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.
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.
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 "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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”
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).
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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...)
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.’
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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").
“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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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[].
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
> 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.
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.
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)
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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 t̶o̶r̶t̶u̶r̶e̶d̶ 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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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?
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.
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.
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).
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.
"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.
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.
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...?
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.
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."
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Part of me says if there's going to be universal surveillance, it might as well be universally accessible to view, not just accessible to the state and the wealthy.
I think society must protect it's most valuable citizens. I feel like we should be able to watch out for our politicians and billionaire class by monitoring their every move. Since they have nothing to hide and everything gain from addition caring oversight.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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"?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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)
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 ...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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)".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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!
>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.
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."
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)
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.
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.
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.
The initial disabling might be asymmetric but when/if you're caught you go to jail for years for something that cost the state maybe an hour tops to fix.
Therefore if only say one of a thousand gets caught, it still costs the people doing it more than the state on average (unless their life/time is worth basically nothing for years on end).
They are making literal zero progress catching copper theft so I doubt flock would be any better. Yeah it takes them hours to fix but they still need to send out a technician and pay for a technician. Maybe you can do this well out of the pov of the camera with a paintball gun.
Zero progress catching copper theft from private persons; because they do not care. They get basically nothing for solving that. If you robbed a cop or the mayor they'd have you found out within a week. Whether they care about vandalizing a camera depends very much on whether the whole thing is a graft or they have something else they want out of the camera.
If the goal is just to enrich their contractors, they might even be happy they're getting vandalized.
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.
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
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.
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."
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.
Can you explain in more detail how the repeat criminals get caught in your scheme?
I can see how surveillance could help in identifying the criminal, finding him or her, and as evidence of crime in the trial, but what exactly happens without it that gets them identified, found and convicted? As of now clearance rate of property crimes is <15% according to a quick search.
There is already lots of surveillance and was even before modern technology. I'd agree that having some at all is of value, my argument was that you don't need much past that to get what we need and certainly don't need the kind of pervasive surveillance that some want: It won't move the needle on crime much past a baseline level but it will enable abuses that are much worse than the level of property crime we see today. Authoritarian governments are the number one mass murderer throughout human history by a wide margin.
Low clearance rates for property crime are significantly because nothing is even done much of the time -- police just take a report and often won't even follow up on an obvious lead (including stuff like "find my phone says my thousand dollar phone is in that house over there").
But in any case to more directly answer your question: If the clearance rate is 15% then they have a 90% chance of being caught after ~14 crimes.
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).
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.
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.
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"
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.”
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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).
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".
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.
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.
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
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.)
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
>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...
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
...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.
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.
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.
In other words it’s the telescreen from 1984.
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
Now you have scale with ai hardware becoming cheaper and software incentives aligning.
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.
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/Cyberpunk/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.
Along with all the cop shows I'm thinking it's almost intentional at this point to normalize things.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”
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-...
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.
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.
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.
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?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT
What is not only true for police but for every sufficiently big group of people.
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.
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
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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/Public-H...
> 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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
> 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...)
flock is a YC startup
We have met the enemy and he is us -Pogo
Are we the baddies?
Yep
I am the "Y-combinator". Do you have any questions?
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.’
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
How is this different from the CCP surveillance? I guess this is easier for third parties to access?
It isn't any different, it is the exact same thing with a different PR spin.
I hate the CCP surveillance too. No state should have this close of an eye on its people. It’s anti-freedom.
The PRC has nothing remotely corresponding to the Fourth Amendment, as far as I know.
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
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.
Was it misconfigured? Or “misconfigured” so people in the know can bypass the minimal controls that are in place?
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.
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
It wasn't my intent to argue otherwise... I was only trying to add to the conversation.
The CEO of Flock, Garrett Langley, called Deflock a terrorist group. It's unhinged. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-kZGrDz7PU
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
Gonna have to write more speeding tickets to pay for these, I guess
>How does that make any kind of economic sense?
It's not about economics, it's about control.
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.
The series Person of Interest is reality just minus the good AI and Batman side of the story
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.
While this makes intuitive sense, do you have any evidence of it?
And car break-ins aren't happening any less frequently.
> 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?
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.
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
Show HN: Torment nexus. Built in Rust (YC W25).
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.
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
"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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Cars, wagons, carts, are not ships
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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/product_id/...
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.
Does the shell have to be serialized? Or does one merely need a stamp that handwaves towards a particular, but generic looking shell?
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-...
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.
>I wonder if Benjamin Franklin would be appalled.
Depends how fast we lost him to porn on the internet
they prob be upset about the 13th 15th and 19th amendments too
Yea they would have had no issue with flock if it was for capturing escaped enslaved people
They aren't a monolithic group. There was a wide range of opinions on slavery and many other topics. Do a bit of research.
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.
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.
They would probably be enraged that we pay 50% income tax and use a central bank to fund all this bs more than anything.
> 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.
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.
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?
The problem is that these laws were written before automated mass surveillance was feasible.
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.
It is possible to have your own thoughts and also wonder what other people think.
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.
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”.
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.
Descartes at least was a mathematician and a philosopher with novel ideas. Derrida and Baudrillard were "postmodern" slop faucets.
Both perspectives could be informative.
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/
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.
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
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.
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...
That definitely wouldn't happen in the states. Corruption only happens in poor countries.
laughs in Ukrainian board of directors
Trump Coin seems way way more flagrant.
Wasn't there a whole impeachment or two about that?
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
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.
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&prefix=false&qu...
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.
> 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.
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.
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)
Maybe the algorithm down-ranks posts that have lots of down-voted comments? Lots of light-grey text on this page.
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.
> 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 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.
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.
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.
Yes, that makes sense and I didn't mean to give the wrong impression!
These things take time for us to correct.
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.
The number of comments is way higher than the number of upvotes, which usually gets submissions heavily downranked.
Comments were moved from this higher upvoted thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46356182 to this lower upvoted one.
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
> 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.
The CCP can hijack your accounts and absolutely do all of those things, using your own government.
could you provide an example of that happening?
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?
Still a much lower risk than Kristi Noem deciding you represent a national security risk because you tweeted “Fk ICE”
America probably invented extraordinary rendition.
s/is take you to/is convince you to willing go to/g
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.
> 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.
> 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 t̶o̶r̶t̶u̶r̶e̶d̶ 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.
> 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.
"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.
> The US government is a democracy and can be replaced
I'm not sure this is as axiomatic as many think, in 2025
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.
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.
In that case, I guess we'll see a live-action remake of Presidency at Bernie's.
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.
Hasn’t Trump already said he won’t do another term?
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.
> 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.
No way would he ever lie!
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
A democratic government that tramples all democratic processes ceases to be democratic.
> 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?
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?
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The gloves were always off, it's the masks that came down. Now they are ready to punch.
You don't understand, when software has support for Chinese characters it is automatically 150% more dystopian.
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.
Indeed, American capitalism is designed to lift the already-rich out of mere "rich" into "obscenely rich."
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.
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?
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
Gary has some unhinged politics with regards to "public safety" even excepting the Flock boosterism.
If it benefits Surveillance Valley, Garry Tan is all over it like Trump on a 13 year old
He’s being sincerely greedy and nihilistic, if that’s what you mean by “sincere”
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?
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.
> 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
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).
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.
"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.
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.
This is the CEO of the startup incubator handwaving away concerns in the name of money.
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...?
Is this dystopian enough yet?
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.
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.
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."
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.
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-...
Does it take that much funding to make such a poorly-secured system?
God, these guys must be real noobs.
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?
There's this book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt that explores the topic.
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.
Him reading the Flock statement on a Flock camera open on the internet was just so good. I love and support Benn Jordan.
I agree, this was the peak experience of watching this video, and somehow the most "chef's kiss" summation of 2025.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
"Or others see when parents are repeatedly leaving their kids unattended."
... which is the expected, default use-case for a playground ...
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.
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.
> 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.
once i learned to ride a bike i took myself to the playground
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.
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.
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.
Is it more symmetrical? I know in theory we all can continuously download and datamine these video feeds but can everyone really?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Seems like a positive side effect. The Seattle area is delaying it after the open records request case.
They don't grant power, they enhance it. Not helpful for those without don't have any actual power.
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.
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.
Part of me says if there's going to be universal surveillance, it might as well be universally accessible to view, not just accessible to the state and the wealthy.
I agree, if we’re going have universal surveillance then the data must be universally accessible.
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.
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.
Here's the video for interested folk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vU1-uiUlHTo
It's amazing that any vendor, let alone a CJIS vendor even allows unsecured deployments of their software in 2025.
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.
The most terrifying part here is the synergy between the AI feature and the security hole. An open stream from a static camera is one thing, but it's entirely different when you have an open-access AI agent that autonomously finds "interesting" targets, zooms in on faces, and tracks people between cameras. This transforms a passive data leak into an active, real-time stalking tool
1984
If the cameras are recoding public areas, isn’t it better the recorded footage stays public
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.
They shouldn't be recording at all is the point.
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.
I think the goal is to do just that. China has it, the west wants it too
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.
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.
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.
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?
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).
> 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"?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Many hands make light work
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
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.”
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.
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.
(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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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!
I mean, it's not just any person at Flock, it's the CEO.
But I hear what you're saying about public cameras.
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.
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!
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.
Wait, I don't agree with that. Why do you assume everyone in this thread agrees with that?
Sorry, I assumed you did, given the advocacy you mentioned you led.
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.
benn jordan has been on an absolute tear recently. one of my favorite people nowadays
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)
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 ...
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.
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.
Kirlian Selections rocks
Wild to see the Flashbulb on top of HN
It's getting pretty crazy out there. What's your recourse for this? Avoid most populated areas?
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.
I live in a town of 6,000 and we have 5 Flock cameras
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.
It's a quality of people problem not a quantity of people problem.
I mean. There are solutions...
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-46822472
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
Yep. Until we start holding decision makers responsible for the consequences of their decisions, they will always choose the selfish option.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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
> 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?
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.
An explanation is not a justification.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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)".
What about when ICE uses this data to abduct and deport your spouse and family members? Will you be grateful then?
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.
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.
"…they're overwhelmingly not using them for the purposes of public safety or random crime."
That would seem to be very relevant information.
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.
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.
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."
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm not sure if it's better or worse to have it publicly accessible or only accessible to an elite group.
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.)
Really great investigation, what's the URL of the "vibe coded" site with the access links?
glock > flock
Is mass vandalism the final answer to this problem?
At what point does the top brass at Flock get arrested?
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.
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!
>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.
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.
Stalking is not illegal at all.
Stalking is very illegal in most US jurisdictions.
Maybe if you are threatening someone. But if you are just following someone in public, that is okay.
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/
Oh they’re buddies with all the departments. Fat chance.
They won’t under this administration. It’s owned and operated by Surveillance Valley Vulture Capitalists
Why do people avoid saying President Trump like he’s Voldemort?
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)
I appreciate the explanation.
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.
Building the torment nexus...
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-...
In your dreams maybe
Should we also arrest computer co execs because computers are used to hack into things?
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.
The initial disabling might be asymmetric but when/if you're caught you go to jail for years for something that cost the state maybe an hour tops to fix.
Therefore if only say one of a thousand gets caught, it still costs the people doing it more than the state on average (unless their life/time is worth basically nothing for years on end).
They are making literal zero progress catching copper theft so I doubt flock would be any better. Yeah it takes them hours to fix but they still need to send out a technician and pay for a technician. Maybe you can do this well out of the pov of the camera with a paintball gun.
Zero progress catching copper theft from private persons; because they do not care. They get basically nothing for solving that. If you robbed a cop or the mayor they'd have you found out within a week. Whether they care about vandalizing a camera depends very much on whether the whole thing is a graft or they have something else they want out of the camera.
If the goal is just to enrich their contractors, they might even be happy they're getting vandalized.
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.
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
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.
It's what happens when we rank private property over human lives. We deserve this.
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."
You can both have a desire to defend your peace, while also being against mass surveillance.
Gp specifies how we rank those 2 is the issue, and didn't say they are mutually exclusive
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.
Can you explain in more detail how the repeat criminals get caught in your scheme? I can see how surveillance could help in identifying the criminal, finding him or her, and as evidence of crime in the trial, but what exactly happens without it that gets them identified, found and convicted? As of now clearance rate of property crimes is <15% according to a quick search.
There is already lots of surveillance and was even before modern technology. I'd agree that having some at all is of value, my argument was that you don't need much past that to get what we need and certainly don't need the kind of pervasive surveillance that some want: It won't move the needle on crime much past a baseline level but it will enable abuses that are much worse than the level of property crime we see today. Authoritarian governments are the number one mass murderer throughout human history by a wide margin.
Low clearance rates for property crime are significantly because nothing is even done much of the time -- police just take a report and often won't even follow up on an obvious lead (including stuff like "find my phone says my thousand dollar phone is in that house over there").
But in any case to more directly answer your question: If the clearance rate is 15% then they have a 90% chance of being caught after ~14 crimes.
No, we do not "deserve this". The universe has no concept of "deserve".
"Deserving" not in the sense of dharma/karma, but as a natural consequence of prior actions.
People are part of the universe, and they have a concept of deserving.
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.
I don’t know that I’ve heard the “saves lives” argument for this type of camera. How would that play out?
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).
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.
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.
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.”
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I appreciate his activism
We really should be referring to them as “Flock (YC S17)”. Credit where credit is due.
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
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.
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).
Most of the time they just send you through a standard metal detector. The state already has my prints from the dmv.
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".
That's why it's good to use GrapheneOS*. In the future, hopefully the pinebook project succeeds
How does using GrapheneOS prevent license plate readers from tracking where you are, or from you being groped at the airport?
I responded to the last point of the parent comment
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.
You mean GrapheneOS?
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.
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
Associated Benn Jordan video post: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vU1-uiUlHTo
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.
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
Fantastic, now I can't report a hit-and-run.
You never have, anyways.
What kind of silly comment is this? In fact I have, and they found the person responsible.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Related:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46356182 Benn Jordan – This Flock Camera Leak Is Like Netflix for Stalkers [video] (youtube.com)
We merged that thread into this one.
(Edit: and put that video's link in the toptext above.)
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.