Now you have scale with ai hardware becoming cheaper and software incentives aligning.

Yes and the biggest problem with this kind of ALPRs are they bypass the due process. Most of the time police can just pull up data without any warrant and there has been instances where this was abused (I think some cops used this for stalking their exes [1]) and also the most worrying Flock seems to really okay with giving ICE unlimited access to this data [2] [3] (which I speculate for loose regulations).

[1]: https://lookout.co/georgia-police-chief-arrested-for-using-f... [2]: https://www.404media.co/emails-reveal-the-casual-surveillanc... [3]: https://www.404media.co/ice-taps-into-nationwide-ai-enabled-...

Nothing will be done until one of the investors of the tech end up embarrassed from weaponization of the tech against themselves. These people have no clue how creepy some of their technologic betters can be. I once witnessed a coworker surveilling his own network to ensure his girlfriend wasn't cheating on him (this was a time before massive SSL adoption). The guy just got a role doing networking at my company and thankfully he wasn't there for very long after that.

How is this different from the CCP surveillance? I guess this is easier for third parties to access?

Thanks to software engineers anyone could watch you; your neighbors could broadcast audio of you and your partner being intimate:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44182186

https://github.com/AlexxIT/go2rtc

Etc, etc... there's a huge list of open source packages to do this. WiFi echo-location too.

This ridiculous effort to separate ground truth into semantic bubbles, ethno objects, etc, is just delusion. Hallucination. "The state" is its people. It's not a concept, it's "the state" of it's people's agency.

Those ethno objects and hallucinations only exist so long as they are observed in shared physical space. The physical context comes before the semantics. Philosophy does not give rise to physics, physics gives rise to philosophy.

Was it misconfigured? Or “misconfigured” so people in the know can bypass the minimal controls that are in place?

I think more importantly people need to recognize that cops are people, flawed and fallible as is the flock system in general. It should never be the whole solution and be used as evidence alone.

I know right. It is like we all forgot that cops were literally sharing pictures of Kobe Bryant’s mutilated body in bars for a laugh. A lot of people in law enforcement are totally screwed up in the head.

> I wonder what our founders would think about tools like Flock.

I suspect they'd make a distinction between private individuals engaging in first amendment protected activity like public photography and corporations or the state doing the same in order to violate people's 4th amendment rights. We certainly don't have to allow for both cases.

they prob be upset about the 13th 15th and 19th amendments too

idk that the government had first amendment rights… like any private citizen can record, but 1a doesn’t immediately mean the government can do anything, right?

> From what I understand these systems are legal because there is no expectation of privacy in public.

Not quite. There's been precedent set that seems to imply flock and other mass surveillance drag net operations such as this do violate the forth.

>I wonder if Benjamin Franklin would be appalled.

Depends how fast we lost him to porn on the internet

I think you should try to decide for yourself what to make of the situation instead of wondering what some ancient dead old dudes would think.

Did you see the other post about this where the guys showed a Flock camera pointed at a playground, so any pedo can see when kids are there and not attended?

Or how it has become increasingly trivial to identify by face or license plate such that combining tools reaches "movie Interpol" levels, without any warrant or security credentials?

If Big Brother surveillance is unavoidable I don't think "everyone has access" is the solution. The best defense is actually the glut of data and the fact nobody is actively watching you picking your nose in the elevator. If everyone can utilize any camera and its history for any reason then expect fractal chaos and internet shaming.

I wonder if such a business model could exist where they were effectively "public" and thus, access was uniformly granted to anyone willing to pay. not sure if this would be net better for society, but an interesting thought.

I've thought the same regarding license plate readers (and saw considerable pushback on HN) — feeling like you suggest: if they have the technology anyway, why not open it up?

I imagined a "white list" though (or whatever the new term is—"permitted list"?) so that only certain license plates are posted/tracked.

> I don't want these cameras to exist but, if they're going to, might we be better off if they are openly accessible?

Cities will remove Flock cameras at the first council meeting that sits after council-members learn their families can be stalked.

Is it more symmetrical? I know in theory we all can continuously download and datamine these video feeds but can everyone really?

They don't grant power, they enhance it. Not helpful for those without don't have any actual power.

Here's the video for interested folk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vU1-uiUlHTo

It's amazing that any vendor, let alone a CJIS vendor even allows unsecured deployments of their software in 2025.

Not directly an answer to your question, but installed Shotspotter locations are generally "not shared with police" and installations are done in a way where the location is obfuscated away from the police/city through Shotspotter contractors. It's not actually true that the device locations aren't shared with the police, but shotspotter/police testimonies in shotspotter cases say so anyway.

Work with your municipality to pass laws banning cameras like this. I'm sure it isn't easy (and I'm not sure I have the stomach for working through that process in my city), but people have done it in some places.

I live in a town of 6,000 and we have 5 Flock cameras

It's a quality of people problem not a quantity of people problem.

deflock.me has a map. (I recently contributed a few flock cameras I spotted.)

I notice they generally watch busy roads and intersections, off and on ramps to highways, retail malls…

Smaller roads through neighborhoods were mostly unmolested.

I mean. There are solutions...

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-46822472

The initial disabling might be asymmetric but when/if you're caught you go to jail for years for something that cost the state maybe an hour tops to fix.

Therefore if only say one of a thousand gets caught, it still costs the people doing it more than the state on average (unless their life/time is worth basically nothing for years on end).

Maybe I’m crazy, but I don’t want laws to be written to the level of my emotional individual reaction to a singular crime. I want laws to reflect the ideals and values of society, and to work at scale when balancing individual freedom, societal safety, and protection from government abuse.

“It is better, so the Fourth Amendment teaches us, that the guilty sometimes go free than the citizens be subject to easy arrest.” - Former Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas

What about when ICE uses this data to abduct and deport your spouse and family members? Will you be grateful then?

They should also require a warrant at least, especially for any data sharing. With "they can only be accessed by law enforcement", we've already had plenty of police harassing their exes. If they couldn't convince a judge to let them use the camera, there's really no hope of the case going anywhere.

> There's nothing worse than being told "we don't have any leads" when someone you care about is attacked.

I'd argue worse is "we know exactly who did it and we're not going to do anything about it (but we would do something if you try to do something about it yourself)".

Until your spouse/SO/sister/mother/girlfriend spurns a LEO, and then the LEO uses it to stalk and harass them. Talk to any LEO, they constantly misuse their data access to look up friends/family/neighbors to find dirt. Most of the time its relatively harmless gossip, but it can easily be used to harass people.

I'll make up another one to pile on. Perhaps the police would have had a visible, deterrent presence if they weren't lazily relying on cameras, and that would have prevented the assault in the first place.

Anyhow, if you read the flock database, they're overwhelmingly not using them for the purposes of public safety or random crime.

Ah yes, the good ol' appeal to fear. "Think of the childr--err, I mean poor defenseless woman!"

No, I don't want these cameras. I don't care if they make law enforcement's job easier. They are an invasion of privacy and a part of the disgusting dragnet surveillance state.

They need to go.

A decade ago, I was attacked on a public sidewalk by three men, who roughed me up a bit and stole from me. The police were utterly unhelpful, and as far as I know, they never caught anyone. But ultimately, that didn't really matter. I was traumatized for a while, but eventually worked through it. Whether or not they were caught would not have changed any part of that process.

I get that, emotionally, we want some sort of justice when things like this happen, but I am not willing to put up with even more constant surveillance in order to feel a little bit better about a bad thing that happened to me. I would much rather criminals sometimes went free.

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

This is true of course. You could also apply this logic to even the most extreme of fascist tendencies though.

There is freedom to and freedom from as they say in The Handmaid’s Tale.

What if your spouse/SO/whatever was wrongfully arrested because they were on a Flock camera and conveniently matched what the police were looking for? Or if they ran whatever dogshit AI algorithm over it looking for suspects?

We can make up situations all day where it can or can not be validated but the reality is that this is a defacto surveillance state. If every move you make can be monitored, you should assume that the state can and will abuse it to hurt innocent people in the name of politics or whatever.

What's the point of making a statement like that? Is it like a Snapple cap thing, or do you expect people to actually give up on talking about the blatant government overreach?

And what a dumb way to frame it. "Think of the woman" is the same argument as "think of the children". Why not just say if you were attacked you'd want it to be on camera? Afraid it'll make you sound weak? Well, so does bootlicking.

We merged that thread into this one.

(Edit: and put that video's link in the toptext above.)