Musician-turning-tech anarchist (?) Benn Jordan is making a very interesting series of videos about Flock cameras, their poor safety, and their gray-area interfacing with local governments:
Benn's videos along with this one from a very chill middle-aged engineer/state rep made the difference in swaying our town to discontinue its Flock contract: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwbE5ks7dFg
During the KMT military dictatorship in Taiwan, the KMT used the radio to spread its anti-democratic propaganda and disparage pro-democracy activists. Activists meanwhile spread their messages via pirate radio.
It seems like this article buried the best lede of the story on paragraph ten, which explains Flock's new business of surveillance drones launched in response to 911 calls (and also presumably triggered by other alerts configured by police and private businesses).
> Flock has recently expanded into other technologies... Most concerning are the latest Flock drones equipped with high-powered cameras. Flock's "Drone as First Responder" platform automates drone operations, including launching them in response to 911 calls or gunfire. Flock's drones, which reach speeds up to 60 mph, can follow vehicles or people and provide information to law enforcement.
This is much less concerning to me than mass surveillance. If someone calls 911 and you need to send a first responder, why not send a drone to get there faster while a person is on their way?
Because today it will be used as a first responder.
Tomorrow a police officer will suggest that these drones (that we are already using successfully) could be very useful for checking up on that "dangerous" neighborhood.
If the drones are "providing information" to the police, it's only a matter of time before their AI hallucinates something that gets someone killed. We've already seen AI gun detection services that report things like Doritos bags as guns.
OTOH it will provide more surveillance of the police themselves. Humans are also bad at gun detection (sometimes willfully so) and this provides another check.
That's right. And also just like the missing epstein footage.
Because it's a social problem, not a technology problem.
At the same time, just because these instances of "missing" tape happen, does not mean that body cams and jailhouse CCTV are useless. We would not take those away. Likewise for the future drone footage
It's a very bleak (and awfully sus) outlook if you think providing more information to people who need to make decisions that could save or end lives is a bad thing.
You are giving those people the benefit of the doubt. It's been proven many many times that police will use "more information" to excuse the decision to use violence. A decision that they already made well before the incident.
Yes. If you called from your cell phone while on foot or in your car, the drone can find your exact location and hover over you until help arrives, quicker than if EMS has to search you out themselves.
How so? I ask as a paramedic of 14 years, now retired.
If EMS has to "search you out" so does the drone.
At least in my County, we actually get very good triangulation info from 911. It was very rare that Dispatch told us they only had Level 2(IIRC) location info (which might be to several hundred feet).
FAR more common was people who actually told us the -wrong- location. Car accidents that were several miles up the road from their location. Saying Blah St SE when they meant Blah Rd NE, etc.
Drones don't solve for that problem. They're going to the wrong location, too.
Obviously I don't know the specifics of your city, but in general there are a lot of scenarios where it's valuable to get to a scene very quickly (no traffic, etc.) and obtain reconnaissance. Especially violent scenes, or it could even be a drunk driver who is still on the move, or a stolen car where the perpetrators are likely to flee on foot if stopped.
I'm sure you can come up with a lot more ideas using your imagination.
Yeah this doesn't bother me in any way, shape, or form. We already have manned aircraft that respond to such things, unmanned aircraft are a strictly better solution. It makes sense for police and it makes even more sense for fire. An aircraft can arrive at the site of a reported fire while firemen are still buckling their pants.
That’s actually really cool and I don’t feel like it’s invasive. It’s surveillance in a specific location for a specific purpose and in response to certain emergencies. Active shooter is probably the first thing that comes to mind, but accidents, fires, unexpected disasters, etc. could all be situations where this technology helps assess the situation and inform response.
They do more than that - our local PD gave a presentation on what Flock’s pitching - ALPRs, fixed pan/tilt cameras, “citizen cameras,” drones, and a whole “sensor fusion” software suite that lets you stitch in everything along with data from surrounding precincts which also have Flock (think Palantir for local cops). We were pretty shocked at the scale.
Thank you for finding this nugget, I really only read HN comments and rarely the source material. You all have been my LLM summary for a decade at least.
These companies build this tech in SF and Seattle, cities with some of the gnarliest public safety problems in the country, then turn around and sell it to smaller towns where it does more harm than good.
Most places in America don't have problems that surveillance solves. They have problems they already know about and won't act on. Cameras don't fix homelessness or addiction or underfunded services. They just make life harder for regular people.
But that's the whole appeal for bureaucrats. Buying a product looks like doing something without having to do any of the actual work.
"Making life harder for people [in the other tribe]" has become a core platform for a great many politicians. There's growing movement advocating that one of the major purposes of government is to grief people you don't like. Looked at through that lens, blanketing small towns with these things, with a plan to use them against "Those People," makes complete sense.
I think this echoes very true in a lot of places, not just in the US. Here in the UK I'm pretty sure the police/the state more broadly know perfectly well who is doing a lot of the low level quality-of-life crime in most areas, but for structural reasons either can't or won't bother acting in many instances. Investigative work has never been easier: oftentimes there's multiple cctv angles of offences being committed, endless digital records, etc., but unless something can be done with this information in the real world, it's useless and actually takes resources away from other areas of public services.
Increasing the quality of the panopticon has all the downsides we talk about regularly on HN, and if you can't do anything useful for society with the data, it only ends up hurting people.
I don't think it's the bureaucrats. You should hear the Flock CEO talk. They have made it very public that their direct intent is to influence government policy in sweeping and total fashion to enable their service to be the mass surveillance tool of the near future. They sincerely believe that people will look back on them as the saviours of mankind.
I'm surprised Garrett Langley still has a job, he seems wildly out of touch. For instance he really believes that his Panopticon as a service is the reason crime is down in cities, conveniently ignoring crime rates prior to COVID.
As an ex-employee of Flock, if he doesn't really believe it he is an amazing actor. He talks of a very Minority Report-esque future, where there is literally zero crime, and it's because of Flock.
Flock's stats are very misleading too. If there was a Flock query in the course of investigating a crime, even if it leads nowhere or isn't relevant to the arrest or conviction, still, Flock was queried, so "Flock solved a crime".
It was sad. I had significant ethical questions when I joined, but all through recruitment and week one, everything was all about controls and restraints and auditing and ethics. After that, nope, a free for all. Selling our products in states that don't allow the use of certain functionality? Not our problem. We're not disabling it. That's up to you to decide whether you're using it or not.
I was recently at a "town hall" meeting in my community and spoke with a older woman about Flock cameras. Initially she was not concerned about it and was generally in favor of the idea.
I agreed that there could be benefits but that the downside is that they know when and where you go to church, or the grocery, or where you get your hair done, or even when you go on vacation. Her eyes lit up and I she replied that she would have to think about that a bit.
I'm not saying that I changed her mind, but that bringing the consequences down to something she could understand was much better than yelling from the rooftops. Mentioning church is especially impactful with a lot of older folks.
In talking with many of the older people in my community about Flock, they initially defer to what our police department says it needs. A few things made them reconsider:
- This is not about our police. This is about all the outside organizations that can watch us.
- Focusing on Flock specifically. Once the cameras are given a name, people can start to form a better opinion fueled by the readily available bad press Flock is producing.
- With the focus on Flock, the YouTube videos elsewhere in this topic do a great job of explaining how crappy their security is and how they're lying to their customers about it. Which brings it back to, this isn't about our local police — it's about the company that's an unworthy partner.
Good job talking to your community. The first step is that people are aware of the cameras - for my neighbors, most did not know about them, and immediately found it creepy.
I'm very in favor of speed & redlight cameras and don't have a particular problem with license plate trackers. I think we partisan-ize far too many things nowadays, unfortunately.
Both of these camera systems also usually come with a kangaroo civil court of sorts. Last time I looked at red light camera distribution in Texas it was also fairly obvious that they were only installing them in poorer areas.
These systems were largely disliked bipartisanly because of those factors.
They are potentially now, but when I lived there (~a decade ago) they were not and this was the battle we were fighting as neighborhoods and communities. At the height of it they couldn't take your drivers license but the company could file an injunction preventing you from renewing your drivers license over civil penalties.
Any dataset involving police actions will show high concentrations in poor areas because that's where police patrol the most and where they're most likely to crack down on behaviors that might be allowed to slide elsewhere (in part due to the racial demographics of those areas).
Usually allocation decisions are related to actual car/pedestrian fatality/injury counts + trial placements and measurements. Either way, wouldn't you be in favor of measures that remove police from overpoliced poor neighborhoods in favor of a technology focusing on traffic safety enforcement?
The value of red light cameras is debatable. I've copied the conclusion from a DoT study below (1):
This statistically defendable study found crash effects that were consistent in direction with those found in many previous studies, although the positive effects were somewhat lower that those reported in many sources. The conflicting direction effects for rear end and right-angle crashes justified the conduct of the economic effects analysis to assess the extent to which the increase in rear end crashes negates the benefits for right-angle crashes. This analysis, which was based on an aggregation of rear end and right-angle crash costs for various severity levels, showed that RLC systems do indeed provide a modest aggregate crash-cost benefit.
The opposing effects for the two crash types also implied that RLC systems would be most beneficial at intersections where there are relatively few rear end crashes and many right-angle ones. This was verified in a disaggregate analysis of the economic effect to try to isolate the factors that would favor (or discourage) the installation of RLC systems. That analysis revealed that RLC systems should be considered for intersections with a high ratio of right-angle crashes to rear end crashes, higher proportion of entering AADT on the major road, shorter cycle lengths and intergreen periods, one or more left turn protected phases, and higher entering AADTs. It also revealed the presence of warning signs at both RLC intersections and city limits and the application of high publicity levels will enhance the benefits of RLC systems.
The indications of a spillover effect point to a need for a more definitive study of this issue. That more confidence could not be placed in this aspect of the analysis reflects that this is an observational retrospective study in which RLC installations took place over many years and where other programs and treatments may have affected crash frequencies at the spillover study sites. A prospective study with an explicit purpose of addressing this issue seems to be required.
tl;dr - it's complicated. There are places RLCs make sense and places they don't. Expecting local government to know the difference... good luck with that.
No but license plate requirements pretty clearly violate the 4th and/or 1st amendment, IMO. And without being required to have your license plate searched (registration 'papers' forced to be displayed) at all times without even an officer presenting RAS or PC of a crime, these cameras become a lot less useful.
I don't see how removing the cameras is compatible with the first amendment, but if you have the right of "speech" to record me in public chasing every place I go in a manner that is the envy of any stalker, I ought to have the right of "speech" not to "say anything" (compelled speech of showing my plate).
> The government's warrantless acquisition of Carpenter's cell-site records violated his Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches and seizures. Chief Justice John Roberts authored the opinion for the 5-4 majority. The majority first acknowledged that the Fourth Amendment protects not only property interests, but also reasonable expectations of privacy. Expectations of privacy in this age of digital data do not fit neatly into existing precedents, but tracking person's movements and location through extensive cell-site records is far more intrusive than the precedents might have anticipated.
> Although the case was ultimately decided on trespass principles, five Justices agreed that “longer term GPS monitoring . . . impinges on expectations of privacy.” See id. at 430 (Alito, J., concurring); id. at 415 (Sotomayor, J., concurring). Based on “[t]raditional surveillance” capacity “[i]n the precomputer age,” the Justices reasoned that “society’s expectation” was that police would not “secretly monitor and catalogue every single movement of an individual’s car for a very long period.”
It seems clear these cameras can hit some kind of threshold where they're common enough and interlinked enough to amount to unconstitutional surveilance. We don't know exactly where that threshold is yet.
The courts have been wrong about many things, sometimes for centuries before they've fixed it. Some things they think they've interpreted correctly now that they'll turn around and interpret some other way later.
Trying to interpret viewing and recording the plate as speech but not displaying it as speech is trying to have your cake and eat it too. If the camera can stalk my car everywhere and record it under auspices of 'speech', it's only logical I can hide it as 'speech.'
Driving a motor vehicle on public roads is a privilege that many of the morons I share the road with seem to take for granted. If they are allowed
to drive then I want their plate identifiable on video from my dash cam.
Automated mass surveillance of license plates should also be illegal.
Ah yes, the muh public roads false representation.
Guess what, all the roads around me are private easements, all privately owned, and they are that way 90% to town. A good portion of my trips never touch a publicly owned road yet I'm still required to display my plate. We don't even have public, tax maintained roads where I live (I literally have to bring out a tractor and fix them myself when they wear down). Yet the compelled 'speech' of displaying the license plate is required even then while driving your car on your privately owned non-gated road.
Is the law obligated to be logical like that? As you note it already doesn't have to be consistent over time, there's no particular reason it must be consistent in who it applies to.
You shouldn't pin your ideals on anything as flawed as the Constitution of the US. It was barely a workable system to begin with, and who knows how long it can last now.
The courts made polygraphs submittable legal evidence used to convict people, and still use them on people under supervision (because lesser standards apply).
Precedent is often crap and wrong until someone can find a good case paired with good lawyers to rectify.
I agree with you generally but taken to the extreme this argument very easily goes to "precedents I agree with should be venerated because they're precedents and precedents I disagree with are wrong" silliness.
"Precedent is often crap" isn't really the basis for any cohesive judicial philosophy or legal thought process.
I'm not aware of any precedent anywhere that approaches "ALPRs violate 4A" territory, it's when other stuff happens that's beyond simply "$lp_id was seen by $camera on $datetime" that I've seen courts start to talk about reasonableness and privacy.
Cameras like Flock which fingerprint the driver and non-registration vehicle information (e.g. light brightness, damage, driving style, etc.) to generate a best-guess as to the driver of the car absolutely does.
Nah, he's just missing a good PR campaign, there's a 30% of the population that will eat whatever their supreme leaders say they should, I'm sure they can sanewash these cameras as well.
> And I used to donate to the ACLU before they went crazy.
When was that? Because in 1977 they defended Nazi's free speech to demonstrate in a town that had jewish people as half its population so it tried to block them, and I don't recall them doing anything nearly that controversial since.
> They now take sides on what speech should be allowed.
Alternative framing: Given limited resources and lots of things to care about, they pick the specific cases that best improve the freedoms they're interested in protecting.
In the case of the Second Amendment, they decided to let the NRA handle it, as that seems to be working just fine.
A disingenuous take. The ACLU has actively published anti-2A literature in the past, arguing (as all such arguments must) that only the police, government, and military forces should have access to effective weapons.
2017: the ACLU defends Milo Yiannopoulos' right to advertise his new book. They file an amicus brief in the Supreme Court supporting a Tea Party supporter challenging a ban on wearing political insignia at polling places.
2018: the ACLU supports the NRA's First Amendment challenge to Governor Cuomo's attempt to convince NY financial institutions not to do business with the NRA.
2019: they defended a conservative student magazine which was denied funding by UCSD.
2020: they filed a brief supporting antisemitic protestors picketing a synagogue on the Sabbath. They also supported a Catholic school's religious right to make religious-based choices in hiring and firing teachers.
I'm just quoting the fruits of five minutes of research here, so I won't go on (but there's more). Is it possible that you're reacting to the radical conservative stereotyping of the ACLU rather than the actual actions of the organization?
It's very possible that I'm misinformed, but if so it was mostly from reading 'radical conservatives' like the NYT and other related reporting, along with ex-ACLU lawyers. [0]
Yup. Some "teens" can riding down my street with a pellet gun shooting at the cars. They ended up breaking 3 to 5 windows. It probably cost us collectively $3000++.
The only problem with the license plate readers is that the "teens" drive cars with fake tags. They deliberately copy the plate numbers from some granny with the same model. Makes it fun when the SWAT team knocks on Granny's door.
Ha ha ha, you think it'll be used to help you? A hit and run drived totaled my car at an intersection with cameras, the cops would not even show up even though it was all on camera. When I called insurance they didn't bat an eye, the claims person pretty obviously was used to this happening all the time and didn't even question why I wasn't able to get a police report.
Happened with my step daughter. Traffic light at intersection. She said she had a green light, so did the other driver.
Cops -did- show up. "Did you have a green light" "I did." Less than 30 seconds of questions. Goes to the other driver, same, is back in under a minute. "Well, he said he's absolutely sure he had a green light, so I'm citing you for failing to obey a traffic signal".
There were no cameras in the area, no witnesses, just the two drivers. But the other driver was a 50 something male, and my step daughter was 17 and upset because it was our car. So the cop took his word and cited her.
Hmm, vehicle black box? If that showed that she had come to and been at a stop, and then accelerated, that would at least imply she had been at a red light, and gone when it turned green, as she said.
No, no interest there. Even the insurer (fine, whatever), said "unless we're facing a six digit payout, we're not pulling the black box".
Don't even start me on the fact that after our insurance denied liability, the other driver sued her in small claims court for $10,000 for a car that had a KBB of $1,450. And the small claims judge noted that he technically couldn't sue a minor in small claims, but required us to go to mandatory arbitration, where the arbitrator said, quote, "I don't understand why, as a decent human being, if insurance will pay out, you don't just accept the claim." (Yeahhhh, filed a complaint about that, too. And here I stop, because I feel my blood pressure rising lol).
Actually, that won’t work. The flock cameras don’t only rely on license plate information. They use “AI” to determine the make model and color of your car as well as any outstanding features, such as bumper stickers or roof racks.
i think politicians have seriously underestimated how much people don't like crime, and most people would take constant surveillance if it could actually improve feelings of safety in urban environments.
I think it's also true that many people are wildly out of touch when they think about how "safe" their local municipality is.
The Bay Area is objectively safe, for example, yet I constantly run into neighbors in affluent neighborhoods who are afraid of venturing various places, letting their kids play outside or bike to school, or just generally exploring around.
I was at a BayFC match last weekend, for example, and ran into the family of an acquaintance from my elementary daughter's school. They have an 8th grader and are trying to get an intra-district transfer approved for high school so she doesn't have to go to the neighborhood school where a student brought a ghost gun on campus 3 years ago (he was arrested and successfully prosecuted, and no one was hurt)... and instead go to the local school where a handful of kids arranged their bodies in a swastika pattern on the football field (and photographed it!) several months ago. My point isn't that either of these crimes is acceptable, but that people tend to be irrational and ignorant of statistical analysis. Both of these are good schools with better than average student outcomes, but families consistently bring their own prejudices into analysis and it creates mild chaos & havoc across the system overall.
Enforcing public safety effectively is one of the most pro-democracy things you can do. Otherwise people use democracy to elect public safety authoritarians like the wildly popular Bukele and Duterte.
Yeah, I'm all for public safety in theory but seems like these days that's just a dog whistle for "go hard on whatever sort of petty deviance I don't like" and so I'm unwilling to support things like that in the default case. It's all just so tiresome.
I read OP differently. I thought they said "we should invest in non-dystopian public safety[1] to avoid dystopian populist creating a 1984 version of public safety".
[1]: I imagine this includes things like mental heath help, housing, and other related social safety nets.
> Giving away food to homeless is a crime in many places. Bad capitalism.
How is this due to capitalism?
I mean, I can maybe see how you can tie it to NIMBYism, and from there to capitalism through the desire to maintain or increase property values. But that's a stretch, and only one mechanism
There are many drivers for this type of regulation, some more well-meaning than others. Most of them would not go away simply because we ceased private ownership of the means of production
It is antithetical to capitalism as well. The whole basis of capitalism is property rights, and it generally encourages the public doing things themselves instead as private individuals instead of relying upon a bureaucrat or public agency to do everything unless there is a major reason not to.
And here they are telling you that you cannot use your own property to help alleviate issues in your community. That sounds more like an exaggeration of Communist attempts at division of labor and to 'organize' a civilization.
Another POV is, they didn't invent cameras or drones, they aren't philosophers / employ any great or influential thinkers, nobody at Flock has won an election, all they really have done is sell some stuff that is easily defeated by a guy with a hammer or spray paint. I'm not sure he has another chance at a big Pay Day in his life, so in such desperate circumstances it will take something really criminal (or souring with VCs) to end this appearance in public life.
I realize how unpopular flock is, and I will first say that I have literally never personally looked into the privacy concerns. But one city you don’t see named here is SF, which has cited Flock as a primary driver of its 10x reduction in car break-ins, and 30% reduction in burglaries. Those were a quality of life plague while I lived there
I could believe that perma-cameraing every inch of public space is more akin to chemo than to vitamin gummies, that SF had the city equivalent of bone cancer, and that this doesn’t mean healthy midwestern towns need Flock in any way.
> Starting on March 19, 2024, Flock Safety began installing ALPR cameras in various strategic locations across San Francisco. This rollout is expected to take place over the next 90 days. Per 19B ALPR policy, the administration of the Flock ALPR system is the responsibility of the Investigations Bureau.
How did the Flock cameras cause two crime drops before their installation?
The article's note about 2018 is talking about extending backwards, not forwards. It's entirely accurate, and a direct quote from your link.
The chart is trending down by January 2020, changes directions (upwards) right around the March 2020 spot, and again around (down) the July 2023 spot.
The fact that they only have data going back to 2018 means it's hard to say if the pre-COVID stuff was the norm or unusual.
To be super-clear, here's the chart annotated to show that 90 day window (black rectangle) in which the cameras were installed. https://imgur.com/a/i00Gna0
"that drop is obviously in early 2020", to reemphasize, is several years before the cameras got installed.
I read this as 2020 was Covid related drop, it then returned to normal for 2 years, then began dropping again in late 2023. The covid blip is explained by what was going on at the time, nothing since 2023 has any explanation and could be flock
yes, people tend to act differently. not the people they're trying to afect, just random people just minding their business. but it is not an effective deterrent to things like "violent crime".
• Meta-analyses (studies that average the results of multiple studies) in the UK show that video surveillance has no statistically significant impact on crime.
• Preliminary studies on video surveillance systems in the US show little to no positive impact on crime.
> Starting on March 19, 2024, Flock Safety began installing ALPR cameras in various strategic locations across San Francisco. This rollout is expected to take place over the next 90 days.
In other words, the cameras were added where I've annotated the chart with a black rectangle here: https://imgur.com/a/i00Gna0
To my knowledge, Flock doesn't have a time machine offering.
Unfortunately, Flock really has been doing some shady stuff and the alliance of 1) people with legitimate concerns about Flock operations, and 2) the much larger population of people who are accustomed to getting away with petty crimes is, together, politically successful.
It would be easy to create a camera network that is locally owned and operated by public agencies, and if any place in America could so that it should be SF.
The crime did not happen because of a lack of technological capability or resources availability at a given price point. It happened because of politics and priorities. The 1984 camera dragnet vendor is no more responsible for the change in politics and priorities and subsequent crime reduction than whatever vendor sold the tires for the cop cars.
I don't know if axon does it, but the future is going to be mobile ALPRs. Uber drivers going around scanning every plate, selling to police, and helping predatory auto lenders repo cars. The latter is already being done, so it's just a matter of time.
Interesting point. Autonomous cars themselves could sell all the data they collect (like license plates, but also street maps, live traffic data, pot hole counts and locations etc)
Practically, axon cameras aren't nearly as ubiquitous as flock's, thus reducing the leo's dragnet capability. I'm sure the feds will successfully try to get access to this footage as well.
Kind of. Motorola (axon) effectively acts as an integration system for flock and about 20 other services. Motorola's stuff is IMO the bigger problem because it includes access to flock.
Non-US citizens - what's the situation with cameras in public spaces where you live? In my town every 2nd hour or building entrance has a private camera pointed at the street. It's very depressing because the cops don't care - I've asked 2 in a patrol car when there was a mild case of vandalism I witnessed. Technically it's illegal, but nothing happens. The public cameras are on intersection and some bus stops. Too much, if you ask me, but the private cameras are everywhere.
In London cameras are everywhere, mostly private and they have been for years. Don't think I've seen anything like it in any European city I've visited.
Japan is exporting it's AI-enhanced crime prediction platform across LatAm after successfully deploying it in Tokyo [0]. Japan is doing similar work to analyze financial transactions [1]. South Korea has also deployed a similar platform called Dejaview [2].
The brutal reality is everyone is doing this and there's nothing you can do about it. National Security trumps all other concerns, especially in a world as unstable as today.
Private cameras pointing to street can be lawful under GDPR, but in that case they are GDPR controller. That then requires them fulfill bunch of obligations which they probably aren't, e.g. giving proper Article 13 notice.
I don't know if it's criminal in any EU country, but it would be something that you could complain to DPA about. Or initiate civil lawsuit against the controller.
Worth noting is that in some cases the camera vendor might also be (joint) controller as they can determine means & purposes of the processing. If they are simply storing the video then it's unlikely, but if they for example use it for AI training that would likely bring them controller territory.
I drove into a very affluent subdivision this weekend, and like most others around here it had a flock camera recording every car on the way in. This camera, however, had the gall to advertise its presence as a neighborhood security measure. "Flock Safety watches this neighborhood" read the sign on the post, or some such. Of course the residents there had no choice but to accept its installation, as the local police support it. Nefarious framing and marketing in the name of "safety".
You might be shocked to discover there are subdivisions so affluent they can afford physical armed security and access control structures with far more invasive identification and logging procedures.
I am not shocked to know that, but there are Flock cameras all over the town. None of the other ones have this advertisement on them. This neighborhood is not gated. However, Flock decided to do announce its presence only here.
Because as far as I've seen until now, Flock cameras were stealthily installed and unannounced by the local government. When somebody contracts a company like ADT, they pay money and put that sign up voluntarily.
I saw the same thing in a Home Depot parking lot yesterday. I guess I'm glad there's some sort of notice about it, even if its intent is more, I dunno, branding? It took me a while to figure out what all the solar panel + camera on a post installations were as they popped up around my town. I even pulled over to inspect the hardware for signs of ownership and didn't find anything.
It is very clearly advertising on their part. They have been paid to put that thing there and added the sign to announce the presence. It's like when you get your roof replaced by a business and they ask if they can put a sign in your yard. They're not doing it to make everybody know that you're getting your roof replaced, they're advertising.
this kind of headline might have some scholarly name, because, no... actually the number of cameras and feeds in the San Francisco Bay Area is multiplying rapidly, along with the entirety of California with few exceptions.. long ago, San Diego county, a military-led area, was the exception and to many pariah on the constant increase in tracking of vehicles, people and "events".. now, what used to be thought of as harsh and creepy, is not only matched in hardware, but exceeded in backend capacity, across almost every populated area
It's funny, if the company had just sold cameras to cities, they probably could have avoided this whole mess. But they just had to hit some keywords for Wall Street (like "AI" "cloud" and "SaaS"), which had the side-effect of making it appear (true or not) that they were part of a Palantir-style surveillance panopticon that tracks you everywhere.
Someone in my hometown was arrested for vandalizing them. The media chose to say "city owned security camera". It's amazing how they will rush to defend private enterprise.
There are ways of doing this that don't require you to abdicate all of your privacy to a third-party SaaS company who makes it easy to share information with the police everywhere.
My camera system is not connected to the cloud and it has a retention policy of 4 weeks. I took pains not to aim them anywhere where I'd be collecting data outside of my own property. There's full-disk encryption in use. The police could maintain their own surveillance network and place their own cameras in a legally compliant way and it would be fine.
Flock and Ring are awful because they enable easy surveillance and search after the fact, not a priori because they are surveillance systems. If they required proof of warrant before letting the police execute a search I think a lot of people would be more comfortable with them. A police officer stalking an ex is like the basic example you get if you ask an ALPR vendor why we need audit logging and proactive auditing of all searches. But that's not the only way these tools enable invasion of privacy.
If you want proof that that's the problem with them, you should know that people have been building wired camera systems and ALPR systems for decades before Flock and Ring came into existence. So it's solely the cloud Search-as-a-Service business model that's the problem there.
> The answer to that is the only one that matters.
This statement rests on the belief that absolute crime rate is the only thing that matters, and is a cousin to the "I have nothing to hide!" response from people who care little for intrusions to their privacy. Are you in favor of giving law enforcement authorities a way to unlock all private electronic devices?
I'm willing to tolerate the presence of some crime in the name of personal liberty. I do not think my whereabouts should be known on demand by government actors just because I drive a car.
You’re going to be so shocked to find out the tracking device the government tricked you to put in your pocket is even worse. Police can run geofenced dragnets whenever they want, and all you got was the ability to shitpost on the Internet.
You’ll be even more shocked when biometric login isn’t protected by the 5th amendment. Possibly, even more shocked when you find out about XKEYSCORE.
ALPR is bad, of course, but in terms of actual invasion of privacy there are far bigger kraken sized fish to fry that we have accepted as just… completely normal and even necessary to function in our society. It’s only natural that they continue to push the boundaries. Almost like giving up rights for security has consequences we were warned about 250 years ago.
I won't be shocked (I don't have biometric logins enabled, thankyouverymuch), but does that mean I just celebrate it, or give up in all circumstances? I'm not yet a kicked dog, in either behavior or attitude.
Unless something has changed (or I'm simply clueless), it's not quite so trivial to ask where my phone was on January 30th. Camera surveillance is not time-limited.
By any means necessary, as long as crime goes down? So we can execute anyone that breaks any kind of law and as long as crime goes down, that's all that should matter? Rights have no value to you, only protecting people from crime? There's no balance to be had, the only relevant question is if crime goes up or down?
You need the carrot and the stick. There's a reason the QoL in urban areas in countries with significantly draconian enforcement like Singapore, Japan, and South Korea is significantly higher peer cities in North America and Western Europe.
Cleanliness as a cultural norm only arose because police in Singapore, Japan, and South Korea are very fine-happy.
You made a broad-brush statement that essentially justified anything in the name of safety. You might want to re-word your statement if you meant otherwise.
I think the point is that it's a tradeoff of civil liberties in exchange for safety.
I think it's an interesting discussion and it's not clear to me what the right answer is.
Given the first amendment in the USA, i think once it's cheap enough everyone will be filming everyone all the time. Just look at how many people have ring doorbells.
The first amendment?? Is surveillance speech now? Lets add it to the list: money is speech, surveillance is speech, protesting is NOT speech. Anything I’m missing?
> Would crime go up, down or stay the same if all surveillance cameras were removed?
I would think the same, crime rates would be unaffected in the short and medium term, since I don't think it prevents much crime given the short or non-custodial sentences given many criminals. Clearance rates and justice (conviction rates) would likely go down though IMO.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMIwNiwQewQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB0gr7Fh6lY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vU1-uiUlHTo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp9MwZkHiMQ
I recommend them.
Also, I can't help but feel like I'm watching a young Dr. Emmett Brown.. Great Scott!!
There’s more of us techno anarchists out there apparently!
Benn Jordan's YouTube channel is a registered Nonprofit https://www.patreon.com/posts/nonprofit-has-82858569
It is very clearly because YouTube has a higher reach than any other platform in that space.
> Flock has recently expanded into other technologies... Most concerning are the latest Flock drones equipped with high-powered cameras. Flock's "Drone as First Responder" platform automates drone operations, including launching them in response to 911 calls or gunfire. Flock's drones, which reach speeds up to 60 mph, can follow vehicles or people and provide information to law enforcement.
Tomorrow a police officer will suggest that these drones (that we are already using successfully) could be very useful for checking up on that "dangerous" neighborhood.
Because it's a social problem, not a technology problem.
At the same time, just because these instances of "missing" tape happen, does not mean that body cams and jailhouse CCTV are useless. We would not take those away. Likewise for the future drone footage
With their drones they now have cameras roaming freely everywhere.
If EMS has to "search you out" so does the drone.
At least in my County, we actually get very good triangulation info from 911. It was very rare that Dispatch told us they only had Level 2(IIRC) location info (which might be to several hundred feet).
FAR more common was people who actually told us the -wrong- location. Car accidents that were several miles up the road from their location. Saying Blah St SE when they meant Blah Rd NE, etc.
Drones don't solve for that problem. They're going to the wrong location, too.
I'm sure you can come up with a lot more ideas using your imagination.
I’m not a fan of Flock but I would welcome anything that knocks out some of the ghetto birds’ budget.
Most places in America don't have problems that surveillance solves. They have problems they already know about and won't act on. Cameras don't fix homelessness or addiction or underfunded services. They just make life harder for regular people.
But that's the whole appeal for bureaucrats. Buying a product looks like doing something without having to do any of the actual work.
"Making life harder for people [in the other tribe]" has become a core platform for a great many politicians. There's growing movement advocating that one of the major purposes of government is to grief people you don't like. Looked at through that lens, blanketing small towns with these things, with a plan to use them against "Those People," makes complete sense.
Increasing the quality of the panopticon has all the downsides we talk about regularly on HN, and if you can't do anything useful for society with the data, it only ends up hurting people.
Flock's headquarters and largest offices are in Atlanta. They also have an office in Boston.
Ring's headquarters were in Santa Monica until post-acquisition they moved to Hawthorne, CA.
Arlo's offices are in Carlsbad and San Jose. Ok, finally an office in the Bay Area (one of two main offices), but still not San Francisco.
I live just outside Seattle. I worked for Flock.
Flock is a company based in Atlanta GA.
I don't think it's the bureaucrats. You should hear the Flock CEO talk. They have made it very public that their direct intent is to influence government policy in sweeping and total fashion to enable their service to be the mass surveillance tool of the near future. They sincerely believe that people will look back on them as the saviours of mankind.
Flock's stats are very misleading too. If there was a Flock query in the course of investigating a crime, even if it leads nowhere or isn't relevant to the arrest or conviction, still, Flock was queried, so "Flock solved a crime".
It was sad. I had significant ethical questions when I joined, but all through recruitment and week one, everything was all about controls and restraints and auditing and ethics. After that, nope, a free for all. Selling our products in states that don't allow the use of certain functionality? Not our problem. We're not disabling it. That's up to you to decide whether you're using it or not.
His only advantage is that the cops are on his side and won’t let go of these cameras without a fight.
But sadly lots of people want everyone else subject to it, and some are willing to submit to it themselves to get it. It's not a foregone conclusion.
I agreed that there could be benefits but that the downside is that they know when and where you go to church, or the grocery, or where you get your hair done, or even when you go on vacation. Her eyes lit up and I she replied that she would have to think about that a bit.
I'm not saying that I changed her mind, but that bringing the consequences down to something she could understand was much better than yelling from the rooftops. Mentioning church is especially impactful with a lot of older folks.
Good job talking to your community. The first step is that people are aware of the cameras - for my neighbors, most did not know about them, and immediately found it creepy.
These systems were largely disliked bipartisanly because of those factors.
Which isn't necessarily where the most incidents are.
This statistically defendable study found crash effects that were consistent in direction with those found in many previous studies, although the positive effects were somewhat lower that those reported in many sources. The conflicting direction effects for rear end and right-angle crashes justified the conduct of the economic effects analysis to assess the extent to which the increase in rear end crashes negates the benefits for right-angle crashes. This analysis, which was based on an aggregation of rear end and right-angle crash costs for various severity levels, showed that RLC systems do indeed provide a modest aggregate crash-cost benefit.
The opposing effects for the two crash types also implied that RLC systems would be most beneficial at intersections where there are relatively few rear end crashes and many right-angle ones. This was verified in a disaggregate analysis of the economic effect to try to isolate the factors that would favor (or discourage) the installation of RLC systems. That analysis revealed that RLC systems should be considered for intersections with a high ratio of right-angle crashes to rear end crashes, higher proportion of entering AADT on the major road, shorter cycle lengths and intergreen periods, one or more left turn protected phases, and higher entering AADTs. It also revealed the presence of warning signs at both RLC intersections and city limits and the application of high publicity levels will enhance the benefits of RLC systems.
The indications of a spillover effect point to a need for a more definitive study of this issue. That more confidence could not be placed in this aspect of the analysis reflects that this is an observational retrospective study in which RLC installations took place over many years and where other programs and treatments may have affected crash frequencies at the spillover study sites. A prospective study with an explicit purpose of addressing this issue seems to be required.
tl;dr - it's complicated. There are places RLCs make sense and places they don't. Expecting local government to know the difference... good luck with that.
1 - https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/safety/05049/
I don't see how removing the cameras is compatible with the first amendment, but if you have the right of "speech" to record me in public chasing every place I go in a manner that is the envy of any stalker, I ought to have the right of "speech" not to "say anything" (compelled speech of showing my plate).
https://www.oyez.org/cases/2017/16-402
> The government's warrantless acquisition of Carpenter's cell-site records violated his Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches and seizures. Chief Justice John Roberts authored the opinion for the 5-4 majority. The majority first acknowledged that the Fourth Amendment protects not only property interests, but also reasonable expectations of privacy. Expectations of privacy in this age of digital data do not fit neatly into existing precedents, but tracking person's movements and location through extensive cell-site records is far more intrusive than the precedents might have anticipated.
Or in United States v. Jones (cited in https://www.ca4.uscourts.gov/opinions/201495A.P.pdf):
> Although the case was ultimately decided on trespass principles, five Justices agreed that “longer term GPS monitoring . . . impinges on expectations of privacy.” See id. at 430 (Alito, J., concurring); id. at 415 (Sotomayor, J., concurring). Based on “[t]raditional surveillance” capacity “[i]n the precomputer age,” the Justices reasoned that “society’s expectation” was that police would not “secretly monitor and catalogue every single movement of an individual’s car for a very long period.”
It seems clear these cameras can hit some kind of threshold where they're common enough and interlinked enough to amount to unconstitutional surveilance. We don't know exactly where that threshold is yet.
Trying to interpret viewing and recording the plate as speech but not displaying it as speech is trying to have your cake and eat it too. If the camera can stalk my car everywhere and record it under auspices of 'speech', it's only logical I can hide it as 'speech.'
Automated mass surveillance of license plates should also be illegal.
Guess what, all the roads around me are private easements, all privately owned, and they are that way 90% to town. A good portion of my trips never touch a publicly owned road yet I'm still required to display my plate. We don't even have public, tax maintained roads where I live (I literally have to bring out a tractor and fix them myself when they wear down). Yet the compelled 'speech' of displaying the license plate is required even then while driving your car on your privately owned non-gated road.
You shouldn't pin your ideals on anything as flawed as the Constitution of the US. It was barely a workable system to begin with, and who knows how long it can last now.
Precedent is often crap and wrong until someone can find a good case paired with good lawyers to rectify.
"Precedent is often crap" isn't really the basis for any cohesive judicial philosophy or legal thought process.
I'm not aware of any precedent anywhere that approaches "ALPRs violate 4A" territory, it's when other stuff happens that's beyond simply "$lp_id was seen by $camera on $datetime" that I've seen courts start to talk about reasonableness and privacy.
When was that? Because in 1977 they defended Nazi's free speech to demonstrate in a town that had jewish people as half its population so it tried to block them, and I don't recall them doing anything nearly that controversial since.
https://www.aclu.org/news/free-speech/the-skokie-case-how-i-...
Alternative framing: Given limited resources and lots of things to care about, they pick the specific cases that best improve the freedoms they're interested in protecting.
In the case of the Second Amendment, they decided to let the NRA handle it, as that seems to be working just fine.
The Second is probably the amendment least in need of defending by the ACLU. It's well covered, and pretty much a third rail of American politics.
2018: the ACLU supports the NRA's First Amendment challenge to Governor Cuomo's attempt to convince NY financial institutions not to do business with the NRA.
2019: they defended a conservative student magazine which was denied funding by UCSD.
2020: they filed a brief supporting antisemitic protestors picketing a synagogue on the Sabbath. They also supported a Catholic school's religious right to make religious-based choices in hiring and firing teachers.
I'm just quoting the fruits of five minutes of research here, so I won't go on (but there's more). Is it possible that you're reacting to the radical conservative stereotyping of the ACLU rather than the actual actions of the organization?
0: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/06/us/aclu-free-speech.html
I think this is particularly noted as a post-2022 shift
The only problem with the license plate readers is that the "teens" drive cars with fake tags. They deliberately copy the plate numbers from some granny with the same model. Makes it fun when the SWAT team knocks on Granny's door.
Cops -did- show up. "Did you have a green light" "I did." Less than 30 seconds of questions. Goes to the other driver, same, is back in under a minute. "Well, he said he's absolutely sure he had a green light, so I'm citing you for failing to obey a traffic signal".
There were no cameras in the area, no witnesses, just the two drivers. But the other driver was a 50 something male, and my step daughter was 17 and upset because it was our car. So the cop took his word and cited her.
Hmm, vehicle black box? If that showed that she had come to and been at a stop, and then accelerated, that would at least imply she had been at a red light, and gone when it turned green, as she said.
No, no interest there. Even the insurer (fine, whatever), said "unless we're facing a six digit payout, we're not pulling the black box".
Don't even start me on the fact that after our insurance denied liability, the other driver sued her in small claims court for $10,000 for a car that had a KBB of $1,450. And the small claims judge noted that he technically couldn't sue a minor in small claims, but required us to go to mandatory arbitration, where the arbitrator said, quote, "I don't understand why, as a decent human being, if insurance will pay out, you don't just accept the claim." (Yeahhhh, filed a complaint about that, too. And here I stop, because I feel my blood pressure rising lol).
Drawing an equivalence is foolish.
The Bay Area is objectively safe, for example, yet I constantly run into neighbors in affluent neighborhoods who are afraid of venturing various places, letting their kids play outside or bike to school, or just generally exploring around.
I was at a BayFC match last weekend, for example, and ran into the family of an acquaintance from my elementary daughter's school. They have an 8th grader and are trying to get an intra-district transfer approved for high school so she doesn't have to go to the neighborhood school where a student brought a ghost gun on campus 3 years ago (he was arrested and successfully prosecuted, and no one was hurt)... and instead go to the local school where a handful of kids arranged their bodies in a swastika pattern on the football field (and photographed it!) several months ago. My point isn't that either of these crimes is acceptable, but that people tend to be irrational and ignorant of statistical analysis. Both of these are good schools with better than average student outcomes, but families consistently bring their own prejudices into analysis and it creates mild chaos & havoc across the system overall.
Reminds me of this classic: https://static.poder360.com.br/2020/11/2020-11-07-22.31.49.j...
Yeah, I'm all for public safety in theory but seems like these days that's just a dog whistle for "go hard on whatever sort of petty deviance I don't like" and so I'm unwilling to support things like that in the default case. It's all just so tiresome.
[1]: I imagine this includes things like mental heath help, housing, and other related social safety nets.
Giving away food to homeless is a crime in many places. Bad capitalism.
Feelings of insecurity are manufactured relative to the danger posed:
https://ourworldindata.org/does-the-news-reflect-what-we-die...
How is this due to capitalism?
I mean, I can maybe see how you can tie it to NIMBYism, and from there to capitalism through the desire to maintain or increase property values. But that's a stretch, and only one mechanism
There are many drivers for this type of regulation, some more well-meaning than others. Most of them would not go away simply because we ceased private ownership of the means of production
And here they are telling you that you cannot use your own property to help alleviate issues in your community. That sounds more like an exaggeration of Communist attempts at division of labor and to 'organize' a civilization.
In other words: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSVqLHghLpw
And "While our data extends only to 2018" is... important, yeah?
https://imgur.com/a/FK3sfna
There's an enormous drop in edit: late 2019, and the second drop starts in 2023.
https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/your-sfpd/policies/depart...
> Starting on March 19, 2024, Flock Safety began installing ALPR cameras in various strategic locations across San Francisco. This rollout is expected to take place over the next 90 days. Per 19B ALPR policy, the administration of the Flock ALPR system is the responsibility of the Investigations Bureau.
How did the Flock cameras cause two crime drops before their installation?
The article's note about 2018 is talking about extending backwards, not forwards. It's entirely accurate, and a direct quote from your link.
The chart is trending down by January 2020, changes directions (upwards) right around the March 2020 spot, and again around (down) the July 2023 spot.
The fact that they only have data going back to 2018 means it's hard to say if the pre-COVID stuff was the norm or unusual.
To be super-clear, here's the chart annotated to show that 90 day window (black rectangle) in which the cameras were installed. https://imgur.com/a/i00Gna0
"that drop is obviously in early 2020", to reemphasize, is several years before the cameras got installed.
The cameras were added where the black rectangle is here: https://imgur.com/a/i00Gna0
• Meta-analyses (studies that average the results of multiple studies) in the UK show that video surveillance has no statistically significant impact on crime.
• Preliminary studies on video surveillance systems in the US show little to no positive impact on crime.
https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/images/asset_upload...
https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/sf-car-breakins/ has a chart of the car breakins.
It shows the drop starting in September of 2023.
https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/your-sfpd/policies/depart...
> Starting on March 19, 2024, Flock Safety began installing ALPR cameras in various strategic locations across San Francisco. This rollout is expected to take place over the next 90 days.
In other words, the cameras were added where I've annotated the chart with a black rectangle here: https://imgur.com/a/i00Gna0
To my knowledge, Flock doesn't have a time machine offering.
Are there reports or studies released which explains how the flock system influenced these reductions?
It would be easy to create a camera network that is locally owned and operated by public agencies, and if any place in America could so that it should be SF.
https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Flock_license_plate_readers
And more about the company behind the cameras:
https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Flock_Safety
I have not done any research if that's out of the frying pan and into the fire or an improvement
The brutal reality is everyone is doing this and there's nothing you can do about it. National Security trumps all other concerns, especially in a world as unstable as today.
[0] - https://www.japan.go.jp/kizuna/2024/06/japans_ai-based_crime...
[1] - https://www.tc.u-tokyo.ac.jp/en/ai1ec_event/10769/
[2] - https://m.blog.naver.com/mtnews_net/223775186368
I don't know if it's criminal in any EU country, but it would be something that you could complain to DPA about. Or initiate civil lawsuit against the controller.
Worth noting is that in some cases the camera vendor might also be (joint) controller as they can determine means & purposes of the processing. If they are simply storing the video then it's unlikely, but if they for example use it for AI training that would likely bring them controller territory.
You might be shocked to discover there are subdivisions so affluent they can afford physical armed security and access control structures with far more invasive identification and logging procedures.
Government loves the product. What it doesn't like about Flock is that the peasants are aware about it and complaining.
My camera system is not connected to the cloud and it has a retention policy of 4 weeks. I took pains not to aim them anywhere where I'd be collecting data outside of my own property. There's full-disk encryption in use. The police could maintain their own surveillance network and place their own cameras in a legally compliant way and it would be fine.
Flock and Ring are awful because they enable easy surveillance and search after the fact, not a priori because they are surveillance systems. If they required proof of warrant before letting the police execute a search I think a lot of people would be more comfortable with them. A police officer stalking an ex is like the basic example you get if you ask an ALPR vendor why we need audit logging and proactive auditing of all searches. But that's not the only way these tools enable invasion of privacy.
If you want proof that that's the problem with them, you should know that people have been building wired camera systems and ALPR systems for decades before Flock and Ring came into existence. So it's solely the cloud Search-as-a-Service business model that's the problem there.
This statement rests on the belief that absolute crime rate is the only thing that matters, and is a cousin to the "I have nothing to hide!" response from people who care little for intrusions to their privacy. Are you in favor of giving law enforcement authorities a way to unlock all private electronic devices?
I'm willing to tolerate the presence of some crime in the name of personal liberty. I do not think my whereabouts should be known on demand by government actors just because I drive a car.
You’ll be even more shocked when biometric login isn’t protected by the 5th amendment. Possibly, even more shocked when you find out about XKEYSCORE.
ALPR is bad, of course, but in terms of actual invasion of privacy there are far bigger kraken sized fish to fry that we have accepted as just… completely normal and even necessary to function in our society. It’s only natural that they continue to push the boundaries. Almost like giving up rights for security has consequences we were warned about 250 years ago.
Wow.
Cleanliness as a cultural norm only arose because police in Singapore, Japan, and South Korea are very fine-happy.
Is it, though? Crime would be super low if we were all confined to prison cells by default, too.
I think the point is that it's a tradeoff of civil liberties in exchange for safety.
I think it's an interesting discussion and it's not clear to me what the right answer is.
Given the first amendment in the USA, i think once it's cheap enough everyone will be filming everyone all the time. Just look at how many people have ring doorbells.
Physician, heal thyself!
Let’s use your example for say a concert. Is checking bags worth it? Would crime go up if there was no bag check? Why or why not?
Probably not. It's mostly there to preserve the profits from alcohol sales.
> Would crime go up if there was no bag check?
Did it go down when they added them?
It should be!
I would think the same, crime rates would be unaffected in the short and medium term, since I don't think it prevents much crime given the short or non-custodial sentences given many criminals. Clearance rates and justice (conviction rates) would likely go down though IMO.
In the USA in 2026, "capitalism", "politics", and "evil" have all become synonymous.
Maybe I am naive, and the corruption is too deep and pervasive.