Good. I just wish more people would take down and destroy the red light/speeding cameras in NYC. Say no to the police state.
At least 25 Flock cameras have been destroyed in five states since April 2025
271–280 of 373 posts
Re: At least 25 Flock cameras have been destroyed in five states since April 2025
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
Russia greatly benefits from political instability and turmoil in America and encouraging stuff like this is their modus operandi. I say this as somebody who very much dislikes the idea of Flock.
Just curious, but what's the basis for this claim? I've heard it a lot. But I feel like this in itself is a political statement more than one rooted in sound facts.
Re: At least 25 Flock cameras have been destroyed in five states since April 2025
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
People are able to do both. There are plenty of grassroots efforts across the country to end cities’ contracts with Flock. Unfortunately, just as many counties have been unresponsive about stopping data center construction, many cities have been unresponsive about ending contracts with Flock. I don’t condone illegal property damage, but civil disobedience on a large scale both in the US and around the world have ofte…
Civil disobedience and non-violent (towards people) destruction of invasive technology is the only outlet left for most people, I would argue. The money and power is so incredibly lopsided that 'traditional' routes of impacting City, county, or state/national practices are closed to most of us. This is just my thought with nothing to back it up, but I believe it's valid. I also believe we'll see widespread actions of…
Just wait until they start burning down all the datacenters after AI takes all the jobs.
Re: At least 25 Flock cameras have been destroyed in five states since April 2025
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
The author wants them smashed. The point of the article is to attempt to normalize and provide justification for the behavior, so that more people feel OK doing it.
I'm not going to suggest anyone break the law since I don't think it's worth risking jail time for this, and I'm certainly too much of a coward to do it myself, but it's also hard for me to condemn this. ICE sort of feels like a militia with infinite funding and basically no oversight. This was already kind of true even before the latest presidential administration, but it has been ramped up to 11 in the last 1.5 yea…
For a deeper dive on just how that funding is meant to circumvent constitutional protections that normally exist around law enforcement, I recommend watching this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkgNnbTrsgw
Re: At least 25 Flock cameras have been destroyed in five states since April 2025
#27525 cameras destroyed over the course of a year, and more than half were destroyed by a single person. This doesn't appear to be a widespread concern the headline makes it out to be.
I feel that part of the insight is that many people reading this story may want it to be true as stated. All the upvotes and it's propagation in networks may lossily lay this claim (of course debatable) The beauty of surveillance is that it mutes the ability to cover the distance between desire and action. Which is another way to state "it has a chilling effect" As I understand, part of any story being shared is that…
And yet, the death penalty, doesn't seem to have muted murder.
Re: At least 25 Flock cameras have been destroyed in five states since April 2025
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did not strike me as AI-written. But it's useless to try to distinguish. There is only good writing and shite writing. (With things like "accuracy" and "verifiability" and even "awareness of adjacent context" included in my definition of "good.") The article is reasonably good and your comment I'm afraid is fairly shite.
I disagree. There is more content out there than I can read in many lifetimes, so I have to be selective. LLM generated text (like any text) can be well put together on the surface level but require deeper consideration to see the flaws, and of course this takes more effort than the writing did. A human-written piece indicates someone believes in it enough to put in enough effort to write it up nicely, so it works as…
All true, but how do you distinguish human-written from AI-written or a hybrid? They all have an author's name attached. You would have to limit your reading to people you know personally. (Which isn't a terrible idea actually.) Otherwise it's a judgment call, which inevitably comes down to a question of writing quality. "This has to be AI because it's so terrible." But humans are perfectly capable of writing terribly (that is in fact where the LLM learned it) and LLMs can even write well occasionally, including with human intervention. So I decided that if I'm using quality as a proxy to guess at authorship, why not just forget authorship and make quality primary. Basically since authorship is unknowable I'm declaring it irrelevant. It's not ideal but these are the times we're living in.
Re: At least 25 Flock cameras have been destroyed in five states since April 2025
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
They aren’t a tiny evil. It’s safetyism, and safetyism gets regularly abused to violate our rights. See age verification laws or online censorship for other examples. By promoting safety they get a way to conduct surveillance. And flock isn’t the only company in the surveillance game. How long before cameras and ALPRs for speeding end up being used by ICE to unconstitutionally round up people? Regarding road safety:…
>Vehicle deaths are very rare, and getting to places quickly matters. People not having any sort of empathy on HN shouldn't surprise me not gonna lie.
This is an ad hominem. It is a fact that road deaths are a small cost relative to the benefit of vehicles. If it weren’t, cars and trucks would be outright banned. Most people prefer to have them around, and prefer them to public transit if they can afford them and if infrastructure exists.
If you think even one death should mean the benefits don’t matter, then the only solution is to shut down all of society. There is risk everywhere. One death per 100 million miles is a small risk to most people.
But that doesn’t mean we are “not having any sort of empathy”.
Re: At least 25 Flock cameras have been destroyed in five states since April 2025
#27825 cameras destroyed over the course of a year, and more than half were destroyed by a single person. This doesn't appear to be a widespread concern the headline makes it out to be.
I think the concern is widespread, but most people aren't ready to challenge the government which can have severe consequences to your life.
I don't think there is "widespread concern". I'd be willing to bet >99% of people don't know what Flock is.
But if you go ask people, in a non-duplicitous way, whether you want less of a police presence or curtail use technology to solve crimes, most people will not want less police. Here is an example
> When asked whether they want the police to spend more time, the same amount of time or less time than they currently do in their area, most Black Americans -- 61% -- want the police presence to remain the same. This is similar to the 67% of all U.S. adults preferring the status quo, including 71% of White Americans.
> Meanwhile, nearly equal proportions of Black Americans say they would like the police to spend more time in their area (20%) as say they'd like them to spend less time there (19%).
It's really a privileged out of touch luxury belief to believe that there is no need to deter or solve crime. People that are affected by crime and/or have common sense, understand that technology that helps solve or prevent criminal activities is actually a good thing.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/316571/black-americans-police-r...
Re: At least 25 Flock cameras have been destroyed in five states since April 2025
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
Based on the number of upvotes I'm getting I think it's you who's really struggling to make a point. I don't think your arguing in good faith and you are getting called out on it by a few people. So you answer first, then I'll answer -- Was the boston tea party justified? Is civil disobedience ever justified? Is breaking the law a good thing sometimes if it's a bad law (e.g. Rosa Parks)? If you can't answer those the…
Again this is not the Boston Tea Party or the Civil Rights movement. I also don’t really care about upvotes either. You keep making comparisons with the past instead of explicitly stating your opinion on the topic at hand in the article. Anyway no point of further discourse.
Re: At least 25 Flock cameras have been destroyed in five states since April 2025
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
Smashing cameras is enjoyable whereas building movement for legislation is laborious. It will be easier to negotiate for legislation as well if the economic risk of installation increases because of vandalism.
And that's why we need more direct democracy. People (correctly) feel like they have very little power over laws which affect them day to day. If someone represents me, then logically I should have the right to vote directly instead of him, or remove him at any point.
We need better democracy, where opportunities for corruption are minimized and proper representation is possible.
Campaign finance reform would be the foundation for this, otherwise we will continue with legalized bribery.
The other need is for daylight and accountability. As much as I loath the Web3 cryptocrowd, having some sort of public ledger of government operations would be incredibly valuable. Anything and everything related to government actions should be public record with the small exception of sensitive information (which itself should have oversight on not being abused).
This is an easy problem to solve (on a technical level), but the established political base will always fight against it they like things the way they are.