the same happened to citywide face recognition.
The only way to stop abuse is to not collect the data : ban the systems entirely.
The money being a red herring is a convenient excuse to say “surveillance capitalism is fine because there’s already a legal path to this dystopia and this idea fits right in”. These capital interests have shown even if there is a legal path to stop they will ignore it and try to circumvent it. So the money isn’t a red herring because the money is being used to bypass the legal pathway to stop the deployments.
This comment is one very long sentence and because it replies to me I'm sorry to have to say I'm not smart enough to understand what it's saying. Did you try to get an ordinance enacted in your municipality and fail? I'd love to hear how that went, and maybe offer advice.
FWIW this is probably the most matter-of-fact series of statements from a commenter about Flock or about the democratic process that I've seen in years on this site.
You’re very clearly defensive about defending flock installs, but yeah I will go back and edit my comment to clarify. Apologies your majesty for forgetting some punctuation while I was sick.
The text "prevented further rollout and ultimately got the cameras shut down" is verbatim in their post maybe a few sentences after talking about how the muni piloted them.
I'm defensive about defending Flock installs? I'm one of a small minority of HN commenters that has actually gotten Flock cameras disabled across a municipality.
For what it's worth, your original comment is a little hard to parse, particularly because you say "our pilot deployment" which makes it sound like you were involved in deploying the cameras. Combined with your realpolitik comment about knowing your neighbors want them, I think several people are confused about your opinions and what you ended up doing to fight the cameras.
I'm very disappointed reading the replies to your comment. It's pretty clear that most people just saw a long set of words that wasn't full-tilt negative and assumed you are pro-camera.
Thanks! But I'm much more interested in just getting people to do local politics. It is nothing at all like national politics. The people you need to persuade aren't faceless, they're not a mass of people swayed by the media, the electeds will take your phone calls directly, you can go door-to-door to make things happen. I see so much nihilistic fatalism in these threads and I think most of it is based off a conception of politics rooted in, like, the shit Politico reports about.
Most of the stuff that really impacts your community, like Flock, is governed locally, by very small numbers of people.
I love that you had to edit this from your original comment, which said "I can't read more than 2 sentences" (in response to my 2-sentence comment). Well played!
Reading comprehension my dude. The money enables the “without Democratic involvement” part.
Idk how you come out of my comment thinking I missed the whole plea to “please stay inside democracy lines while your opponent runs laps around you with money”.
Why is the money a red herring? Just like in Oak Park, the police in Vegas are required to follow a democratic process for large purchases, and they were only able to avoid that with the money.
> Metro funds the project with donor money funneled into a private foundation. It’s an arrangement that allows Metro to avoid soliciting public comment on the surveillance technology
It doesn't matter whether the cameras are a good idea or not, the police should not be able to use a "donation" (from a guy who's going to profit from the donated equipment) to pretend they haven't done anything the public needs to know about.
The money is the main issue here, without it the public would have had a chance to discuss all the things you're talking about, and maybe reject them or put in some limitations. I would object to any secret arrangement like this, even if it was something completely innocuous like pencils for schools. There's no reason for significant acquisitions to be secret, and even if the government is acquiring something good and necessary, I don't want public services to be dependent on the generosity of some random dude without public discussion.
The large purchase has nothing to do with the actual problem! In Oak Park, OPPD rolled ALPR cameras out without bending a single rule because Flock structured a pilot deployment for them that came in under the purchase threshold. You aren't OK with that (and I'm not either) and it has nothing to do with the money.
Ok maybe this is just a semantic issue, but I'm still not understanding your argument that money has nothing to do with it. In your case, instead of having the founder donate the cameras, the company itself essentially donated them, I assume for a limited time. How is that not a money issue? When you said "a minor fracas erupted at the board", why did the board have a say at that point? Was it because the police now had to spend money, triggering public oversight?
It seems like the main problem you identified in your original comment is "I do believe you have to run a legit process to get them deployed." What is currently preventing this from happening? The only barrier I'm seeing is Ben Horowitz and Flock finding creative ways to temporarily let their customers not pay for their services.
I don't know how to more clearly say that the purchasing thresholds for police departments are not the actual issue with ALPR deployment. What you need is affirmative consent from the board/council before they're deployed, regardless of cost. If you rely on cost thresholds, ALPR vendors will make arrangements to get deployed in ways that fit under those thresholds. That's exactly what happened to us.
I think maybe one thing that's happening here is that people thing literally the only possible control against unwanted ALPR deployment is expenditure rules. But this is a story about one way a large metro got around expenditure rules. Meanwhile: there are model ordinances you can adopt that completely moot the price/gift issue. Pass them!
The point of my comment is "here is something you can do besides yelling on message boards about how much you don't like surveillance".
I think proactively passing a model ordinance is a good idea, but installing cameras is obviously not the only objectionable thing a police department can do. It isn't practical to make them get public approval for every acquisition regardless of cost, and it also isn't practical to brainstorm every possible bad thing they might ever try in the future and pass ordinances covering all of them.
I agree that the concrete bad thing that happened here is that cameras were installed without public consent. You are responding by saying "well the public should have predicted that and passed an ordinance before the police had a chance to try it". I am saying the police should be forced to consult the public when they make any significant acquisition, in any area, not just surveillance.
Perhaps the cost threshold could be amended to apply to the value of the good or services received, not the amount paid for them.
You also are not addressing the issue of government dependency on a private individual. Let's say Vegas has a public debate and decides they are in favor of cameras with no restrictions. Great, so is it now ok that Horowitz is donating them? No, it's still bad, because he might decide to stop being generous at any time, and then what happens? Vegas either suddenly loses an important service they depend on, or is forced to immediately pay whatever exorbitant price Flock/Horowitz comes up with.
ACLU CCOPS covers all surveillance technology, broadly construed; it is not simply an anti-camera ordinance. The whole point of it is to codify what things require consent.
Does it cover AI tools or things like predictive policing? What about heavy weapons and equipment? What if some guy decides to donate a bunch of tanks and rocket launchers? Drones? Personnel? Maybe a billionaire feels unsafe and donates $100 million for the police to hire hundreds of new cops to patrol the streets. Chemical weapons? "Education" from an extremist organization? Buildings? Maybe a "donor" could manipulate police presence by giving them land for police stations in specific areas. How about those high-pitched alarms that most adults can't hear, so that kids stay out of our donor's favorite part of town? Free high-powered legal defense for cops accused of crimes?
Do you understand what I'm saying? How is any community supposed to prevent every possible violation before it happens? Read through the history of police misconduct in this country and I'm sure you'll find some creative things you never would have thought of.
Yes and yes. Donation doesn't change anything; it's deployment that trips the threshold. If you care about heavy weaponry, add that to your ordinance (it's not hard) but the concern on this thread is surveillance.
I do not agree with the philosophy that the police should be allowed to do whatever they want as long as it wasn't explicitly prohibited in advance. That is the result of relying on ordinances that enumerate "what things require consent". A blanket expenditure limit is a better system in theory, but the article posted here demonstrates that it should actually be something like a "value added" limit. I am disagreeing with you that surveillance is the only concern in this thread. Private donations to the police of any kind are concerning when they bypass what is supposed to be a blanket limit on police power.
I honestly don't see the issue with private donations. Either it's something you want the police to have or it isn't. So the system needs to be structured to prevent them unilaterally deploying things that the bulk of the populace might not approve of.
I agree that a blacklist approach doesn't work. But neither does an expenditure limit. A value added limit is I think just a roundabout way of expressing a whitelist approach? Which seems like the only sensible solution to me. Ideally all deployments should require case-by-case approval unless an ordinance is passed to blanket approve an entire technology class for a specific type of usage.
Yes a whitelist makes a lot of sense, I don't know why I didn't think of that. Seems like it would be doable to blanket allow office supplies, gas, uniforms, etc. and then declare that anything else, even if it's free, must be approved by the public. If it's something uncontroversial then you can just update the ordinance.
Donations would be less of a problem with this system in place, but I still think it would be irresponsible to accept a donation without a plan to pay for it in the future if donations stop, and I also wouldn't want officers to feel indebted to some rich guy.
Getting your foot in the door: I think that having a supposed non-profit foundation make a contribution to a local government that then purchases a product that directly benefits an investor in that company which also happens to run that same foundation seems if not illegal ethically challenged.
This is why gifts to government are problematic. They are never gifts, they are end-runs around accountability and should have exceptionally high scrutiny. It is hard to say they should be outright illegal since participating in government often blurs the line between gifting government and just normal participation. This though is clearly just an end-run around democracy.
This particular gift is also problematic because Horowitz is an investor in Flock, and Horowitz's family foundation is spending money on Flock that will in turn increase its value, which benefits him as an investor. Of course lawyers will have looked at all this to make sure it doesn't run afoul of self-dealing rules, but that just means the rules verge on uselessly weak.
So if I understand the totality of the situation here: mans donates cameras from company he invested in, gets tax break for doing so, helps portfolio co, furthers own self-interest and propels us towards surveillance state?
I think the money is a red herring here. ALPR firms can come up with any number of different pilot/licensing/financing programs to keep deployments under purchasing thresholds for police departments.
The issue is that Las Vegas, like most major metros, doesn't appear to have ordinances preventing their police department from deploying cameras without the consent of the city council. That's fixable! There's model ordinances for this.
Flock was valued at $7.5 billion last year, and it's probably worth more now. It's absolutely one of YCombinator's success stories.
YCombinator's goal is to make a lot of money by causing there to be more startups, and therefore more successor startups. "Make the world a better place" is not one of their success metrics. They're investors, not altruists.
This is YC we're talking about. They'd fund payday loans with organs as collateral for African orphans if they could. Seriously, they have NO scruples.
That sounds like honest business compared to getting paid by the government to circumvent the laws that prevent the state from spying on it's own citizens at scale.
They do. The political and economic environment (edit: in the US) is currently supporting the idea that mass surveillance is an extremely lucrative investment opportunity.
Why would they? There’s no “pro-social” enforcement in their funding terms, so they’re just as “morals aren’t applicable to profit” as any off-the-shelf C-corp is. If they required their startups to found B-corps then I’d understand trying to apply human ethical concerns to them, but they don’t, so human morals simply don't apply.
Sure, but you created your account 14 years ago and have lost of posts. The person to whom I'm replying created their account 0 minutes before posting the comment to which I am replying. Not really apples to apples.
I've never posted anything on hn before and saw this post and it reminded me of a blog I found interesting. So yes, I did make this account to post this comment
Technically it should be covered as not just illegal, but by virtue of being the pinnacle of capital crimes, inherently treasonous through the violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clause… but abiding by the Constitution is just so lame and old. We need to move fast and break things.
gotta feel bad for snowden's naivete that he thought his big disclosures would resonate with the public at large. All we got in the years since was more surveillance and for him, a life in exile.
It sure wouldn't have been hard to create a digital deadman that released his information while he stayed in the country leveraging whistleblower protection. Or, he could have found his version of deepthroat and told his story. Or, he dumps everything on 4chan or on the Tor network and let someone else expose it... if all he actually cared about was exposing the moral ineptitude of the US.
Alas no, he was much more interested in the attention and TV interviews.
He lives in exile because he wasn't interested in whistleblowing.
My guy, there were double-digit number of people who had his level of access to both foreign surveillance and domestic surveillance. They were going to find him out, so he did away with pretense and put his name on it.
Yes, I think he could have. He didn't want to cover his tracks. Leaking information to the media is falling-off-a-log easy. The best journalists will tell you to your face "I'll go to jail before I give up a source"
It's not a matter of a journalist giving up his source. The issue is the sheer quantity of data leaked and the fact that the systems are (I assume) audited. Barring a security exploit I assume it would have been trivial to identify the responsible accounts.
If you believe otherwise I'm open to your theory but I think it is on you to provide a plausible explanation here.
This is the type of self-interested philanthropy that gives tech non-profits a bad name. Whatever happened to giving without the expectation of return?
I wish people would get more thoughtful, because fascism is the last thing any of this is, it’s something brand new and way worse, something from some sci-fi story of a tech-dystopian ruling class with suffocating and smothering domination over the masses. I think you would have to mash together a couple different novels and movies to accurately capture what this is.
Just alone note that not a single tyrant of the past could have even dreamt of the power and control over society that even just currently exists, let alone what is in the pipeline.
Do you remember Minority Report? That seems to be approaching things, but even that did not include many things that even already exist. Frankly, I think authors and directors didn’t include many aspects of things, simply because audiences of the past would have probably not found it believable that even just current things existed, because how could they, it would seem so utterly crushing and depressive that it would break the suspense when you can’t see any prospect for survival/success.
> surveillance technology, which critics worry could be co-opted to track undocumented immigrants
They're worried that the system could be co-opted to enforce the law on law breakers? Isn't that the job description of a cop?
This is how toxic American political discourse has become. Instead of pointing out that mass surveillance is evil because of the potential for abuse, they're saying it's bad because cops could do their jobs.
Genuine question, why does Flock get so much bad press in the US compared to other, much more infringing surveillance tech?
Your mobile provider knows your exact location at any point in time, and the NSA probably has access to most big tech data. Those tell you much more than a license plate reader.
In much of Europe, it is quite normal to see cameras everywhere both for traffic enforcement and for crime prevention. They are generally popular with the public, eg. in the UK with a >80% approval rate. In many cities, essentially every corner has CCTV.
Is it because Flock Safety also markets to private businesses, whereas in Europe CCTV and ANPR are state-run? Or is it a cultural thing, eg. because Americans value freedom or prefer driving over the speed limit, and Flock may end that?
> Your mobile provider knows your exact location at any point in time, and the NSA probably has access to most big tech data.
I can choose whether to carry a cell phone. I can control what data I share with big tech (very little here since I use free software and self-host everything).
I cannot do anything (that isn't illegal) if some bureaucrat decides to place a camera down my street to identify me or my car anytime I pass nearby.
I think the money is a red herring here.
In Oak Park, Illinois, we ran into a rhyming version of this problem: the only control we had about what technology OPPD deployed was a spending limit ($15K, if I'm remembering right), above which they had to ask the board for an appropriation. Our pilot deployment of Flock cameras easily went underneath that limit.
I'm not reflexively anti-ALPR camera. I don't like them, but I do local politics and know what my neighbors think, and a pretty significant chunk of my neighbors --- in what is likely one of the top 10 bluest municipalities in the United States (we're the most progressive in Chicagoland, which is saying something) --- want these cameras as a response to violent crime.
But I do believe you have to run a legit process to get them deployed.
OPPD was surprised when, after attempting to graduate their pilot to a broader deployment, a minor fracas erupted at the board. I'm on Oak Park's information systems commission and, with the help of a trustee and after talking to the Board president, got "what the hell do we do about the cameras" assigned to my commission. In conjunction with our police oversight commission (but, really, just us on the nerd commission), we:
* Got General Orders put in place for Flock usage that limited it exclusively to violent crime.
* Set up a monthly usage report regime that allowed the Village to get effectiveness metrics that prevented further rollout and ultimately got the cameras shut down.
* Presented to the board and got enacted an ACLU CCOPS ordinance, which requires board approval for anything broadly construed as "surveillance technology" for policing, whether you spend $1, $100,000, or $0 on it.
Especially if you're in a suburb, where the most important units of governance are responsive to like 15,000-50,000 people, this stuff is all pretty doable if you engage in local politics. It's much trickier if you're within the city limits of a major metro (we're adjacent to Chicago, and by rights should be a part of it), but still.
I cannot imagine a scenario where I'd want those in my neighborhood. Glad you like them, but I hope they don't make it to the west suburbs where I live.
Who are you talking about who likes the cameras? It isn't me. But if you're in a suburb of Chicagoland, my guess is your neighbors like them a bunch. They won't like Flock, because of the Trump administration and ICE press around Flock, but ALPRs are commodity technology now and you'll likely roll out some other vendor, like the munis surrounding Oak Park did.
Hi, Evanstonian here, we got rid of them.
Right, you're the 2nd most liberal muni in Illinois after us. But Wilmette still has theirs, just like River Forest still has their ALPRs. I think a lot of munis will drop Flock, because of the bad PR, but they're just going to stand up no-name ALPRs.
(For people unfamiliar with Chicagoland, Oak Park borders Chicago to its west and is like our version of Park Slope, and Evanston, which houses Northwestern University, borders Chicago to the North and is like our Westchester County.)
I was pretty irritable about us cancelling our Flock contract. We did a metric fuckton of regulation on our cameras; I think we may have had the most sophisticated ALPR regulation of any ALPR in the country (granted, that's a statement about how little regulation there is of them, but still). We could have disabled our cameras but kept the contract, kept our standing as a municipality that uses Flock, and then shopped our ordinances and police general orders to the neighboring municipalities.
Instead, we performatively cancelled our contract, while remaining 4.5 square miles surrounded on all sides by totally unregulated ALPRs.
> They won't like Flock, because of the Trump administration and ICE
This tells me the population votes based on emotion and vibes rather than critical thinking. With that attitude, presenting a reasoned rebuttal doesn't stand a chance; i.e. it's okay when my team does it.
This would be a more compelling rebuttal if I hadn't just told you a story about how we obtained exactly the outcome you claim to want in our own municipality.
Almost nobody on either side of the aisle likes the government putting up cameras in their neighborhood.
It's a reflexive reaction that Americans have to the government stepping on them. They get away with digital surveillance because it's generally well-hidden, but Trump is even changing that.
I really don't think this is true. I just watched lots and lots of people in an extraordinarily liberal suburb make impassioned cases for why they wanted these things up.
This is very helpful information, thanks for sharing. Vegas is unlikely to be an outlier here, especially given the involvement of Horowitz. I expect that many cities and towns will face similar moves to do an end run around citizen's rights and knowledge.
This is all well and good, but the problem is that those systems leak left and right. No amount of politics can stop that.
Back in the day when first ALPRs went into operation (I don't remember, was it 10 or 15 years ago) it took about two weeks for the data to appear on darkweb.
Then the same happened to citywide face recognition.
The only way to stop abuse is to not collect the data : ban the systems entirely.
I mean, that's what we ended up doing, as I wrote above.
No, I meant someting like chemical/biological weapons use in home alarms - level ban. Worldwide.
The money being a red herring is a convenient excuse to say “surveillance capitalism is fine because there’s already a legal path to this dystopia and this idea fits right in”. These capital interests have shown even if there is a legal path to stop they will ignore it and try to circumvent it. So the money isn’t a red herring because the money is being used to bypass the legal pathway to stop the deployments.
This comment is one very long sentence and because it replies to me I'm sorry to have to say I'm not smart enough to understand what it's saying. Did you try to get an ordinance enacted in your municipality and fail? I'd love to hear how that went, and maybe offer advice.
FWIW this is probably the most matter-of-fact series of statements from a commenter about Flock or about the democratic process that I've seen in years on this site.
You’re very clearly defensive about defending flock installs, but yeah I will go back and edit my comment to clarify. Apologies your majesty for forgetting some punctuation while I was sick.
The text "prevented further rollout and ultimately got the cameras shut down" is verbatim in their post maybe a few sentences after talking about how the muni piloted them.
I'm defensive about defending Flock installs? I'm one of a small minority of HN commenters that has actually gotten Flock cameras disabled across a municipality.
For what it's worth, your original comment is a little hard to parse, particularly because you say "our pilot deployment" which makes it sound like you were involved in deploying the cameras. Combined with your realpolitik comment about knowing your neighbors want them, I think several people are confused about your opinions and what you ended up doing to fight the cameras.
It isnt that hard to parse and it is very clear what position the commenter holds they state it
> I'm not reflexively anti-ALPR camera. I don't like them
Even LLMs can correctly parse this commenters intention.
I'm very disappointed reading the replies to your comment. It's pretty clear that most people just saw a long set of words that wasn't full-tilt negative and assumed you are pro-camera.
I read it and I admire what you accomplished!
Thanks! But I'm much more interested in just getting people to do local politics. It is nothing at all like national politics. The people you need to persuade aren't faceless, they're not a mass of people swayed by the media, the electeds will take your phone calls directly, you can go door-to-door to make things happen. I see so much nihilistic fatalism in these threads and I think most of it is based off a conception of politics rooted in, like, the shit Politico reports about.
Most of the stuff that really impacts your community, like Flock, is governed locally, by very small numbers of people.
Oh sorry I can’t read more than 1 sentence so I don’t know what I’m replying to, you’ll have to reword yours.
I love that you had to edit this from your original comment, which said "I can't read more than 2 sentences" (in response to my 2-sentence comment). Well played!
I love that I can keep you busy with nonsense commentary. You’re sweating trying to make sense of it all. Poorly played!
Reading comprehension my dude.
The money isn't the problem, deploying surveillance measures without Democratic involvement is.
Idk how you come out of the top comment thinking they were or flock.
Reading comprehension my dude. The money enables the “without Democratic involvement” part.
Idk how you come out of my comment thinking I missed the whole plea to “please stay inside democracy lines while your opponent runs laps around you with money”.
Why is the money a red herring? Just like in Oak Park, the police in Vegas are required to follow a democratic process for large purchases, and they were only able to avoid that with the money.
> Metro funds the project with donor money funneled into a private foundation. It’s an arrangement that allows Metro to avoid soliciting public comment on the surveillance technology
It doesn't matter whether the cameras are a good idea or not, the police should not be able to use a "donation" (from a guy who's going to profit from the donated equipment) to pretend they haven't done anything the public needs to know about.
The money is the main issue here, without it the public would have had a chance to discuss all the things you're talking about, and maybe reject them or put in some limitations. I would object to any secret arrangement like this, even if it was something completely innocuous like pencils for schools. There's no reason for significant acquisitions to be secret, and even if the government is acquiring something good and necessary, I don't want public services to be dependent on the generosity of some random dude without public discussion.
The large purchase has nothing to do with the actual problem! In Oak Park, OPPD rolled ALPR cameras out without bending a single rule because Flock structured a pilot deployment for them that came in under the purchase threshold. You aren't OK with that (and I'm not either) and it has nothing to do with the money.
Ok maybe this is just a semantic issue, but I'm still not understanding your argument that money has nothing to do with it. In your case, instead of having the founder donate the cameras, the company itself essentially donated them, I assume for a limited time. How is that not a money issue? When you said "a minor fracas erupted at the board", why did the board have a say at that point? Was it because the police now had to spend money, triggering public oversight?
It seems like the main problem you identified in your original comment is "I do believe you have to run a legit process to get them deployed." What is currently preventing this from happening? The only barrier I'm seeing is Ben Horowitz and Flock finding creative ways to temporarily let their customers not pay for their services.
I don't know how to more clearly say that the purchasing thresholds for police departments are not the actual issue with ALPR deployment. What you need is affirmative consent from the board/council before they're deployed, regardless of cost. If you rely on cost thresholds, ALPR vendors will make arrangements to get deployed in ways that fit under those thresholds. That's exactly what happened to us.
I think maybe one thing that's happening here is that people thing literally the only possible control against unwanted ALPR deployment is expenditure rules. But this is a story about one way a large metro got around expenditure rules. Meanwhile: there are model ordinances you can adopt that completely moot the price/gift issue. Pass them!
The point of my comment is "here is something you can do besides yelling on message boards about how much you don't like surveillance".
I think proactively passing a model ordinance is a good idea, but installing cameras is obviously not the only objectionable thing a police department can do. It isn't practical to make them get public approval for every acquisition regardless of cost, and it also isn't practical to brainstorm every possible bad thing they might ever try in the future and pass ordinances covering all of them.
I agree that the concrete bad thing that happened here is that cameras were installed without public consent. You are responding by saying "well the public should have predicted that and passed an ordinance before the police had a chance to try it". I am saying the police should be forced to consult the public when they make any significant acquisition, in any area, not just surveillance.
Perhaps the cost threshold could be amended to apply to the value of the good or services received, not the amount paid for them.
You also are not addressing the issue of government dependency on a private individual. Let's say Vegas has a public debate and decides they are in favor of cameras with no restrictions. Great, so is it now ok that Horowitz is donating them? No, it's still bad, because he might decide to stop being generous at any time, and then what happens? Vegas either suddenly loses an important service they depend on, or is forced to immediately pay whatever exorbitant price Flock/Horowitz comes up with.
ACLU CCOPS covers all surveillance technology, broadly construed; it is not simply an anti-camera ordinance. The whole point of it is to codify what things require consent.
Does it cover AI tools or things like predictive policing? What about heavy weapons and equipment? What if some guy decides to donate a bunch of tanks and rocket launchers? Drones? Personnel? Maybe a billionaire feels unsafe and donates $100 million for the police to hire hundreds of new cops to patrol the streets. Chemical weapons? "Education" from an extremist organization? Buildings? Maybe a "donor" could manipulate police presence by giving them land for police stations in specific areas. How about those high-pitched alarms that most adults can't hear, so that kids stay out of our donor's favorite part of town? Free high-powered legal defense for cops accused of crimes?
Do you understand what I'm saying? How is any community supposed to prevent every possible violation before it happens? Read through the history of police misconduct in this country and I'm sure you'll find some creative things you never would have thought of.
Yes and yes. Donation doesn't change anything; it's deployment that trips the threshold. If you care about heavy weaponry, add that to your ordinance (it's not hard) but the concern on this thread is surveillance.
I do not agree with the philosophy that the police should be allowed to do whatever they want as long as it wasn't explicitly prohibited in advance. That is the result of relying on ordinances that enumerate "what things require consent". A blanket expenditure limit is a better system in theory, but the article posted here demonstrates that it should actually be something like a "value added" limit. I am disagreeing with you that surveillance is the only concern in this thread. Private donations to the police of any kind are concerning when they bypass what is supposed to be a blanket limit on police power.
I honestly don't see the issue with private donations. Either it's something you want the police to have or it isn't. So the system needs to be structured to prevent them unilaterally deploying things that the bulk of the populace might not approve of.
I agree that a blacklist approach doesn't work. But neither does an expenditure limit. A value added limit is I think just a roundabout way of expressing a whitelist approach? Which seems like the only sensible solution to me. Ideally all deployments should require case-by-case approval unless an ordinance is passed to blanket approve an entire technology class for a specific type of usage.
Yes a whitelist makes a lot of sense, I don't know why I didn't think of that. Seems like it would be doable to blanket allow office supplies, gas, uniforms, etc. and then declare that anything else, even if it's free, must be approved by the public. If it's something uncontroversial then you can just update the ordinance.
Donations would be less of a problem with this system in place, but I still think it would be irresponsible to accept a donation without a plan to pay for it in the future if donations stop, and I also wouldn't want officers to feel indebted to some rich guy.
Getting your foot in the door: I think that having a supposed non-profit foundation make a contribution to a local government that then purchases a product that directly benefits an investor in that company which also happens to run that same foundation seems if not illegal ethically challenged.
> Why is the money a red herring?
Because even $1 for surveillance is too much.
This is why gifts to government are problematic. They are never gifts, they are end-runs around accountability and should have exceptionally high scrutiny. It is hard to say they should be outright illegal since participating in government often blurs the line between gifting government and just normal participation. This though is clearly just an end-run around democracy.
This particular gift is also problematic because Horowitz is an investor in Flock, and Horowitz's family foundation is spending money on Flock that will in turn increase its value, which benefits him as an investor. Of course lawyers will have looked at all this to make sure it doesn't run afoul of self-dealing rules, but that just means the rules verge on uselessly weak.
So if I understand the totality of the situation here: mans donates cameras from company he invested in, gets tax break for doing so, helps portfolio co, furthers own self-interest and propels us towards surveillance state?
Did I miss anything?
The only thing you may have missed is that YCombinator is also an investor in Flock.
You're saying the quiet part out loud sir...
That’s my curse
I think the money is a red herring here. ALPR firms can come up with any number of different pilot/licensing/financing programs to keep deployments under purchasing thresholds for police departments.
The issue is that Las Vegas, like most major metros, doesn't appear to have ordinances preventing their police department from deploying cameras without the consent of the city council. That's fixable! There's model ordinances for this.
How long until YCombinator stops listing Flock "Safety" on their website as one of their proud VC success stories?
[1] https://www.ycombinator.com
Flock was valued at $7.5 billion last year, and it's probably worth more now. It's absolutely one of YCombinator's success stories.
YCombinator's goal is to make a lot of money by causing there to be more startups, and therefore more successor startups. "Make the world a better place" is not one of their success metrics. They're investors, not altruists.
It's only a success if all you care about is money.
This is YC we're talking about. They'd fund payday loans with organs as collateral for African orphans if they could. Seriously, they have NO scruples.
(And yes, I know where I am.)
That sounds like honest business compared to getting paid by the government to circumvent the laws that prevent the state from spying on it's own citizens at scale.
Yes. Therefore, for Y Combinator, this is a success story.
They could also care about mass surveillance.
They do. The political and economic environment (edit: in the US) is currently supporting the idea that mass surveillance is an extremely lucrative investment opportunity.
Which is all a great deal of people in America care about, yes.
never, it is a shining success when viewed through the eyes of venture capital
Never.
We should not expect any VC no matter how big or small to care.
It prints money and harvest data, the holy grail basically, why would they remove it
Hunh, didn’t know flock was ycomb.
The new leadership (Tan) is utterly shameless and free of moral constraints. I wouldn't count on it.
Yeah, the idea that YC will disown unfettered capitalism seems dreamy.
Why would they? There’s no “pro-social” enforcement in their funding terms, so they’re just as “morals aren’t applicable to profit” as any off-the-shelf C-corp is. If they required their startups to found B-corps then I’d understand trying to apply human ethical concerns to them, but they don’t, so human morals simply don't apply.
Similar post here on cities being gifted surveillance tools: https://computer.rip/2025-12-26-Flock-and-Urban-Surveillance...
Did you make this account to post this comment?
I was about to link the same article and I did not make my account to post this comment.
Sure, but you created your account 14 years ago and have lost of posts. The person to whom I'm replying created their account 0 minutes before posting the comment to which I am replying. Not really apples to apples.
I've never posted anything on hn before and saw this post and it reminded me of a blog I found interesting. So yes, I did make this account to post this comment
We all have to start somewhere, welcome aboard.
Very cool, welcome aboard!
can you explain why it matters?
i am trying (and failing!) to see any reason the account age matters in this particular case. but i could be missing something.
(i did not make this account just to reply to you)
Gross. Ethics laws should prohibit this.
Technically it should be covered as not just illegal, but by virtue of being the pinnacle of capital crimes, inherently treasonous through the violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clause… but abiding by the Constitution is just so lame and old. We need to move fast and break things.
I sounds naive to assert that the jurisdiction of city government doesn't extend beyond just "whatever is funded by taxpayers."
Also, if someone were to destroy one of these things, the damage caused, by a similar logic, is $0, right? /s
gotta feel bad for snowden's naivete that he thought his big disclosures would resonate with the public at large. All we got in the years since was more surveillance and for him, a life in exile.
Snowden's naivete was grounded in arrogance.
It sure wouldn't have been hard to create a digital deadman that released his information while he stayed in the country leveraging whistleblower protection. Or, he could have found his version of deepthroat and told his story. Or, he dumps everything on 4chan or on the Tor network and let someone else expose it... if all he actually cared about was exposing the moral ineptitude of the US.
Alas no, he was much more interested in the attention and TV interviews.
He lives in exile because he wasn't interested in whistleblowing.
My guy, there were double-digit number of people who had his level of access to both foreign surveillance and domestic surveillance. They were going to find him out, so he did away with pretense and put his name on it.
You really think he could have dumped all of that without having it traced back to him? Aren't these audited systems?
Yes, I think he could have. He didn't want to cover his tracks. Leaking information to the media is falling-off-a-log easy. The best journalists will tell you to your face "I'll go to jail before I give up a source"
It's not a matter of a journalist giving up his source. The issue is the sheer quantity of data leaked and the fact that the systems are (I assume) audited. Barring a security exploit I assume it would have been trivial to identify the responsible accounts.
If you believe otherwise I'm open to your theory but I think it is on you to provide a plausible explanation here.
The journalist doesn’t need to leak all of the documents, they need to tell the story, with like… 3% of the docs.
This again leads me back to, Snowden didn’t give a fuck about whistleblowing. He just didn’t.
So installing mass surveillance systems without permission of the people being spied on counts as philanthropy now?
We are at a weird place right now in the US.
This is the type of self-interested philanthropy that gives tech non-profits a bad name. Whatever happened to giving without the expectation of return?
Palantir used this backdoor to get into municipal police departments. LA is the example that sticks in my mind. I remember others.
It's democracy in action, nothing to see, please move along.
I mean eventually founders with strong ideals will find VCs better aligned to society, since now it's en vouge to go full mask off.
Are people going to start "disabling flock cameras" when they are integrated into police vehicles?
I’m not necessarily defending that, but that sounds far less problematic in general.
Title is: Vegas police are big users of license plate readers. Public has little input because it’s a gift.
The US is such a joke. Free market my ass. What an end run around true competition. Just grift top to bottom.
Nothing stops other surveillance companies from donating cameras and 24-7 monitoring services.
Imagine if the government was as creative with getting things done people want as it is with getting things done that people don't want.
Fascists, him and his VC partner
I wish people would get more thoughtful, because fascism is the last thing any of this is, it’s something brand new and way worse, something from some sci-fi story of a tech-dystopian ruling class with suffocating and smothering domination over the masses. I think you would have to mash together a couple different novels and movies to accurately capture what this is.
Just alone note that not a single tyrant of the past could have even dreamt of the power and control over society that even just currently exists, let alone what is in the pipeline.
Do you remember Minority Report? That seems to be approaching things, but even that did not include many things that even already exist. Frankly, I think authors and directors didn’t include many aspects of things, simply because audiences of the past would have probably not found it believable that even just current things existed, because how could they, it would seem so utterly crushing and depressive that it would break the suspense when you can’t see any prospect for survival/success.
> surveillance technology, which critics worry could be co-opted to track undocumented immigrants
They're worried that the system could be co-opted to enforce the law on law breakers? Isn't that the job description of a cop?
This is how toxic American political discourse has become. Instead of pointing out that mass surveillance is evil because of the potential for abuse, they're saying it's bad because cops could do their jobs.
Genuine question, why does Flock get so much bad press in the US compared to other, much more infringing surveillance tech?
Your mobile provider knows your exact location at any point in time, and the NSA probably has access to most big tech data. Those tell you much more than a license plate reader.
In much of Europe, it is quite normal to see cameras everywhere both for traffic enforcement and for crime prevention. They are generally popular with the public, eg. in the UK with a >80% approval rate. In many cities, essentially every corner has CCTV.
Is it because Flock Safety also markets to private businesses, whereas in Europe CCTV and ANPR are state-run? Or is it a cultural thing, eg. because Americans value freedom or prefer driving over the speed limit, and Flock may end that?
> Your mobile provider knows your exact location at any point in time, and the NSA probably has access to most big tech data.
I can choose whether to carry a cell phone. I can control what data I share with big tech (very little here since I use free software and self-host everything).
I cannot do anything (that isn't illegal) if some bureaucrat decides to place a camera down my street to identify me or my car anytime I pass nearby.
I think a big part is the name. Like we are the sheep for the shearing.
Does this question really warrant the downvotes? I'm genuinely curious. Why not just answer it instead?
Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.[1]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I suspect you're getting downvoted because the phrasing of your question implies that you don't consider this type of surveillance to be a problem.