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Lawmakers added $1 to car insurance policies. That money paid for Flock cameras

texastribune.org

141–150 of 326 posts

Re: Lawmakers added $1 to car insurance policies. That money paid for Flock cameras

#141
post #130
post #76

So to fight abuse and overreach by your leaders, you can: - give up your car/vehicle propery - let an LLC take ownership - reside in the privacy protections of LLC and corporation I don't think any successful case has happened yet where flock et al have pierced the corporate veil to get address information, nor dug into insurance records to find who the LLC-license plates belong to.

The fact that corporations have more privacy rights than people is dystopian.

It would be, you're right.

Re: Lawmakers added $1 to car insurance policies. That money paid for Flock cameras

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think George parking his horse/car in a public parking lot outside a brothel should confer an expectation of privacy? Can a bank or ATM miles away have a security camera, just on the off-chance that George stops to withdraw cash for said brothel? Can police not stake out the brothel to gather evidence of prostitution because all the patrons have an expectation of privacy? IE, is it ever acceptable to be notice…

It's not the individual threads, it's the tapestry made whole.

That's a pretty nebulous answer. Just to help solidify my understanding of your position, can the government ever operate a camera recording a public roadway?

Re: Lawmakers added $1 to car insurance policies. That money paid for Flock cameras

#143

For a country that staged a revolution over a tea tax modern Americans sure seem to love having their rights trampled.

Weird how people view "Americans" as different species. Never have I seen someone say "Europeans", "Germans"...

"These Americans", "Modern Americans".

Re: Lawmakers added $1 to car insurance policies. That money paid for Flock cameras

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Texas I'm surprised it's not legal to shoot a catalytic converter thief if caught in the act. That's what they used to do for cattle rustlers.

I would love to live in a world where thieves feared for their lives.

I think that world largely exists. There are some counties in Texas where crime is essentially negligible.

I live a few minutes away from one of the facilities where capital punishment is administered. The local community is extremely pleasant. I don't bother locking my doors at home or at the grocery store. The only place any real crime occurs is within a few hundred yards of the interstate. Target and Home Depot get robbed occasionally, but that's about it around here. I don't think it's physically possible to steal from my local Home Depot without ending up in the flock database. The geometry and overlapping coverage they have is pretty crazy now. You can tell they waged a full scale war against an army of meth addicts and won decisively. Every time I go into that store looking for a Milwaukee product, I find it in stock and unmolested.

At no point do I worry about a western style shootout with a bandit. The most prolific criminal around here has 4 legs and only really cares for the contents of particular trash cans and gardens.

Re: Lawmakers added $1 to car insurance policies. That money paid for Flock cameras

#145
post #3

Texas > In 2023, the Texas Legislature unanimously passed a law raising auto insurance costs for Texans by $1 to combat rampant catalytic converter theft. > The Motor Vehicle Crime Prevention Authority, led by a board mostly appointed by Gov. Greg Abbott, has turned the $1 fee hike into at least 3,200 Flock cameras. More coming. Meanwhile, secure your EV!!! Batteries will be next!!!

Stealing an EV battery is harder than stealing a cat.

Re: Lawmakers added $1 to car insurance policies. That money paid for Flock cameras

#146

For a country that staged a revolution over a tea tax modern Americans sure seem to love having their rights trampled.

Weird how people view "Americans" as different species. Never have I seen someone say "Europeans", "Germans"... "These Americans", "Modern Americans".

The term is "nationality", it describes a person's legal bond and citizenship tied to a specific country, usually gained by birth or naturalization.

If you have never heard of that before then someone failed you during your education.

Re: Lawmakers added $1 to car insurance policies. That money paid for Flock cameras

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you sleep in the car it will qualify no matter where you're parked. This also appears to be true of an RV or any vehicle that clearly accommodates sleeping. For reference: "Burglary" under the Texas penal code is defined by entering a habitation or any portion of a building that is not open to the public, either with the intent to commit a crime, or when followed by the actual commission of, or the attempt to comm…

> I feel like it's a mistake for the legal code to distinguish between what are fully interchangeable terms in the language the code is supposedly written in. I’ve thought about this too. They often vary from state to state as well. But the alternative would be to create new legal terms, which would be more confusing, or use just use numbers, which would be hard for laypeople to discuss.

> But the alternative would be to create new legal terms, which would be more confusing, or use just use numbers, which would be hard for laypeople to discuss.

Well, compare homicide, which in popular culture is divided into "murder in the first degree", "murder in the second degree", and "murder in the third degree" alternately known as "manslaughter".

It's not clear to me whether you consider those "new legal terms" or "just using numbers", since in my eyes they are terms invented for the purpose of the law, distinguished from each other by numbers.

But they appear to be superior to the division between "burglary", "robbery", and "theft" either way. They have no preexisting meaning (unlike "burglary" and "robbery", which are used in spite of existing contradictory meaning) and they cause no difficulties in discussing the crimes, which we can be certain of because these terms already exist and people discuss them all the time.

In the Texas penal code, homicide is actually divided into "murder", "capital murder", "manslaughter", and "criminally negligent homicide".

These are clearly "new terms" rather than "numbers". They seem pretty straightforward: "murder" is defined in harmony with its natural English-language meaning. "Capital murder" is a variety of murder that allows for capital punishment. "Manslaughter" is homicide caused recklessly rather than intentionally, and is in harmony with the popular understanding of the word "manslaughter". And "criminally negligent homicide" is homicide caused negligently rather than intentionally, and that's also in harmony with the normal construction of noun phrases in English.

If we were instead to give those four categories names that nobody without special training was even capable of distinguishing from one another -- as Texas has already done for "burglary", "robbery", and "theft" -- what would improve? I submit that that would make some things worse while making nothing better.

Compare also the popular-culture division between "assault" and "assault with a deadly weapon". What would giving those two crimes synonymous names accomplish?

Re: Lawmakers added $1 to car insurance policies. That money paid for Flock cameras

#148

For a country that staged a revolution over a tea tax modern Americans sure seem to love having their rights trampled.

What right does a Flock camera violate?

Carpenter v. United States and the supporting opinion written by John Roberts in 2018 reaffirms that ongoing electronic surveillance requires a search warrant and constitutes a violation of the 4th amendment.

I don't live in the US, but it seems that constant monitoring via government sanctioned facial recognition technology falls under that umbrella.

Re: Lawmakers added $1 to car insurance policies. That money paid for Flock cameras

#149
Given how unpopular these cameras are, and how sloppy their security has been, I have come to assume there's boatloads of bribery happening. I can't come up with any other explanation for how willing police chiefs and city councilors and mayors are to get yelled at at city council meetings and how wantonly they're giving away the privacy of their constituents.

I'm guessing that as scrutiny increases, we'll begin to hear about questionable, at best, sales tactics, if not outright bribery. Trips, sponsored speaking/training engagements that puts money in the pockets of cops and policymakers, etc. The whole thing stinks of it.

Re: Lawmakers added $1 to car insurance policies. That money paid for Flock cameras

#150
post #76

So to fight abuse and overreach by your leaders, you can: - give up your car/vehicle propery - let an LLC take ownership - reside in the privacy protections of LLC and corporation I don't think any successful case has happened yet where flock et al have pierced the corporate veil to get address information, nor dug into insurance records to find who the LLC-license plates belong to.

i don’t think that will help anything. surely flock and similar companies use facial recognition features? particularly at every stores parking lot that has these in it?

and i’d be more shocked if the same stores weren’t already sharing their own inside cameras facial recognition directly with companies like flock already.

and from what we’ve seen, these companies cameras are linked up with names from frequent shopper cards, cc data, what people buy, when they buy it, etc…

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