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Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves

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Re: Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves

#361

Post by godelski »

throwway120385 wrote: post #11
dvtkrlbs wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and the biggest problem with this kind of ALPRs are they bypass the due process. Most of the time police can just pull up data without any warrant and there has been instances where this was abused (I think some cops used this for stalking their exes [1]) and also the most worrying Flock seems to really okay with giving ICE unlimited access to this data [2] [3] (which I speculate for loose regulations). [1]: http…

When you give access to any system that collects the personal information including location data for people in the US to the police, a percentage of the police will always use those systems for stalking their exes.

Don't forget we even saw that in the Snowden leaks.

Those were people with much higher scrutiny and background checking than your average cop. Those were people that themselves were more closely monitored. And yet... we want to give that to an average cop? People who have a higher than average rate of domestic abuse?

Re: Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves

#362

Post by mysterydip »

tehlike wrote: post #344
dogman144 wrote: post #311

Was fortunate to talk to a security lead who built the data-driven policing network for a major American city that was an early adopter. ALPR vendors like Flock either heavily augment and/or anchor the tech setups. What was notable to me is the following, and it’s why I think a career spent on either security researching, or going to law school and suing, these vendors into the ground over 20 years would be the ultim…

Now you have scale with ai hardware becoming cheaper and software incentives aligning.

I always thought that show "person of interest" was a bit far fetched. how could one system have access to that much data? privacy concerns would surely stop it.

Re: Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves

#363

Post by dghlsakjg »

mothballed wrote: post #349
autoexec wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wonder what our founders would think about tools like Flock. I suspect they'd make a distinction between private individuals engaging in first amendment protected activity like public photography and corporations or the state doing the same in order to violate people's 4th amendment rights. We certainly don't have to allow for both cases.

They'd have not forced license plates to be displayed at all times to begin with, as they are a search of your papers without probable cause your vehicle is unregistered. Private ships in those days (probably the closest equivalent of something big and dangerous that could do tons of damage quickly on the public right of way) did not have required hull numbers or anything like that. Of course that doesn't totally sol…

Ships then, and now, don’t really need numbers for identification. There are various unique numbers that they can and do use occasionally for specific purposes(IMO numbers and hull numbers). However, a ship’s name and home port were, and are, more than sufficient to identify a ship for legal purposes. You don’t need a registration number on a ship, and certainly wouldn’t have needed one then.

The authorities absolutely kept meticulous records of ships entry and exit from any harbour as well as what was on board, what was loaded and unloaded and frequently a list of all persons onboard.

Some flag states enforce uniqueness constraints on name and home port combinations. The US does not, but that really doesn’t matter much in the real world. There just aren’t that many conflicts.

More importantly, the founding fathers very much did not extend privacy rights to ships. Intentionally so. The very first congress passed a law in 1790 that exempted ships from the requirements of needing a warrant to be searched.

The ability to track and search ships without warrants has been an important capability of the federal government from day one.

Hell, the federal register of ships is published and always has been. I don’t know how they would have felt about private cars, but the founding fathers revealed preference is that shipping and ships are not private like your other “papers and effects” are.

Re: Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves

#365

Post by wizzwizz4 »

mothballed wrote: post #357
torben-friis wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There are 124 cameras for every 1,000 people How does that make any kind of economic sense? Morals aside, that’s a ridiculous amount of devices, data collected and transmitted, and so on.

The cameras don't make economic sense unless the goal is to enrich contractors or generate money on speed/red light tickets. The bottleneck in solving crime is going after the criminals. There's already not enough resources to go after the crimes that are open and shut.

While this makes intuitive sense, do you have any evidence of it?

Re: Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves

#366

Post by appreciatorBus »

mothballed wrote: post #349
autoexec wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wonder what our founders would think about tools like Flock. I suspect they'd make a distinction between private individuals engaging in first amendment protected activity like public photography and corporations or the state doing the same in order to violate people's 4th amendment rights. We certainly don't have to allow for both cases.

They'd have not forced license plates to be displayed at all times to begin with, as they are a search of your papers without probable cause your vehicle is unregistered. Private ships in those days (probably the closest equivalent of something big and dangerous that could do tons of damage quickly on the public right of way) did not have required hull numbers or anything like that. Of course that doesn't totally sol…

The comparison to private ships doesn't quite land, IMO.

Ships - ships big enough to do material damage would be very small in # - ships big enough to do material damage would have a (somewhat?) professional crew - whatever damage they could do would always be limited to tiny areas - only where water & land meet, only where substantial public or private investment had been made in docks/etc - operators have strong financial incentive to avoid damaging ship or 3rd party property (public or private)

Cars - in some countries the ratio of cars to people is approaching 1 - a vanishingly small portion of vehicles have professional drivers - car operators expect to be able to operate at velocities fatal to others on nearly 100% of land in cities, excepting only land that already has a building on it, and sometimes not even that. - car operators rarely held liable for damage to public property, injury, or death and there's strong political pressure to socialize damage and avoid realistic risk premiums

I don't love flock but IMO the only realistic way to get rid of license plates would be mandatory speed governors that keep vehicles from going more than like 15mph. I would be fine with that, but I suspect most would not. If we expect to operate cars at velocities fatal to people outside our vehicles, then there will always be pressure to have a way of identifying bad actors who put others at risk.

Re: Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves

#367

Post by Ajedi32 »

docjay wrote: post #276
Ajedi32 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's easy. Person gets kidnapped, government surveillance camera helps police find the car before the kidnapper kills them. Or, probably more common: murder happens, government surveillance camera helps police find murderer and jail them before they kill someone else. That's why these cameras are so prevalent, the case for them is extremely obvious and easy to make (give police more tools to stop bad guys), while t…

I don’t mean that I can’t imagine a scenario in which an imagined world has cameras covering every square inch, a 911 operator with their fingers hovering over the keyboard and ready to enter a license plate into the InstaLocate system, which then automatically triggers SWAT to be quick-released from a drone directly onto the current location of what is still called a “getaway car”, rather than “evidence.” But I can…

So is it your position, based on what you just said, that people who have committed murder but have not yet been caught are no more likely to commit murder a second time than the average person?

I think my example of helping police catch a murderer "before they kill again" is not only "grounded in reality" but has, in fact, quite plausibly already happened thousands of times throughout the course of Flock's existence.

Now, whether I think that justifies mass surveillance is another matter entirely.

Re: Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves

#368

Post by canyp »

fuckflock wrote: post #42
Bender wrote: post #39

Children could go missing thanks to Flock default settings. HN would tell me to never attribute to malice ... but there may be criminal negligence. To cover their butts I strongly suggest Flock implement a default "grading system" that will show a city in a banner at the top of their management and monitoring system that based on their camera and network configuration they get an A+ to F-. If the grade is below a C t…

HN is the malice in this instance. > The financing was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with backing from Greenoaks Capital, Bedrock Capital. Meritech Capital, Matrix Partners, Sands Capital, Founders Fund, Kleiner Perkins, Tiger Global, and Y Combinator also participated. https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/flock-safety-secures-major-...

Does it take that much funding to make such a poorly-secured system?

God, these guys must be real noobs.

Re: Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves

#370

Post by dghlsakjg »

amrocha wrote: post #303
unclad5968 wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is possible to have your own thoughts and also wonder what other people think.

If that was the case then you should wonder what Descartes would think. What Derrida or Baudrillard would think. We both know it’s not about that though.

Wondering what the people who created the government think of the current government is massively different than wondering what either of two French philosophers who never participated in statecraft born 150 years later thinks.

It is perfectly normal to wonder what the architect of a system thinks of the current system, and entirely separate from wondering what a pair of unrelated Frenchman think of that system. Even if they are just “some ancient dead old dudes”.

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