411–420 of 572 posts
A bit concerning how some people in this thread will bend over backwards to defend mass surveillance. Not surprising given who owns the board, but still.
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It's for a good cause! This has enabled the DEA to keep all dangerous drugs out of the country and avoid any sort of drug abuse epidemics! Think of the children!
I'm guessing this was /s sarcasm given the "think of the children" reference. Just saying so in case others didn't get the reference and thought you were being sincere...
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Corporations are more accountable than government agencies. A government agency can switch vendors or you can drag their CEOs in front of Congress. Try that with some internal bureaucrat in an agency you've never heard of.
> Try that with some internal bureaucrat in an agency you've never heard of. https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/hearings/testimony-of-anthony-f... How many Americans had heard of internal bureaucrat Anthony Fauci and NIAID before 2020?
Thanks for proving my point.
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> users have a private relationship with Google where they elect to let Google track them and retain their information Elect to is a bit strong here. Acquiesce to , maybe, or perhaps suffer to .
You elect to buy an Android and not an Apple I suppose.
We need laws mandating open and interoperable interfaces and standards for all the things a modern life takes for granted: public transit, banking, digital ID, etc.
Once that's in place, we can start talking about what people are "choosing". Because currently our "choice" is at best between a rock and a hard place (or as we say in my native tongue: between plague and cholera).
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The other thing that's going on is that Flock is essentially an always-on "dragnet." A "dragnet" is when you set up police checkpoints everywhere and essentially put entire cities under watch to find a fugitive. This happened in Boston after the bombings. "Dragnets" are illegal except in extreme circumstances (like a bombing). Flock is a "dragnet on demand." You have a digital dragnet in place not just in one city bu…
FISA basically authorises dragnet on demand - it's how XKeyscore operates.
- FISA courts, re: 4th Amendment
Unless our judiciary gets serious about what started with 9/11, authoritarianism is inevitable.
This actually is my primary candidate for the great filter.
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Flock is YC. This is being done by investors for ads. Somr govts are cutting deals, those that aren’t are banning them. Never trust HN articles or high karma accts
Checks. I didn’t believe it at first, because I’ve always considered YC, in spite of its flaws, to be politically astute.
YC's current CEO is Garry Tan, who has a lot of ties to "effective accelerationism" and the "dark enlightenment" movement (The Curtis Yarvin/network state/cuckoo for cocoa puffs far-right tech broligarch movement that wants to end all democratic oversight of tech companies).
So, yeah, not only is Flock a YC company, but YC's current CEO produces a lot of propaganda for them. For example, this:
https://garryslist.org/posts/flock-found-more-stolen-cars-th...
...which is perhaps the most obviously Claude-generated AI slop content I have seen (and since the internet is becoming a firehose of this shit, I've seen quite a lot). Like somehow every fucking sentence in it is peak claude-slop.
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I too base my political beliefs on poetry
You do realize that humans use art to communicate difficult or emotional ideas including political beliefs, right?
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Private citizens filming in public and police forces setting up arrays of surveillance cameras in public somehow don’t seem equivalent. I’m not a lawyer so I can’t properly articulate what the legal difference is. And if there isn’t one then the law needs change. Clearly the majority of citizens agree with me. Is it legal for US citizens to all put cameras on their cars and set up a network where we can all see where…
> Is it legal for US citizens to all put cameras on their cars and set up a network where we can all see where all police are at any given time? Sure. There's absolutely nothing illegal about monitoring the location and activity of police (unless you broke some other law to do so, like hacking). Hell, most of them will simply tell you where they are and what they're doing, as they tend to broadcast over unencrypted r…
In theory, sure. In practice? Good luck.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2025/10/03/apple-t...