Amazing. How true is this? Anyone got a source?
Edit: ah, they only had 8 cameras. Still, that’s amazing.
This is a city of ~25K people, so quite small. Several articles have pointed out that the city, not Flock, bears the costs of the vandalism, so in this instance the city counsel that enabled the city to enter into the contract with Flock to the detriment of its citizens have now burdened the city with a substantial budget item. If the cameras are replaced, you can bet that they will likely be torn down again. At some point there will be a reckoning with voters, and hopefully the idiots that enabled the surveillance state will be voted out.
One witness said “I’m Glad members of the community do civic duties, but we don’t need to active about finding their identity, I’m sure they did it as a gift for society”
They’re easy to cut down for now. The next step is going to be making them radio antenna’s that mount on light poles so they’re way harder to see or reach. The camera function will get removed, since it isn’t needed anyway.
No, they’ve already released the next step - it’s a drone that watches from 2 kilofeet up.
Imagine the cost of doing that.
And they still won’t be able to track every person they want like they can do now.
I call that a win.
kft feels like a cursed unit of measurement
Must have been the wind
If the surveillance cameras can’t even catch the persons who removed all of their cameras, then they have proven to be worthless at catching real criminals, with their only proven worth is stalking police officers ex wives.
That’s just not true. Sometimes they haven’t even met the women they’re stalking.
All Flock cameras do is identify cars. If you aren’t a car, they can’t see you. They aren’t just mindlessly recording everything like an ordinary camera, so police can’t look through the recordings to identify you.
Lol
Me when I’m a liar who’s eternally loyal to peter theil:
I’m against Flock cameras. I didn’t expect to run into people on the anti side who are in denial about how the things work. Like, Flock truthers.
“they can’t see you if you’re not a car” is how they work?
I misunderstood. I didn’t realize that they also functioned as ordinary cameras.
That’s the whole point of their use of the “licence plate reader” euphemism. They are high definition, high refresh-rate cameras, and cloud-based as opposed to a CCTV system (would be OCTV I guess) that 100% can and do track people as has been shown by independent research
They won’t create a searchable database of faces, assuming they work as advertised. However, the footage is streamed to a server (sometimes publicly accessible) and available for manual review.
Edit: also BT/Wi-Fi MAC addresses of devices, whether on cars or not, are recorded, and can link drivers to their licence-plate-equipped cars even when they’re walking with the same phone or earpods
All the news stories I’ve seen talk about concerns over tracking movement. This is the first I’ve heard about people worried about the actual video.
Yes, the searchable DB is the big problem. But they work like regular IP cameras too: do you think police would buy them as much if they didn’t? Or did stream but blurred out anything that wasn’t a vehicle? If a crime happened recently near a Flock camera and they know when, they can absolutely use whatever it saw. Not to mention, third-party “AI” tools can be always used on raw footage from any camera for face recognition, event classification etc. so you’re not safe even as a pedestrian without the police having “probable cause”. And the camera going offline is probable cause*.
* Here, probable cause would ideally mean legally justifiable reasons to check the recording. However, in practice, it’s just any excuse for a police officer to justify spending time retrieving and watching the footage.
Look up Benn Jordan’s videos on these things. They are NOT just license plate readers.
Correct but Flock’s own system, if their public statements can be trusted, doesn’t do facial recognition itself. The main use is tracking vehicles using license plates and all kinds of visual cues, and Bluetooth/Wi-Fi devices by their MAC address and properties, and linking this huge swath of data together. Still, faces are recorded as video that can be checked manually or processed by third-party tools, including “AI” facial-recognition ones. Therefore, if a pedestrian destroys all Flock cameras and has Bluetooth earpods on them, there will be an easy way to link the events, and then the police will check if their face is visible in surviving footage and check the country-wide database if the person ever used the earphones in a vehicle near the cameras.
Flock just pocketed another $3k to replace this one. Really showing them.
Edit: Seems I touched a nerve. Fuck me for just pointing out the reality of the situation. I think it would be more effective to find ways to disable the cameras without breaking them to the point of replacement. Anyone who has worked for the city knows those cameras would be down much longer in a backlog of maintenance requests as opposed to the quick turn around time of just replacing them.
Logical thinking isn’t for everyone. Just let the crowd think for you, downvote, and move on. Wouldn’t want anyone to risk pulling a thinking muscle.
When you think really hard about a simple issue, it’s called “mental gymnastics”.
Short term, maybe. Long term? Who knows. I foresee several lawsuits in the future
And until all employees and major shareholders are killed this will remain a problem, but this isn’t nothing.
Maybe a government that works against the will of the people shouldn’t be funded by them?
I mean there’s a reason the founding fathers debated how often an government should be revolted against and that ranged from 20-100 years. No surprise our country is going to shit around 250 years old.
This is all stuff people in the 1700s saw coming, because human nature wasn’t different back then, they already experienced it. They just didn’t think we would let it get so bad for so long, they certainly didn’t!
I highly doubt they saw this coming or cared. You Americans and your idolization of rich white dudes is mind blowing.
This is a known issue with flock systems, sometimes they just do that.
The top fell off
It’s called “Flock.” Obviously, they all flew away! But you can’t blame the PD for not knowing that; pigs don’t know much about flying.
I’m very much against the government surveillance apparatus but I’m torn in a couple ways. I don’t believe a centralized system like this can exist by our current, and probably any political apparatus, without being abused.
However, we need to ensure we’re being reasonable. I’m torn because even without flock millions of people are going to pay for and install their own cloud-connected security cameras and those corporations mostly act like the flock middlemen for government agencies
But I’m not against people having their own cameras, heck I’m not even against them recording to a cloud device. I’m against the abuse of thst data though ny the government and corporations. And that is the real issue where we need to be demanding the most from our government officials.
Most people are so caught up in wedge issues that Democrats and Republicans can hand over your privacy and data to corporations, or greatly reduce your privacy in countless other ways, and it is going entirely unnoticeable and unchallenged. I live in Washington, a blue state, and there are multiple red states with better privacy rights and CCPA-like protections. Yet it never gets brought up in a primary or election, or challenged. They’d rather people be fighting over culture war issues.
AND, what concerns me as well is some of these anti-flock activists—which I think is a reasonable position—are soon going to become overzealous about any type of camera, and you’ll see them destroying and vandalizing home security systems as well. And I do take issue with that because I’ve seen enough people leaving domestic violence situations, those who were victims of sexual abuse or those who had burglars break into their personal space, etc., to know that not all security cameras are there for nefarious purposes and some people legitimately need some early warning for their homes and a way to have proof to seek justice when their safety is jeopardized.
And so you may have thousands or millions of people saying destroy flock cameras, but it doesn’t feel like a single one of them are saying they care about privacy enough to demand the politicians they’re electing to actually commit in meaningful ways or codify in law the protections from government and corporate abuse. And once they start seeing other cameras as targets of surveillance as well…those on homes, businesses, etc. The movement will quickly lose support and end up making things worse, not better.
Is there an SCP that writes New York Times editorials?
Simple solution is to stop giving cops/corporations access to these surveillance systems without a warrant. It’s private data and it should remain so. If people didn’t have to worry about being tracked by this shit then they wouldn’t be hostile towards it.
Being hostile towards flock is understandable. Being hostile to everyone holding a phone or with a security camera on their house is not. Again, take the issues to the people you elect. I’m not even sure I’ve seen a single candidate make it a pillar of their campaign.
I’ll be hostile to anyone I please. If those people are putting up cameras that can be used by corporations/cops to track the rest of us then they’re part of the problem. They’re enablers. There are self-hostable options for that shit If you want to have cameras up. Being ignorant to the harm you’re doing is not an excuse. Expecting politicians to fix everything is never going to work. We have to be better in spite of them.
