You can find installed Flock cameras around the world with this site: https://deflock.me/
This is missing the Lowes and Home Depot security cameras.
That’s because you haven’t submitted them yet :)
It’s crowdsourced via OpenStreetMaps
Cities panic over having to release mass surveillance recordings
71–80 of 83 posts
Re: Cities panic over having to release mass surveillance recordings
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Again I can speak only for Illinois (and 'chaps is more authoritative than I am) but for the most part you're not going to be axiomatically deriving what you can do with FOIA; most permutations of what can be done have already been attempted, and there's really rich case law. It's super easy to FOIA things! Lots of relatively normie people use FOIA. So FOIA lawyers have seen some shit. Generally I'd predict that it's…
The real one is people coming up with minor, but recognized, reasons to request footage from different cameras. Most everything is covered, as you mentioned. But there's a huge difference between things like Obama's birth cert(canned reply after paying the fee), and the entire US populations worth of people requesting a single 5min segment from a camera... But everybody wants a different camera, date, and time. I sus…
> Public streams with no retention is how TXDOT handled this.
We know there's no retention because they say there is no retention and we believe them.
Why is this so hard to accept? Do you think people can lie?
Re: Cities panic over having to release mass surveillance recordings
#73I don't understand the correlation here, why does having to release the footage mean that the cities are shutting down the systems? It seems like they could simply comply with the requirement that footage is public and they can/must share that footage as part of the FOIA process, I don't see much of a downside there and it seems like something which most police departments and municipalities are already doing with fo…
> why does having to release the footage mean that the cities are shutting down the systems?
It means any rando can now retroactively surveil[1] board members' movements, if they choose, rather than the police or rando-at-city-hall selecting targets.
1. This is what the ciry leadership thought of first, hut the general problem is rich/powerful interests who can fight this are now potential targets of surveillance by anyone. Funny how unplanned egalitarianism consistently results in shutdowns of systems designed to work under a power imbalance.
Re: Cities panic over having to release mass surveillance recordings
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or as Thomas stated elsewhere in this thread, they can follow Illinois and just exempt ALPRs from FOIA reach. ALPR FOIAs have the potential problem of abuse by stalkers and others wanting to track someone (imagine “Hollywood” personæs.) It’d be a bad precedent to follow, but they could. I wonder what Tiburon will be doing. They’ve had ALPRs since forever as they only have one road in and one road out, so it’s easy fo…
Just raw footage and identifying information from cars, if I remember right. You can still make FOIA requests of data the PD keeps on hand from Flock searches. There is an interesting thing happening in FOIA law here in WA (you'd never notice it from this spammy article, though). A pretty common FOIA exemption is for data not managed by a public body, but via some commercial vendor. FOIA generally only allows you to…
Wouldn't this only be true if the camera's are primarily used by non-government entities? Once their income/use is primarily from the government they become an agent of the state and relevant laws apply, no? Wasn't this how they were able to FOIA 'private' parole officers in the south a couple of years back? Or they could 'constructively' construed as being a public entity? Private parole officer, private care providers, etc have all been ruled to in fact be constructively agents of the state and the rules (not necessarily FOIA in each instance, but even tougher constraints that would easily apply as precedent for FOIA) applied to them.
Re: Cities panic over having to release mass surveillance recordings
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
First actual swede to reply here it seems! It's not a very simple question to answer, but I'll do my best. In general terms, most Swedes trust the government and all government agencies to do their job in a fair and just way, barring the occasional case of incompetence. When a Swede say they don't trust the government, in my experience, they typically mean that they disagree with the current government on matters of…
I felt a need to expand on this. In Sweden, the various agencies are independent from the elected politicians to some degree. This means that while I personally do not trust the current government, I do still trust, for example, the tax agency. The Swedish tax agency is very different from the American IRS, or at least the impression I have of the irs as a Swede who's never been to the USA for longer than it takes to…
The fact that we can't do this in the US boggles my mind. So the data is already reported to the IRS, yet I have to fill out a tax return containing the same data, and then I'm responsible if it's screwed up? Why can they not just send me a bill if they already have all the data, then I dispute it if there's a problem?
Re: Cities panic over having to release mass surveillance recordings
#76It's interesting that even people who are anti-Flock have been convinced to refer to Flock's camera products as automatic license plate readers (ALPRs).
This is similar to how Google has convinced Android users to refer to installing apps from stores other than the Play Store as "side-loading". It's a distraction.
Make no mistake -- Flock cameras are mass-surveillance tools with the ancillary use case of automatic license plate reading. I encourage anyone discussing these products not to refer to them as ALPRs, unless specifically discussing their license plate reading functionality.
Re: Cities panic over having to release mass surveillance recordings
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just raw footage and identifying information from cars, if I remember right. You can still make FOIA requests of data the PD keeps on hand from Flock searches. There is an interesting thing happening in FOIA law here in WA (you'd never notice it from this spammy article, though). A pretty common FOIA exemption is for data not managed by a public body, but via some commercial vendor. FOIA generally only allows you to…
Wouldn't this only be true if the camera's are primarily used by non-government entities? Once their income/use is primarily from the government they become an agent of the state and relevant laws apply, no? Wasn't this how they were able to FOIA 'private' parole officers in the south a couple of years back? Or they could 'constructively' construed as being a public entity? Private parole officer, private care provid…
No, that's not how it works. So far as I know, FOIA basically never compels private entities to do anything. It can compel usage by the public body, in many (but not all) cases. But FOIA isn't going to let you crack open an Atlassian (or Flock) database, unless something truly novel happens in FOIA jurisprudence.
We might be talking past each other, because this stuff is subtle. But basically: whoever's doing the actual document production under FOIA, it's got to be a public body. If you're a commercial SAAS serving a public body, and you've got data that FOIA says needs to be produced, that's the public body's problem, not yours.
Re: Cities panic over having to release mass surveillance recordings
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
I felt a need to expand on this. In Sweden, the various agencies are independent from the elected politicians to some degree. This means that while I personally do not trust the current government, I do still trust, for example, the tax agency. The Swedish tax agency is very different from the American IRS, or at least the impression I have of the irs as a Swede who's never been to the USA for longer than it takes to…
The fact that we can't do this in the US boggles my mind. So the data is already reported to the IRS, yet I have to fill out a tax return containing the same data, and then I'm responsible if it's screwed up? Why can they not just send me a bill if they already have all the data, then I dispute it if there's a problem?
I don't claim to know or understand, but I can venture a guess: as far as I can tell, America doesn't really have a good digital identity solution. In fact, given the frequent online discussions about whether it should be allowed to vote without physical identification in America, I'm given to believe that you don't have a good personal identity system at all!
The above combined with the to me foreign notion that tax filings could be considered private(in Sweden, everyone's income and their complete tax filings are public information) probably makes it problematic for them to just send it out willy nilly. What if they sent you the wrong filings?
Based on a very widespread stereotype about Americans, I imagine the irs would get sued.
But, as previously stated, I've only been in America long enough to switch planes, so my guess is likely to be inaccurate!
Re: Cities panic over having to release mass surveillance recordings
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
The fact that we can't do this in the US boggles my mind. So the data is already reported to the IRS, yet I have to fill out a tax return containing the same data, and then I'm responsible if it's screwed up? Why can they not just send me a bill if they already have all the data, then I dispute it if there's a problem?
I don't claim to know or understand, but I can venture a guess: as far as I can tell, America doesn't really have a good digital identity solution. In fact, given the frequent online discussions about whether it should be allowed to vote without physical identification in America, I'm given to believe that you don't have a good personal identity system at all! The above combined with the to me foreign notion that tax…
American here; very accurate.
On the digital ID part, the government + regulated industries like banking will enforce validating specific types of IDs via third party companies and data sources to use said government / regulated industry services - which is used as a hacked duct tape and silly string version of digital ID. Other than that… yep you got it.
Re: Cities panic over having to release mass surveillance recordings
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the local governing body is too small to handle the requirements of governance, what then? Laws can be broken just because there are too few clerks?
I really don't know, it's a difficult question. In this case I agree with most people here on HN that these sorts of mass surveillance tools are not desirable but the reason why is not "because the city is too small to handle FOIA requests". For another example, some rural localities want to restrict drone usage, but actually enforcing that is expensive and difficult. What's the solution? I really don't know.
I think this is where the conversation is from theoretic vs practical limits. Most folks don't care about government overreach until it affects them or theirs personally. And because of costs, government overreach has been theoretical versus practical. And even when practical, it's more whiteglove treatment.
First example is that most folks don't care about police checkpoints, simply because they are rare, and when they do happen they are over pretty fast. You do have some that care and think they are an infringement of rights, but they are a loud minority, and even those that do have issues with them, just bite the bullet and provide them their license and tell them where they are going.
Some things we don't care that much about is simply because they can't be abused that much. For example, majority of the population doesn't care too much that the NSA is hoovering up all traffic including encrypted traffic, because there's no way to practically decrypt it a mass scale.
But if quantum computing or some other method makes it cost effective and allows them to effectively decrypt this traffic, we would see a lot more people calling their lawmakers complaining of government overreach.
Another current example is that most people never cared about the fact that ICE or border patrol can require ID and have warrantless stops within 100 miles of a border simply because the stops weren't front page news.