I know this is preaching to the choir but from the article on the person holding the skimmer
> Police can also use the cameras to surveil protestors and stalk ex-lovers—or strangers they find attractive.
I didn't believe police actually did this until a roommate's new classmate told me her story. She has recently moved in to the neighborhood (an HOA at that). She was walking her dog one evening when a police officer who also lives in the HOA greeted her by her full legal name which she swears she never uses anywhere so the only way someone would know it was if they looked her up. She was just a roommate at this new place so her name wouldn't be in any HOA papers.
The police (or any law enforcement) really should not have access to any kind of dragnet surveillance.
They won't use technology to find our lost/stolen phones but they want even more surveillance for what?
A little searching will find you all sorts of such hits, like an officer tracking her domestic partner [0], an officer stalking someone after meeting on a TV set* [1], another officer tracking his ex partner [2], another officer tracking his mistress [3]. This is just a random sample.
* Note this scenario was not with Flock, which is important: there's more than one player in this space. Kill Flock and others might roll in; something broader is needed like, oh, I don't know, constitutional protections or something.
I wouldn't be surprised to find that the quality of the average cop in the US has improved since the 1960s, at least by some measures. But they are a lot more heavily armed, so mistakes and malfeasance on their part is deadlier.
The big thing that's changed is that you're hearing about it. The second biggest thing is that we've given cops more and more access to automated systems that they can misuse.
Police are, in the most generous light, just as fallible and likely to abuse power as the rest of us.
You can loosely define power as “Effect minus repercussion”.
Massive effects like the nuclear football have massive repercussions like the end of civilization, so we tend to view them with a degree of balance. MAD has worked on this principle for decades pretty effectively. Even a tiny bit of Effect, with zero Repercussion, leads to unjust abuse, such as the diplomatic immunity issues in New York City.
Nearly everything we have given the police has huge Effect, mostly by necessity, but more every day with tools like flock and the stripping of our rights. Endless military hardware, etc.
Simultaneously we have ALSO been shrinking the repercussions for police. for decades. When sued the taxpayers pay for their defense. When they lose the lawsuits, the taxpayers pay the plaintiffs out and the police very very rarely face prison. Often times they can keep working in another department. They have extra protections nobody else has so they are less likely to lose those cases in the first place. There is next to ZERO oversight of all the tools we give them, to prevent the lawsuits. Federal police can remain anonymous when they commit obvious homicide or executions, apparently.
We are very close to an effectively infinite power situation because there are next to zero repercussions. Even IF cops had no firearms, no armored vehicles, no flock, no palantir. They could still bust the door down to their ex girlfriend’s place and beat up their new boyfriend for any kind of flimsy excuse. Because what are you going to do about it? Sue them? You’re just offering them a free vacation.
We were hearing during the Snowden era about the abuse of NSA systems like XKeyscore and others through what was termed jokingly LOVEINT. Anything that's built will get abused in some way - sometimes its even best not to build such databases at all.
Here's CNN discussing NSA analyst abuse from 13 years ago:
This is 10 years old, but in 2016 the Associated Press did a massive public records request for police departments across the country. Between 2013-2015, they found over 600 cases where the police department actually did an internal investigation, found this kind of misuse, didn't cover it up, and handed over the records. About half of those cases resulted in a firing, suspension, or resignation.
This is clearly an undercount, and I'm sure it's only gotten worse since 2016.
My only question is why you didn’t believe police could/would do this in the first place? My default perspective is that this is exactly what law-enforcement and other government officials would use this technology to do, especially if there are no guardrails or laws preventing them from abusing it.
> While Flock’s audit logs have been successful in bringing to light certain abuses, that very fact is likely to deter many officers from honestly describing the purposes of their searches moving forward. Take the controversial Texas abortion search. If the officer who logged, "had an abortion, search for female" had just left out the word "abortion” that story never would have seen the light of day. And there’s no doubt that the department — and police around the nation — realize that.
> Our ability to identify officers was clearly effective. In a direct attempt to stop us from providing transparency, Flock and police departments have dropped the unique IDs (UUIDs) in the transparency portals entirely. They now simply replace them with the word “redacted” in the public audit logs, effectively preventing oversight and individual accountability.
> Flock Safety updated the system on 12/11/2025 to protect officer safety and active investigations, Network Audit Logs no longer include officer names, license plate, or vehicle fingerprint information.
Audit logs are only useful if they are used to action abuses. The issue is that police departments protect abusers due to the “thin blue line” mentality.
I'm sure there is an audit log. But because, you know, computers, they'll probably charge you a few thousand dollars to process the FOIA request. If you could get the time cards and GPS tracks from police departments, how much detail and overtime fraud do you think you would find?
>They won't use technology to find our lost/stolen phones
Our local sheriff’s department used Apple’s FindMy to search for my parent’s iPad that had been stolen from their car during a smash and grab. In this case, he found it in the possession of a couple that had found it tossed on the side of the street after the thief had stripped it for cash and credit cards, but it saved them the hassle and cost of having to buy a new one.
Anyways, there’s nothing stopping PDs from searching for stolen electronics. Maybe you should talk to your local city council and ask why yours don’t?
Why don't they instead push for making abuses of law enforcement access illegal? That way we can both catch criminals and missing people along with avoiding abuse.
Those things are illegal, but it still happens because it is so easy and they usually aren't caught. We only hear about the rare instances where something actually happens to the cop doing it, most of the time it is never reported.
This isn't because police are inherently horrible people, it is because they are normal humans.
We all know people who would abuse the ability to track anyone they want. And we also have all seen times at work where employees ignore or cover for another employee breaking the rules, for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes because the coworker is a friend, sometimes because of peer pressure, and sometimes just because we don't want the hassle and paperwork and stress of reporting someone for what seems at the time like a minor infraction. And then the next time it happens with a slightly worse infraction, you think, "Well, I didn't report them when the did X, and this isn't that much worse, so ill just keep my mouth shut"
That is just human nature, and it is why sometimes making something illegal isn't enough. You have to make it impossible.
> This isn't because police are inherently horrible people, it is because they are normal humans.
Well, you also have to remember that police aren't selected at random from the population. The kind of guy (or gal) who wants to be a cop is often attracted to the power that the job brings. This sets a culture, which is self-perpetuating, affecting the kind of person who they hire, and how people think once they get in.
A few bad apples spoil the bunch - and boy oh boy, we did not get rid of those bad apples in time. It's not a perfect metaphor, of course, but we've been dealing with constant police corruption issues for at least 50 years now. I feel like we gotta try something new.
Police do not prevent crime and rarely catch criminals, in fact they are often _involved_ in crime. There are scientific approaches to solving crime and larger budgets for more cameras and police tanks is not it.
Also, he and Flock recently boasted on LinkedIn that they are not shipping face-tracking in some cities. Wow this makes them so much more secure and private right? No it's likely because most people are looking at their phones and they can more easily identify you via the way you walk, the clothes you wear, and the places you visit.
Because in the United States, cops are de facto above the law. Either because of qualified (translation: total) immunity or because if you try to enforce the law on them they throw tantrums and work stoppages. Attempting to constrain their behavior with the law is basically useless, so it has to be done on the level of functional capabilities.
Qualified immunity is not total immunity and throwing a tantrum doesn't prevent you from being arrested. There is plenty of body cam footage that attests to that.
> Approximately 4,000 NYPD officers took part in a protest that included blocking traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge and jumping over police barricades in an attempt to rush City Hall. Rioters were observed to be openly drinking, damaging cars, and physically attacking journalists from the New York Times on the scene. Rioters also chanted racial epithets towards the African-American Mayor Dinkins. The nearly 300 uniformed on-duty officers did little to control the riot.
> Of the nearly 10,000 participating officers, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly sanctioned 42 of them.
> In early August 1975, the SFPD went on strike over a pay dispute, violating a California law prohibiting police from striking. The city quickly obtained a court order declaring the strike illegal and enjoining the SFPD back to work. The court messenger delivering the order was met with violence and the SFPD continued to strike. Only managers and African-American officers remained on duty, with 45 officers and three fire trucks responsible for a city population of 700,000. Supervisor Dianne Feinstein pleaded Mayor Joseph Alioto to ask Governor Jerry Brown to call out the National Guard to patrol the streets, but Alioto refused. When enraged civilians confronted SFPD officers at the picket lines, the officers arrested them. The strike was joined by the city's firefighters. The ACLU obtained a court order prohibiting strikers from carrying their service revolvers. Again, the SFPD ignored the court order. On August 20, a bomb detonated at the Mayor's home with a sign reading "Don't Threaten Us" left on his lawn. On August 21, Mayor Alioto advised the San Francisco Board of Supervisors that they should concede to the strikers' demands. The Supervisors unanimously refused. Mayor Alioto immediately then declared a state of emergency, assumed legislative powers, and granted the strikers' demands. City Supervisors and taxpayers sued but the court found that a contract obtained through an illegal strike is still legally enforceable.
It's way worse than that. It runs full stack top to bottom. Your local municipal clerk is using that shit to look up the Applebees manager that told them to shove it.
I was with you up until the very last line. Why do people imagine that the police are in the business of property retrieval? Once your stuff is stolen in almost all cases it's long LONG gone! Cars are sent to be broken down for parts, tools are sold to fences and so on. The typical thief isn't some mastermind who carefully holds on to what they stole, they rush to their nearest fence or dealer to trade it for what they need.
Police are there to report a crime and add that to area stats, and if the issue is more than a lone junkie then it eventually gets to a detective in whatever the local version of Robbery is.
"They didn't get my stuff back" isn't a realistic criticism, and it detracts from the many other points that are.
With a few exceptions, like mob run baggage theft rings at big airports, criminals are not very smart and have pretty poor opsec. Solution rates could be a lot better than they are.
The sort of low-level thieves you're thinking off sold off their ill-gotten gains within a very short time for a fraction of their value, often in a direct trade for drugs. It would be very hard to justify the investment required to prevent that, track the route property takes through handoff networks, and recover it in a form the owner would accept. Given that society suffers from more serious crimes that's generally where effort goes, and that's the result of public demand.
People want to not pay a lot for police, they want them well trained and highly accountable, they want excellent 'customer service', and they want to defund the police all at the same time. Out of this incoherent mess of conflicting desires the compromise is to focus on crime prevention, fighting organized crimes, or crimes against people rather than property as the top priorities.
This scene from The Big Lebowski is how all cops treat personal property theft cases (They got us working in shifts!): https://youtu.be/N0rOe59wKAc
Save your time and don’t get laughed at behind your back. By all means, report your stolen car but anything smaller than that is a waste of your time and the cops time since they do not care at all.
The Flock CEO Garret Langley called people that didn't want his unsecure surveillance state in their own communities "terrorists". A term that has a very loose meaning but is always used to invoke state violence. So he wants to create a strong police state and violence against regular people for money aka he's a fascist.
(but HN will flag me for "name-calling" a person promoting and creating violent state oppression)
Doing his job as a CEO he's making noises, desperately trying to move the overton window now that enough concerned citizens have been made aware of how much malfeasance his product enables, and how little safety it brings. I think at this point a few more inane statements from the guy are to be expected, desperately trying to shift the hate onto his well-protected person and away from his fragile electronic boxes & the malware they run.
That’s the sad part. There was a nationwide trend to ignore misdemeanor theft so much so that now there is a new baseline and most police have taken this to heart and don’t even pretend to put an effort into misdemeanor theft -yes, I know many or perhaps most departments are understaffed but still. It’s irritating.
> “I've spent the last several months talking to people all over Casa Grande, and one thing keeps coming up: Safety. So, today I'm excited to announce a new company called Shepherd Safety,” he said. “Our mission is simple. Keep government officials and their families safe.” It would be no different than how the city monitors its citizens using Flock cameras, he said; he planned to launch satellites that would use AI to monitor “where government officials go, where they stop, who they meet with, and when they return home.”
I do find it very funny how over the past couple of decades US has been talking about how awful Chinese government is wrt surveillance, but now doing exactly the same but through private industry contracts instead. I hold a semi-middle ground view to CCTVs/plate readers, and understand how it can deliver improved QoL to most citizens. But a bit weird how a core American "surveillance = big no no" belief was thrown out in a few years. Another proof of people just say things, but when it comes to action, you can just do stuff.
Sorry for a negative comment, but it's just an interesting observation from an outsider.
> But a bit weird how a core American "surveillance = big no no" belief was thrown out in a few years.
I can't speak for China since I'm not as familiar with that culture, but as for the US, the culture has not changed, as you can see by protest campaigns like this and many similar types of protests (e.g. public destruction of Flock cameras). The culture in the US was founded on minimal government interference based on those trying to escape persecution elsewhere at that time, and that thread is still baked into many facets of US politics.
What has changed is the state. Surveillance has been growing constantly, to much of the disapproval of those who live in the US (e.g. Edward Snowden's revelations were very damning and the revealed surveillance was very much protested against, and likewise after the Cambridge Analytica leaks). But it's a bit of boiling frog syndrome for those experiencing it: the state can grow more controlling of our lives slow enough not to be perceptible, or to spin surveillance under manipulative politics, which is for example what led to bipartisan support of the Patriot Act. This makes it difficult to stop. Technology is especially a double edged sword for making this worse.
Thanks for explanation. To be honest, that's what I've heard from my American friends as well, and I genuinely respect this position (as I agree somewhat agree with it). But at the end of the day, the results speak for themselves. Since it's a democracy, if it was an issue people cared about, they would have voted in someone in local/state/national level who would oppose surveillance, no?
I understand that it sounds a bit condescending to paint the whole nation in such manner, but this is what it looks like to me an observer with no skin in the game. And I understand that when you're in political minority, you can't really do much to change it.
I can't respond to a couple of dead comments under my post, like the one says "Difference is china uses to police speech. Police in US use it to catch scumbags". And this is exactly what I meant in my post. There's an interesting perception of "when X does it, it's definitely for bad stuff, but when WE do it, obviously it's for good". Again, sorry, I think I woke up in a shitty mood, and picking up fights.
The useful idiots were happy to bury their heads in the sad and ignore the broader trajectory so long as the state threw them a bone from time to time. A few speed cameras here or there, environmental violation lead generation via location data there, maybe even a shotspotter deployment or two. It didn't take much to not just keep HN quiet, but to get their active support, as every brick in the road to hell was laid down.
I would guess if you really put it up to the people many wouldn't be a fan of this sort of broad warrantless surveillance (or at least want more controls or limits on it). Good luck finding a candidate that matches this and your other values in one of the two political parties you have a choice between. Also good luck effecting any political change in whatever gerrymandered district you are in. I think the US government with a more actually representative democracy would look very different.
I am right up the road from Casa Grande. I run a youtube channel with 30k subs and have recently gotten VERY INTERESTED in investigating Flock/Deflock. I had no idea the cameras were everywhere.
I'll reach out anywhere on the site but feel free to get in touch here as well. I want to interview the creator and broadcast the situation in Casa Grande.
edit: emailed the address on the site. Anyone else on the east valley working on similar efforts should give me a nudge in the comments.
Yea, I am thoroughly unconvinced that protesting and asking nicely is really a way to implement political change. The people implementing these things and making these deals are sitting on their yachts and mansion balconies, sipping their martinis, and looking down at us little people with raised eyebrows, not caring in the slightest what we say. They are going to keep doing what they are doing, they're going to keep getting elected, they're going to keep getting appointed to their corporate boards, and they look at the protesters as just loud annoyances--if they even look at them at all.
My suburb got rid of Flock after enough people complained at a city council meeting. I think more places in our county are following or attempting to follow in our footsteps.
I’m familiar with cities that conduct time-bounded surges of policing in reaction to specific outbreaks of criminality.
When inter-faction violence in a neighborhood escalates to the level of a murder, for example, they surge for a couple weeks. Massively increased visible patrol presence—cops on every corner—portable light towers attached to generators, to provide near-daylight-level illumination on the sidewalks and streets... a conspicuous level of “eyes on the street” that discourages retaliation and responds to residents’ heightened fear in the immediate aftermath. While at the same time
being obviously temporary—not permanent measures that signal the neighborhood as structurally crime-ridden.
It’s a “fly the flag at half mast for a bit” kind of signal, not “this neighborhood is full of criminals and deserves the corresponding built environment.”
I wonder if something in that spirit might be a reasonable long-term equilibrium for things like Flock. Garbage bags over the camera poles for ordinary times, almost as a point of civic pride that the place we’ve built and maintained is safe enough not to need to use them. Pull the garbage bags off if there’s a problem—spate of auto thefts, high-profile crime, fugitive on the loose—but we demand an explanation when that happens and a concrete end point where they go back on.
Not all crimes are equal. I'd like very much for my stuff to not be stolen. I'd like it even better if I didn't get murdered. Optimally, no murders would happen.
Our city doesn’t have them. Except there’s one in the main hospital parking lot. This reminds me to finish up that letter I meant to send to them asking how they square that with the fact any cop in Texas can peek at people coming in and out of the maternity ward in New Hampshire, given Ken Paxton a call and try to jam up someone for looking like they terminated a pregnancy.
I wonder if this is as efficient or as effective. The guy holding the skimmer was viral and garnered a lot of attention to the situation. This site, while something I support, probably won't. Maybe it'll be the place people find after learning about the guy holding the sign.
Now, if the guy holding the skimmer had a sign with the URL on it, then we're on to something.
I agree with the implication that the parent's use of the word "nobody" is incorrect. It might be hard to believe if you read some of the things I write, but I have enormous sympathy for people who want surveillance. Personal crime is a hideous affront to the comfortable society that we all deserve. Related: I even sympathize with people who want to be allowed to lethally attack any home invader, despite my being largely liberal. Such invasions are an indescribable violation of our sense of civilization and dignity, that I think many people don't appreciate.
However... the opinion of people who do not want to be surveilled is heavier than those who do, naturally. The effect of being surveilled, especially by a system that has already been demonstrated to be abused, is more dramatic than the effect of not being surveilled despite wanting it.
Surveillance is simply too double-edged in the long term (or, in this case, the short term, considering Flock's incompetence). We must resist the temptation to allow it just because it currently benefits us.
When you say "especially by a system that has already been demonstrated to be abused," what does that mean exactly? We have some of the largest and globally important cities with tens of thousands of cameras. Look at London, NYC, Singapore, Sydney, Seoul, Chicago, or Tokyo. Tens of millions of people live in those cities, and they have relied on massive camera networks for years without turning into dystopias.
If you force surveillance on 10 people and even one of them doesn't consent, that's still a net bad. And this situation is probably closer to the inverse of those numbers, or at the very least 50/50.
And this isn't even to mention the criminal negligence of Flock, and the evils they have already enabled, as committed both by Flock employees and by government.
It's hard to gauge the sincerity of these beliefs, and even harder to tell if you've actually tested these beliefs against the reality of mass surveillance, especially when it's been used to arrest and stalk innocent people.
Well, we need laws and oversight to stop these actions. Do you realize that people use phones to stalk innocent people? And yet you probably have a phone. Why is that?
This is like the "why drive if it's so dangerous" fallacy. We trade cost for value, downsides for upsides, risk for reward. Cars and phones are highly valuable to normal people. Virtually all people do not experience immediate, constant, concrete benefits from public camera surveillance. And this is not even to mention that Flock cameras are more abused than phones (although scale makes that subjective, it's kind of apples-to-oranges right now).
Analogies are distracting. They are rhetorical junk food. Make an argument directly supporting Flock cameras - don't just say "it's like phones".
This was my exact point. I don't actually believe in banning phones and was just using it to point out how poor the argument is. I'm curious why you're jumping on me, but not OP. Is it because you agree with their opinions but not mine?
Saying "surveillance is bad because it has been abused in these instances" is not a particularly compelling argument because it doesn't talk about the "cost for value, downsides for upsides, risk for reward" aspects of flock.
That's because you haven't thought it through. "We only want info on the bad people" might not alarm you personally until any government entity changes the definition of bad and now you're a "bad guy".
There are all sorts of powers we afford law enforcement that could be abused; I hardly think cameras would be at the top of the list of concerns, honestly. NYC has had thousands upon thousands of cameras for quite a while without much fanfare, along with other major top cities worldwide.
OP knows only a very basic opinion of mine, and they tell me I'm wrong because I haven't thought about it, what else should I think? Do you think they know how much I thought about this?
Isn't the implication "if only you thought more and better about this topic, your opinion would match mine"?
While such a surveillance system appears to (kinda) work in China, do you really trust American companies and the American police system to implement it at anywhere close to that level of competency?
It's not the cameras I mind per-se. They have legitmately been used to solve some crimes that might have gone unsolved otherwise.
But the problem is the cameras are pervasive. It's not like a red light camera, or a speed zone camera, or a toll road camera, that has a specific purpose in a specific location. And it's the building of a database, and correlation of data from point to point, and the potential abuse. We have documented cases of cops abusing Flock data to stalk exes, And history proves that any time you collect data about a group of people, it will eventually if not immediately be abused.
You can propose all the warrants and anonymizing and other restrictions that you might like to control who looks at the data and when, but at the end of the day it's all about trusting those in power who have control of the data, and that's not a good thing to do. The government does not (or should not) have the right to track the public to this degree as they go about their daily personal business.
Would you care to elaborate on why you don't mind individuals being stalked by employees with zero oversight or accountability, and why you don't mind protestors being monitored by the government? Since those are both part of "this type of surveillance", and are a pretty fucking crazy thing to state you're okay with with no argument for them. Do you perhaps lack the imagination to consider how this would affect your life if a government that did not agree with your political views came into power sometime in the future and were to use "this type of surveillance" against you?
I wonder how many of the people that defend Flock, Google, Facebook " etc, also are the ones that "denounce" Huaweii for spying for the Chinese government.
Coincidentally I was just watching this video and felt it was a pretty decent way to communicate this to old boomer city councils. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6oKX1w7k5w
I know this is preaching to the choir but from the article on the person holding the skimmer
> Police can also use the cameras to surveil protestors and stalk ex-lovers—or strangers they find attractive.
I didn't believe police actually did this until a roommate's new classmate told me her story. She has recently moved in to the neighborhood (an HOA at that). She was walking her dog one evening when a police officer who also lives in the HOA greeted her by her full legal name which she swears she never uses anywhere so the only way someone would know it was if they looked her up. She was just a roommate at this new place so her name wouldn't be in any HOA papers.
The police (or any law enforcement) really should not have access to any kind of dragnet surveillance.
They won't use technology to find our lost/stolen phones but they want even more surveillance for what?
A little searching will find you all sorts of such hits, like an officer tracking her domestic partner [0], an officer stalking someone after meeting on a TV set* [1], another officer tracking his ex partner [2], another officer tracking his mistress [3]. This is just a random sample.
* Note this scenario was not with Flock, which is important: there's more than one player in this space. Kill Flock and others might roll in; something broader is needed like, oh, I don't know, constitutional protections or something.
[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/atlanta/news/police-supervisor-accus...
[1] https://www.404media.co/footage-shows-cop-stalking-woman-he-...
[2] https://www.404media.co/cops-keep-getting-arrested-for-using...
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byhWSvwz1Vw
This is quite distressing to hear. It's not the United States I know or even grew up in. What went wrong and how can we try to fix it?
It is exactly the United States you grew up in. You just were not aware.
It's not like people having good reason to be skeptical of police is a new thing.
I wouldn't be surprised to find that the quality of the average cop in the US has improved since the 1960s, at least by some measures. But they are a lot more heavily armed, so mistakes and malfeasance on their part is deadlier.
The big thing that's changed is that you're hearing about it. The second biggest thing is that we've given cops more and more access to automated systems that they can misuse.
Police are, in the most generous light, just as fallible and likely to abuse power as the rest of us. You can loosely define power as “Effect minus repercussion”. Massive effects like the nuclear football have massive repercussions like the end of civilization, so we tend to view them with a degree of balance. MAD has worked on this principle for decades pretty effectively. Even a tiny bit of Effect, with zero Repercussion, leads to unjust abuse, such as the diplomatic immunity issues in New York City. Nearly everything we have given the police has huge Effect, mostly by necessity, but more every day with tools like flock and the stripping of our rights. Endless military hardware, etc. Simultaneously we have ALSO been shrinking the repercussions for police. for decades. When sued the taxpayers pay for their defense. When they lose the lawsuits, the taxpayers pay the plaintiffs out and the police very very rarely face prison. Often times they can keep working in another department. They have extra protections nobody else has so they are less likely to lose those cases in the first place. There is next to ZERO oversight of all the tools we give them, to prevent the lawsuits. Federal police can remain anonymous when they commit obvious homicide or executions, apparently. We are very close to an effectively infinite power situation because there are next to zero repercussions. Even IF cops had no firearms, no armored vehicles, no flock, no palantir. They could still bust the door down to their ex girlfriend’s place and beat up their new boyfriend for any kind of flimsy excuse. Because what are you going to do about it? Sue them? You’re just offering them a free vacation.
We were hearing during the Snowden era about the abuse of NSA systems like XKeyscore and others through what was termed jokingly LOVEINT. Anything that's built will get abused in some way - sometimes its even best not to build such databases at all.
Here's CNN discussing NSA analyst abuse from 13 years ago:
https://www.cnn.com/2013/09/27/politics/nsa-snooping/
Here's an article from 10 years ago discussing the police doing it:
https://apnews.com/general-news-699236946e3140659fff8a2362e1...
This is 10 years old, but in 2016 the Associated Press did a massive public records request for police departments across the country. Between 2013-2015, they found over 600 cases where the police department actually did an internal investigation, found this kind of misuse, didn't cover it up, and handed over the records. About half of those cases resulted in a firing, suspension, or resignation.
This is clearly an undercount, and I'm sure it's only gotten worse since 2016.
https://apnews.com/general-news-699236946e3140659fff8a2362e1...
My only question is why you didn’t believe police could/would do this in the first place? My default perspective is that this is exactly what law-enforcement and other government officials would use this technology to do, especially if there are no guardrails or laws preventing them from abusing it.
I kinda expect the s/w engineer who wrote this would create an audit log. i.e. police-id, licence-place-id.
Well that's the way I would write it.
https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/tracking-alpr-c...
> While Flock’s audit logs have been successful in bringing to light certain abuses, that very fact is likely to deter many officers from honestly describing the purposes of their searches moving forward. Take the controversial Texas abortion search. If the officer who logged, "had an abortion, search for female" had just left out the word "abortion” that story never would have seen the light of day. And there’s no doubt that the department — and police around the nation — realize that.
https://footnote4a.org/news/secret-searches-part2
> Our ability to identify officers was clearly effective. In a direct attempt to stop us from providing transparency, Flock and police departments have dropped the unique IDs (UUIDs) in the transparency portals entirely. They now simply replace them with the word “redacted” in the public audit logs, effectively preventing oversight and individual accountability.
> Flock Safety updated the system on 12/11/2025 to protect officer safety and active investigations, Network Audit Logs no longer include officer names, license plate, or vehicle fingerprint information.
Audit logs are only useful if they are used to action abuses. The issue is that police departments protect abusers due to the “thin blue line” mentality.
I'm sure there is an audit log. But because, you know, computers, they'll probably charge you a few thousand dollars to process the FOIA request. If you could get the time cards and GPS tracks from police departments, how much detail and overtime fraud do you think you would find?
If something can be abused, especially with little to no accountability, it will be abused.
>They won't use technology to find our lost/stolen phones
Our local sheriff’s department used Apple’s FindMy to search for my parent’s iPad that had been stolen from their car during a smash and grab. In this case, he found it in the possession of a couple that had found it tossed on the side of the street after the thief had stripped it for cash and credit cards, but it saved them the hassle and cost of having to buy a new one.
Anyways, there’s nothing stopping PDs from searching for stolen electronics. Maybe you should talk to your local city council and ask why yours don’t?
Check out the new Netflix doc, A Toxic Love Story. US Marshall at the center of it all (no spoiler).
Well known pattern: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT
Why don't they instead push for making abuses of law enforcement access illegal? That way we can both catch criminals and missing people along with avoiding abuse.
Those things are illegal, but it still happens because it is so easy and they usually aren't caught. We only hear about the rare instances where something actually happens to the cop doing it, most of the time it is never reported.
This isn't because police are inherently horrible people, it is because they are normal humans.
We all know people who would abuse the ability to track anyone they want. And we also have all seen times at work where employees ignore or cover for another employee breaking the rules, for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes because the coworker is a friend, sometimes because of peer pressure, and sometimes just because we don't want the hassle and paperwork and stress of reporting someone for what seems at the time like a minor infraction. And then the next time it happens with a slightly worse infraction, you think, "Well, I didn't report them when the did X, and this isn't that much worse, so ill just keep my mouth shut"
That is just human nature, and it is why sometimes making something illegal isn't enough. You have to make it impossible.
Considering all of the access gets logged surely it's possible to build a system to flag abusive usage that is unrelated to a current case.
> This isn't because police are inherently horrible people, it is because they are normal humans.
Well, you also have to remember that police aren't selected at random from the population. The kind of guy (or gal) who wants to be a cop is often attracted to the power that the job brings. This sets a culture, which is self-perpetuating, affecting the kind of person who they hire, and how people think once they get in.
A few bad apples spoil the bunch - and boy oh boy, we did not get rid of those bad apples in time. It's not a perfect metaphor, of course, but we've been dealing with constant police corruption issues for at least 50 years now. I feel like we gotta try something new.
> Why don't they instead push for making abuses of law enforcement access illegal?
We did. Guess who you have to call when it happens?
Police are not above the law. Police officers can arrest and charge other police officers.
Can? Sure. Will? Often not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_wall_of_silence
It's like communism; works great, until humans get involved.
They will investigate themselves?
Police do not prevent crime and rarely catch criminals, in fact they are often _involved_ in crime. There are scientific approaches to solving crime and larger budgets for more cameras and police tanks is not it.
Also, he and Flock recently boasted on LinkedIn that they are not shipping face-tracking in some cities. Wow this makes them so much more secure and private right? No it's likely because most people are looking at their phones and they can more easily identify you via the way you walk, the clothes you wear, and the places you visit.
Because in the United States, cops are de facto above the law. Either because of qualified (translation: total) immunity or because if you try to enforce the law on them they throw tantrums and work stoppages. Attempting to constrain their behavior with the law is basically useless, so it has to be done on the level of functional capabilities.
Qualified immunity is not total immunity and throwing a tantrum doesn't prevent you from being arrested. There is plenty of body cam footage that attests to that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrolmen%27s_Benevolent_Assoc...
> Approximately 4,000 NYPD officers took part in a protest that included blocking traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge and jumping over police barricades in an attempt to rush City Hall. Rioters were observed to be openly drinking, damaging cars, and physically attacking journalists from the New York Times on the scene. Rioters also chanted racial epithets towards the African-American Mayor Dinkins. The nearly 300 uniformed on-duty officers did little to control the riot.
> Of the nearly 10,000 participating officers, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly sanctioned 42 of them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_San_Francisco_P...
> In early August 1975, the SFPD went on strike over a pay dispute, violating a California law prohibiting police from striking. The city quickly obtained a court order declaring the strike illegal and enjoining the SFPD back to work. The court messenger delivering the order was met with violence and the SFPD continued to strike. Only managers and African-American officers remained on duty, with 45 officers and three fire trucks responsible for a city population of 700,000. Supervisor Dianne Feinstein pleaded Mayor Joseph Alioto to ask Governor Jerry Brown to call out the National Guard to patrol the streets, but Alioto refused. When enraged civilians confronted SFPD officers at the picket lines, the officers arrested them. The strike was joined by the city's firefighters. The ACLU obtained a court order prohibiting strikers from carrying their service revolvers. Again, the SFPD ignored the court order. On August 20, a bomb detonated at the Mayor's home with a sign reading "Don't Threaten Us" left on his lawn. On August 21, Mayor Alioto advised the San Francisco Board of Supervisors that they should concede to the strikers' demands. The Supervisors unanimously refused. Mayor Alioto immediately then declared a state of emergency, assumed legislative powers, and granted the strikers' demands. City Supervisors and taxpayers sued but the court found that a contract obtained through an illegal strike is still legally enforceable.
It's way worse than that. It runs full stack top to bottom. Your local municipal clerk is using that shit to look up the Applebees manager that told them to shove it.
I was with you up until the very last line. Why do people imagine that the police are in the business of property retrieval? Once your stuff is stolen in almost all cases it's long LONG gone! Cars are sent to be broken down for parts, tools are sold to fences and so on. The typical thief isn't some mastermind who carefully holds on to what they stole, they rush to their nearest fence or dealer to trade it for what they need.
Police are there to report a crime and add that to area stats, and if the issue is more than a lone junkie then it eventually gets to a detective in whatever the local version of Robbery is.
"They didn't get my stuff back" isn't a realistic criticism, and it detracts from the many other points that are.
With a few exceptions, like mob run baggage theft rings at big airports, criminals are not very smart and have pretty poor opsec. Solution rates could be a lot better than they are.
The sort of low-level thieves you're thinking off sold off their ill-gotten gains within a very short time for a fraction of their value, often in a direct trade for drugs. It would be very hard to justify the investment required to prevent that, track the route property takes through handoff networks, and recover it in a form the owner would accept. Given that society suffers from more serious crimes that's generally where effort goes, and that's the result of public demand.
People want to not pay a lot for police, they want them well trained and highly accountable, they want excellent 'customer service', and they want to defund the police all at the same time. Out of this incoherent mess of conflicting desires the compromise is to focus on crime prevention, fighting organized crimes, or crimes against people rather than property as the top priorities.
This scene from The Big Lebowski is how all cops treat personal property theft cases (They got us working in shifts!): https://youtu.be/N0rOe59wKAc
Save your time and don’t get laughed at behind your back. By all means, report your stolen car but anything smaller than that is a waste of your time and the cops time since they do not care at all.
The Flock CEO Garret Langley called people that didn't want his unsecure surveillance state in their own communities "terrorists". A term that has a very loose meaning but is always used to invoke state violence. So he wants to create a strong police state and violence against regular people for money aka he's a fascist.
(but HN will flag me for "name-calling" a person promoting and creating violent state oppression)
Doing his job as a CEO he's making noises, desperately trying to move the overton window now that enough concerned citizens have been made aware of how much malfeasance his product enables, and how little safety it brings. I think at this point a few more inane statements from the guy are to be expected, desperately trying to shift the hate onto his well-protected person and away from his fragile electronic boxes & the malware they run.
That’s the sad part. There was a nationwide trend to ignore misdemeanor theft so much so that now there is a new baseline and most police have taken this to heart and don’t even pretend to put an effort into misdemeanor theft -yes, I know many or perhaps most departments are understaffed but still. It’s irritating.
I learned about this site from the 404 media article: https://www.404media.co/casa-grande-arizona-flock-city-counc...
An excerpt:
> “I've spent the last several months talking to people all over Casa Grande, and one thing keeps coming up: Safety. So, today I'm excited to announce a new company called Shepherd Safety,” he said. “Our mission is simple. Keep government officials and their families safe.” It would be no different than how the city monitors its citizens using Flock cameras, he said; he planned to launch satellites that would use AI to monitor “where government officials go, where they stop, who they meet with, and when they return home.”
It was satire, but drove the point home well.
Why, what a fantastic idea! Maybe a certain trillionaire would be interested...
"Politicians will be exempted from chat control"
I do find it very funny how over the past couple of decades US has been talking about how awful Chinese government is wrt surveillance, but now doing exactly the same but through private industry contracts instead. I hold a semi-middle ground view to CCTVs/plate readers, and understand how it can deliver improved QoL to most citizens. But a bit weird how a core American "surveillance = big no no" belief was thrown out in a few years. Another proof of people just say things, but when it comes to action, you can just do stuff.
Sorry for a negative comment, but it's just an interesting observation from an outsider.
> But a bit weird how a core American "surveillance = big no no" belief was thrown out in a few years.
I can't speak for China since I'm not as familiar with that culture, but as for the US, the culture has not changed, as you can see by protest campaigns like this and many similar types of protests (e.g. public destruction of Flock cameras). The culture in the US was founded on minimal government interference based on those trying to escape persecution elsewhere at that time, and that thread is still baked into many facets of US politics.
What has changed is the state. Surveillance has been growing constantly, to much of the disapproval of those who live in the US (e.g. Edward Snowden's revelations were very damning and the revealed surveillance was very much protested against, and likewise after the Cambridge Analytica leaks). But it's a bit of boiling frog syndrome for those experiencing it: the state can grow more controlling of our lives slow enough not to be perceptible, or to spin surveillance under manipulative politics, which is for example what led to bipartisan support of the Patriot Act. This makes it difficult to stop. Technology is especially a double edged sword for making this worse.
Thanks for explanation. To be honest, that's what I've heard from my American friends as well, and I genuinely respect this position (as I agree somewhat agree with it). But at the end of the day, the results speak for themselves. Since it's a democracy, if it was an issue people cared about, they would have voted in someone in local/state/national level who would oppose surveillance, no?
I understand that it sounds a bit condescending to paint the whole nation in such manner, but this is what it looks like to me an observer with no skin in the game. And I understand that when you're in political minority, you can't really do much to change it.
I can't respond to a couple of dead comments under my post, like the one says "Difference is china uses to police speech. Police in US use it to catch scumbags". And this is exactly what I meant in my post. There's an interesting perception of "when X does it, it's definitely for bad stuff, but when WE do it, obviously it's for good". Again, sorry, I think I woke up in a shitty mood, and picking up fights.
The useful idiots were happy to bury their heads in the sad and ignore the broader trajectory so long as the state threw them a bone from time to time. A few speed cameras here or there, environmental violation lead generation via location data there, maybe even a shotspotter deployment or two. It didn't take much to not just keep HN quiet, but to get their active support, as every brick in the road to hell was laid down.
I would guess if you really put it up to the people many wouldn't be a fan of this sort of broad warrantless surveillance (or at least want more controls or limits on it). Good luck finding a candidate that matches this and your other values in one of the two political parties you have a choice between. Also good luck effecting any political change in whatever gerrymandered district you are in. I think the US government with a more actually representative democracy would look very different.
I am right up the road from Casa Grande. I run a youtube channel with 30k subs and have recently gotten VERY INTERESTED in investigating Flock/Deflock. I had no idea the cameras were everywhere.
I'll reach out anywhere on the site but feel free to get in touch here as well. I want to interview the creator and broadcast the situation in Casa Grande.
edit: emailed the address on the site. Anyone else on the east valley working on similar efforts should give me a nudge in the comments.
This is like sending a letter to Satan asking him to please stop being a nuisance.
Yea, I am thoroughly unconvinced that protesting and asking nicely is really a way to implement political change. The people implementing these things and making these deals are sitting on their yachts and mansion balconies, sipping their martinis, and looking down at us little people with raised eyebrows, not caring in the slightest what we say. They are going to keep doing what they are doing, they're going to keep getting elected, they're going to keep getting appointed to their corporate boards, and they look at the protesters as just loud annoyances--if they even look at them at all.
My suburb got rid of Flock after enough people complained at a city council meeting. I think more places in our county are following or attempting to follow in our footsteps.
It's local government.
Austin Texas has 1 million+ residents and they stopped their contract with Flock.
Well made website IMO. Gets to the point with plenty of easy-to-understand evidence and calls to action.
Feels like every other site that AI generates. Hard to tell what the creators believe and what is just probabilistically generated.
I wouldn't be surprised if AI was used to generate it. But it mostly feels that way becuase it uses Astro. There's no other obvious AI tells.
Yeah, I suppose I was just responding to the Astro aesthetics. Copy seems human-written when taking a deeper look.
Nothing about this site screams AI to me. The site does its job well. Not sure what you are complaining about.
I disagree. To me, it's clear from how comprehensive the site is that they are very invested in the editorial outcomes of what they've published.
I’m familiar with cities that conduct time-bounded surges of policing in reaction to specific outbreaks of criminality.
When inter-faction violence in a neighborhood escalates to the level of a murder, for example, they surge for a couple weeks. Massively increased visible patrol presence—cops on every corner—portable light towers attached to generators, to provide near-daylight-level illumination on the sidewalks and streets... a conspicuous level of “eyes on the street” that discourages retaliation and responds to residents’ heightened fear in the immediate aftermath. While at the same time being obviously temporary—not permanent measures that signal the neighborhood as structurally crime-ridden.
It’s a “fly the flag at half mast for a bit” kind of signal, not “this neighborhood is full of criminals and deserves the corresponding built environment.”
I wonder if something in that spirit might be a reasonable long-term equilibrium for things like Flock. Garbage bags over the camera poles for ordinary times, almost as a point of civic pride that the place we’ve built and maintained is safe enough not to need to use them. Pull the garbage bags off if there’s a problem—spate of auto thefts, high-profile crime, fugitive on the loose—but we demand an explanation when that happens and a concrete end point where they go back on.
It's okay to enable mass surveillance to fight crime that's already decreasing?
The optimal amount of crime is not zero.
Not all crimes are equal. I'd like very much for my stuff to not be stolen. I'd like it even better if I didn't get murdered. Optimally, no murders would happen.
Our city doesn’t have them. Except there’s one in the main hospital parking lot. This reminds me to finish up that letter I meant to send to them asking how they square that with the fact any cop in Texas can peek at people coming in and out of the maternity ward in New Hampshire, given Ken Paxton a call and try to jam up someone for looking like they terminated a pregnancy.
This sort of hyper-local protest is the way to go. Nobody wants to be surveilled.
Still hyper-local but much more efficient than one retiree holding a sign in front of one camera! Kudos to all doing it nondestructively.
I wonder if this is as efficient or as effective. The guy holding the skimmer was viral and garnered a lot of attention to the situation. This site, while something I support, probably won't. Maybe it'll be the place people find after learning about the guy holding the sign.
Now, if the guy holding the skimmer had a sign with the URL on it, then we're on to something.
> Now, if the guy holding the skimmer had a sign with the URL on it, then we're on to something.
Or a QR code.
(Extra points for a hand-drawn QR code. Yes, it takes patience (or grid paper), but it's easier than it sounds.)
I do actually
I agree with the implication that the parent's use of the word "nobody" is incorrect. It might be hard to believe if you read some of the things I write, but I have enormous sympathy for people who want surveillance. Personal crime is a hideous affront to the comfortable society that we all deserve. Related: I even sympathize with people who want to be allowed to lethally attack any home invader, despite my being largely liberal. Such invasions are an indescribable violation of our sense of civilization and dignity, that I think many people don't appreciate.
However... the opinion of people who do not want to be surveilled is heavier than those who do, naturally. The effect of being surveilled, especially by a system that has already been demonstrated to be abused, is more dramatic than the effect of not being surveilled despite wanting it.
Surveillance is simply too double-edged in the long term (or, in this case, the short term, considering Flock's incompetence). We must resist the temptation to allow it just because it currently benefits us.
When you say "especially by a system that has already been demonstrated to be abused," what does that mean exactly? We have some of the largest and globally important cities with tens of thousands of cameras. Look at London, NYC, Singapore, Sydney, Seoul, Chicago, or Tokyo. Tens of millions of people live in those cities, and they have relied on massive camera networks for years without turning into dystopias.
Great hand over the links to your 24hour live stream of your home and neighborhood. I promise I will only watch you.
Speak for yourself. I don't mind this type of surveillance personally.
If you force surveillance on 10 people and even one of them doesn't consent, that's still a net bad. And this situation is probably closer to the inverse of those numbers, or at the very least 50/50.
And this isn't even to mention the criminal negligence of Flock, and the evils they have already enabled, as committed both by Flock employees and by government.
Is surveillance special in that it needs total buy in from society, or else it's bad? Is any other aspect of governance held to that standard?
Surveillance isn't populist. The Patriot Act, for instance, is not representative of what taxpayers want to spend money on.
It's hard to gauge the sincerity of these beliefs, and even harder to tell if you've actually tested these beliefs against the reality of mass surveillance, especially when it's been used to arrest and stalk innocent people.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/georgia-cops-keep-get...
https://cambridgeanalytica.org/surveillance-privacy/police-f...
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/the-cop-investigating-a...
Well, we need laws and oversight to stop these actions. Do you realize that people use phones to stalk innocent people? And yet you probably have a phone. Why is that?
This is like the "why drive if it's so dangerous" fallacy. We trade cost for value, downsides for upsides, risk for reward. Cars and phones are highly valuable to normal people. Virtually all people do not experience immediate, constant, concrete benefits from public camera surveillance. And this is not even to mention that Flock cameras are more abused than phones (although scale makes that subjective, it's kind of apples-to-oranges right now).
Analogies are distracting. They are rhetorical junk food. Make an argument directly supporting Flock cameras - don't just say "it's like phones".
This was my exact point. I don't actually believe in banning phones and was just using it to point out how poor the argument is. I'm curious why you're jumping on me, but not OP. Is it because you agree with their opinions but not mine?
Saying "surveillance is bad because it has been abused in these instances" is not a particularly compelling argument because it doesn't talk about the "cost for value, downsides for upsides, risk for reward" aspects of flock.
https://iea.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/mister-gotcha-...
> Well, we need laws and oversight to stop these actions.
Do you think this hasn't been tried?
We have laws on stalking. We've tried to rein in cops.
We have laws and oversight surrounding phone surveillance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawful_interception
Just like you say, it still gets abused both within and outside the government (eg. Salt Typhoon) because surveillance inherently threatens society.
Shouldn't we get rid of phones then?
More to your point, shouldn't we arrest anyone without a phone?
It's unfair that criminals can opt-out of surveillance, while Senators and CEOs cannot.
That's your right, but the problem is that cameras are in public and some people do mind this.
I believe they mean they don’t mind if others are surveilled against their will
That's because you haven't thought it through. "We only want info on the bad people" might not alarm you personally until any government entity changes the definition of bad and now you're a "bad guy".
There are all sorts of powers we afford law enforcement that could be abused; I hardly think cameras would be at the top of the list of concerns, honestly. NYC has had thousands upon thousands of cameras for quite a while without much fanfare, along with other major top cities worldwide.
They are abused.
They can be abused in the future even more.
Mass surveillance is abuse within itself.
There has been controversy in NYC.
No controversy doesn't make things right.
Yes, I have thought it through. Is this how you view the world? "Smart people agree with me and thoughtless people disagree with me"
There is no implication of that in the parent post. This is uncharitable to the point of trolling.
Edit: Actually, it's such an extreme misconstrual that I'm wondering if you thought you were replying to a different post?
OP knows only a very basic opinion of mine, and they tell me I'm wrong because I haven't thought about it, what else should I think? Do you think they know how much I thought about this?
Isn't the implication "if only you thought more and better about this topic, your opinion would match mine"?
While such a surveillance system appears to (kinda) work in China, do you really trust American companies and the American police system to implement it at anywhere close to that level of competency?
It's not the cameras I mind per-se. They have legitmately been used to solve some crimes that might have gone unsolved otherwise.
But the problem is the cameras are pervasive. It's not like a red light camera, or a speed zone camera, or a toll road camera, that has a specific purpose in a specific location. And it's the building of a database, and correlation of data from point to point, and the potential abuse. We have documented cases of cops abusing Flock data to stalk exes, And history proves that any time you collect data about a group of people, it will eventually if not immediately be abused.
You can propose all the warrants and anonymizing and other restrictions that you might like to control who looks at the data and when, but at the end of the day it's all about trusting those in power who have control of the data, and that's not a good thing to do. The government does not (or should not) have the right to track the public to this degree as they go about their daily personal business.
Neither do the pedophiles in positions of power that want to watch you and your children.
Would you care to elaborate on why you don't mind individuals being stalked by employees with zero oversight or accountability, and why you don't mind protestors being monitored by the government? Since those are both part of "this type of surveillance", and are a pretty fucking crazy thing to state you're okay with with no argument for them. Do you perhaps lack the imagination to consider how this would affect your life if a government that did not agree with your political views came into power sometime in the future and were to use "this type of surveillance" against you?
I wonder how many of the people that defend Flock, Google, Facebook " etc, also are the ones that "denounce" Huaweii for spying for the Chinese government.
Get your reps to pass a law.
> Their own patent describes something bigger: video analysis that can identify people, assign traits, and make real-world activity searchable.
That’s not news, and I did mention that months ago in here
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46226795
I watched few videos where the police by mistake mentioned how they tracked the cars even with no plate numbers on them.
Coincidentally I was just watching this video and felt it was a pretty decent way to communicate this to old boomer city councils. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6oKX1w7k5w
Great video thanks. That guy is well spoken. Always find occasional really great speakers at these meetings.
Alan McLintock comes to mind:
https://youtu.be/KgEe22H3phg?t=2012
I watched his speech until he got cut off by the guy saying he's out of order and I have to admit I really didn't follow what he was saying
This video is what led to the 404 media article I shared above.