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Redmond, WA, turns off Flock Safety cameras after ICE arrests

seattletimes.com

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Re: Redmond, WA, turns off Flock Safety cameras after ICE arrests

#371

Post by tavavex »

generalizations wrote: post #348
bdangubic wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anyone who wants policing to be effective and cares about crime / public safety would like them to have the best tools. This depends on what the “cost” is for this “safety,” no? "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety"

The public safety issue has been ignored and denied (and "defunded") to the point where measures like this now appear necessary.

That seems like the general mantra that's currently being adapted to justify all sorts of power grabs and expansions of surveillance all over the world. "We would really rather not do this, honestly! But the crisis is just too pressing, and has been left unaddressed for too long. You all just couldn't behave, and now we're going to have to do it the painful way. This is just what is needed, it's the natural outcome."

But surely, it's not the entire world that's suddenly experiencing these waves of perceived crises, right? The statistics to justify tough-on-crime enforcement are useful for the proponents, but it's not the statistics that prompted them to act. They have their own reasons, and some marketable justifications just happened to be lying around. If they weren't there, they would find some other numbers or some other category of criminals that must be urgently pursued, anything to justify the power grabs. Reducing crime won't stop them.

Re: Redmond, WA, turns off Flock Safety cameras after ICE arrests

#372

Post by remarkEon »

Eisenstein wrote: post #256
remarkEon wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Up until it conflicts with my country’s rights, yes. Not sure what you’re suggesting. Is mass migration to the United States the policy of, say, Mexico?

I'm suggesting that we spent a lot of effort overturning elected governments in South America because we didn't like who they voted for and what their policies were with regard to US fruit companies. US policy directly created instability, civil war, and a generally terrible situation that they are dealing with now. Do you know what a banana republic is?

>with regard to US fruit companies

I suggest you take this up with these so called "fruit" companies.

Re: Redmond, WA, turns off Flock Safety cameras after ICE arrests

#373

Post by jesterson »

marssaxman wrote: post #352
helterskelter wrote: post #217

I'm in the PNW and they put Flock cameras up in my area recently. Nobody likes them (libs or cons), and we've seen some rather creative approaches to uh...disabling them. One person took a pipe cutter to the mount and spirited the whole unit away, another apparently fired a shotgun slug through it, somebody else looks like they used it to relieve their anger problems with a metal pipe. Flock cameras, America's bipart…

Some guy I once met in a bar told me that he liked to mix a 1:1 solution of elmer's glue and water, put it into a spray bottle, set the nozzle to "stream", then squirt it all over the lens of a traffic camera near his house which he found offensive. His logic was that this made more sense than destroying the camera, because he could do it over and over and over: the company operating it would have to send someone out…

Not only this does good to society in the obvious way, but also creates jobs as someone needs to clean those.

Kudos to the guy, who single-handedly doing what almost all politicians miserably fail at.

Re: Redmond, WA, turns off Flock Safety cameras after ICE arrests

#374

Post by tastyface »

remarkEon wrote: post #353
tastyface wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a non-sequitur response to the thread. "Turns out that most people actually want a more liberal immigration system than we currently have when surveyed" "That lines up with my experience describing the greencard process to others" "Well immigration should not be easy" Your personal opinions on immigration are not really relevant to the topic.

[flagged]

Got it, so you're engaging completely in bad faith. Flagged and moving on.

Re: Redmond, WA, turns off Flock Safety cameras after ICE arrests

#375

Post by wobfan »

SilverElfin wrote: post #118
cipehr wrote: post #24

A little annoyed, this seems like is has nothing to do with the ICE arrests ... > The city suspended its Flock system because city officials could not guarantee they wouldn’t be forced to release data collected by those devices someday, she said. Key part is " someday ". Seems like the article is implying that flock may have shared this data with ICE which led to the arrests... but there is no proof supporting this..…

From what I read, the pressure from activist groups on Redmond’s city leadership began before the Skagit County ruling. So it is probably unrelated. But I think it’s still a bad outcome for Redmond. Why wouldn’t you want law enforcement to be able to observe public spaces (which these cameras are monitoring) and identify or track suspects? We want our city services (like policing) to be efficient, right? We want crim…

> Redmond’s police department confirmed they’ve never shared this camera data with federal agencies

The problem with this is, that in the age of put-as-much-data-as-we-have-in-some-us-megacorp-managed-cloud this does not mean anything anymore. I may sound paranoid but it's just the truth. There is an abundance of general evidence for this, but even more, there is evidence that Flock data has been shared with parties in the US government who weren't "allowed" to access them.

Your sentence makes it sound like they have a document somewhere in their office that has not shared with anyone else. But that's wrong. They have a document on servers ran by a shady company (prob. AWS, Azure, Google), managed by another even shadier company (Flock). The police department has no idea who can see it, and who can't.

I can only speak for myself, but I do not have a problem with enforcement of immigration laws at all. What I do have a problem with is how it is enforced [1,2] and how the general surveillance is handled, especially by Flock [3,4] and the US Government [5], but, to be honest, in the whole US.

[1] https://www.hrw.org/report/2025/07/21/you-feel-like-your-lif...

[2] https://factually.co/fact-checks/justice/ice-power-abuse-cas...

[3] https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/flock-pushback

[4] https://www.forbes.com/sites/larsdaniel/2024/10/22/warrantle...

[5] https://www.aclunc.org/blog/mass-surveillance-trump-era

Re: Redmond, WA, turns off Flock Safety cameras after ICE arrests

#376

Post by Eisenstein »

remarkEon wrote: post #372
Eisenstein wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm suggesting that we spent a lot of effort overturning elected governments in South America because we didn't like who they voted for and what their policies were with regard to US fruit companies. US policy directly created instability, civil war, and a generally terrible situation that they are dealing with now. Do you know what a banana republic is?

>with regard to US fruit companies I suggest you take this up with these so called "fruit" companies.

The US Government was very much involved.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaragua_v._United_States

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_intervention_in_...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_PBFortune

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d%27%C3%A...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_Chilean_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1971_Bolivian_coup_d%27%C3%A9t...

Re: Redmond, WA, turns off Flock Safety cameras after ICE arrests

#377

Post by hyperliner »

reaperducer wrote: post #244
wrs wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The example of Seattle Police dashcam and body camera footage may be interesting. When those things were relatively new, ten years ago or so, someone started filing daily public records requests for footage from all 911 dispatches (among other things). They wanted to build their own database of the theoretically public footage. The SPD complained that the overhead of redacting all that footage would be impossible. Ev…

ten years ago or so, someone started filing daily public records requests for footage from all 911 dispatches (among other things). I know someone who until very recently worked for a major city's police department. He said there were people who would request every video they could think of, and it was his team's job to scrub through the video and blur/block out faces of children and things like that. He said his tea…

[dead]

Re: Redmond, WA, turns off Flock Safety cameras after ICE arrests

#378

Post by watwut »

generalizations wrote: post #348
bdangubic wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anyone who wants policing to be effective and cares about crime / public safety would like them to have the best tools. This depends on what the “cost” is for this “safety,” no? "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety"

The public safety issue has been ignored and denied (and "defunded") to the point where measures like this now appear necessary.

It is a lie. Crime rates were going down. The problem is that right wingers scared of own shadow kept being afraid.

Re: Redmond, WA, turns off Flock Safety cameras after ICE arrests

#379

Post by reactordev »

pseudalopex wrote: post #274
reactordev wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet they drive away in their GM/Ford/Nissan/Tesla/Any car/truck with its connected media unit and telemetry gathering infotainment systems and think “This is fine”.

Most cars or trucks used in the US are older than you seemed to assume.[1] [1] https://www.bts.gov/content/average-age-automobiles-and-truc...

They have been collecting data since 2014, with some car manufacturers as early as 2010. Also, average age of vehicle isn’t a good metric when a lot of vehicles in the US are registered but never driven.

Re: Redmond, WA, turns off Flock Safety cameras after ICE arrests

#380

Post by reactordev »

bluedino wrote: post #311
afavour wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For most people in the US a car is a daily necessity so it’s very difficult to avoid that telemetry gathering.

I have multiple cars and none of them are new enough to have that. They'll have to track me the old-fashioned way, by my phone.

If they were made after 2016, they definitely are tracking you.
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