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The growing vigilante movement to knock out Flock surveillance cameras

theguardian.com

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Re: The growing vigilante movement to knock out Flock surveillance cameras

#171

Post by culi »

kergonath wrote: post #147
culi wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funnily enough, the whole "social credit" thing that Westerners like to meme about was supposed to work like that. Although it never really got implemented, it was meant to be a score applied exclusively to business leaders, politicians, etc. And it was actually mostly meant to track corporations rather than individuals. That's why the full name of it was Corporate Social Credit System. It was supposed to increase tr…

> Funnily enough, the whole "social credit" thing that Westerners like to meme about was supposed to work like that. That’s not particularly funny and those memes are about the actual thing, not what it might have been in an ideal world. What it might have been in an ideal world, had it not been implemented by a totalitarian state is not very relevant.

The "actual thing" was never implemented. People meme about it because it's funny. Not based on reality

Re: The growing vigilante movement to knock out Flock surveillance cameras

#172

Post by eth0up »

antonvs wrote: post #168
eth0up wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, and notice all the critical surveillance footage that happens to conveniently disappear? I could start a list, but anyone who knows it won't need one.

Even the Secret Service - once considered a fairly reputable organization - deleted text messages related to the Jan 6 insurrection, after they had received a preservation request. And the video gap for the Epstein suicide is just too ridiculous. Someone should start an investigation into why records gaps so often occur right around the time they're most needed. Maybe it's aliens.

I was beginning to fear none concurred. We've named a pittance of the many examples. We are even seeing it with the Tyler Robinson (C Kirk) case, where the rooftop footage is null and the responding officer lost his body-cam footage, because the battery failed in the first 20 minutes. This shit goes on and on. And it is not only with cameras; even the Pulse Nightclub, where broadcastify went down during the most critical part of the event, and no public records were retained. The London bombing of 2007, on and on.

I know it seems unfair to boast an abundance and give only a few examples, but it seems nearly everyone has their own unique memory of a significant example and I gave up cataloging things long ago.

We seem to have enough integrity issues to warrant a little extra caution in our panoptiprudence.

Re: The growing vigilante movement to knock out Flock surveillance cameras

#173

Post by EA-3167 »

dyauspitr wrote: post #136
EA-3167 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again by this logic prisons should be free of crime, rather than hotbeds of it. Insisting that something is true because it makes sense to you doesn’t make it true.

Prisons don’t have cameras in cells where most “bad” stuff happens. It’s a also a manpower problem but that’s probably going to go away with LLMs being able to auto review videos at some point.

“Most bad stuff happens” in cells? That seems like it could use more than assertion, and in fact plenty of prisons have cameras inside of cells.

Re: The growing vigilante movement to knock out Flock surveillance cameras

#174

Post by arjie »

vrganj wrote: post #153
arjie wrote: post #141

Yeah it’s quite common it seems. Similar to the ULEZ camera takedowns. And the ULEZ cameras were also supposedly a tool of government control. As were SF’s speed cameras. And so on and so forth. I am not convinced. I am happy with the speed cameras, and I’m happy with the ULEZ cameras, and I’m happy with Flock cameras. The position that we must destroy state function is outrageous to me. We have a path to peace and s…

It's one thing if a democratically legitimized government entity is in control, like with ULEZ. It's another thing entirely if a private oligarch owns the cameras. Flock and ULEZ are not the same.

ULEZ cameras are also run by private contractors: Capita and Yunex. Is the entire objection centered around the distinction between owning vs. operating? i.e. if each city owned their network and used it (as ULEZ cameras are - in addition to their primary reason) for policing and used contractors to operate it then the objections would disappear? I see, I didn't realize this was a question of structuring of the purchase orders.

Re: The growing vigilante movement to knock out Flock surveillance cameras

#175

Post by BoxwoodSeed »

Barrin92 wrote: post #66
BoxwoodSeed wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know how animals in captivity behave differently from animals living in the wild and why this is judged to be a bad thing for the animals? Humans under surveillance also act differently from free humans and it's a bad thing for the same reason. It is in essence an attack on the human spirit.

>It is in essence an attack on the human spirit. Although this is by no means a consensus view on the human spirit. Culture and civilization are in many ways simply what you describe, means of domesticating the human animal. It's quite loaded to assume everyone who isn't on board with the Taxi Driver view of the human spirit is 'bad'. Another user points to the Panopticon which wasn't viewed as evil or 'dystopian'. I…

There's a small but important difference between surveillance in certain settings (like a prison) and surveillance around the clock. There's also a difference between keeping records forever and not keeping records at all.

The Panopticon was designed in a way that inmates would not know whether they were watched or not and there was no camera to record everything to be reviewed later by AI agents, either. It also wasn't something that caught on.

Personally, I don't mind surveillance in certain public spaces, as long as the public has access to everything that is recorded in real time and whatever archives are kept. If it's a camera in a public space you'd think it would be better if not everyone had access, then it's probably a camera that it would be better no one had access to.

Re: The growing vigilante movement to knock out Flock surveillance cameras

#176

Post by dvdkon »

cucumber3732842 wrote: post #160
dvdkon wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our laws only work because of a hidden assumption that trivial or victimless crimes won't be prosecuted. This assumption isn't always upheld, but automatic surveilance would break it pretty much every time. Even if our laws were actually written with perfect enforcement in mind, only outlawing what's actually antisocial, I don't think I could ever trust a government enough to give it that kind of power. Mass surveill…

>antisocial God I hate this word. Maybe you just picked it up from "those people" but the correlation it has with downright authoritarian and statist tendencies is too damn high for me. Like I expect it to be followed by a rant about how anyone who doesn't pull permits and call dig safe before installing a mailbox deserves to lose their house or whatever. I mostly agree with everything else you wrote.

Sorry about your connotations. I just needed a simple term to express "actions that are against the implicit social contract and harm the rest of society".

Of course pinning down what exactly this should encompass is hard, which is where my general distrust comes in.

Re: The growing vigilante movement to knock out Flock surveillance cameras

#177

Post by picofarad »

pibaker wrote: post #65
dyauspitr wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Total surveillance would be watching people all the time, indoors too aka Fahrenheit. It would absolutely end 95% of crime.

This assumes the people watching actually cared about stopping crime enough to step in and arrest the offenders. To echo the topmost comment's point, you can't convince the public that law enforcement actually cared when the elites who flew on the Lolita express to the child rape island are facing zero consequences while urinating on the side of a highway gets you put on a list forever.

I've heard the chances of being put on that list for that infraction is less that getting an STD from a toilet seat.

If you know people who say they've gotten put on a lost for peeing in public, you know someone who is a sex pest but won't admit it.

Re: The growing vigilante movement to knock out Flock surveillance cameras

#178

Post by brookst »

fool0 wrote: post #98
brookst wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re getting at the distinction between the right to speak and the right to be heard. There are tons of time-and-place limitations that make perfect sense. I can’t interrupt a city council meeting to give a speech about, well, anything not on the agenda. And of course social media companies have no legal obligation to allow free speech at all, which is their own right to speech. Core freedom of speech means the gov…

---I can’t interrupt a city council meeting to give a speech about, well, anything not on the agenda. and if you can't get your issue onthe agenda....? Or, you arent aware of jury nullificaton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification Or your pockets aren't deep enough to influence the police, city manager, council members, etc...?

…then yes, you will have a harder time being heard. That was kind of my point.

You can say whatever you want. Ensuring that people hear it is something else entirely and does often require money, influence, contacts.

I’m not saying it’s morally ideal, I’m saying that freedom of speech does not extend to freedom to be heard.

Re: The growing vigilante movement to knock out Flock surveillance cameras

#179

Post by try_the_bass »

inigyou wrote: post #114
try_the_bass wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That isn't what it is being used for. I'm not sure if you know what you're talking about? Flock cameras have definitely involved in detecting people who come into SF in stolen cars or with stolen plates, who proceed to go on sprees of breaking into cars and stealing things. I really dislike Flock as a company, but their cameras absolutely do get used in the way they're publicly pitched. Flock doing bad things does…

You said it - they only care when it's a spree.

That wasn't what I said at all, and you know this. Please don't deliberately misrepresent me
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