[HN Gopher] Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet...
___________________________________________________________________
Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked
Ourselves
Archive Link: https://archive.ph/IWMKe Also:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vU1-uiUlHTo - _This Flock Camera
Leak is like Netflix For Stalkers_
Author : chaps
Score : 772 points
Date : 2025-12-22 16:31 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.404media.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.404media.co)
| dvtkrlbs wrote:
| I just watched the Benn Jordan's video on this. Even if this is
| just configuration error on some of their cameras this is
| terrifying and I think they should be held accountable for this
| and their previous myriad of CVEs.
| chaps wrote:
| Here's the video for interested folk:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vU1-uiUlHTo
| tencentshill wrote:
| It's amazing that any vendor, let alone a CJIS vendor even
| allows unsecured deployments of their software in 2025.
| edot wrote:
| Flock or their defenders will lock in on the excuse that "oh
| these are misconfigured" or "yeah hacking is illegal, only cops
| should have this data". The issue is neither of the above. The
| issue is the collection and collation of this footage in the
| first place! I don't want hackers watching me all the time, sure,
| but I DEFINITELY don't trust the state or megacorps to watch me
| all the time. Hackers concern me less, actually. I'm glad that
| Benn Jordan and others are giving this the airtime it needs, but
| they're focusing the messaging on security vulnerabilities and
| not state surveillance. Thus Flock can go "ok we will do better
| about security" and the bureaucrats, average suburbanites, and
| law enforcement agencies will go "ok good they fixed the
| vulnerabilities I'm happy now"
| dvtkrlbs wrote:
| Yes and the biggest problem with this kind of ALPRs are they
| bypass the due process. Most of the time police can just pull
| up data without any warrant and there has been instances where
| this was abused (I think some cops used this for stalking their
| exes [1]) and also the most worrying Flock seems to really okay
| with giving ICE unlimited access to this data [2] [3] (which I
| speculate for loose regulations).
|
| [1]: https://lookout.co/georgia-police-chief-arrested-for-
| using-f... [2]: https://www.404media.co/emails-reveal-the-
| casual-surveillanc... [3]: https://www.404media.co/ice-taps-
| into-nationwide-ai-enabled-...
| throwway120385 wrote:
| When you give access to any system that collects the personal
| information including location data for people in the US to
| the police, a percentage of the police will always use those
| systems for stalking their exes.
| hugo1789 wrote:
| What is not only true for police but for every sufficiently
| big group of people.
| kcatskcolbdi wrote:
| Cops do have some unique tendencies but I think the real
| issue is the cops are able to leverage the power of the
| government in ways other large groups cannot.
| djtango wrote:
| The problem with police is a) that police have to deal
| with bad people and it is very hard to stay untainted
| when you constantly deal with bad people, and b) being a
| cop is no longer a desirable or rewarding job which not
| only causes applicant pool issues but also polarises the
| job and police force itself. Then the nature of
| polarisation is that it is self reinforcing. So if your
| job isn't rewarding financially or socially, the "perks"
| must come from somewhere and so it attracts people who
| seek to abuse power etc
| SOLAR_FIELDS wrote:
| I believe strongly that people have zero problem paying
| their knuckle dragging police fuckwad of the day $150k if
| they would actually do the job they signed up for. It's
| the fact that 99% of them can't handle it that pisses
| people off
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _So if your job isn 't rewarding financially_
|
| I don't know where you are, but some of the highest paid
| public employees in my state are police. In fact, median
| salaries for cops are higher than those of software
| engineers.
|
| Add the fact that they get generous pensions + benefits,
| and can retire at 45 and draw from that pension until
| they die, they have it better than most of the people
| they police.
|
| It's one of the only professions where you can make north
| of $250k+ a year doing overtime by sitting in your car
| playing Candy Crush all night.
| jonway wrote:
| I don't agree that police isn't attractive or rewarding,
| the salaries have gone up and requirements reduced
| (college degree requirements in places for example)
|
| Come with a pension and active lifestyle with a club(FoP)
| and a union in some positions, its ostensibly public
| service and you get to much more than peek behind the
| curtain.
|
| Personally, I feel both ways about cops writ large. I
| feel like we could do a lot better really
| easily(mandatory body cam recordings please? Our guys
| literally just take them off.), and on the other hand I
| get it, they're doing important work often enough.
| godelski wrote:
| Don't forget we even saw that in the Snowden leaks.
|
| Those were people with much higher scrutiny and background
| checking than your average cop. Those were people that
| themselves were more closely monitored. And yet... we want
| to give that to an average cop? People who have a higher
| than average rate of domestic abuse?
| jofla_net wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Maybe with these systems we should require them TO be open
| for anyone to query against. Maybe then people would care
| more about how they impact their privacy.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Flock's objective is to hope people don't care long enough
| to reach IPO. Will enough people care to dis enable this
| corporate dragnet surveillance apparatus? Remains to be
| seen. I don't much care about the grift of dumping this pig
| onto the public markets (caveat emptor), but we should care
| about its continued use as a weapon against domestic
| citizens without effective governance and due process.
| ipdashc wrote:
| IIRC, this happened in Washington state:
| https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/11/washington-court-
| rules...
|
| And as a result, they got rid of the cameras. Funny how
| that works!
| quitit wrote:
| I keep an unofficial record of instances where police and
| similar authorities have abused their access to these types
| of systems. The list is long. It's almost exclusively men
| stalking ex-partners or attractive women they don't know, but
| have seen in public.
|
| What's frightening is it's not rare, it actually happens
| constantly, and this is just within the systems which have a
| high level of internal logging/user-tracking.
|
| So now with Flock and data brokers we have authorities having
| access to information that was originally held behind a
| judge's signature. Often with little oversight, and
| frequently for unofficial, abusive purposes.
|
| This reality also ties back to the discussion about providing
| the "good guys" encryption backdoors. The reality is that
| there are no "good guys", everyone exists in shades of grey,
| and I dare say there are people in forces whom are attracted
| to the power the role provides, rather than any desire for
| public service.
|
| In conclusion it's a fundamental design flaw to rely on the
| operator being a "good guy", and that's before we get into
| the problem of leaks, bugs, and flaws in the security model,
| or in this case: complete open access to the public web -
| laughable, farcical, and horrifying.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| No idea why you're being downvoted, this is all true.
|
| Same was found in Australia when they looked into police
| access of data [0] [1] [2]
|
| [0] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-
| news/article/2024/jun/...
|
| [1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-12-15/victoria-police-
| leap-...
|
| [2] https://www.ccc.qld.gov.au/sites/default/files/Docs/Pub
| lic-H...
| Phemist wrote:
| > What's frightening is it's not rare, it actually happens
| constantly, and this is just within the systems which have
| a high level of internal logging/user-tracking.
|
| Would not be surprised if these types of abuse serve to
| obfuscate other abusive uses as well and are thus part of
| the system operating as it should. Flood the internal
| logging with all kinds of this "low-level" stuff, hiding
| the high-level warrantless tracking.
| bigiain wrote:
| And my guess is we only ever find out about some probably
| very small percentage of the abuses by police, at least in
| theory having rules and oversight of their use of these
| systems.
|
| What are the chances that nobody at Flock has ever abused
| their access?
|
| Cynical-me assumes that if you're the sort of person who'd
| take a job at a company like Flock, which I and evidently a
| lot of other people consider morally bankrupt, then you are
| at least as likely as a typical cop to think that stalking
| your exes or random attractive people you see - is just a
| perk of your job, not something that should come with jail
| time.
| tdeck wrote:
| I'm sure the 40 percent of cops who are domestic abusers and
| the white supremacists militias recruited wholesale into ICE
| will use this power responsibly.
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| You can go onto the ICE subreddit and see a ton of posts
| that ask if their previous domestic abuse/gross
| misconduct/ejection from police academy/etc will effect
| their ICE application.
|
| These aren't people who should hold any kind of intel. It's
| an actual danger to the population to give these people
| this much power.
| SamInTheShell wrote:
| Nothing will be done until one of the investors of the tech end
| up embarrassed from weaponization of the tech against
| themselves. These people have no clue how creepy some of their
| technologic betters can be. I once witnessed a coworker
| surveilling his own network to ensure his girlfriend wasn't
| cheating on him (this was a time before massive SSL adoption).
| The guy just got a role doing networking at my company and
| thankfully he wasn't there for very long after that.
| tejtm wrote:
| flock is a YC startup
|
| We have met the enemy and he is us -Pogo
| haimez wrote:
| Are we the baddies?
| therobots927 wrote:
| Yep
| fleshmonad wrote:
| I am the "Y-combinator". Do you have any questions?
| tejtm wrote:
| no questions asked go eat yourself now
| or at least your own dog food
| StanislavPetrov wrote:
| As O'Brien passed the telescreen a thought seemed to strike
| him. He stopped, turned aside and pressed a switch on the
| wall. There was a sharp snap. The voice had stopped.
|
| Julia uttered a tiny sound, a sort of squeak of surprise.
| Even in the midst of his panic, Winston was too much taken
| aback to be able to hold his tongue.
|
| 'You can turn it off!' he said.
|
| 'Yes,' said O'Brien, 'we can turn it off. We have that
| privilege.'
| bigiain wrote:
| > Nothing will be done until one of the investors of the tech
| end up embarrassed from weaponization of the tech against
| themselves.
|
| I propose that it become mandatory for all senior managment,
| board members, and investors in Flock - to have these Condor
| camears and their ALPR cameras installed out the front of
| their houses, along their routes to work, along the route to
| nearby entertainment precincts, outside their children's
| school and their spouses workplace (or places they regularly
| visit if they don't work) - all of which must be unsecured
| and publicly available at all times.
|
| (Yes I know, I'm dreaming. I reckon every Meta employee's
| children should be required to have un-parental-controlled
| access to Facebook/WhatsApp/Messenger/et al...)
| tracker1 wrote:
| I think more importantly people need to recognize that cops are
| people, flawed and fallible as is the flock system in general.
| It should never be the whole solution and be used as evidence
| alone.
| monkaiju wrote:
| This totally misses the OCs point, which is that this data
| shouldn't be gathered at all, regardless of the competency
| (or lack there of) of the cops
| tracker1 wrote:
| It wasn't my intent to argue otherwise... I was only trying
| to add to the conversation.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Was it misconfigured? Or "misconfigured" so people in the know
| can bypass the minimal controls that are in place?
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| I know right. It is like we all forgot that cops were literally
| sharing pictures of Kobe Bryant's mutilated body in bars for a
| laugh. A lot of people in law enforcement are totally screwed
| up in the head.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| How is this different from the CCP surveillance? I guess this
| is easier for third parties to access?
| AlexCoventry wrote:
| The PRC has nothing remotely corresponding to the Fourth
| Amendment, as far as I know.
| edot wrote:
| I hate the CCP surveillance too. No state should have this
| close of an eye on its people. It's anti-freedom.
| AngryData wrote:
| It isn't any different, it is the exact same thing with a
| different PR spin.
| SOLAR_FIELDS wrote:
| I'm glad Benn has gone into the YouTube space. He has
| demonstrated a great balanced view on how to sell your soul for
| advertisement money in YouTube land.
|
| I've known of him a long time simply because of his extremely
| progressive views towards releasing his own music. In other
| words, I would not care about Benn Jordan but for the fact that
| he was releasing his own torrented music on WCD 15 years ago
| KurSix wrote:
| Fair point but there's a crucial nuance: state surveillance
| used to be limited by human resources. You couldn't assign an
| agent to every citizen - there aren't enough people. Flock with
| their AI tracking has effectively removed this scalability
| constraint. This vulnerability just highlighted how powerful a
| tool they've built. If these were just dumb cameras, the state
| would have to hire an army of operators. As it stands, the
| technology allows for total surveillance with essentially zero
| marginal cost. And when they fix the security, that terrifying
| potential for infinite scale isn't going anywhere; it just goes
| back under the client's control
| SamInTheShell wrote:
| It's 2025. The ISP gateway I got comes with more default security
| than these cameras. The barrier to entry on security is lower
| than it ever has been in history. Whoever let this past the QC
| phase is an idiot.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > Whoever let this past the QC phase is an idiot.
|
| It's all a matter of perspective. I'm sure to some executive
| somewhere, the person/s who approved all of this is seen as
| heroes, as they shaved of 0.7% or whatever from the costs of
| the development, and therefore made shareholders more money.
|
| Until there are laws in place that makes people actually
| responsible for creating these situations, it'll continue, as
| for a company, profits goes above all.
| SamInTheShell wrote:
| So you're trying to justify this type of rampant negligence
| in tech? Do you think justifying such malfeasance makes up
| for fact we literally have surveillance networks that bad
| actors can tap to do really awful things?
|
| Anyone that cares about their perspective has missed the
| point.
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| I don't think the person you're replying to is justifying
| it, but saying there's no laws to prevent the abuse.
|
| Personally I think tech CEOs should be put in stocks in the
| town square on the regular but they're protected from any
| form of repercussions besides extreme cases of fraud. Even
| then, they're only held accountable when the money people
| have their money effected, not when normal people are
| bulldozed by the abuse.
| SamInTheShell wrote:
| If I was 10 years younger, I might agree that they aren't
| justifying it, but I have enough experience with passive
| speech to just not let it pass anymore.
|
| Regarding remedy, we really need laws on this stuff
| yesterday. The problem is that we have to gut first
| amendment freedoms for some of this stuff, which wont go
| anywhere because there will always be too much overreach
| with today's representatives.
| yunwal wrote:
| You should probably read the comment you're replying to
| before replying
|
| > Until there are laws in place that makes people
| actually responsible for creating these situations, it'll
| continue, as for a company, profits goes above all.
|
| They obviously meant that we ought to be holding these
| people responsible.
| SamInTheShell wrote:
| > You should probably read the comment you're replying to
| before replying
|
| Congrats you spotted the thing we agreed on between
| comments. If you fail to see the agreement through parity
| of the part that was echoed, idk what to tell you.
| Education system is failing everyone in it these days.
| yunwal wrote:
| > If I was 10 years younger, I might agree that they
| aren't justifying it
|
| You maybe need to read your own comments then? Idk man,
| they clearly aren't justifying anything, they're being
| critical and you're just spouting off about the education
| system
| hrimfaxi wrote:
| An explanation is not a justification.
| eptcyka wrote:
| Why stick your neck out, swim upstream to do a good job
| that will not be recognised as such?
|
| Fix the corporate incentives and engineers will be able to
| do the right thing without suffering. Not everyone gets the
| luxury of a secure career doing morally ok things.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > So you're trying to justify this type of rampant
| negligence in tech?
|
| Don't know how you reached that conclusion, I obviously
| isn't trying to justify anything. But maybe something I
| said was unclear? What exactly gave you the idea I'm trying
| to justify anything of this?
| SamInTheShell wrote:
| Nothing against you personally, just so you know. But I
| have to point out that anyone caring about the reason for
| the short coming of flock on stuff like this are just
| crafting soft reasons they can use to justify things
| later. Being up front here I care not for their reason
| because the entire business model is frankly disgusting
| and an affront to a functioning society. This is the type
| of tech that evolves into social credit scores and precog
| crime units, stoping crime before it happens.
|
| At the end of the day your rationalization only affords
| comfort to those that have a vested interest in this
| stuff being successful and it needs to be clear to those
| people driving this that they're not doing something
| popular or even good.
| jandrese wrote:
| It probably makes close to no difference in development or
| production, but it does significantly cut down on the number
| of tech support calls from people who can't figure out how to
| set the password, or immediately forget the password they
| set. If it has no password then you can just plug it in an
| have it work. Sure it's totally insecure, but its also
| trivial to install.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Generating a password that is unique to the device and
| print it with a sticky label on the underside of the device
| isn't exactly rocket-science, and ISPs somehow figured this
| out at least two decades ago, which was the first time I
| came across that myself. Surely whoever developed this IP-
| camera has an engineering department who've also seen
| something like this in the wild before?
| jandrese wrote:
| Yep, but if you do that you need to staff a help line
| with people who can say "turn the box over and look at
| the sticker, no the sticker with the numbers on it, it's
| white with black letters and says PASSWORD in a big font,
| no the password isn't literally PASSWORD, it's the line
| below that with the strange letters, yes, to type that
| one you need to hold the shift key and press 3..."
|
| Remember that ISPs often have people who come to your
| home to hook stuff up.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Yes, which costs money, which is exactly my original
| point. It's not because "Oh I'm so hassled because
| customers are dumb", it's "No, hiring people to do
| support would cost us money, which we don't want".
|
| > Remember that ISPs often have people who come to your
| home to hook stuff up.
|
| I can't recall a single time a technician wasn't required
| to come to my flat/house to install a new router. I'm
| based in Spain, maybe it's different elsewhere, but I
| think it's pretty much a requirement, you can't setup the
| WAN endpoint or ISP router yourself.
| jandrese wrote:
| Last time I moved I opted for the "self install" kit,
| which was fine because I'm technical and the previous
| owners already had the service so there was nothing that
| needed to be done except hooking up the pre-configured
| modem. Saved me $200 in truck roll fees.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Interesting stuff, I've asked if I could do the
| installation myself every single time I've moved to a new
| place, and never has the ISP (three different ones) said
| yes. There isn't any installation fee place(probably by
| law?) so that isn't an issue here, just a hassle to
| coordinate having to meet between 12:00 and 18:00 or some
| super wide range of time for them to come and install it.
| ewoodrich wrote:
| In the US for the past 5+ years Xfinity/Comcast, Charter,
| and whatever CenturyLink is called these days have all
| heavily pushed the "self-install kit" option vs
| traditional tech install each time I've moved.
|
| Worked 4/5 times (all with cable), only time it failed
| was because I had apparently subscribed to a DSL plan
| from CenturyLink without realizing and they needed to
| wire up the extra lines upstream for the "modern" version
| of DSL to work in my apartment. After insisting multiple
| times that the self-install kit was 100% plug-n-play at
| my new address despite my intense skepticism since I
| _really_ needed reliable internet from Day 1 during COVID
| remote work.
|
| I was seriously missing Comcast/cable by the time that 1
| yr contract was up, the devil you know and all...
| braingravy wrote:
| Yep. Until we start holding decision makers responsible for
| the consequences of their decisions, they will always choose
| the selfish option.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| Counterpoint: whoever let this past the QC phase got paid very
| generously, and everyone involved is ignoring the laws that
| already exist to combat this, because law enforcement, too,
| gets paid generously. And the laws that forbid _that_ aren 't
| getting enforced because the police doesn't police the police,
| and dad has made it perfectly clear that flagrantly ignoring
| the law is fine if you're in power.
| salawat wrote:
| What makes you think QA/QC is paid handsomely? It's a bloody
| cost center mate, and you can't measure "damage prevented"
| consistently, or at least in a way most high-risk tolerating
| exec types won't immediately undermine.
|
| t. Former QA veteran
| bromuk wrote:
| Really great investigation, what's the URL of the "vibe coded"
| site with the access links?
| eightysixfour wrote:
| I don't want these cameras to exist but, _if they 're going to_,
| might we be better off if they are openly accessible? At the very
| least, that would make the power they grant more diffuse and
| people would be more cognizant of their existence and
| capabilities.
| hrimfaxi wrote:
| Is it more symmetrical? I know _in theory_ we all can
| continuously download and datamine these video feeds but can
| everyone really?
| eightysixfour wrote:
| No, but the same argument could be made for things like open
| source software. We assume/hope that someone more aligned
| with our outcomes is actively looking.
|
| Or, at the very least, that we can go back and look later.
| hrimfaxi wrote:
| I don't think they are similar. Public feeds would enable
| someone to document and sell people's whereabouts in real
| time. The fact that I could do the same or go back and look
| later is no defense.
| eightysixfour wrote:
| This is a different argument than what I was responding
| to.
|
| > I know in theory we all can continuously download and
| datamine these video feeds but can everyone really?
|
| To which my response is "this is like OSS." What I mean
| by that is that, in theory, people audit and review code
| submitted to OSS software, in reality most people trust
| that there are other people who do it.
|
| > Public feeds would enable someone to document and sell
| people's whereabouts in real time. The fact that I could
| do the same or go back and look later is no defense.
|
| This is a different argument to me and one that I'm still
| torn about. I _think_ that if the feeds exist and the
| government and private entities have access to them, the
| trade-offs may be better if everyone has access to them.
| In my mind this results in a few things:
|
| 1. Diffusion of power - You said public feeds would
| "enable someone to document and sell people's whereabouts
| in real time." Well, private feeds allow this too. I'd
| rather have everyone know about some misdeed than Flock
| or the local PD blackmail someone with it.
|
| 2. Second guessing deployment - I think if the people
| making the decisions know that the data will be publicly
| available, they're more likely to second guess deploying
| it in the first place.
|
| 3. Awareness - if you can just open an app on your phone
| and look at the feed from a camera then you become aware
| of the amount of surveillance you are subject to. I think
| being aware of it is better than not.
|
| There's trade-offs to this. The cameras become less
| effective if everyone knows where they are. It doesn't
| help with the location selection bias - if they're only
| installed in areas of town where decision makers don't
| live and don't go, the power is asymmetric again. Plenty
| of other reasons it is bad. None of them worse than the
| original sin of installing them in the first place.
| xyzzy123 wrote:
| Open cameras make information that was previously local
| and difficult to collect global and easier to collect.
| Relatively, it reduces the privacy and power of people on
| the ground in your neighbourhood and increases the power
| of more distant actors. It doesn't seem very socially
| desirable as an outcome. It also increases the relative
| power of people with technical capacity and capital for
| storage and processing etc.
|
| I do buy your argument that open access could help check
| the worst abuses. But, if widespread, it'd be so
| catastrophic for national security that I can't see how
| it would ever fly.
| eightysixfour wrote:
| I think the theater of closed versions have the same
| problems, we just don't acknowledge them as well.
|
| If I were an enemy nation state, flock would definitely
| be a target.
| kgwxd wrote:
| They don't grant power, they enhance it. Not helpful for those
| without don't have any actual power.
| lubujackson wrote:
| Did you see the other post about this where the guys showed a
| Flock camera pointed at a playground, so any pedo can see when
| kids are there and not attended?
|
| Or how it has become increasingly trivial to identify by face
| or license plate such that combining tools reaches "movie
| Interpol" levels, without any warrant or security credentials?
|
| If Big Brother surveillance is unavoidable I don't think
| "everyone has access" is the solution. The best defense is
| actually the glut of data and the fact nobody is actively
| watching you picking your nose in the elevator. If everyone can
| utilize any camera and its history for any reason then expect
| fractal chaos and internet shaming.
| eightysixfour wrote:
| > so any pedo can see when kids are there and not attended?
|
| Sure. It also lets parents watch. Or others see when parents
| are repeatedly leaving their kids unattended. Or lets you see
| some person that keeps showing up unattended and watching the
| kids.
|
| > Or how it has become increasingly trivial to identify by
| face or license plate such that combining tools reaches
| "movie Interpol" levels, without any warrant or security
| credentials?
|
| That already exists and it is run by private companies and
| sold to government agencies. That's a huge power grab.
|
| > The best defense is actually the glut of data and the fact
| nobody is actively watching you picking your nose in the
| elevator. If everyone can utilize any camera and its history
| for any reason then expect fractal chaos and internet
| shaming.
|
| This argument holds whether it is public or not. It is worse
| if Flock or the government can do this asymmetrically than if
| anyone can do it IMO, they already have enough coercive
| tools.
| rsync wrote:
| "Or others see when parents are repeatedly leaving their
| kids unattended."
|
| ... which is the expected, default use-case for a
| playground ...
| eightysixfour wrote:
| I didn't want to get into an argument over whether kids
| should be unattended at playgrounds or not - I don't know
| where the other poster is front and it seems to be based
| on age, density, region, etc. Where I grew up it would be
| weird to stay, in the city I am in it would be weird to
| leave them.
|
| If you leave your kids unattended at a playground I don't
| see how the camera changes the risk factor in any
| meaningful way. Either a pedophile can expect there to be
| unattended children or not.
| braingravy wrote:
| It's anonymity of the viewers combined with mass open-
| access surveillance that enables an unheard of level of
| stalking capacity.
|
| Most people don't like the idea that strangers could
| easily stalk their child remotely.
|
| It's the easy of access to surveillance technology that
| is different. Has nothing to do with the park being safe
| or not.
|
| Try to think like an evil person with no life and very
| specific and demonic aims if you're still having trouble
| seeing why this would be an issue.
| eightysixfour wrote:
| > Try to think like an evil person with no life and very
| specific and demonic aims if you're still having trouble
| seeing why this would be an issue.
|
| That person already has incredible power to stalk and
| ruin someone's life. Making Flock cameras public would
| change almost nothing for that person. It fascinates me
| how fast people jump to "imagine the worst person" when
| we talk about making data public.
|
| We have the worst people, they're the ones who profit off
| of it being private, with no public accountability, who
| don't build secure systems. The theater of privacy is,
| IMO, worse than not having privacy.
| braingravy wrote:
| "almost nothing" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that
| sentence.
|
| Stalking someone from your desk vs. IRL is a whole
| different ball game. Not sure why this needs
| explanation... anyways, the main difference is how easy
| it do things from your desk. For example, no one see you
| when you're stalking someone from your desk. Think of the
| success of 4chan investigations vs. those in authority to
| actually do so. It's empowering.
|
| We live in a world of strangers, and unfortunately a % of
| those are the type to kill/rape other strangers. Why
| enable them?
|
| Not sure who else would be empowered by making all public
| camera accessible at the click of a button, but I'm
| interested in who you think that population is.
|
| Certainly we can agree most normal folks will not spend
| their time looking camera feeds of strangers?
|
| I'm fascinated by people who stick to their theoretical
| principles ('all data should be public', etc.) no matter
| the real world implications, but we all have our own
| interests :).
| bakies wrote:
| once i learned to ride a bike i took myself to the
| playground
| tptacek wrote:
| There are sites that index thousands of public live streaming
| cameras, with search fields where you can just enter "park"
| and get live cams with kids playing, because people have
| specifically arranged for those cameras to exist.
| autoexec wrote:
| > Did you see the other post about this where the guys showed
| a Flock camera pointed at a playground, so any pedo can see
| when kids are there and not attended?
|
| If it's inappropriate for any pedo to see when kids are in a
| park then certainly it should inappropriate when those pedos
| just happen to be police officers or Flock employees. The
| nice thing about the "everyone has access" case is that it
| forces the public to decide what they think is acceptable
| instead of making it some abstract thing that their brains
| aren't able to process correctly.
|
| People will happily stand under mounted surveillance cameras
| all day long, but the moment they actually see someone point
| a camera at them they consider that a hostile action. The
| surveillance camera is an abstract concept they don't
| understand. The stranger pointing a camera in their direction
| is something they do understand and it makes their true
| feelings on strangers recording them very clear.
|
| We might need a little bit of "everyone has access" to
| convince people of the truth that "no one should have access"
| instead.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I've thought the same regarding license plate readers (and saw
| considerable pushback on HN) -- feeling like you suggest: if
| they have the technology anyway, why not open it up?
|
| I imagined a "white list" though (or whatever the new term
| is--"permitted list"?) so that only certain license plates are
| posted/tracked.
| overfeed wrote:
| > I don't want these cameras to exist but, if they're going to,
| might we be better off if they are openly accessible?
|
| Cities will remove Flock cameras at the first council meeting
| that sits after council-members learn _their_ families can be
| stalked.
| eightysixfour wrote:
| Seems like a positive side effect. The Seattle area is
| delaying it after the open records request case.
| enahs-sf wrote:
| I wonder if such a business model could exist where they were
| effectively "public" and thus, access was uniformly granted to
| anyone willing to pay. not sure if this would be net better for
| society, but an interesting thought.
| givemeethekeys wrote:
| At what point does the top brass at Flock get arrested?
| reactordev wrote:
| Oh they're buddies with all the departments. Fat chance.
| SamInTheShell wrote:
| Rather just see them get Flocked honestly. Seems like the type
| of tech a child would dream up only to realize when it's too
| late that it's dystopian, creepy, and a detriment to society.
| zrobotics wrote:
| Building the torment nexus...
| cons0le wrote:
| In your dreams maybe
| fuckflock wrote:
| By top brass do you mean the people behind this website?
|
| > The financing was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with backing
| from Greenoaks Capital, Bedrock Capital. Meritech Capital,
| Matrix Partners, Sands Capital, Founders Fund, Kleiner Perkins,
| Tiger Global, and _Y Combinator_ also participated.
|
| https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/flock-safety-secures-major-...
| gruez wrote:
| For what? Under current jurisprudence collecting license plates
| images isn't illegal, because there's no expectation of privacy
| in public. They could post the information online if they
| wanted to and they'd be in the clear. It's fine to object to
| ANPR networks on the basis of "mass surveillance" or whatever,
| but screaming for people to be arrested without legal basis,
| just because you don't like what they're doing is childish and
| counterproductive to the conversation.
| array_key_first wrote:
| I mean, stalking is very clearly illegal.
|
| The main issue is that we have a different set of laws that
| govern businesses and that govern private citizens.
|
| If I set up a camera in a local park and programmed it to
| zoom into children's faces and stream it directly to my
| computer, I am surely going to jail.
|
| But if I set up 100 cameras to do just that, baby, that's
| just business.
|
| It's almost paradoxical. The more evil I do, the less illegal
| it becomes. The greater the scale of harm I inflict, the more
| palatable it is. It's a get out of jail free card.
|
| Are you a psychopath? Love to kill people? Well, don't use
| knives or guns silly! Instead, form an LLC and give people
| poison. You'll kill 100x more people with 100x less
| consequences!
| gruez wrote:
| >If I set up a camera in a local park and programmed it to
| zoom into children's faces and stream it directly to my
| computer, I am surely going to jail.
|
| [citation needed]
|
| You might be called a creep, and you might be asked to
| remove the camera (because you can't leave random cameras
| on public property without permission), but operating
| cameras in public and recording stuff isn't illegal.
| Paparazzis do that all the time.
| array_key_first wrote:
| No, actually, how you do it matters.
|
| If I use that information to track someone and watch them
| specifically, that is stalking and is illegal. I know
| it's illegal here in Texas.
|
| The law is not an algorithm, it's very complex. Recording
| people in public is absolutely illegal in many instances.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Stalking is not illegal at all.
| array_key_first wrote:
| Stalking is very illegal in most US jurisdictions.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Maybe if you are threatening someone. But if you are just
| following someone in public, that is okay.
| wyre wrote:
| Stalking is not "just following someone".
|
| From Stalking Prevention, Awareness, & Resource Center
| (SPARC): " A pattern of behavior directed at a specific
| person that would cause a reasonable person to fear for
| the person's safety or the safety of others; or suffer
| substantial emotional distress."
|
| https://www.stalkingawareness.org/definition-faqs/
| therobots927 wrote:
| They won't under this administration. It's owned and operated
| by Surveillance Valley Vulture Capitalists
| tonymet wrote:
| Why do people avoid saying President Trump like he's
| Voldemort?
| therobots927 wrote:
| Because he attained his current position by ragebaiting
| everyone. He's just a puppet of the people who are really
| in charge (intelligence agencies and billionaires)
| tonymet wrote:
| I appreciate the explanation.
| mvkel wrote:
| Should we also arrest computer co execs because computers are
| used to hack into things?
| j3s wrote:
| flock is the most heinous reflection of the ills of our current
| socioeconomic structure. absolutely nobody should be okay with
| mass surveillance, much less mass surveillance enabled by a
| private company.
| simlevesque wrote:
| It's what happens when we rank private property over human
| lives. We deserve this.
| esseph wrote:
| No, we do not "deserve this". The universe has no concept of
| "deserve".
| riversflow wrote:
| People are part of the universe, and they have a concept of
| deserving.
| overfeed wrote:
| "Deserving" not in the sense of dharma/karma, but as a
| natural consequence of prior actions.
| ordinaryradical wrote:
| Agree.
|
| If you find yourself sympathetic to Flock, you should ask
| yourself: do we have a right to any kind of privacy in a
| public space or is public space by definition a denial of any
| sort of privacy? This is the inherent premise in this
| technology that's problematic.
|
| In Japan, for instance, there are very strict laws about
| broadcasting people's faces in public because there is a
| cultural assumption that one deserves anonymity as a form of
| privacy, regardless of the public visibility of their person.
|
| I think I'd prefer to live in a place where _I_ have some
| sort of recourse over when and how I 'm recorded. Something
| more than "avoid that public intersection if you don't like
| it."
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| I think you have it backwards. This is what happens when we
| rank human lives over human freedom.
|
| The argument for these cameras is that they save lives. The
| argument against them is that they destroy freedom.
| docjay wrote:
| I don't know that I've heard the "saves lives" argument for
| this type of camera. How would that play out?
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| That's easy. Person gets kidnapped, government
| surveillance camera helps police find the car before the
| kidnapper kills them. Or, probably more common: murder
| happens, government surveillance camera helps police find
| murderer and jail them before they kill someone else.
|
| That's why these cameras are so prevalent, the case for
| them is extremely obvious and easy to make (give police
| more tools to stop bad guys), while the case against them
| is a lot more subtle (human freedom, government abuse,
| expectations of privacy, risk of data breaches, etc).
| ryandrake wrote:
| > Person gets kidnapped, government surveillance camera
| helps police find the car before the kidnapper kills
| them. Or, probably more common: murder happens,
| government surveillance camera helps police find murderer
| and jail them before they kill someone else.
|
| It's a good steelman/devil's advocate of their position,
| but I wonder if proponents realize how much wishful
| thinking drives those supposed outcomes.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| I don't think it's wishful thinking. Flock advertises how
| many actual, real-world cases their cameras have
| contributed to solving, and even just reading news
| reports on murder trials you'll often see comments like
| "suspect's car was caught on camera traveling such and
| such direction" in the timeline of events.
|
| The question isn't whether these cameras help law
| enforcement. Of course they do. The question is whether
| that's sufficient justification for continuous government
| surveillance of the public movements of millions of law
| abiding citizens.
| docjay wrote:
| 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 also imagine a
| situation with less steps wherein a spoon takes down an
| F-16, but I equally haven't heard an argument for using
| spoons as air defense. ;)
|
| Helping to solve a crime after the fact is certainly a
| thing, and that discussion has merit, but I think you're
| taking creative license again with stopping a serial
| killer or spree killer "before they kill again." That's
| not really how murders play out, which is why there are
| special names for them.
|
| It would be helpful for discourse, and for making your
| own argument, if the discussion was grounded in the
| reality of the sour world we live in now.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| So is it your position, based on what you just said, that
| people who have committed murder but have not yet been
| caught are no more likely to commit murder a second time
| than the average person?
|
| I think my example of helping police catch a murderer
| "before they kill again" is not only "grounded in
| reality" but has, in fact, quite plausibly already
| happened thousands of times throughout the course of
| Flock's existence.
|
| Now, whether I think that justifies mass surveillance is
| another matter entirely.
| docjay wrote:
| 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."
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| Okay, dozens, not thousands. My point still stands.
|
| If you really want to split hairs over the exact number,
| maybe also consider the number of murderers who committed
| other crimes prior to their first murder, and whether
| getting caught sooner in their criminal career might have
| prevented such escalations, plus the larger society-wide
| deterrent effect of the increased clearance rates of
| crimes in all categories.
|
| You don't need to run any numbers to see my original
| comment was obviously correct, I'm not sure why you're
| contesting this so hard.
| 0x1ch wrote:
| You can both have a desire to defend your peace, while also
| being against mass surveillance.
| overfeed wrote:
| Gp specifies how we _rank_ those 2 is the issue, and didn
| 't say they are mutually exclusive
| nullc wrote:
| 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 commit a crime comes
| from the combination of the opportunity and the deterrence--
| and not everyone is responsive to deterrence so controlling
| the opportunity is critical.
|
| Against repeated or organized criminals nothing but taking
| them out of society is very effective. Because they are
| repeated extensive surveillance is not required-- eventually
| they'll be caught even if not in the first instance. If you
| _fail_ to take them off the streets no amount of surveillance
| will ever help, as they 'll keep doing it again and again.
|
| Many repeat criminals are driven by mental illness,
| stupidity, emotional regulation, or sometimes desperation.
| They're committing crimes at all _because_ for whatever
| reason they 're already not responding to all the incentives
| not to. Adding more incentives not to has a minor effect at
| most.
|
| The conspiratorially minded might wonder if the failure to
| enforce and incarcerate for property crime in places like
| California isn't part of a plot to manufacture consent for
| totalitarian surveillance. But sadly, life isn't a movie
| plot-- it would be easier to fight against a plot rather than
| just collective failure and incompetence. In any case, many
| many people have had the experience of having video or know
| exactly who the criminal is only to have police, prosecutors,
| or the court do absolutely nothing about it. But even when
| they do-- it pretty much never undoes the harm of the crime.
| pandaman wrote:
| 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.
| nullc wrote:
| 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.
| pandaman wrote:
| >There is already lots of surveillance and was even
| before modern technology.
|
| Do you mean that all the people who are installing Flock
| cameras now do that not because they think there is not
| enough surveillance but for some other reason? Like help
| a YC company to raise more money? Or help LEOs to stalk
| their exes? Or some other crazy reason mentioned in these
| threads?
|
| Do you have a neighborhood social network (NextDoor and
| its kind)? If you do, check out reports of theft, they
| rarely have any surveillance and ones that have are very
| poor quality, usually not showing the perp enough to ID.
|
| > 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.
|
| This does not follow. If your math had been valid we'd
| have to agree that hunting elk in a forest where 15% of
| animals are bears would result in 90% chance that every
| 15th elk would turn out to be a bear.
| ck2 wrote:
| remember when people first started experiencing TSA and there
| were massive protests at how obscene and violating it all was,
| then uncovering how useless they were as fake security theater
|
| and they were going to get it all shut down
|
| TWENTY-FIVE YEARS NOW
|
| so good luck getting rid of flock where people don't even know
| it's happening
|
| Not sure if people realize that cellphone locations, several
| layers in the firmware and software, can be had without warrant
| by anyone YEARS LATER
| vatsachak wrote:
| That's why it's good to use GrapheneOS*. In the future,
| hopefully the pinebook project succeeds
| rfl890 wrote:
| You mean GrapheneOS?
| gruez wrote:
| How does using GrapheneOS prevent license plate readers from
| tracking where you are, or from you being groped at the
| airport?
| vatsachak wrote:
| I responded to the last point of the parent comment
| gruez wrote:
| Grapheneos doesn't stop cellphone tracking either. Cell
| carriers keeping track of where you are (or at least
| which cell you're in) is fundamental to how cell phone
| networks work, so a privacy focused android distribution
| can't fix that.
| ck2 wrote:
| Exactly, the tracking has to happen and there's no law to
| discard the data ever
|
| It's how we know even YEARS later EVERYONE who went to
| Epstein Island
|
| They didn't even have smartphones then, just regular
| cellphones
|
| Wired just bought all the tracking from a databroker, no
| warrant needed
|
| https://www.wired.com/video/watch/we-tracked-every-
| visitor-t...
| stackedinserter wrote:
| Moreover, people are pissed off when someone's angry because of
| TSA bs. "Don't be an asshole, they're just doing their jobs".
| "Oh someone's first week on this planet".
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Wasn't the first edition of the TSA scanner straight up showing
| pretty much nude photos of people? I seem to remember something
| like that. Now a days at least it just flags a region on a
| generic human model for more investigation.
|
| The funniest part though is you pay $80 every five years and
| just bypass it entirely. I guess they assume terrorists are too
| stupid to figure out TSA precheck is available.
| gnabgib wrote:
| All my pre-check friends have to go through the nude scanner.
| And gave up bio-metrics. It's a two tiered security line -
| theirs is faster, but you need money to get into it (or fly
| business class+, or a flight crew, or know someone in the
| airport, or win the entrance-line direction lottery).
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Most of the time they just send you through a standard
| metal detector. The state already has my prints from the
| dmv.
| monkaiju wrote:
| i guess that while it is alarming that these feeds were
| "unsecured" I'm just as concerned that they exist at all. Folks
| worry about it getting into the "wrong hands" but from my POV it
| was put up by the wrong hands.
|
| While both are a problem I am far more concerned about the power
| this gives our, increasingly authoritarian, government than about
| individual stalkers/creeps.
| tptacek wrote:
| I would love to watch a shorter version of this video that just
| discussed the deltas between the status quo and Flock, rather
| than breathlessly reporting the implications of cameras as if
| they were distinctive to Flock. He'll spend 30 seconds talking
| about how you can see _every_ activity and _every_ person on the
| camera --- yeah, that 's how cameras work. There are thousands of
| public IP cameras on the Internet, aimed at intersections, public
| streets, houses, playgrounds, schools; most of them operated that
| way deliberately.
|
| There _are_ Flock-specific bad things happening here, but you
| have to dig through the video to get to them, and they 're not
| intuitive. The new Flock "Condor" cameras are apparently auto-
| PTZ, meaning that when they detect motion, they zoom in on it.
| That's new! I want to hear more about that, and less about "I had
| tears in my eyes watching this camera footage of a children's
| playground", which is something you could have done last week or
| last year or last decade, or about a mental health police
| wellness detention somewhere where all the cops were already
| wearing FOIA-able body cams.
|
| If open Flock cameras gave you the Flock search bar, that would
| be the end of the world. And the possibility that could happen
| _is_ a good reason to push back on Flock. But that 's not what
| happened here.
| jkestner wrote:
| In my experience, people respond much more strongly to naming a
| specific company or person. Clearer plan of action than a
| resigned "This tech is old news."
| akerl_ wrote:
| If your takeaway from that comment is that 'tptacek thinks
| Flock's tech is old news and he's resigned about it, I think
| you're going to be in for a treat.
| tptacek wrote:
| Is the plan of action "eliminate all public IP cameras"?
| That's coherent, I'd get it, but that doesn't seem to be what
| he's saying at all. He used a Google search to find exposed
| Flock admin consoles (interesting! say more about that!) but
| he could just as easily have just searched "open IP cameras";
| there's sites that do nothing but index those.
| phyzome wrote:
| He's pretty open in this video about how Flock is far from
| alone in this space, and he's just using them as an example
| because they're so popular and flagrantly abusive.
| tptacek wrote:
| In what way this is an illustration of Flock's "flagrancy"?
| I'm seriously asking. I'm not a Flock supporter. My point is
| that cameras just as sensitive as the ones he shows here are
| _deliberately_ public on the Internet.
| ryandrake wrote:
| It's the attitude and marketing. Maybe not "flagrant" but
| "ambitious," "aggressive," and "expansive." I don't know
| the name of any other public surveillance/camera company,
| but I've heard about Flock, and the same is probably true
| of any of my neighbors who are even the least bit tech-
| following. They are also ambitiously funded for growth and
| expansion and their outward press attitude is congruent.
|
| Other camera companies would like to see steady year-over-
| year growth in camera sales. Flock would like to see the
| world blanketed in 24/7 surveillance.
|
| They make themselves a lightning rod as a business
| strategy.
| tptacek wrote:
| If Flock vanished off the Earth tomorrow I think we'd see
| exactly the same ALPR penetration. Municipalities aren't
| buying these things because Flock's so good at selling
| them; they're buying because the ALPR vendors have an
| extremely compelling pitch! Two of our neighboring
| municipalities have non-Flock ALPRs; I think you're going
| to see a lot of non-Flock ALPR penetration in
| progressive-leaning suburbs, for instance, because
| progressives are all het up about Flock.
|
| (I helped get Flock cancelled in Oak Park, where I live,
| and before that led the passage of what I believe to be
| the most restrictive ALPR regs/ordinance package in the
| country. I'm not an ALPR booster.)
|
| But I'm going to keep saying: my thing about this video
| is that he's describing _mostly_ things that are true of
| all public IP cameras. There are zillions of those!
| ryandrake wrote:
| I think everyone in this thread can agree that
| surveillance cameras should be fought against, no matter
| whose brand is stamped on them. Flock is still a better
| than average target because of the attitude they project
| and because of name recognition.
| tptacek wrote:
| Wait, I don't agree with that. Why do you assume everyone
| in this thread agrees with that?
| ryandrake wrote:
| Sorry, I assumed you did, given the advocacy you
| mentioned you led.
| tptacek wrote:
| I pushed back on our Flock deployment because the
| particulars of its deployment meant that we were curbing
| more cars driven by innocent Black drivers than we were
| responding to any meaningful crimes, and because when we
| had Flock's alerts enabled, the net effect was to take
| our selectively-recruited, highly-trained, very expensive
| police force and turn them into failure-to-appear-warrant
| debt collectors for nearby suburbs with far worse police
| departments.
|
| It was not some nerd+ principled stand against
| "surveillance". My experience working on the public
| policy of this stuff is that when you take a stand
| against "surveillance", normal people --- and I'm in what
| I believe to be one of the 10 most progressive
| municipalities in the country, the most progressive
| municipality in Chicagoland --- look at you like you're a
| space alien.
|
| + _I am, obviously, a nerd, fwiw._
| phyzome wrote:
| His other two (much longer) videos go into those details.
| This one is more of a quick update.
|
| Just to give you a sense of the kind of company we're
| dealing with, the CEO of Flock called the guy who made a
| Flock camera map an "antifa terrorist". He's unhinged.
| tptacek wrote:
| Thanks! I know it's a big ask, but can you give me
| pointers (rough timestamps, whatever). A friend told me
| to watch _this_ video for the distinctive Flock badness,
| and the time I spent on that was not rewarded.
| phyzome wrote:
| Sure, around 33:00 here:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB0gr7Fh6lY
|
| The other video is
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp9MwZkHiMQ but I don't
| recall which one goes more into it.
|
| It's also possible I'm just remembering Flock-specific
| stuff from other sources, and the things he shows in
| these videos are more general issues with security camera
| companies (using Flock as the example).
|
| It would be great if this stuff was (also?) published as
| blog posts so that it could be easily skimmed...
| tptacek wrote:
| Thanks! I looked, but that's a segment about someone at
| Flock accusing anti-Flock people of being "antifa" or
| terrorists. I'm about as anti-Flock as I think it's
| possible to be (having been instrumental in killing it my
| Chicagoland suburb) and I'm not not sure what to do with
| "someone at Flock said something dumb".
|
| In case it helps: my thing here is, the video we were
| commenting on thread seems to be about _all public
| cameras_ , not just AI-assisted smart cameras or even
| security cameras more broadly. That was my complaint.
|
| It's not that I don't think there's a video to do about
| 60 open Flock admin consoles; I'm sure there is. I'm just
| not sure what the implications are, because that video
| spent all its time talking about stuff that is trivially
| true of all public cameras, many of which are indexed on
| Google already, not through Google-dork searches for open
| console but instead with searches like "open IP camera
| live streams".
|
| (I was struck by this in part because I vividly remember
| when Russia invaded Ukraine flipping between dozens of
| different live camera streams in places like Mariupol;
| that's obviously not the US, but you can do very similar
| stuff in the US, and on a lot more than 60 random
| misconfigured Flock cameras).
|
| I think there may be something to the PTZ on the new
| Flock cameras that makes this worse? I just think he
| should make a better, sharper video case against them.
|
| Thank you for giving me a link!
| phyzome wrote:
| I mean, it's not just any person at Flock, it's the CEO.
|
| But I hear what you're saying about public cameras.
| fuzzylightbulb wrote:
| Have you ever gone fishing? Did you catch all the fish?
|
| Often it is more impactful to address one major/tangible player
| in a particular space than it would be to "boil the ocean" and
| ensure that we are capturing every possible
| player/transgressor. I agree that some of the video was overly
| breathless, but if that's what wakes people up to the dangers
| of unsecured cameras/devices then so be it.
| tptacek wrote:
| Ok, you're the second person to say that, and I think my
| point is not clear enough. That's on me.
|
| This response would make sense if I was saying "why focus on
| Flock, there are so many other ALPR cameras out there" (also
| true, but not relevant to my point).
|
| But this is a video that is _mostly_ about things that are
| true of _all_ IP cameras, of the kind that we 've had staring
| out onto public streets for decades, plural decades. People
| celebrated those cameras, thought they were super neat, built
| sites indexing them. All of them do most of the same things
| this video says those Flock cameras did, the tiny minority of
| Flock cameras you can access publicly.
| hackable_sand wrote:
| Many hands make light work
| dang wrote:
| (This was originally posted to
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46356182 but we've since
| merged the threads.
|
| The video in question is linked from the toptext above.)
| KurSix wrote:
| But isn't that "auto-PTZ" exactly what changes the game here?
| Sure, there are plenty of open cameras, but usually, that's
| just a passive stream you have to stare at for hours to spot
| anything interesting. Here, we have a situation where
| technology has effectively removed the "friction" from the
| surveillance process. You don't need to monitor the screen for
| hours - the algorithm itself grabs the person, zooms in on the
| face, and tracks them. It's like the difference between
| searching for a needle in a haystack by hand and having a
| powerful magnet. Because of the Flock leak, this magnet is now
| available to anyone with a link, and that is what's truly
| terrifying, not just the mere fact of filming a playground
| Bender wrote:
| Children could go missing thanks to Flock default settings. HN
| would tell me to never attribute to malice ... but there may be
| criminal negligence.
|
| To cover their butts I strongly suggest Flock implement a default
| _" grading system"_ that will show a city in a banner at the top
| of their management and monitoring system that based on their
| camera and network configuration they get an A+ to F-. If the
| grade is below a C then it must be impossible to get rid of the
| banner and it must be blinking red. The grading system must be
| both free, mandatory and a part of the core management code. This
| assumes Flock will have the willpower to say no when a city
| demands removal of the flashing red banner. Instead up-sell
| professional services to secure their mess. I would like to see
| the NCC Group review their security and future grading system.
| fuckflock wrote:
| HN _is_ the malice in this instance.
|
| > The financing was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with backing
| from Greenoaks Capital, Bedrock Capital. Meritech Capital,
| Matrix Partners, Sands Capital, Founders Fund, Kleiner Perkins,
| Tiger Global, and _Y Combinator_ also participated.
|
| https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/flock-safety-secures-major-...
| canyp wrote:
| Does it take that much funding to make such a poorly-secured
| system?
|
| God, these guys must be real noobs.
| NietzscheanNull wrote:
| I always found Hanlon's Razor a bit too optimistic in tone. I
| prefer it restated in the form of Clarke's third law:
| "Sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from
| malice."
| array_key_first wrote:
| Hanlons razor is stupid and we should stop using it.
|
| First off, we don't actually know how ignorant someone is or is
| not, but from what I see people GREATLY underestimate
| ignorance.
|
| Rich people building state-sponsored surveillance are not
| ignorant. They absolutely know the consequences. They either
| don't care, or they are actually targeting those consequences.
|
| Secondly, it falls apart in organizations. When we apply
| hanlons razor to an organization, we're claiming EVERYONE there
| must be ignorant. Which is just obviously not true.
|
| Someone knows, probably lots of people know. And they choose
| not to act - that is malice. Choosing not to do something is a
| form of malice.
| huflungdung wrote:
| Oh no. Someone can view cctv data and delete it. Always blown out
| of proportion. The likelihood of someone a) committing a crime or
| otherwise b) knowing there was this specific brand of camera
| software being run on a camera in that area c) knowing how to
| access these portals
|
| Is basically zero.
| kklisura wrote:
| For more context here Flock Safety is a YC-backed company [1][2]
|
| [1] https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety
|
| [2] https://x.com/garrytan/status/1856016868580151615
| kklisura wrote:
| And let me share this reply by Garry Tan, CEO of YC, after
| someone made a comment that Flock might be _pretty dystopian_
| [1][2]:
|
| > You're thinking Chinese surveillance
|
| > US-based surveillance helps victims and prevents more victims
|
| [1] https://x.com/neurajordan/status/1963303084609966288
|
| [2] https://x.com/garrytan/status/1963310592615485955
| embedding-shape wrote:
| I've never heard about this Tan guy before, I don't keep up
| with politics/corporatism anymore, but is that possibly
| sarcasm? It sure feels like it to me. But again, I don't know
| this person, but if I came across that by itself I feel like
| it's pretty clearly sarcastic, as Twitter tends to be. Maybe
| I'm just tone deaf myself to how tone deaf others could be?
| esseph wrote:
| This is the CEO of the startup incubator handwaving away
| concerns in the name of money.
| gruez wrote:
| He probably being sincere. If you're logged in (or use
| something like xcancel), you can see the full thread, where
| he starts off with
|
| > Flock Safety currently solves 700,000 reported cases of
| crime per year, which is about 10% of reported crime
| nationwide
|
| > And they're just getting started
|
| His profile also says:
|
| >President & CEO @ycombinator --Founder @Initialized--
| designer/engineer who helps founders--SF Dem accelerating
| the boom loop--haters not allowed in my sauna
| embedding-shape wrote:
| It's really interesting the different cultures
| "YCombinator the startup incubator" and "Ycombinator/HN
| the internet forum has". A comment being so oblivious
| about surveillance would probably be flagged here, at
| least heavily downvoted, while this guy is actively the
| president and CEO of Ycombinator today?
|
| pg, what happened? Ycombinator used to be a beacon of
| sense in a sea of uselessness, but now uselessness is
| running Ycombinator?
| overfeed wrote:
| > pg, what happened?
|
| Don't look to pg for anything that can be seen as "woke"
| - he wants that mind-virus eliminated forever[0]. Many
| billionaires revealed their true colors after November
| 2024, remember this when they adjust their public posture
| to follow the political winds.
|
| 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42780223
| eastbound wrote:
| This is not woke, no matter how large you define woke.
| You can see links with the ACLU or various human rights
| defense groups, but those groups may have become woke,
| without "global surveillance" becoming a woke topic.
|
| Wokism is about making racist accusations of dominance
| over an audience who didn't do it. It's about unfairness
| and hyping factions against each other. The global
| surveillance is not about pitting groups against each
| other. To wit, 1984 has always been a very right-wing
| torpe.
| overfeed wrote:
| "Wokism" is an amorphous culture-war weapon that can be
| anything an author wants it to be. Diversity is woke,
| equity is woke, inclusion is woke, non-heteronomative
| relationships are woke, movies that are barely critical
| of unbridled capitalism are woke. Not being onboard with
| "law and order" is woke - and not being 100% onboard with
| Flock can be reframed as being pro-Criminal and "woke"
|
| > global surveillance is not about pitting groups against
| each other.
|
| And yet this is exactly how the surveillance companies
| sell their global surveillance tools. Ring, Flock are all
| about keeping an eye on "outsiders" - see Nextdoor for
| examples on how people justifying surveiling others.
| eastbound wrote:
| Many gays (or "non-heteronormative" as you say) are anti-
| woke. You're operating a dichotomy between your opponents
| and you, trying to paint them as sweeping generalizators.
| But this is not wokism. Wokism is when you take "gays"
| and attribute them to your side, painting the others as
| nazis.
|
| I'm gay and the single most powerful harm that was made
| to my life was the emergence of wokism.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Did you link the right comment? He seems to argue against
| "aggressively performative moralism", something a lot
| more specific than the common "woke-ism" conservatives in
| the US is yelling about which is basically about anything
| with "social" in it's name (for them, in their eyes).
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Another case in point is most commenters are incredulous
| about AI, often coming from people who try and use it and
| see its shortcomings. Then you scroll over YC startups
| and I believe every single one at this point is some dumb
| AI startup.
| therobots927 wrote:
| He's being sincerely greedy and nihilistic, if that's
| what you mean by "sincere"
| plorg wrote:
| Gary has some unhinged politics with regards to "public
| safety" even excepting the Flock boosterism.
| therobots927 wrote:
| If it benefits Surveillance Valley, Garry Tan is all over
| it like Trump on a 13 year old
| aaroninsf wrote:
| It is not sarcastic.
|
| Generally speaking, today, surveillance capitalism is the
| foundation of both our political culture, economy, and the
| tech industry that backs them.
|
| In polite circles we call surveillance "user telemetry" and
| the like. It's not just Palantir and FLock; where does
| Meta's money come from...? Google's for that matter...?
| leeoniya wrote:
| > You're thinking Chinese surveillance
|
| the big irony, of course, is that i'm much more comfortable
| with China surveilling me than the US, since the latter can
| throw me in jail, seize my assets, and ruin my family's life,
| while the former cannot.
| devwastaken wrote:
| The CCP can hijack your accounts and absolutely do all of
| those things, using your own government.
| riversflow wrote:
| could you provide an example of that happening?
| afavour wrote:
| The US government is a democracy and can be replaced should
| it exceed people's limits. The CCP... uh, not so much.
|
| I'm not trying to say the US government is faultless but it
| amazes me how often I see this kind of anti-democratic
| institition sentiment.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| > _it amazes me how often I see this kind of anti-
| democratic institition sentiment._
|
| leeoniya didn't say anything about democracy. The
| practical reality is that regardless of what forms of
| government are involved, whichever government has the
| ability to arrest you is the government which is the
| greatest threat in your day-to-day life.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > government has the ability to arrest you is the
| government which is the greatest threat in your day-to-
| day life
|
| Assuming every government is the same, which I'm not so
| sure about. I rather be arrested by the German government
| than the US government, mainly because I don't want to
| disappear to black site and be made to disappear for
| years while I'm tortured receiving enhanced discussion
| techniques. At least I know I'll be treated relatively OK
| by Germany, while my fear is pretty much the opposite
| from a lot of other governments out there.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| > _Assuming every government is the same_
|
| _Wrong._ The American government is much better than the
| Russian government, but the Russian government cannot
| arrest me while the American government can, therefore
| the American government is a _much_ more serious threat
| _to me_ than the Russian government. _No equivalence
| between the two governments is assumed or implied._
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| "The government that has the ability to arrest you" is
| the one that controls the police on the street you live
| on. Not some abstract commentary on which government is
| best at arresting people.
| LocalH wrote:
| > The US government is a democracy and can be replaced
|
| I'm not sure this is as axiomatic as many think, in 2025
| embedding-shape wrote:
| I've already placed my bets that current president will
| be the first to serve at least three terms since the two-
| term limit was introduced. Judging by what's happening,
| seems like a safer and safer bet every day.
| tchalla wrote:
| Hasn't Trump already said he won't do another term?
| pixelpoet wrote:
| No way would he ever lie!
| Hikikomori wrote:
| Like he said he didn't know anything about project 2025?
|
| Steve Bannon is the one working on this, has said they
| have a plan to do it. Trump himself seems to believe that
| if the country is at war elections are postponed because
| that is how it works in Ukraine. Ergo Venezuela.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| He has said that he cannot do more than two terms, but
| also there are ways to do more terms. Then he said it's
| too early to think about, then that he is joking, then
| that he wasn't joking, then that he isn't looking into
| it, but that they're "probably entitled to another four
| after that" (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/what-trump-has-
| said-about-pursu...), whatever the fuck that means.
|
| Ultimately, I don't think it matters much what he says or
| has said, he won't clearly say what he/they are planning,
| obviously.
| autoexec wrote:
| > Ultimately, I don't think it matters much what he says
| or has said, he won't clearly say what he/they are
| planning, obviously.
|
| Honestly they're pretty open about their plans. They laid
| most of them out in Project 2025. They just sometimes
| carry out those plans while also denying that they are
| following the playbook. Trump in particular will be
| surprisingly candid about what he's doing in between
| bouts of lies and denials.
| SAI_Peregrinus wrote:
| I think the most likely reason that won't happen is some
| sort of cardiovascular failure (heart attack or stroke),
| not because anyone will actually stop the Republicans
| otherwise trying. Conservatives want a monarchy.
| tremon wrote:
| In that case, I guess we'll see a live-action remake of
| Presidency at Bernie's.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| Shitty bet tbqh, but it's your money. Trump promises his
| supporters much but delivers very little. If J6 is the
| sort of insurrection his base can muster, there's no
| chance in hell of him getting another term.
| array_key_first wrote:
| It's not anti-democratic, it's just pragmatic.
|
| Yes the US is a democracy, but a lot of our systems suck
| ass and are also close in proximity. You DO NOT want to
| get into legal trouble in the US. Our justice system is
| beyond fucked. If there's one way to permanently ruin
| your life in the US, it's getting into legal trouble.
| You're better off smoking crack cocaine, that's probably
| healthier for your livelihood.
|
| I don't know about China's legal system, but even
| assuming it's more fucked, it's all the way over there.
| Not here.
|
| The main trouble with Flock and companies like them is
| that they attach to our broken systems like a tumor. If
| the system fails, which it often does, these accelerate
| it and make it worse. If you get falsely accused of
| something or piss off the wrong PD, this shit can ruin
| your life. Permanently and expeditiously.
|
| Even if you are the most Moral Orel you should be
| skeptical of these crime reduction claims. They don't
| just beat down crime, they beat down regular people, too.
| And if you ask them, they don't know the difference.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > I don't know about China's legal system, but even
| assuming it's more fucked, it's all the way over there.
| Not here.
|
| You're saying that the US legal system is extremely bad,
| shouldn't the assumption be that other countries have it
| better? I don't know much about either country's legal
| systems, but I do know that if I feel like my country is
| extremely bad at something, other countries probably do
| it better, at least that what I'll assume until I see
| evidence of something else.
| array_key_first wrote:
| Maybe, I mostly gave that disclaimer to say that it
| actually doesn't matter much. Even if it's worse, that's
| still better, because it's over there.
|
| But yes, generally, I assume virtually every developed
| country (and some of the kind of developed countries)
| have a more just and competent legal system than the US.
|
| The US is an interesting beast, because when you compare
| it to the entire world on a bunch of stuff, it doesn't
| seem so bad. But when you compare to countries that have,
| like, clean running water, then it really falls flat in a
| lot of ways. This allows apologists to basically justify
| anything the US does, because somebody, somewhere, is
| doing it much worse. Hey guys, look at Uganda, they're
| genociding gay people!
| ryandrake wrote:
| Not being an expert in every single country's legal
| system, I would _guess_ that the USA 's is about middle
| of the spectrum in terms of badness/fairness/justice.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| These things are hard to weigh objectively. For instance,
| in America the police don't take bribes, you can't bribe
| your way out of a traffic ticket. The cops will laugh at
| your attempt and pile on more charges. But if you're a
| local business owner, the bribes to local politicians are
| far from unheard of and all manner of corrupt dealings
| between business and local government is prevalent. So
| how you rank America's corruption depends on how you
| weigh those two forms of corruption. There's not one
| single objectively correct way to do that.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > For instance, in America the police don't take bribes,
| you can't bribe your way out of a traffic ticket. The
| cops will laugh at your attempt and pile on more charges.
|
| Sure, they might not take as many bribes as South
| American police tends to take (as someone who traveled
| that continent in car without a driving license, I'd say
| 90% are accepting of bribes for minor crimes), but
| American police also accept bribes from time to time.
| They'll laugh at you and pile on more charges if you
| offer too little, but even American police has a price.
|
| FY 2024 has 229 "Number of Bribery Offenses"
| (https://www.ussc.gov/research/quick-facts/bribery),
| which obviously doesn't account for the bribing that no
| one noticed or where there wasn't enough proof, we could
| probably assume it's at least 50% higher than that if
| we're being charitable, but in reality that number is
| probably way higher, by magnitudes.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| I don't see anything about cops in that link. What I do
| see is that public officials were 49% of those charged
| but 45% were high-level elected officials. So that's
| what, maybe 4% that might be cops?
|
| In Mexico, cops will pull people over just to collect
| chump change cash bribes. In America, you have people
| like Epstein bribing state attorney generals, but nobody
| even thinks to slip a cop a $100 bill with their drivers
| license. This sort of casual everyday roadside bribery
| does not exist in America.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > but nobody even thinks to slip a cop a $100 bill with
| their drivers license. This sort of casual everyday
| roadside bribery does not exist in America.
|
| Obviously incorrect for both Southern and middle states
| in America. But sure, go on believing the US cops are
| somehow immune to corruption, which is something I never
| thought someone would honestly believe, even on the
| internet.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| If you ever decide to visit America and learn what it's
| like firsthand, I encourage you to try this. Just make
| sure you know a good orthodontist first, and probably a
| good therapist too, because you're going to get thrown to
| the ground, handcuffed and sent to jail. There is no
| world in which trying to bribe your way out of an
| American traffic ticket makes more sense than just taking
| and paying the ticket. Even trying this is genuinely one
| of the stupidest things you could ever do.
| tremon wrote:
| I don't see how it matters how other countries rank vs
| the one a person lives in. Even if Canada's legal system
| is better than the US, you can't choose to subject
| yourself to the Canadian legal system without extricating
| yourself from the US first.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| It's not anti-democratic, it's simply a matter of
| exposure. China can WANT to do whatever they want to me,
| but I have no assets in China, no trade in China, and
| neither me nor anyone close to me will ever go to China.
| So it simply matters a lot less what China has on me than
| the country where I have friends, loved ones, financial
| assets, property, and frequently visit.
| autoexec wrote:
| Generally I'd agree. The threats here are larger. That
| said China isn't powerless to hurt you either. I haven't
| seen much of it happening, but in theory China could
| blackmail you. They can manipulate and influence you and
| your children through social media and advertising, even
| encouraging kids to harm themselves/others.
|
| They can also fill the products they make for us with
| heavy metals and other poisons while building them to
| break draining our finances and filling our country with
| trash. The worst thing they could do though is just stop
| producing crap for us entirely since we're basically
| dependent on them for just about everything.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| And the united states can also do those things. We've
| been fighting against the hormone-filled milk for
| decades, and half of the ingredients are banned by
| smarter countries, but more than half of our food is
| still imported poison.
|
| But none of that has to do with who is surveilling me
| online.
| seniorThrowaway wrote:
| Maybe it isn't the US government we need to worry about.
| What's stopping Flock from compiling and selling personal
| dossiers on every citizen like all the other big tech
| companies? They're just a private company so nothing to
| worry about, right?
| bean469 wrote:
| > The US government is a democracy and can be replaced
| should it exceed people's limits
|
| In theory, yes, but why do you think that it would be
| possible to forcefully replace in practice?
| tremon wrote:
| A democratic government that tramples all democratic
| processes ceases to be democratic.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| why would the former bother, when all they have to do is
| take you to one of their secret police stations in the US
| and disappear you?
| therobots927 wrote:
| Still a much lower risk than Kristi Noem deciding you
| represent a national security risk because you tweeted
| "Fk ICE"
| ok_dad wrote:
| America probably invented extraordinary rendition.
| cwillu wrote:
| s/is take you to/is convince you to willing go to/g
| isoprophlex wrote:
| jesus fuck the gloves really came off in the past few years.
| noone even cares to hide it anymore.
|
| i could almost admire the transparency of these people, the
| way they're apparently okay accepting collateral damage of
| their schemes, up to the complete destruction of the fabric
| of society... as long as there's money to be made.
| csomar wrote:
| The gloves were always off, it's the masks that came down.
| Now they are ready to punch.
| saubeidl wrote:
| American venture capitalism ironically creates all of the
| same authoritarian issues as Chinese state capitalism, but
| without any of the lifting hundreds of millions of people out
| of poverty part.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Indeed, American capitalism is designed to lift the
| already-rich out of mere "rich" into "obscenely rich."
| femiagbabiaka wrote:
| Another sign of Chinese ideological dominance is that nobody
| can conceive of a future that does not mimic China's
| solutions to social problems. Trump says frequently that he's
| jealous of Xi's position as dictator, tech firms envy 996
| culture, public safety advocates are pivoting to restricting
| internet speech and constant surveillance.. etc. etc.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| Well a lot of people can conceive of a cultural hegemony
| that is more pleasant to live under. It's more that Y
| Combinator wants to be exposed to the returns of the
| Palantirs, Andurils and Clearviews out there.
| femiagbabiaka wrote:
| Possibly. I think, at the very least, Garry Tan is a true
| believer. He's not proposing putting this in someone
| else's neighborhood or city, he wants it in SF, SJ,
| Berkeley, etc.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| it's the opposite. expanding the Y Combinator startup
| index strategy to include the surveillance startups is
| less belief not more. it's _less_ opinionated. Paul
| Graham is actually more opinionated about this than Garry
| Tan is.
| GaryBluto wrote:
| You don't understand, when software has support for Chinese
| characters it is automatically 150% more dystopian.
| YY34798347329 wrote:
| This isn't a surprising sentiment when you consider America
| is a country that protects billionaire pedophiles who partied
| on Epstein Island while China puts corrupt billionaires in
| the slammer, or even executes them. America is a country that
| exists to keep him rich at the expense of the poor while
| China does the reverse - its the greatest threat to his
| continued class dominance over the proles.
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| In the book "Blockchain Chicken Farm", American Journalist
| Xiaowei Wang went to her parents' home country of China to
| interview various parts of the economy to get an
| understanding of how it works from an outsider's perspective.
|
| In one part of the book, she goes to speak to a police chief
| on the topic of surveillance. She discusses with the officer
| the challenges of tracking migrant workers, and how in China
| there isn't a single ID number similar to an SSN in the
| states.
|
| Towards the end of the interview, the officer, Xiaoli
| comments that much of the modernizing of the policing work is
| moving to be more "United States-Like".
| femiagbabiaka wrote:
| Incredible anecdote, I purchased the book. In this way, the
| relationship between America and China is exactly like the
| relationship between America and the USSR was -- each
| trying to become the other precisely as they try to consume
| each other.
| verisimi wrote:
| Is this dystopian enough yet?
| Hikikomori wrote:
| Flock does ai enabled mass surveillance.
|
| Palantir uses such information, feds and local governments
| are already customers.
|
| The CEO of ycombinator is part of the same weird church as
| Peter Thiel, acts 17.
|
| Then look up the other SV tech billionaires that are on board
| with network states and other Curtis Yarvin nonsense.
| ribosometronome wrote:
| I wonder if that's why this post, with more upvotes than a
| number of the other ones on the front page, has seemingly
| vanished from it.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| The number of comments is way higher than the number of
| upvotes, which usually gets submissions heavily downranked.
| lossolo wrote:
| Comments were moved from this higher upvoted thread
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46356182 to this lower
| upvoted one.
| dang wrote:
| No, it's the other way around. This post is ranked higher on
| the frontpage than it would be if it weren't YC-related. (In
| fact, it probably wouldn't be on the frontpage at all in that
| case.)
|
| A core principle is that we moderate less, not more, when YC
| or a YC-funded startup is part of the story. Many past
| explanations: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&pr
| efix=false&qu...
| LexiMax wrote:
| I believe you when you say that nobody at YC put their
| thumb on the scale for this story in particular.
|
| However, YC very much has control over the algorithm used
| to rank stories on the Hacker News front page, and this
| algorithm very commonly downranks threads which are
| detected as being "controversial."
|
| If the algorithm "working as intended" consistently
| downranks stories that cast a bad light on YCombinator, the
| sorts of people y'all mingle with, or the tech industry in
| general...is that any better than putting your thumb on the
| scale?
|
| This is kind of why I feel obligated to use
| https://news.ycombinator.com/active - after all, it's a
| very good indication of what Hacker News' algorithm and
| certain cohorts of its readership wants to hide from the
| casual viewer. And given the sorts of stories it tends to
| hide, it doesn't reflect well on this site or its users.
| itishappy wrote:
| > If the algorithm "working as intended" consistently
| downranks stories that cast a bad light on YCombinator,
| the sorts of people y'all mingle with, or the tech
| industry in general...is that any better than putting
| your thumb on the scale?
|
| That's the exact opposite of what Dan stated, what this
| thread (and your link) demonstrate, and my own lived
| experience here.
| ed wrote:
| that's fair but the post was on page 3 for a while. glad
| to see it restored to the front page. (the charitable
| explanation is that non-moderators can flag stories, as
| opposed to an official policy to protect YC companies)
| edoceo wrote:
| Maybe the algorithm down-ranks posts that have lots of
| down-voted comments? Lots of light-grey text on this
| page.
| LexiMax wrote:
| This thread required manual intervention to override the
| algorithm - intervention that it did not always have and
| not all stories benefit from.
|
| My argument is that the algorithm, as well as the various
| gameified engagement mechanisms on this site, are badly
| conceived and gives too much censure and veto power to
| ordinary users.
| culi wrote:
| dang won't like me sharing this repo ( _sorry_!) but hn-
| undocumented has a relevant section on this:
|
| https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-
| undocumented?tab=re...
|
| > Currently, there is no evidence that non-job
| submissions about a YC startup receive preferential
| treatment on the front page, or kill submissions critical
| of a YC startup. In fact, the moderators have stated that
| they explicitly avoid killing controversial YC posts when
| possible.
|
| And also:
|
| > Additionally, founders of YC companies see each other's
| usernames show up in orange, which -- although not an
| explicit benefit -- does allow fellow YC founders to
| immediately identify one another in discussions.
| tomhow wrote:
| We're fine with people sharing that doc. It's been on the
| front page multiple times and Dan has provided
| information/corrections to Max.
| tomhow wrote:
| > If the algorithm "working as intended" consistently
| downranks stories that cast a bad light on YCombinator
|
| We manually intervene to reduce or remove the penalties
| that downrank YC-related stories. Thus, stories like this
| one get more front page exposure and discussion than they
| would if they were not YC-related. And anyone can audit
| this via /active, HNRankings and any other tools they may
| want to build by pulling data from the API.
|
| > the sorts of people y'all mingle with, or the tech
| industry in general
|
| That phrase reflects an assumption that YC is synonymous
| with the tech industry and that everyone at YC and in the
| tech industry "mingles" and agrees with one another.
| That's far from true. Even among the YC partners there
| are differences in opinion about these things, and there
| have been huge public disputes in recent years between
| prominent YC-aligned figures and other major tech
| industry identities.
|
| It's natural that people come to HN to discuss and
| scrutinize the activities of the tech industry, given
| that we're a major public discussion forum focused on the
| tech industry. We accept that and make allowances for it.
| It doesn't mean we need to apply the same lower-
| moderation philosophy to every tech industry controversy
| that we do when YC is a part of the story.
| dang wrote:
| Everything you've said here is answerable by anyone who
| is willing to read some of the posts I just linked to.
| Here's the link again: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=
| all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....
|
| HN is designed to downweight sensational-indignant
| stories, internet dramas, and riler-uppers, for the
| obvious reason that if we didn't, then they would
| dominate HN's frontpage like they dominate the rest of
| the internet. Anyone who spends time here (or has read
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) knows
| that this is not what the site is for. The vast majority
| of HN readers like HN for just this reason. It is not
| some arbitrary switch that we could just flip, if only we
| would stop being censoriously sinister It's essential to
| the operation of the site.
|
| At the same time, we downweight such threads _less_ when
| the sensational-indignant story, drama, or riler-upper
| happens to be about YC or a YC-related startup. Note that
| word _less_. It means we "put our thumb on the scale" in
| the _opposite_ direction you 're implying: to make those
| stories rank _higher_ than they otherwise would.
|
| How you get from that all the way back to the notion that
| we moderate HN specifically to suppress negative stories
| about YC strikes me as escape-artist-level logic, and
| citing a web page that we ourselves publish as the best
| (only?) supposed evidence for this is surely a bit
| ironic.
| ribosometronome wrote:
| When I made this comment, it was nowhere to be found on my
| front or second page, I had to navigate back through my
| browser history to find it.
| dang wrote:
| Yes, that makes sense and I didn't mean to give the wrong
| impression!
|
| These things take time for us to correct.
| sneak wrote:
| It's admirable that this is the policy. It's sad that YC
| (as separate from to HN) doesn't have a better policy about
| the types of investments they make.
|
| Mass surveillance systems should be a bright line, I think.
| eddyg wrote:
| Yes, they should be secured so they can only be accessed by law
| enforcement.
|
| But if your spouse/SO/sister/mother/girlfriend/whatever was
| assaulted while jogging in a park that had Flock cameras, and it
| allowed law enforcement to quickly identify, track, apprehend and
| charge the criminal, you'd _absolutely_ be grateful for the
| technology. There 's nothing worse than being told "we don't have
| any leads" when someone you care about has been attacked.
| estimator7292 wrote:
| What about when ICE uses this data to abduct and deport your
| spouse and family members? Will you be grateful then?
| gs17 wrote:
| They should also require a warrant at least, especially for any
| data sharing. With "they can only be accessed by law
| enforcement", we've already had plenty of police harassing
| their exes. If they couldn't convince a judge to let them use
| the camera, there's really no hope of the case going anywhere.
|
| > There's nothing worse than being told "we don't have any
| leads" when someone you care about is attacked.
|
| I'd argue worse is "we know exactly who did it and we're not
| going to do anything about it (but we would do something if you
| try to do something about it yourself)".
| fzeroracer wrote:
| What if your spouse/SO/whatever was wrongfully arrested because
| they were on a Flock camera and conveniently matched what the
| police were looking for? Or if they ran whatever dogshit AI
| algorithm over it looking for suspects?
|
| We can make up situations all day where it can or can not be
| validated but the reality is that this is a defacto
| surveillance state. If every move you make can be monitored,
| you should assume that the state can and will abuse it to hurt
| innocent people in the name of politics or whatever.
| gs17 wrote:
| Or if they were simply being harassed because their ex was a
| cop who decided to use the cameras to stalk them, where
| there's not even an excuse.
| kgwxd wrote:
| What's the point of making a statement like that? Is it like a
| Snapple cap thing, or do you expect people to actually give up
| on talking about the blatant government overreach?
|
| And what a dumb way to frame it. "Think of the woman" is the
| same argument as "think of the children". Why not just say if
| you were attacked you'd want it to be on camera? Afraid it'll
| make you sound weak? Well, so does bootlicking.
| dexwiz wrote:
| Until your spouse/SO/sister/mother/girlfriend spurns a LEO, and
| then the LEO uses it to stalk and harass them. Talk to any LEO,
| they constantly misuse their data access to look up
| friends/family/neighbors to find dirt. Most of the time its
| relatively harmless gossip, but it can easily be used to harass
| people.
| tediousgraffit1 wrote:
| "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a
| little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
| 542354234235 wrote:
| Maybe I'm crazy, but I don't want laws to be written to the
| level of my emotional individual reaction to a singular crime.
| I want laws to reflect the ideals and values of society, and to
| work at scale when balancing individual freedom, societal
| safety, and protection from government abuse.
|
| "It is better, so the Fourth Amendment teaches us, that the
| guilty sometimes go free than the citizens be subject to easy
| arrest." - Former Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas
| LeFantome wrote:
| This is true of course. You could also apply this logic to even
| the most extreme of fascist tendencies though.
|
| There is freedom to and freedom from as they say in The
| Handmaid's Tale.
| thedougd wrote:
| I'll make up another one to pile on. Perhaps the police would
| have had a visible, deterrent presence if they weren't lazily
| relying on cameras, and that would have prevented the assault
| in the first place.
|
| Anyhow, if you read the flock database, they're overwhelmingly
| not using them for the purposes of public safety or random
| crime.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| "...they're overwhelmingly not using them for the purposes of
| public safety or random crime."
|
| That would seem to be very relevant information.
| kelnos wrote:
| Ah yes, the good ol' appeal to fear. "Think of the childr--err,
| I mean poor defenseless woman!"
|
| No, I don't want these cameras. I don't care if they make law
| enforcement's job easier. They are an invasion of privacy and a
| part of the disgusting dragnet surveillance state.
|
| They need to go.
|
| A decade ago, I was attacked on a public sidewalk by three men,
| who roughed me up a bit and stole from me. The police were
| utterly unhelpful, and as far as I know, they never caught
| anyone. But ultimately, that didn't really matter. I was
| traumatized for a while, but eventually worked through it.
| Whether or not they were caught would not have changed any part
| of that process.
|
| I get that, emotionally, we want some sort of justice when
| things like this happen, but I am not willing to put up with
| even more constant surveillance in order to feel a little bit
| better about a bad thing that happened to me. I would much
| rather criminals sometimes went free.
| SunshineTheCat wrote:
| Yea I've never been a fan of the whole "makes law
| enforcement's job easier" arguments.
|
| As though personal rights/liberties are trumped by a cop
| needing to do paperwork or leave his desk.
|
| Plus, when you follow this to its natural/extreme conclusion,
| the absolute easiest thing for law enforcement would be to
| arrest you for no reason at all.
|
| The rationalization for this policy of course could simply be
| that probable cause is "inconvenient."
| array_key_first wrote:
| If your argument has to start with "now, imagine your sister
| was raped", then it's probably just a bad argument.
|
| Appealing to emotions, tsk tsk, but going right for the
| jugular? Yikes.
|
| Also, elephant in the room: if your sister was going to be
| raped or beaten, it would probably be by someone in her home,
| in her family. Like her cop husband.
| kirykl wrote:
| If the cameras are recoding public areas, isn't it better the
| recorded footage stays public
| butlike wrote:
| They shouldn't be recording at all is the point.
| esseph wrote:
| Would you want your partner or child stalked, raped, and
| murdered?
|
| You don't even need to drop an air tag now, you can use the
| license plate reader to track them everywhere they go. There is
| no hiding.
| adamthegoalie wrote:
| At first I thought you were defending flock. Seems clear the
| cameras make it harder to commit crimes and easier to go
| after the offenders, despite all the side effects most people
| are upset about here.
| esseph wrote:
| It makes it easy for a random person to track anyone,
| regardless of which states they go to.
|
| It also makes it easy to say, track a person's movements to
| an abortion clinic if your state would like to prosecute
| that (this is happening).
| rainonmoon wrote:
| How does a camera make it harder to commit a crime? If I
| bash your skull in on camera, did the camera make that more
| difficult? Would your family be less aggrieved?
| eightysixfour wrote:
| I think so, but it is a loosely held opinion at this point.
| Fundamentally, I think it is a huge, asymmetric power grab by
| Flock and local police to install these systems. It only takes
| one officer looking up their local politician and finding them
| doing something that could even look like a bad deed (or to
| fake it in the era of AI videogen...) to enable blackmail and
| personal/professional gain.
|
| _If they 're going to exist_, it may be better for that to be
| spread among the public than to be left in the hands of the
| few.
| SamInTheShell wrote:
| 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 is the gateway tech that brings in a
| dystopian society. At first stuff like this is fairly benign,
| but slowly over time it ramps up into truly awful outcomes.
| grugagag wrote:
| I think the goal is to do just that. China has it, the west
| wants it too
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| I mean public venues in the US use this stuff to kick out
| people that they don't like, or that work for firms that have
| been involved in lawsuits. That is no different than the
| start of a social credit score and it's happening already.
| everdrive wrote:
| It's getting pretty crazy out there. What's your recourse for
| this? Avoid most populated areas?
| murderingmurloc wrote:
| I live in a town of 6,000 and we have 5 Flock cameras
| potato3732842 wrote:
| It's a quality of people problem not a quantity of people
| problem.
| potzemizer wrote:
| I mean. There are solutions...
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-46822472
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| deflock.me has a map. (I recently contributed a few flock
| cameras I spotted.)
|
| I notice they generally watch busy roads and intersections, off
| and on ramps to highways, retail malls...
|
| Smaller roads through neighborhoods were mostly unmolested.
| kelnos wrote:
| Work with your municipality to pass laws banning cameras like
| this. I'm sure it isn't easy (and I'm not sure I have the
| stomach for working through that process in my city), but
| people have done it in some places.
| e40 wrote:
| Him reading the Flock statement on a Flock camera open on the
| internet was just so good. I love and support Benn Jordan.
| grantmuller wrote:
| I agree, this was the peak experience of watching this video,
| and somehow the most "chef's kiss" summation of 2025.
| neogodless wrote:
| Related:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46356182 _Benn Jordan - This
| Flock Camera Leak Is Like Netflix for Stalkers_ [video]
| (youtube.com)
| dang wrote:
| We merged that thread into this one.
|
| (Edit: and put that video's link in the toptext above.)
| vatsachak wrote:
| You could kinda already do this with all kinds of security
| cameras. There are only so many people who are computer
| proficient, and that number is lower than the number of camera
| installers.
|
| There have been cases of people getting into baby monitors and
| yelling at the baby.
|
| But as a tech company, this is extremely irresponsible
|
| BTW, Benn Jordan is also known as The Flashbulb, an ambient
| legend
| fortran77 wrote:
| Interesting, but nothing new. Shodan users have known about
| clueless IP camera owners that leave their cameras on the public
| internet for years. This is a little more interesting because
| it's from a well-funded startup rather than independently owned
| Chinese IP cameras.
| achillean wrote:
| Searching for ALPR was also one of the popular early queries:
| https://github.com/jakejarvis/awesome-shodan-queries?tab=rea...
|
| The old PIPS ALPR devices aren't online anymore but they had
| horrible security as well. Just sending a newline to their UDP
| port would cause them to send you all images as they were being
| collected in real-time - no authentication needed. And the
| images had the license plate information encoded in the JPG
| metadata. I did a talk about it at some point
| (https://imgur.com/HHcpJOr) and worked with EFF to take them
| offline
| stackedinserter wrote:
| Easy solution for Flock problem: get rid of visible license
| plates. Make them 2x1" of size and RFID-readable, give readers to
| police, problem solved.
|
| Not-that-easy solution is legal ban for such surveillance.
|
| None of these both will happen though.
|
| You accepted TSA and PRISM, you will get used to Flock too.
|
| Next is Flock but for people, with face recognition.
| phyzome wrote:
| Fantastic, now I can't report a hit-and-run.
| stackedinserter wrote:
| You never have, anyways.
| phyzome wrote:
| What kind of silly comment is this? In fact I have, and
| they found the person responsible.
| stackedinserter wrote:
| Why not obligate people to wear license plate on their
| clothes then? It will help identify and found persons
| responsible, right?
|
| Don't complain when it eventually happens.
| DetectDefect wrote:
| Flock works without license plates. Also, what do you mean
| "next"?
|
| > if the object class of the identified object is that of a
| human being, then the object detection module 154 may further
| analyze the image 501 using a neural network module 507B
| configured to identify different classes of people (male,
| female, race, etc.)
|
| https://patents.google.com/patent/US11416545B1
| bpiche wrote:
| Kirlian Selections rocks
| guiltygatorade wrote:
| Wild to see the Flashbulb on top of HN
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Associated Benn Jordan video post:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vU1-uiUlHTo
| culi wrote:
| This was posted to HN a week ago but didn't get enough attention
| due to the weird title.
|
| It's a map of all city council meetings in the US whose agenda
| mentions Flock
|
| https://alpr.watch/
| dang wrote:
| _alpr.watch_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46290916 -
| Dec 2025 (444 comments)
|
| That post was literally the #1 story on HN for the entire day:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2025-12-16.
|
| It was on the frontpage for 25 hours. That's about as much
| attention as _any_ thread gets - well above the 99th
| percentile.
| culi wrote:
| you're right I misremembered. I still feel the enigmatic
| title of the post made it hard to realize its importance.
|
| Maybe I'm just biased because it took me _way_ too long to
| find it even with the algolia front-end
| dang wrote:
| Yeah, finding it after-the-fact with search is not a
| trivial undertaking.
|
| I do feel somewhat proud that an article with that title
| did so well on HN.
| therobots927 wrote:
| Flock is cooked. They didn't even implement basic security
| features for an extremely sensitive database. More ammo for those
| of us trying to get our local authorities to cut ties with this
| disgusting excuse for a startup.
| tonymet wrote:
| Have breaches like this had a meaningful impact on businesses
| before? If there has been a case where the public cared , and
| the business was terminated, it's definitely been an exception
| to the rule.
| therobots927 wrote:
| We'll see. Benn Jordan is doing the Lords work and providing
| a lot of evidence peopl can bring along to their local
| council meetings.
| tonymet wrote:
| I appreciate his activism
| fusslo wrote:
| 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 against
| the people does not seem to align with my understanding of why
| the Bill of Rights was cemented into our constitution in the
| first place.
|
| I wonder what Adams or Madison would make of it. I wonder if
| Benjamin Franklin would be appalled.
|
| I wonder if they'd consider every license plate reading a
| violation of the 4th amendment.
| TheCraiggers wrote:
| > From what I understand these systems are legal because there
| is no expectation of privacy in public.
|
| Not quite. There's been precedent set that seems to imply flock
| and other mass surveillance drag net operations such as this do
| violate the forth.
| snazz wrote:
| Defendants trying to exclude ALPR evidence often invoke
| _Carpenter v. U.S._ (or _U.S. v. Jones_ , but that's
| questionable because the majority decision is based on the
| trespass interpretation of the 4th Amendment rather than the
| _Katz_ test). Judges have not generally agreed with
| defendants that ALPR (either the license plate capture itself
| or the database lookup) resembles the CSLI in _Carpenter_ or
| the GPS tracker in _Jones_. A high enough density of Flock
| cameras may make the _Carpenter_ -like arguments more
| compelling, though.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| Yeah, I don't think capturing your license plate at a light
| falls afoul of _Carpenter_ , but aggregating timestamped
| records of your license plate all over town to build a
| complete picture of your movements probably does.
| chzblck wrote:
| they prob be upset about the 13th 15th and 19th amendments too
| rimbo789 wrote:
| Yea they would have had no issue with flock if it was for
| capturing escaped enslaved people
| kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote:
| They aren't a monolithic group. There was a wide range of
| opinions on slavery and many other topics. Do a bit of
| research.
| tomrod wrote:
| The only acceptable opinion today should be that slavery
| of all stripes, practiced both before the emancipation
| proclamation, as well as today in both prison settings
| and trafficking, is abhorrent.
| amrocha wrote:
| I think you should try to decide for yourself what to make of
| the situation instead of wondering what some ancient dead old
| dudes would think.
| reed1234 wrote:
| Both perspectives could be informative.
| unclad5968 wrote:
| It is possible to have your own thoughts and also wonder what
| other people think.
| amrocha wrote:
| If that was the case then you should wonder what Descartes
| would think. What Derrida or Baudrillard would think. We
| both know it's not about that though.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| Wondering what the people who created the government
| think of the current government is massively different
| than wondering what either of two French philosophers who
| never participated in statecraft born 150 years later
| thinks.
|
| It is perfectly normal to wonder what the architect of a
| system thinks of the current system, and entirely
| separate from wondering what a pair of unrelated
| Frenchman think of that system. Even if they are just
| "some ancient dead old dudes".
| faidit wrote:
| Descartes at least was a mathematician and a philosopher
| with novel ideas. Derrida and Baudrillard were
| "postmodern" slop faucets.
| amrocha wrote:
| These guys made a constitution that says all men are
| free, except for slaves and women because they're
| obviously not men. This led to a civil war just a couple
| decades later. I think it's pretty clear that they didn't
| really know what they were doing. In fact, that's why
| they gave you the tools to change the laws of the
| country.
| randall wrote:
| idk that the government had first amendment rights... like any
| private citizen can record, but 1a doesn't immediately mean the
| government can do anything, right?
| pixl97 wrote:
| >I wonder if Benjamin Franklin would be appalled.
|
| Depends how fast we lost him to porn on the internet
| autoexec wrote:
| > I wonder what our founders would think about tools like
| Flock.
|
| I suspect they'd make a distinction between private individuals
| engaging in first amendment protected activity like public
| photography and corporations or the state doing the same in
| order to violate people's 4th amendment rights. We certainly
| don't have to allow for both cases.
| mothballed wrote:
| They'd have not forced license plates to be displayed at all
| times to begin with, as they are a search of your papers
| without probable cause your vehicle is unregistered. Private
| ships in those days (probably the closest equivalent of
| something big and dangerous that could do tons of damage
| quickly on the public right of way) did not have required
| hull numbers or anything like that. Of course that doesn't
| totally solve the flock problem, but makes it a lot harder.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| Ships then, and now, don't really need numbers for
| identification. There are various unique numbers that they
| can and do use occasionally for specific purposes(IMO
| numbers and hull numbers). However, a ship's name and home
| port were, and are, more than sufficient to identify a ship
| for legal purposes. You don't need a registration number on
| a ship, and certainly wouldn't have needed one then.
|
| The authorities absolutely kept meticulous records of ships
| entry and exit from any harbour as well as what was on
| board, what was loaded and unloaded and frequently a list
| of all persons onboard.
|
| Some flag states enforce uniqueness constraints on name and
| home port combinations. The US does not, but that really
| doesn't matter much in the real world. There just aren't
| that many conflicts.
|
| More importantly, the founding fathers very much did not
| extend privacy rights to ships. Intentionally so. The very
| first congress passed a law in 1790 that exempted ships
| from the requirements of needing a warrant to be searched.
|
| The ability to track and search ships without warrants has
| been an important capability of the federal government from
| day one.
|
| Hell, the federal register of ships is published and always
| has been. I don't know how they would have felt about
| private cars, but the founding fathers revealed preference
| is that shipping and ships are not private like your other
| "papers and effects" are.
| tomrod wrote:
| Cars, wagons, carts, are not ships
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Thanks for this level of detail. History is complex,
| which is why I tend to be skeptical of bare "what would
| the founders have thought about this" complaints.
| appreciatorBus wrote:
| The comparison to private ships doesn't quite land, IMO.
|
| Ships - ships big enough to do material damage would be
| very small in # - ships big enough to do material damage
| would have a (somewhat?) professional crew - whatever
| damage they could do would always be limited to tiny areas
| - only where water & land meet, only where substantial
| public or private investment had been made in docks/etc -
| operators have strong financial incentive to avoid damaging
| ship or 3rd party property (public or private)
|
| Cars - in some countries the ratio of cars to people is
| approaching 1 - a vanishingly small portion of vehicles
| have professional drivers - car operators expect to be able
| to operate at velocities fatal to others on nearly 100% of
| land in cities, excepting only land that already has a
| building on it, and sometimes not even that. - car
| operators rarely held liable for damage to public property,
| injury, or death and there's strong political pressure to
| socialize damage and avoid realistic risk premiums
|
| I don't love flock but IMO the only realistic way to get
| rid of license plates would be mandatory speed governors
| that keep vehicles from going more than like 15mph. I would
| be fine with that, but I suspect most would not. If we
| expect to operate cars at velocities fatal to people
| outside our vehicles, then there will always be pressure to
| have a way of identifying bad actors who put others at
| risk.
| autoexec wrote:
| > I don't love flock but IMO the only realistic way to
| get rid of license plates would be mandatory speed
| governors that keep vehicles from going more than like
| 15mph.
|
| I don't understand this reasoning. License plates don't
| stop speeding from happening. Removing license plates
| wouldn't prevent enforcement of speed limits either. A
| cop can pull over and ticket someone without a license
| plate just as easily as they do now.
|
| At best they're good for a small number of situations
| where they help identify a car used in a crime (say a hit
| and run) but even then plenty of crimes are committed
| using cars that can't be linked back to the driver
| (stolen for example) or where the plates have been
| removed/obscured.
| appreciatorBus wrote:
| I'm not arguing that license plates solve the problem of
| the danger of cars, simply that as long as cars are
| dangerous to people not inside the car, there will be
| political pressure to have some way, however imperfect,
| of identifying them and their owners/operators.
| PleasureBot wrote:
| Even the least sophisticated criminals know that you
| should buy a stolen Kia or Hyundai for ~$100 and use that
| to commit your crime. I suspect most of the crime these
| Flock cameras are catching is red-light runners and maybe
| hit and runs if it happens to be caught on camera.
| mothballed wrote:
| A hit and runner hit me in front of such camera and
| totalled my truck. Police refused to investigate, they're
| not interested in using camera for such reasons nor is
| there much incentive that's in it for the police to do
| so.
| 15155 wrote:
| > Private ships
|
| Often, the same people crying about Flock will decry
| private arms ownership through mental gymnastics.
|
| These very same ships you speak of that could do "tons of
| damage" had actual cannonry - with no registration or
| restrictions on ownership or purchase, either.
| mothballed wrote:
| You can still buy and bear a cannon with no background
| check or registration or any of the like, FWIW. Very easy
| to order on the internet and have shipped straight to
| your door[].
|
| [] https://www.dixiegunworks.com/index/page/product/produ
| ct_id/...
| iamnothere wrote:
| You can, but be aware that an exploding cannonball
| (widely available in 1776) is considered a destructive
| device, so each shell must have an NFA stamp. Solid shot
| is not considered a destructive device.
| mothballed wrote:
| Does the shell have to be serialized? Or does one merely
| need a stamp that handwaves towards a particular, but
| generic looking shell?
| pornel wrote:
| The problem is that these laws were written before automated
| mass surveillance was feasible.
| godelski wrote:
| > because there is no expectation of privacy in public
|
| Funny enough thats actually not true. Legally speaking. It's
| often claimed but it is an over simplification.
|
| I think maybe the worst part is that the more we buy into this
| belief the more self fulfilling it becomes (see third link).
| But I don't expect anyone to believe me so here's several
| links. And I'd encourage people to push back against this
| misnomer. In the most obvious of cases I hope we all expect to
| have privacy in a public restroom. But remember that this
| extends beyond that. And remember that privacy is not binary.
| It's not a thing you have complete privacy or none (public
| restrooms again being an obvious example). So that level of
| privacy that we expect is ultimately decided by us. By acting
| as if it is binary only enables those who wish to take those
| rights from us. They want you to be nihilistic
|
| https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/09/you-really-do-have-som...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_expectation_of_priv...
|
| https://legalclarity.org/is-there-an-expectation-of-privacy-...
| Humorist2290 wrote:
| I'd bet many of the founders would've been amazed at the
| technology and insist on wide scale adoption. It could've
| further cemented the power of slaveholders over their slaves.
| It could've helped to track the movements of native groups. It
| could've helped to root out loyalists still dangerous to
| American independence.
| fakedang wrote:
| Your founding fathers would become feasible perpetual energy
| sources as they roll in their graves seeing what your country
| has turned into. Not that you guys are alone - a lot of
| countries would benefit from such energy sources too.
| ericmcer wrote:
| They would probably be enraged that we pay 50% income tax and
| use a central bank to fund all this bs more than anything.
| tonymet wrote:
| I'm baffled by the state of law enforcement. On one hand we are
| spending loads on surveillance, but on the other we refuse to
| enforce violent, property & drugs-abuse crimes. Gross violent
| offenders are being allowed to walk. So what is the point of all
| the CCTV ?
|
| As major investors in Flock, being aware of the long term law
| enforcement strategy, I'm guessing ycombinator can comment on
| what all of this investment is for.
| fzeroracer wrote:
| The surveillance state is there to benefit the rich and wealthy
| whom not only wield disproportionate power but are increasingly
| scared of their own shadow. The rest of us get nothing but
| crickets if we ask the police to do anything.
| tonymet wrote:
| It's a nice theory but still doesn't explain why the laws
| aren't being enforced. Presumably these rich, powerful and
| paranoid also control the AG's and judges. Why aren't they
| locking these people up?
| fzeroracer wrote:
| Because it doesn't affect them directly, it's really that
| simple. Look at how quickly the entire media and police
| apparatus mobilized when Brian Thompson was killed.
| jjwiseman wrote:
| The CEO of Flock, Garrett Langley, called Deflock a terrorist
| group. It's unhinged. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-kZGrDz7PU
| therobots927 wrote:
| Expect more of this. The masks are coming off.
|
| "Are the fires of Hell a-glowing? Is the grisly reaper mowing?
| Yes! The danger must be growing For the rowers keep on rowing
| And they're certainly not showing Any signs that they are
| slowing!" - Willie Wonka
| saubeidl wrote:
| "like Antifa". Very telling how he uses a far-right boogeyman
| as comparison point, literally antifascists.
|
| If you're anti-antifascist, you are exposing yourself.
| superultra wrote:
| I live in an Atlanta neighborhood where one of the founders
| lived. A prototype for Flock Camera was designed by three
| Georgia Tech grads because someone kept breaking into their car
| (not uncommon in our neighborhood tbh).
|
| The trick is that the camera was pointed towards a middle
| school. Which means they were constantly recording kids without
| adult consent.
|
| Now, years later, Atlanta is the most surveilled city in North
| America and one of the most in the world. Flock cameras are
| everywhere. There are 124 cameras for every 1,000 people. Just
| last week, a ex-urb police chef was arrested for using the
| Flock network to stalk and harass citizens.
|
| I know a lot of people who work at Flock. I'm shocked that they
| do though.
|
| I don't know when it stops.
| kawfey wrote:
| That makes a lot of sense... I'm in the rich/middle class
| north Atlanta burbs visiting family, and the entrance to
| every cul-de-sac has a flock LPR pointing inwards.
|
| I didn't notice it at all last year but the cameras were
| there. Benn blew the cap off and now they're omnipresent.
| hattmall wrote:
| And car break-ins aren't happening any less frequently.
| kace91 wrote:
| >There are 124 cameras for every 1,000 people
|
| How does that make any kind of economic sense? Morals aside,
| that's a ridiculous amount of devices, data collected and
| transmitted, and so on.
| MPSimmons wrote:
| Gonna have to write more speeding tickets to pay for these,
| I guess
| mothballed wrote:
| The cameras don't make economic sense unless the goal is to
| enrich contractors or generate money on speed/red light
| tickets.
|
| The bottleneck in solving crime is going after the
| criminals. There's already not enough resources to go after
| the crimes that are open and shut.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| While this makes intuitive sense, do you have any
| evidence of it?
| crazygringo wrote:
| Honestly, not really. If you actually want to have decent
| coverage to observe crimes and track criminals, that's a
| ballpark reasonable figure.
|
| And it's not really that expensive, and the idea is that it
| ultimately saves money in terms of the crime it prevents
| and fewer police and detectives needed.
|
| I'm not defending it, but in terms of _economic_ sense it
| 's quite well justified. Opposition to it is
| moral/ideological around privacy/freedom, not economic.
| hypercube33 wrote:
| The series Person of Interest is reality just minus the
| good AI and Batman side of the story
| jjulius wrote:
| >How does that make any kind of economic sense?
|
| It's not about economics, it's about control.
| array_key_first wrote:
| The police has never made economic sense. If you look up
| your local PD's budget, you will be shocked.
|
| There's only so much military-grade vehicles you can spend
| that on, I guess. Cameras will do.
| 15155 wrote:
| > constantly recording kids without adult consent
|
| Why do they need consent in a public place? Children
| vandalize, steal, etc. as well - should they just be immune
| from detection because they are below some arbitrary age?
|
| Do banks just shut off all surveillance when a child walks
| past their front door?
| throw-12-16 wrote:
| You shouldn't be shocked.
|
| People gladly line up to work for organizations who willfully
| erode their civil rights all the time.
|
| Just look at all the people here who work for Google, FB,
| Palantir etc.
|
| It stops when we gather outside these CEO's houses and burn
| them to the ground.
| bearjaws wrote:
| It's wild how stalking isn't considered by these people from
| day one.
|
| Hire anyone whos worked in healthcare privacy or compliance
| and they will tell you without a doubt ex-girlfriends, bitter
| rivals and celebrities are the #1 item people abuse their
| access for.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| He has said his goal is for a "world with no crime. Thanks to
| Flock." and his goal is not aspirational, visionary, but quite
| literal.
|
| He sees false negatives as more problematic than false
| positives. He has admitted being inspired by Minority Report
| (to me it's always very telling when someone takes a cautionary
| tale like this and finds it "inspirational").
|
| It is right to be amazingly concerned.
| CPLX wrote:
| Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a
| cautionary tale
|
| Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus
| from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Show HN: Torment nexus. Built in Rust (YC W25).
| fouc wrote:
| Oof, that felt too real. I'm half torn making that a
| reality before someone else does.
|
| That's often the thing about these torment nexuses,
| they're somehow profitable.
| GaryBluto wrote:
| I'm not sure if it's better or worse to have it publicly
| accessible or only accessible to an elite group.
| afarah1 wrote:
| In Brazil there is a similar problem, but it's not as widely
| discussed. Here, police investigations revealed that a website
| sold access for less than $4 to the nation-wide surveillance
| system, which included live feed of public safety cameras and
| person search by tax identifier. It was also shown that criminal
| organizations used it to locate their targets. Access was through
| the open internet, with leaked credentials, the federal
| government's system requires no VPN for access.
|
| Source (Portuguese):
| https://mpmt.mp.br/portalcao/news/1217/164630/pf-expoe-invas...
| aucisson_masque wrote:
| That definitely wouldn't happen in the states. Corruption only
| happens in poor countries.
| kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote:
| _laughs in Ukrainian board of directors_
| tomrod wrote:
| Wasn't there a whole impeachment or two about that?
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| Trump Coin seems way way more flagrant.
| mmaunder wrote:
| Really valuable research. A benefit to public safety, and drawing
| attention to a sloppy vendor in the security space, claiming to
| secure the public, but instead putting the public at risk.
| However I'm deeply concerned for the researcher and all involved
| because this may be a criminal violation under the CFAA -
| accessing these systems without authorization, even if they don't
| have authentication.
| argomo wrote:
| They should have gone all in and published the travel history
| of elite politicians, CEOs, and celebrities. That'd get a lot
| more media attention and potential for consequential
| legislation.
| btbuildem wrote:
| glock > flock
|
| Is mass vandalism the final answer to this problem?
| rsync wrote:
| There's an interesting idea here that is tangentially related to
| "common carrier" regulations ...
|
| Specifically:
|
| If a flock (or similar) camera is deployed on public land/infra
| there should exist default permission for any alternate vendor to
| deploy a camera in the same location.
|
| I wonder how that could be used and/or abused and, further, what
| the response from a company like flock would be ...
| chaps wrote:
| Not directly an answer to your question, but installed
| Shotspotter locations are generally "not shared with police"
| and installations are done in a way where the location is
| obfuscated away from the police/city through Shotspotter
| contractors. It's not actually true that the device locations
| aren't shared with the police, but shotspotter/police
| testimonies in shotspotter cases say so anyway.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| I have absolutely zero faith in any of this.
|
| Multiple cases have revealed that it seemed like police and
| Shotspotter worked hand-in-glove to tweak Shotspotter data
| and demographics to help shore up a case and make things
| appear more reliable than they were.
|
| And multiple cases where, sufficiently pushed, DAs have
| dropped cases or dropped Shotspotter as evidence rather than
| have the narrative challenged too closely.
| crumpled wrote:
| Yes. This looks bad for Flock security.
|
| Good thing nobody tried to pop a shell on the camera OS and move
| laterally through the network. That would be bad.
|
| I'm sure it's all very secure though.
| sneak wrote:
| We really should be referring to them as "Flock (YC S17)". Credit
| where credit is due.
| dogman144 wrote:
| Was fortunate to talk to a security lead who built the data-
| driven policing network for a major American city that was an
| early adopter. ALPR vendors like Flock either heavily augment
| and/or anchor the tech setups.
|
| What was notable to me is the following, and it's why I think a
| career spent on either security researching, or going to law
| school and suing, these vendors into the ground over 20 years
| would be the ultimate act of civil service:
|
| 1. It's not just Flock cams. It's the data eng into these
| networks - 18 wheeler feed cams, flock cams, retail user nest
| cams, traffic cams, ISP data sales
|
| 2. All in one hub, all searchable by your local PD and also the
| local PD across state lines who doesn't like your
| abortion/marijuana/gun/whatever laws, and relying on:
|
| 3. The PD to setup and maintain proper RBAC in a nationwide
| surveillance network that is 100%, for sure, no doubt about it
| (wait how did that Texas cop track the abortion into
| Indiana/Illinois...?), configured for least privilege.
|
| 4. Or if the PD doesn't want flock in town, they reinstall
| cameras against the ruling (Illinois iirc?) or just say "we have
| the feeds for the DoT cameras in/out of town and the truckers
| through town so might as well have control over it, PD!"
|
| Layer the above with the current trend in the US, and 2025 model
| Nissan uploading stop-by-stop geolocation and telematics to cloud
| (then, sold into flock? Does even knowing for sure if it does or
| doesn't even matter?)
|
| Very bad line of companies. Again all is from primary sources who
| helped implement it over the years. If you spend enough time at
| cybersecurity conferences you'll meet people with these jobs.
| tehlike wrote:
| Now you have scale with ai hardware becoming cheaper and
| software incentives aligning.
| mysterydip wrote:
| I always thought that show "person of interest" was a bit far
| fetched. how could one system have access to that much data?
| privacy concerns would surely stop it.
| bakies wrote:
| Along with all the cop shows I'm thinking it's almost
| intentional at this point to normalize things.
| spiderfarmer wrote:
| It's the entire reason some shows and movies exist. The
| Pentagon, CIA and other agencies routinely and openly
| assist hundreds of films and TV shows with equipment,
| locations and expertise in exchange for script changes
| that protect U.S. military and intelligence reputations.
| b00ty4breakfast wrote:
| The very first cop show, Dragnet, was explicitly a PR
| move to rehab the image of the police in the public's
| imagination. Every cop show since has been propaganda.
| Even shows where the police are not necessarily the "good
| guys", like The Shield or even Chicago PD, normalizes
| police brutality and the flaunting of basic
| constitutional laws because those dastardly bad guys have
| to be stopped at all costs.
|
| I enjoy some of these shows myself but it is sometimes
| crazy how blatant they are about it.
| Tanoc wrote:
| The Wire was very good at showing the police as the
| villains, but it also instilled a lot of pessimism into
| the audience because said villains got away with damn
| near everything. Jimmy and Ellis probably sent more
| people to the hospital or the morgue than anyone else in
| the show (either directly or indirectly), but neither one
| got more than a few days of unpaid leave and a
| reassignment as a consequence. It also undercuts itself
| by having Ellis become probably the most respectable
| person in the cast and having all of the cast tell Jimmy
| he's not to blame for multiple shootings, destroying both
| families he's built, and even framing multiple innocent
| people with life sentences.
|
| So even the ones that try to buck the trend end up
| following it.
| Tanoc wrote:
| 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 & Order, NYPD Blue, NCIS, Chicago
| PD, and Blue Bloods each correspond to each of those
| periods. The shows and movies are designed to make the
| abusive and destructive actions of the police look
| gallant. The police themselves actually advocate on many
| of them in order to sensationalize depictions or
| manipulate points of view so that they can then take them
| and use them as emotional appeals when the public
| criticizes policing.
|
| The name "Law & Order" is a blatant example of this, as
| it's a phrase used by Richard Nixon during his campaign
| in 1968, and was widely repeated when he created
| justifications for starting the War On Drugs in 1970.
| This same phrase was later used by Reagan and H.W. Bush
| when they planted their positions of wanting to wield
| state violence against countercultures that arose. The
| '90s was full of change as Gen-X started to become adults
| and formed their own powerful countercultures, and the
| title of the show was an emotional appeal to conservative
| older people who hated that change and wanted the state
| to shape society instead of the other way around.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| 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.
| tehlike wrote:
| You'd think so, but everytime a crime is solved by flock or
| the like, people keep celebrating it and using it as a
| justification.
|
| It reminds me of this meme: https://www.reddit.com/r/Cyberp
| unk/comments/sa0eh3/dont_crea...
|
| There are few reasons people probably keep building on this
| topic: 1. Eventually someone will do this anyway. 2. Thus,
| it shall be mine - I for sure will handle data better than
| anyone else can, respecting all sorts of guardrails etc. 3.
| company ipos, founder leaves, things happen.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| I will offer an alternative POV: if your big brilliant plan is,
| sue the elected institutions over administrative decisions,
| don't go to law school. It would be a colossal waste of your
| time. You will lose, even if you "win."
|
| You are advocating that talented people go for _Willits_ as a
| blueprint of "civil service," which is a terrible idea. It's
| the worst idea.
|
| If you have a strong opinion about administrative decisions,
| get elected, or work for someone who wins elections.
|
| Or make a better technology. Talented people should be working
| on Project Longfellow for everything. Not, and I can't believe
| I have to say this, becoming lawyers.
|
| And by the way, Flock is installed in cities run by Democrats
| and Republicans alike, which should inform you that, this guy
| is indicting civil servants, not advocating for their elevation
| to some valued priesthood protecting civil rights.
| fasbiner wrote:
| https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-
| lobbying/clients/lobbyis...
|
| Do you mean these fine former civil servants simply making
| administrative decisions who are now Flock lobbyists, or do
| you mean current civil servants who are future Flock
| lobbyists?
|
| You more likely are getting paid something to _not_
| understand things if you, in 2025, believe the "bipartisan
| consensus" with massive donor class overlap is credible to
| anyone without an emotional need to rationalize.
| skipants wrote:
| As someone who has thought about, planned, and implemented a
| lot of RBAC... I would never trust the security of a system
| with RBAC at that level.
|
| And to elaborate on that -- for RBAC to have properly defined
| roles for the right people and ensure that there's no
| unauthorized access to anything someone shouldn't have access
| to, you need to know exactly which user has which access. And I
| mean all of them. Full stop. I don't think I'm being hyperbolic
| here. Everyone's needs are so different and the risks
| associated to overprovisioning a role is too high.
|
| When it's every LEO at the nation level that's way too many
| people -- it is pretty much impossible without dedicated people
| whose jobs it is to constantly audit that access. And I
| guarantee no institution or corporation would ever make a role
| for that position.
|
| I'm not even going to lean into the trustworthiness and
| computer literacy of those users.
|
| And that's just talking about auditing roles, never mind the
| constant bug fixes/additions/reductions to the implementation.
| It's a nightmare.
|
| Funny enough, just this past week I was looking at how my
| company's roles are defined in admin for a thing I was working
| on. It's a complete mess and roles are definitely
| overprovisioned. The difference is it's a low-stakes admin app
| with only ~150 corporate employees who access it. But there was
| only like 8 roles!
|
| Every time you add a different role, assign it to each
| different feature, and then give that role to a different user,
| it compounds.
|
| I took your comment at face value but I hope to god that Flock
| at least as some sort of data/application partitioning that
| would make overprovisioning roles impossible. Was your Texas
| cop tracking an abortion a real example? Because that would be
| bad. So so bad.
| faidit wrote:
| _> Was your Texas cop tracking an abortion a real example?
| Because that would be bad. So so bad._
|
| https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/05/she-got-abortion-so-
| te...
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| 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 something that has no role for
| it so they "temporarily" gets some role unrelated to his job.
|
| Then project changes a manager but the old one is still there
| for the transition
|
| And nobody ever makes a ticket to rescind that access
|
| And everything is a mess
| riskable wrote:
| ...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 troubleshoot. "I guess it'll have to
| stay down until tomorrow."
|
| The way systems like this usually get implemented is
| there's an approval chain: First, your boss must approve
| the request and then the owner of the resource. Except
| that's only the most basic case. For production systems,
| you'll often have a much more complicated approval chain
| where your boss is just one of many individuals that need
| to approve such requests.
|
| The end result is a (compounding) inefficiency that slows
| down everything.
|
| _Then there 's AI:_ Management wants to automate as much
| as possible--which is a fine thing and entirely doable!--
| except you have this system where making changes requires
| approvals at many steps. So you actually _can 't_ "automate
| all the things" because the policy prevents it.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| 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.
| Barathkanna wrote:
| This is the part that doesn't get enough attention. The real
| risk isn't any single vendor, it's the aggregation layer. Once
| ALPR, retail cams, traffic cams, ISP data, and vehicle
| telematics all land in one searchable system, the idea that
| this will be perfectly RBAC'd and jurisdictionally contained is
| fantasy. At that point it's not policing tech, it's a
| nationwide surveillance substrate held together by policy
| promises.
| throwaway173738 wrote:
| In other words it's the telescreen from 1984.
| KurSix wrote:
| The problem goes even deeper than messy RBAC in a database.
| This story showed that the system's brains are pushed to the
| edge, and if you gain access to the device, you don't even need
| the central police database. You get a local, highly
| intelligent agent working autonomously. This breaks the
| traditional threat model where we worry about "someone leaking
| the database"; here, the camera itself becomes an active
| reconnaissance tool. It turns out that instead of hacking a
| complex, (hopefully) secured cloud, you just need to find a
| smart eye like this with default settings, and you already have
| a personal spy at an intersection, bypassing any police access
| protocols
| performative wrote:
| benn jordan has been on an absolute tear recently. one of my
| favorite people nowadays
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Flock cameras would be so easy to disable by motivated people.
| Dress in nondescript clothing, mask, sunglasses, and just
| spraypaint over the lenses. This is completely asymmetric warfare
| because it is trivial how long it would take for you to do this.
| You could hit dozens of cameras across an area overnight.
| Meanwhile, flock or the city, whoever maintains this stuff, needs
| to identify the vandalized cameras, flag them for repair, pay a
| technician to go out and presumably repair the unit outright. You
| pay cents and they are paying potentially thousands in labor and
| hardware costs.
|
| And this would absolutely work at scale too. Streetlights are
| already being vandalized for their copper and most cities cannot
| afford to hire more technicians to even keep up with streetlight
| repair. I believe I've seen the backlog for streetlight repair in
| LA is over 10x what the current street services crew is capable
| of repairing in a year of constant work and growing by the day.
|
| Municipalities and these technology companies cannot keep up
| against a motivated crew and can't afford to scale either.
| Totally asymmetric.
| mothballed wrote:
| 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).
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| 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.
| mothballed wrote:
| 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.
| mvkel wrote:
| the main summary of 1984: "neighbors are encouraged, via
| telesecreens, to spy on one another to enforce conformity."
|
| There thing to fear isn't some higher state; it's each other. We
| happily will surveil each other under the auspices of safety.
|
| Hell, these days, our kids grow up with cameras pointing at them
| in their own rooms. What did we expect?
|
| Until we are willing to accept more "risk" in exchange for more
| privacy, this will only get worse. (It's why I believe most
| tech/services that tout privacy are DoA, because nobody actually
| cares)
| catoc wrote:
| What I don't understand is how you can work at a company like
| Flock and look yourself in the mirror. Seriously. You must be
| aware of the inherent evil, of the privacy invasive nature of
| your product, of how it's being actively abused. How do you
| rationalize this for yourself?
| Klaster_1 wrote:
| There's this book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the
| Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt that explores the topic.
| throwaway_7274 wrote:
| An old friend of mine went to work at a similar company,
| seemingly with no qualms. He praised how "nice" the ceo was. It
| was a sad and eye-opening experience of losing respect for
| someone.
|
| The thing is, a lot of ordinary people in tech are naive,
| gullible, more intelligent than wise, easily flattered, limited
| to first-order thinking socially-speaking, and obsessed with
| rules and systems. Then there's another stratum of actors on
| top who are all of the above, and sociopathic to boot.
|
| I don't know, I think it's just the way it is. I've become very
| disillusioned with the ability of 'tech people' as a class to
| work for good.
| KurSix wrote:
| 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
| grugagag wrote:
| 1984
| potato3732842 wrote:
| Systems like this that exist to facilitate dispatching government
| violence will never be "good" by whatever the standards of the
| time is because they don't need to be. They have "at-cost" access
| to nearly infinite government violence they can dispatch
| capriciously and an unequally good relationship with any system
| that would hold them accountable for any misuse of their stuff.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| US becoming more like China by the day, where the freedoms of the
| Constitution aren't worth more than the paper they're written on.
| (For those who don't know, the Chinese constitution guarantees
| freedom of speech and freedom of the press.)
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| 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.
| chasd00 wrote:
| I agree, if we're going have universal surveillance then the
| data must be universally accessible.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| 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.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| > I think the one that affected me most was as playground. You
| could see unattended kids, and that's something I want people to
| know about so they can understand how dangerous this is
|
| So... you could also just walk or drive by the playground to see
| "unattended kids"?
| prophesi wrote:
| Ironically, these cameras are marketed to help catch predators
| walking/driving by playgrounds. What's concerning here is that
| they're connected to the internet and can be viewed remotely,
| which said predators would use to know when and where to strike
| off-camera.
| bearjaws wrote:
| You just know other nation states are all inside these camera
| systems and probably buried deep at this point.
|
| Of course no liability will be faced by the company, and none for
| the police departments who violate our constitutional rights.
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