How come we allowed all these cronies to put camera and do surveillance. Any politician advocating this should have cameras in their home for safety reason.
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Holy cum hoc ergo propter hoc, Batman!
Flock Credibility Lost as It Repeatedly Lies to City Councils, Police, & Public
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Re: Flock Credibility Lost as It Repeatedly Lies to City Councils, Police, & Public
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Company directly lies to governing body of city. Is found out the next day. Loses contract. Attacks city online afterwards. This isn’t about surveillance states, it’s about companies run by idiots.
This just sounds like the standard playbook for this crowd (by which wide brush I mean authoritarians and their enablers). They really hate being called on their lies, and their immediate response is to attack with whatever comes to hand (press release, xeet, the DoJ…depends on the person).
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Re: Flock Credibility Lost as It Repeatedly Lies to City Councils, Police, & Public
#33Re: Flock Credibility Lost as It Repeatedly Lies to City Councils, Police, & Public
#34when I was a kid, my mom used to say "think about something nice and pleasant if you cannot fall asleep". So sometimes I think about scenario in which some disgruntled IT manager in one of AWS data centers, knowing which CDN server belongs to Flock, unplugs one of their RAID drives and plug it to their own laptop and copies the whole database of all plates, coordinates, etc, and Flock didn't even find out because most soft raids won't report an issue, and if they do, then what is there to troubleshoot if everything got back to normal 2 hours later? And then post it all in form of a torrent, so everyone can download it and see who went where. Imagine politicians caught visiting strip clubs or their mistresses, patterns of cops going to places where bad guys hang out (to collect bribes), highway patrol going over speed limits without genuine emergency. Thinking about all this I fell asleep much easier...
Re: Flock Credibility Lost as It Repeatedly Lies to City Councils, Police, & Public
#35Am I the only one picturing the Oshkosh mayor and Oshkosh city council as a group of toddlers in overalls?
Re: Flock Credibility Lost as It Repeatedly Lies to City Councils, Police, & Public
#36How come we allowed all these cronies to put camera and do surveillance. Any politician advocating this should have cameras in their home for safety reason.
Because clearly we are powerless. Someone should post that chart of how likely a law is to be passed vs. how much the people want it or not. It is basically a flat line. People's will have zero impact.
Every time someone repeats this, they are telling a self-fulfilling story. I got a law passed -- a state law, about ALPRs, establishing a list of restrictions on them. I didn't do it alone, I had a lot of really important help, including from ACLU of Oregon. There was a lot of opposition, and it ate months of my life, but it was worth it.
I never would have accomplished that if I spent more time reading comments on the internet about all the things we are powerless to do.
Re: Flock Credibility Lost as It Repeatedly Lies to City Councils, Police, & Public
#37This seems to me to be the inevitable outcome of a society that celebrates winners who claim their lies are merely "alternative facts" This relevant post is flagged, but yes, I do think this is a symptom of America crossing the asshole threshold where it pays to outright lie and call your fact checkers insincere: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48837460
There's too much in this article to distill as "this". The city of Oshkosh cancelling their contact with Flock after one day is actually quite heartening.
You're right. By "this" I'm referring to a company selling to the government feeling like they will not face consequences for publicly lying to their buyers. I agree it's heartening to see the contract cancelled. I find the doubling down on the lies as both unsurprising and disheartening.
Re: Flock Credibility Lost as It Repeatedly Lies to City Councils, Police, & Public
#38Were they ever credible?
I don't see why not. They're one of YCombinators most successful companies.
Re: Flock Credibility Lost as It Repeatedly Lies to City Councils, Police, & Public
#39How come we allowed all these cronies to put camera and do surveillance. Any politician advocating this should have cameras in their home for safety reason.
>How come we allowed all these cronies to put camera and do surveillance.
Because city counsel meetings are scheduled at awkward times for anyone employed to actually show up to. So only tech unaware old people show up