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LAPD lets contract with surveillance giant Flock expire

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Re: LAPD lets contract with surveillance giant Flock expire

#421

Post by _DeadFred_ »

EthanHeilman wrote: post #71
ajmurmann wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder why we aren't addressing the real problem which seems to be cops behaving completely unethically. Their job is about enforcing the system that codifies our societies agreed up and codified rules of ethics. They should be obsessed with this the same way people here obsess over system performance, correctness, etc! If we cannot trust them with the very basics of ethical behavior they are absolutely in the wron…

Because finding people that are 100% ethical is extremely difficult. Even if we are wildly optimistic and say 20% of the population is 100% ethical. You aren't likely to weed out unethical people, so you are hiring people, training them, and then firing them 4 out of 5 of them. There are many cases where an experienced but occasionally unethical worker is better than an unexperienced but ethical worker. When faced wi…

Police are extended 'good faith' all the time simply for the fact that they are police. Including in situations such as loss of chain of custody for evidence, etc. We have the appearance of what you outline, with a blanket 'good faith' exemption that allows quite a bit of bad behavior/breaks the systems/rules the public believes to exist/be enforced.

Re: LAPD lets contract with surveillance giant Flock expire

#422

Post by smalltorch »

alistairSH wrote: post #418
smalltorch wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the interview goes in good depth in all the details of the scenario it doesn't sound like you listened.. Publicity for what? The publicity comes from a elected government official getting charged with felonys for stealing when he didn't steal anything. The playground analogy doesn't really hold up here I don't see the connection between the two.

Except he did steal the cameras. He only returned them when confronted by law enforcement. You don't get to rob a bank and then say "oopsie! my mistake, here's the bag of cash" when the police come knocking.

Yeah I don't think you understand the full context. He took them down and told flock to come pick them up. And obviously didn't deprive flock from their property in any form.

Re: LAPD lets contract with surveillance giant Flock expire

#423

Post by fc417fc802 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #354
smalltorch wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Silliness. Who enforces it then? The local law banning it was already equally as valid as a court order would have been. Would the county need to ask the judge to take it down? Someone has to physically take it down and I'm guessing flock didn't put that in the budget.

Ultimately, as a member of a legislative body, if you don’t like the way the executive bodies charged with inplementing a law are doing so, your choices are: (1) Work with other members of the legislative body to hold the executive accountable for failures, via hearings, sanctions (often, if at the same level, including removal), etc., or (2) Work with the same body to file a lawsuit as a body to compel compliance, w…

I agree in general but on the other hand, isn't removal of unauthorized private property from public lands a routine duty of local government employees? So if anything I feel like flock is lucky the cameras weren't physically destroyed upon removal.

For example, if a maintenance worker had been instructed to remove them how would this have played out?

Re: LAPD lets contract with surveillance giant Flock expire

#424

Post by MichaelZuo »

EthanHeilman wrote: post #405
SoftTalker wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not possible. Whether it's a city government, judges, cops, schoolteachers, or clergy... some number of people are unethical. Trying to pretend otherwise is a source of a lot of problems. The best way to avoid it is to make it impossible, i.e. in this case don't collect the camera data in the first place. Once it is collected, it will eventually be abused no matter who has control of it.

Exactly! Assume that you will have bad apples and build a system that protects against them and minimizes the harm they do.

This seems to imply a vast expansion of paperwork…?

The LAPD doesnt operate in some fantasy legal environment, but in the real world.

Re: LAPD lets contract with surveillance giant Flock expire

#425

Post by alistairSH »

smalltorch wrote: post #422
alistairSH wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except he did steal the cameras. He only returned them when confronted by law enforcement. You don't get to rob a bank and then say "oopsie! my mistake, here's the bag of cash" when the police come knocking.

Yeah I don't think you understand the full context. He took them down and told flock to come pick them up. And obviously didn't deprive flock from their property in any form.

https://www.ky3.com/2025/08/20/camden-county-presiding-commi...

This article seems to confirm what I stated above - he took the cameras, and was later confronted by law enforcement about it.

And even if your telling is correct, that's still theft. Similarly, I can't just take your car, drive it around, and call you later to tell you where it is.

Re: LAPD lets contract with surveillance giant Flock expire

#426

Post by tptacek »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #423
dragonwriter wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ultimately, as a member of a legislative body, if you don’t like the way the executive bodies charged with inplementing a law are doing so, your choices are: (1) Work with other members of the legislative body to hold the executive accountable for failures, via hearings, sanctions (often, if at the same level, including removal), etc., or (2) Work with the same body to file a lawsuit as a body to compel compliance, w…

I agree in general but on the other hand, isn't removal of unauthorized private property from public lands a routine duty of local government employees? So if anything I feel like flock is lucky the cameras weren't physically destroyed upon removal. For example, if a maintenance worker had been instructed to remove them how would this have played out?

The cameras would have been removed. Munis don't generally destroy random tech infrastructure they pull off poles, though they might throw it in a big pile. Flock could invoice for the cameras, but most munis would probably tell them to go fuck themselves.

Re: LAPD lets contract with surveillance giant Flock expire

#427

Post by tptacek »

Spooky23 wrote: post #419
krupan wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Closed loop systems that require explicit consent to share outside the organization. Flock is like 50x worse than NSA stuff like PRISM that everyone freaked out about. The Feds have full access to search everything, are no doubt exempt from any transparency on the platform, and ICE is already using it to abuse and intimidate political enemies. It’s a nationwide surveillance system posing as a local police tool.

They're pretty comparable in that the people most het up about them tend not to know what either actually was. The feds do not have full access to search everything on Flock's platform except through the same mechanism by which they'd have access to search literally anything (a court order).

Re: LAPD lets contract with surveillance giant Flock expire

#428

Post by tptacek »

lokar wrote: post #380
krupan wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 benefi…

Every piece of technology deployed by the police is provided by a for-profit company.

Re: LAPD lets contract with surveillance giant Flock expire

#429

Post by [deleted] »

moron4hire wrote: post #197
smalltorch wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Id have to re-listen as well for all the details. But I think this is slightly different than the headline here. In this case, the county voted for an ordinance banning them. Ike was threatened saying your going to be charged this is potentially state property, he did a sunshine request to see that they were privately owned by flock. Then he requested flock take them down but they didn't. After a few months he decide…

Moral of the story: never talk to the police. Even if you yourself are police.

[deleted]

Re: LAPD lets contract with surveillance giant Flock expire

#430

Post by lokar »

tptacek wrote: post #428
lokar wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 benefi…

Every piece of technology deployed by the police is provided by a for-profit company.

I’m against flock the company. I’m in favor of a narrower form of plate recorders.
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