Curious. Why didn’t they want them taken down?

Spooky23 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

They do have a legitimate purpose and help to solve crimes. The network effect, funded by federal grants to make a surveillance infrastructure nationally is the biggest issue.

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lokar 3 hours ago | parent [-]

This is the part that upsets me. They really could help solve crimes without sacrificing privacy.

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krupan 2 hours ago | parent [-]

How? Whatever the system is now is clearly not preserving privacy

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lokar 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Have an independent non-profit with strong oversight manage the data. Grant access with a warrant.

The police should show that a crime has likely been committed, and get access to just the data that probably has evidence.

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krupan an hour ago | parent | next [-]

You still have people with very tempting access to a whole lot of data. I don't see how this is different from the current situation other than it's just different (corruptible) people with access.

	▲	lokar an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I think motivations matter. Putting a for-profit company hired by the police, and the police in charge is just the worst. There are many other contexts where we trust properly supervised people who lack an immediate and obvious incentive to abuse the system. Combined with good overall software design, auditing and transparency almost all of the harms could be mitigated. And the tech does have some pretty major benefits.

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tptacek an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

How do you do a warrant for a device that alerts when a car on a hotlist transits an intersection?

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lokar an hour ago | parent [-]

Record the plates. Don’t alert, search. And just for a specific crime.

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tptacek an hour ago | parent [-]

The whole pitch for the cameras is alerting! The point is to interdict the cars right after they pass the camera.

	▲	lokar 34 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		That may be what police like, but in my town it’s sold to residents on solving crimes.

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tptacek 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Everybody is filter-bubbled and people on HN are profoundly filter-bubbled. Wait'll you find what a huge number of ordinary people think about NSA surveillance.

The cameras apprehend criminals. I can show with evidence that the juice isn't worth the squeeze, and in fact that the cameras had the effect of tasking our police force with doing municipal debt collection for Melrose Park and Maywood, at the cost of 5-7 hours of sworn officer time per "failure to appear warrant" arrest. But supporters of the cameras will point to multiple stolen car interdictions and recovered firearms.

If you go into these kinds of things assuming that the median resident of a municipality is anti-policing, you're already way, way off. And I find when I talk to anti-Flock advocates (that is: people who have "anti-Flock" as part of their personal identity, not just a person chosen at random who would happen to answer "no" to "should we ALPR") that many of them are operating from anti-policing premises, and so these kinds of responses are very surprising to them.

(Totally reasonable for your reaction to this to be "whoah, that was a lot more than I asked for", I just feel like I've been in these kinds of conversations a lot. It's not personal.)