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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

#481

Post by nullc »

pandaman wrote: post #401
nullc wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surveillance technology doesn't stop property crime, so it isn't a tradeoff question. The necessary and sufficient steps to stop property crime are: 1. Secure the stuff. 2. Take repeat criminals off the street. Against random 'crime of opportunity' with new parties nothing but proactive security is particularly effective because even if you catch the person after the fact the damage is already done. The incentive to…

Can you explain in more detail how the repeat criminals get caught in your scheme? I can see how surveillance could help in identifying the criminal, finding him or her, and as evidence of crime in the trial, but what exactly happens without it that gets them identified, found and convicted? As of now clearance rate of property crimes is <15% according to a quick search.

There is already lots of surveillance and was even before modern technology. I'd agree that having some at all is of value, my argument was that you don't need much past that to get what we need and certainly don't need the kind of pervasive surveillance that some want: It won't move the needle on crime much past a baseline level but it will enable abuses that are much worse than the level of property crime we see today. Authoritarian governments are the number one mass murderer throughout human history by a wide margin.

Low clearance rates for property crime are significantly because nothing is even done much of the time -- police just take a report and often won't even follow up on an obvious lead (including stuff like "find my phone says my thousand dollar phone is in that house over there").

But in any case to more directly answer your question: If the clearance rate is 15% then they have a 90% chance of being caught after ~14 crimes.

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

#482

Post by makeitdouble »

riskable wrote: post #478
PunchyHamster wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It always starts with "we just give developers in project access to things in project and it all be nice and secure, we will also have separate role for deploy so only Senior Competent People can do it. Then the Senior Competent Person goes on vacation and some junior needs to run a deploy so they get the role. The the other project need a dev from different project to help them. Then some random person need somethin…

...and "the fix" that companies usually resort to is "use it or lose it" policies (e.g. you lose your role/permission after 30 days of non-use). So if you only do deployments for any given thing like twice a year, you end up having to submit a permissions request every single time. No big deal, right? Until something breaks in production and now you have to wait for multiple approvals before you can even begin to tro…

To add to that, the roles also need to be identified.

When some obscure thing breaks you either need to go on a quest to understand which are all the roles involved in fixing it, or send a much vaguer "let me do X and Y" request to the approval chain and have them figure it out on their end.

And as the approval agents aren't the ones fixing the issue, it's a back and forth of "can you do X?" "no, I'm locked at Y" "ok. then how about now ?"

Overprovisioning at least some key people is a fatality.

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

#483

Post by docjay »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #367
docjay wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My friend, I've said only what I've said. Past my casual "that's not really how murders play out", through the comma, sits "special name”, which isn't "the general population." Serial killer, serial murderer, and spree killer aren't synonyms for general population. The mere existence of those terms gave you all the information you needed to determine that they’re distinct from the general population and simple “murderer”, and my mention of them should have implied my understanding of the same.

Your assertions in every comment so far have been fully balanced on what you ‘feel like’ should be the case, not on known facts. I’ll give you an example:

“quite plausibly already happened thousands of times throughout the course of Flock's existence.”

‘ FBI monograph, July 2008: "Serial Murder: Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives for Investigators"

https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/reports-and-publications...

Introduction on page 1: "Serial murder is a relatively rare event, estimated to comprise less than one percent of all murders committed in any given year." ‘

The FBI used to classify serial murder as 3+ murders with a cooling off period between them, but that resulted in too few cases to bother studying, so by the time of the quoted statement they had reduced it to 2+ separate murder events. Seems like it fits our discussion.

In 2008 there were 16,465 homicides, so if we take “less than 1%” to be a healthy 0.5% that would be ~82. Even if you assume every year spawns a fresh new set of 82 serial murderers then Flock would have needed to contribute to catching every single one this century in order to meet the minimum requirements for “thousands.”

Of course there’s no way of telling if the murderer you caught would have become a serial murderer if not caught, so here’s where your intuition can be helpful. Take the 82, spread them around the country in densities that you ‘feel’ are appropriate. Do the same for the density of Flock cameras. Then use the same rigor when guessing at how many of the 82 just got witnessed committing a murder, and their license plate was noted, and they happen to transit an area with Flock camera license plate readers in the future while still driving the same car. Feel your way through to how many of them might be caught, then intuit what it would take to catch “thousands.”

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

#484

Post by Spooky23 »

Tanoc wrote: post #458
bakies wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Along with all the cop shows I'm thinking it's almost intentional at this point to normalize things.

It's definitely. Notice how after the 1994 Crime Bill was put into effect you had a large wave of shows and movies that increasingly depicted police as tools of the state rather than as protectors of the public. The fact that police-centered media exploded in ever larger shockwaves after that, the Atlanta Centennial Olympic Park Bombing, 9/11, and the deaths of Trayvon Martin and George Floyd was no coincidence. Law…

Law and Order is interesting as the early episodes were way more nuanced and gritty. It evolved into something different over the years.

They went from exposition of “tv reality” to making a weird case that both cops and prosecutors must cut corners and push the envelope. The weird part is they gloss over the futility. But as you said, the old people get the message that we need to do more.

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

#485

Post by ericmcer »

fusslo wrote: post #131

I wonder what our founders would think about tools like Flock. From what I understand these systems are legal because there is no expectation of privacy in public. Therefore any time you go in public you cannot expect NOT to be tracked, photographed, and entered into a database (which may now outlive us). I think the argument comes from the 1st amendment. Weaponizing the Bill of Rights (BoR) for the government agains…

They would probably be enraged that we pay 50% income tax and use a central bank to fund all this bs more than anything.

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

#486

Post by mothballed »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #465
mothballed wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The initial disabling might be asymmetric but when/if you're caught you go to jail for years for something that cost the state maybe an hour tops to fix. Therefore if only say one of a thousand gets caught, it still costs the people doing it more than the state on average (unless their life/time is worth basically nothing for years on end).

They are making literal zero progress catching copper theft so I doubt flock would be any better. Yeah it takes them hours to fix but they still need to send out a technician and pay for a technician. Maybe you can do this well out of the pov of the camera with a paintball gun.

Zero progress catching copper theft from private persons; because they do not care. They get basically nothing for solving that. If you robbed a cop or the mayor they'd have you found out within a week. Whether they care about vandalizing a camera depends very much on whether the whole thing is a graft or they have something else they want out of the camera.

If the goal is just to enrich their contractors, they might even be happy they're getting vandalized.

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

#487

Post by grugagag »

KurSix wrote: post #438

The most terrifying part here is the synergy between the AI feature and the security hole. An open stream from a static camera is one thing, but it's entirely different when you have an open-access AI agent that autonomously finds "interesting" targets, zooms in on faces, and tracks people between cameras. This transforms a passive data leak into an active, real-time stalking tool

1984

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

#488

Post by grugagag »

SamInTheShell wrote: post #300
kirykl wrote: post #54

If the cameras are recoding public areas, isn’t it better the recorded footage stays public

This is pretty naive. What happens when you develop and extend such a system in a way that it can track who you interact with? What about social credit scores? You might go out to a social event with a very distinguished social credit score of 820 and get knocked down to 69 just because you were in proximity to Bob and Alice, who happen to be on some blacklists for their work in cryptography. What you're staring at i…

I think the goal is to do just that. China has it, the west wants it too

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

#489

Post by _DeadFred_ »

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote: post #325
aucisson_masque wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That definitely wouldn't happen in the states. Corruption only happens in poor countries.

laughs in Ukrainian board of directors

Trump Coin seems way way more flagrant.

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

#490

Post by _DeadFred_ »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #466

Part of me says if there's going to be universal surveillance, it might as well be universally accessible to view, not just accessible to the state and the wealthy.

I think society must protect it's most valuable citizens. I feel like we should be able to watch out for our politicians and billionaire class by monitoring their every move. Since they have nothing to hide and everything gain from addition caring oversight.
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