Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

At least 25 Flock cameras have been destroyed in five states since April 2025

stateofsurveillance.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 373 posts

Re: At least 25 Flock cameras have been destroyed in five states since April 2025

#301

Post by zamalek »

tombert wrote: post #16
thegrim33 wrote: post #5

Earlier 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…

> ICE sort of feels like a militia with infinite funding and basically no oversight.

ICE is a proto-gestapo for what it's worth - including having a way to report unwanted ethnicities. They answer to the sovereign and are not accountable to the law of the people.

Re: At least 25 Flock cameras have been destroyed in five states since April 2025

#302

Post by squibonpig »

ecshafer wrote: post #150
danvoell wrote: post #78

Counter point - I live in a major-ish city in which our police force isn't as strong as the surrounding suburbs so I don't mind a few extra eyes on the streets. My kids like to explore the neighborhood and I like a little extra peace of mind.

People generally underestimate the amount of damage to morale and civic pride the lack lack of police enforcement causes. People see people speeding and driving recklessly, vandalism, littering, and violent crime with impunity.

Morale and civic pride? Dog the government is putting untrained morons with guns on the street to harass, beat up, and deport people who look vaguely ethnic. That shit is bad for civic pride, and they use the cameras.

Re: At least 25 Flock cameras have been destroyed in five states since April 2025

#303

Post by pc86 »

amazingamazing wrote: post #40
JKCalhoun wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There seems to be enough energy for both?

The irony is destruction of private property will only justify the very surveillance one is trying to avoid. Would you agree ring cameras should be destroyed too? The police can use their footage. In practice they are similar to flock.

There is both a practical and ideological difference between a private person putting a camera on their private property and agreeing to share that data with law enforcement when requested, and government organizations deploying fleets of cameras and collecting troves of data just in case.

The difference is so staggering I have trouble believing anyone who has spent more than about 90 seconds thinking about the issue could believe in good faith that they're in any way comparable. Happy to be proven wrong, though.

Re: At least 25 Flock cameras have been destroyed in five states since April 2025

#304

Post by [deleted] »

piloto_ciego wrote: post #132
zug_zug wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kinda like saying "Throwing the British's tea into Boston harbor will only make us subject to harsher terms." The reality is the vast majority of social progress in the last millenium was achieved with force and threat of force. I find this weird revisionist "violence is never the answer" trope recited as a fact that needs no justification to be incredibly weird and unreliable.

I'd say, "you can't commit violence against a camera" but now everything is violence if it costs someone money.

[deleted]

Re: At least 25 Flock cameras have been destroyed in five states since April 2025

#305

Post by Forgeties79 »

tolerance wrote: post #48

I've warmed to LLM-generated/assisted writing in general but this kind of stuff is just lazy and is basically "I got Claude to say something I agree with and then made it pretty".

I’ve definitely learned lately to basically never trust an LLM sending back to me “other people have reported the same issue.” it means it in the most literal sense, as in it went online and found somebody who said something similar to what I am looking in to. It has no ability to determine validity, proportion, relevance, etc.

Re: At least 25 Flock cameras have been destroyed in five states since April 2025

#306

Post by dualvariable »

bko wrote: post #278
unglaublich wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 current…

Ask them what they think about cameras run by private companies being used to spy on them and their neighbors and see what the poll results look like.

Just because people want policing doesn't mean they want the kind of policing that we seem to be getting.

And that article you cite is a pretty good example of this.

The title is: Black Americans Want Police to Retain Local Presence

The bottom half is: Black Americans Lack Assurance Police Encounters Will Go Well

Re: At least 25 Flock cameras have been destroyed in five states since April 2025

#307

Post by Forgeties79 »

nicce wrote: post #195
danjc wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A browser plugin that scores webpage content based on how likely it is to have been AI-generated would be quite useful. Browser vendors can't build this.

> A browser plugin that scores webpage content based on how likely it is to have been AI-generated would be quite useful. I am strongly against this, because you cannot accurately detect it. People start to get blamed even more when they actually did not use the AI.

Nothing new under the sun unfortunately. It’s just an easy way to dismiss people you don’t want to listen to, and people abuse it like crazy.

Re: At least 25 Flock cameras have been destroyed in five states since April 2025

#308

Post by EvanAnderson »

atmavatar wrote: post #258
megaman821 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why planes should be flown using direct democracy. Passengers (correctly) feel like they have little power over the maneuvers planes make and affect them moment to moment. Representational democracy is far superior. Decisions need to be weighed against both their popularity and their effect with input from experts and other affected parties.

The problem with representative democracy arises when it stops being representative. Alas, at least in the US, Congress nearly always votes according to moneyed interests over the desires of its constituent voters. That isn't to say we should use something other than representative democracy. I believe the best option is to fix the system rather than replace it. However, it does explain why people currently feel they…

I think increasing the size of the House would make representatives more responsive to their constituents. I also don't think it'll ever happen for exactly that reason.

Re: At least 25 Flock cameras have been destroyed in five states since April 2025

#309

Post by Barbing »

pc86 wrote: post #299
Barbing wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> I wonder how many Flock decision makers will take personal offense to their little installations being damaged I'd bet any amount of money it will be approximately 0.

Easy for people to feel disrespected when damaging property associated with them, no?

Re: At least 25 Flock cameras have been destroyed in five states since April 2025

#310

Post by Sanzig »

bko wrote: post #278
unglaublich wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 current…

I don't think that's a particularly charitable read of people's objections with Flock.

If Flock was simply a network of plate readers with some additional computer vision classification features (make, model, colour, vehicle type) which only saved data on vehicles matching an active BOLO, there would be far less concern.

But Flock is not that. It saves a timestamp and location of every single plate it sees. It is a mass surveillance machine, enabling gross privacy violations by collecting and making available to law enforcement movement data on anyone with a car.

Flock also shares data with the federal government, particularly ICE, even when the local PD has specifically signed contracts forbidding the practice. People who may otherwise be comfortable with Flock providing data to their local PD may not be comfortable when that data is handed to the Trump administration.

The CEO calling those who disagree with him "domestic terrorists" is also ample reason to be skeptical of Flock's mission.

Post reply on HN