At least 25 Flock cameras have been destroyed in five states since April 2025(stateofsurveillance.org) |
At least 25 Flock cameras have been destroyed in five states since April 2025(stateofsurveillance.org) |
> I found this on the side of the road and thought you might want it back.
This definitely takes more effort than smashing them does.
> Reduces what you can be charged with,
Does it? How? There's not even a return address to show that a person sent the parts back to Flock instead of just disappearing it.
> prevents Flock from getting insurance benefits
How? The camera doesn't repair itself. It still takes money to turn a pile of camera parts into a working camera on some street corner somewhere.
> and is all the more frustrating for them to deal with.
Is it? Is corporate frustration the goal? (Is corporate frustration even possible?)
A Little Brother solution: they want data, give them so much bad data the rest of their data becomes worthless. But it only works on a mass scale.
In Italy two different agencies are buying spying tools they cannot even legally use.
Laws don't matter.
Alcohol is involved nearly half the time as well...but the driver is intoxicated only 18% of the time. Usually it's drunk pedestrians stumbling into the road.
https://www.cdc.gov/pedestrian-bike-safety/about/pedestrian-...
Pedestrian fatalities are largely not a vehicle speed issue so much as a street design issue. Cities should be planned so nobody is ever walking near higher speed arterial roads, with crosswalks at controlled intersections, foot bridges over long/wide streets, and separated sidewalks. Then areas that need lower speeds (residential areas, downtown areas with street parking) should use narrower designs.
In contrast, the city I live in is primarily built around a handful of four lane streets that all of the businesses are along, with no crossings for miles and places where sidewalks randomly disappear. So you'll see pedestrians standing in the middle of a lane, waiting for a gap to run across the next two lanes. It's wildly dangerous, but the problem has nothing to do with people exceeding the speed limit...and even lowering it would achieve nothing.
Bonus, use the opportunity for some nice civil forfeiture scams.
Regarding road safety: Many roads have artificially low speed limits to either generate revenue or appease anti car activists. But the benefit of cars, getting us quickly to our destinations, is very clear. Vehicle deaths are very rare, and getting to places quickly matters. I see this a lot on highways especially, where a low speed limit like 55-60 should really be 80.
We should be designing for faster, not slower, roads. Safety is always improving due to cars having all kinds of driver assistance features now anyways, but we also could just make roads support the speeds people want to drive at. And then the value of surveillance cameras for safety will also go away.
How do you have a civil society when the people in power cheat?
This kind of discretionary spending authority can used for things that are good, bad, or indifferent. When it gets used to cut through the red tape and buy a new swingset for a neighborhood park, then that's good; nobody complains about that. (Except someone would surely complain about that, but come on man.)
And when it gets used to install government tracking systems, that's bad.
> How do you have a civil society when the people in power cheat?
The problem isn't that the mayor can spend some money. Rather, the problem here is that government tracking systems are completely legal to buy.
The laws need adjusted so that government tracking systems are completely illegal, instead.
"Yeah, good luck getting the government to do that!"
The people of Colorado are free to initiate their own legislation and constitutional amendments and then vote them into force.
"But that will never work!"
It can work, and it has worked. As just one example, the people did this rather famously, and with good effect, back in 2012 when they legalized recreational weed: https://ballotpedia.org/Colorado_Amendment_64,_Regulation_of...
https://www.denver7.com/news/local-news/denver-city-council-...
If some goober installs massive floodlights that blast into windows of some houses, I think everyone would support a kid with a slingshot busting a few bulbs. If some guy is blasting music from a speaker at 3 AM every single day, I don't think anyone will complain about a cable being cut. If cameras are installed that sell data to companies like Palantir, companies that say they want to kill you and they're going to kill you and it's just a matter of time until they kill you, destroying those cameras is the non-violent option.
Violence against inanimate objects is morally neutral. Violence against instruments of violence is self-defense. Violence against oppression is how the USA was founded.
A corporation has unfair political advantages including a deep purse, an unlimited lifespan, and more recently all the rights of personhood. The only advantage the people have is their numbers, and yeah numbers of votes would be great, I agree, but when votes are ignored, or never solicited in the first place, it often comes down to numbers of pitchforks, as it were.
Okay, but what about destruction of property?
On voting harder, see the lead incident mentioned: "This happened weeks after the city council voted to keep the cameras despite overwhelming public opposition." I also advocate patiently working through the process, but people are not blind to the trends: the democratic process is failing as government increasingly sidelines voters and the richest have the levers of power.
The website largely documents the current state of privacy and provides resources for (digital) services that help maintain privacy. This is an encouraging civil engagement which educates and empowers the audience.
Calling the "destruction of property" violence though—I might take issue with that.
That's... one way to attempt to incite action, I suppose. Not a very honorable or ethical one, I must say.
People not having any sort of empathy on HN shouldn't surprise me not gonna lie.
If you think even one death should mean the benefits don’t matter, then the only solution is to shut down all of society. There is risk everywhere. One death per 100 million miles is a small risk to most people.
But that doesn’t mean we are “not having any sort of empathy”.
Frustrating them is not the goal per-se, but it feels good, and may make them consider that market as not worth the cost of maintaining a presence there.
When I take your things and then mail them back to you, I have still stolen from you. That's still theft.
It's the taking part that constitutes theft.
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If I instead just smash your things in-situ, then that can be a different crime like vandalism.
But I see your point. Destroying a thing (even corporate) is a pretty extreme reaction that I can only see making sense after having exhausted all other "peaceable" avenues.
People that see these things as detrimental to society though are likely pretty motivated.
I need a lot bigger of a return if I am going to give up privacy.
But you have to think about second order effects. The knowledge that you may be punished afterwards serves as a disincentive for doing the wrong thing now. It may be preferable to convince everyone that they would be punished without actually doing the punishment, but it's not possible. Apart from the death penalty, punishments also can directly teach an individual not to commit the crime again.
Or, if not, we can be more specific. Imprisonment means that an individual is separated from society, making it much harder for them to commit crimes. Most crime is done by young men, and time spent in prison contributes to age. Issuing a 10-year sentence means directly reducing the number of crimes that occur. Is that not beneficial to society?
Or if a CFO embezzles $10M, should society be indifferent to whether taxpayers make the company whole or the CFO does it?
The beauty of surveillance is that it mutes the ability to cover the distance between desire and action. Which is another way to state "it has a chilling effect"
As I understand, part of any story being shared is that its propagation is part of the story, in a McLuhan medium-is-the-message sense.
People that are writing this story surely would. They, of course, wouldn't do it themselves - I mean, you could be arrested and lose your job and go to jail... but if somebody else would bear those consequences, then of course it's fine!
> Which is another way to state "it has a chilling effect"
Yes, that's kind of the point. The question is what does it chill. If it is chilling criminal activities, it's good, if it's chilling legal activities, it's bad.
This whole thread is pretty powerful evidence for that proposition: it's sprawling commentary on what pretty clearly seems to be LLM slop writing. You could build a novel operating system and get flagged off the front page for having a README with Claude tells in it, but that preference is obviously contingent.
But if you go ask people, in a non-duplicitous way, whether you want less of a police presence or curtail use technology to solve crimes, most people will not want less police. Here is an example
> When asked whether they want the police to spend more time, the same amount of time or less time than they currently do in their area, most Black Americans -- 61% -- want the police presence to remain the same. This is similar to the 67% of all U.S. adults preferring the status quo, including 71% of White Americans.
> Meanwhile, nearly equal proportions of Black Americans say they would like the police to spend more time in their area (20%) as say they'd like them to spend less time there (19%).
It's really a privileged out of touch luxury belief to believe that there is no need to deter or solve crime. People that are affected by crime and/or have common sense, understand that technology that helps solve or prevent criminal activities is actually a good thing.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/316571/black-americans-police-r...
In my non-tech circles, people don't think and don't care about this stuff.
I would love to use AI to re-write article headlines into non-ragebait slop.
But it’s not too late!
ICE sort of feels like a militia with infinite funding and basically no oversight. This was already kind of true even before the latest presidential administration, but it has been ramped up to 11 in the last 1.5 years. I don't love the idea of a president effectively having his own "secret police" and people fighting back does seem kind of appropriate to me.
> Reddit threads show near-universal support.
If your barometer for actual support is Reddit sentiment, I've got news for you...
Flock cameras appeal to weak communist attitudes, where there is a desire for a "good" authoritarian government that tracks everyone... for "their own good".
some newer models require a button to be pressed for them to start the AP, but still leaves them vulnerable to attacks with a long stick and doesn't draw any attention while hundreds of cameras suddenly stop working, making the city government think they're unreliable.
The article suggests that some of the cameras are smashed and left in highly visible places to "send a message".
a good 'message' would be convincing the government and cities that these are useless and that they don't work as well as create more administrative costs than just hiring more police officers or raising education levels.
It's important to not look suspicious. You may also need to start lifting weights right now. That long stick is going to be heavy.
put on a vest and it looks like you're just doing maintenance.
Which of CA OR VA IL CT(the states mentioned above that sentence) is red? Virginia I guess is the closest one but still rather blue...
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety
This organization that built itself on top of the “hacker ethos” is now happy to profit from building the surveillance state
As soon as citizens of Minneapolis though start tracking the movements of ICE vehicles though, then something will have to be done about it…
If a few people set them up, took pictures, recorded some of their friends’ license plates with the cameras… then prime time to make a marketing website for the roof cameras that is as scary as possible. It would include the real footage of the license plates, some story about how you get paid for bounties like facial recognition of a husband and the partner he’s suspected to be cheating with… and that you’re not allowed to hire the camera network for stalking (“wink“).
Claim to pay bonuses for cameras mounted in the highest traffic/value locations, with illusions to corporate espionage and stuff.
Is it possible to represent 'what it means to be American', if a person is not actually American, but their great-great-grandfather was?
Also, cameras can't pull over a bad driver.
Also, I highly doubt a car is in the camera's frame long enough, that the camera could even detect if there is bad driving going on.
Like it or not, this technology is way too useful for too many purposes to be stopped.
This is case for finding "the serenity to accept the things I cannot change".
This is what patriotism really looks like.
Browser vendors can't build this.
I am strongly against this, because you cannot accurately detect it. People start to get blamed even more when they actually did not use the AI.
Even humans who deliberately use lazy formatting and leave obvious errors uncorrected to provide "proof" of being human aren't seeing the big picture, here.
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That bigger picture is that it's easy to make instruct a bot to be lazy, or to avoid the usual quirks. I hate when I'm working on a project and see a constant outflow of negation ("Don't do x, y, or w" is a recent hit) and unfounded exclusive confidence ("The correct answer" as if this is Highlander and there can be only one). Repetitious jargon like overuse of "gate" for things other than fences and skiing is something I can't stand. Plus the usual things — like overuse of unusual punctuation — that are obvious tells.
That stuff all drives me nuts.
But the bot just follows instructions, and my bot has been instructed to avoid those things. It generally performs very well, though the instructions do need re-hashed every now and then as models ebb and flow.
It's super easy to get the bot to write some python or perl that takes a body of text and intentionally some words or lose a comma while mmaking other errors and converting — into --.
When it comes to human error in written language, we just aren't that hard to emulate.
Now, that all said: You'll just have to take my word for it, but I do not use the bot to help with writing English. But I do have every confidence that if I woke up tomorrow and actually started bulking up my comments using a bot, none of you would be able to tell.
People want their slop to be undetectable.
But you could build something that ranks the quality of the webpage content! This would also be more useful.
Of course, that tool would have to use AI...
A human-written piece indicates someone believes in it enough to put in enough effort to write it up nicely, so it works as a heuristic of underlying quality.
This is just my thought with nothing to back it up, but I believe it's valid. I also believe we'll see widespread actions of this type within the next decade.
Civil disobedience, in perspective, has by comparison been incredibly ineffective historically.
Books are written to glamorize remarkable exceptions, not the mundane reality of the facts we expect in every day life. The majority by far were punished or executed and forgotten.
Voting has plenty of impact. But most people don't and they're really easy to manipulate into free advertising to garner support for an otherwise unpopular cause at the expense of their own well-being.
It's far better to ask yourself if your cause might not be popular or even just before you run out and change the world. With very, very few exceptions that you're not likely to be able to recognize through mere self reflection.
It will be easier to negotiate for legislation as well if the economic risk of installation increases because of vandalism.
This is all Internet logic. It's fun to talk about destroying cameras as a vector for public policy, ergo, by the First Law of Message Boards, that must be a viable strategy. Reader, it is not. Nobody's going to blink at these costs, but residents who supported or were on the fence about the cameras are now negatively polarized against doing anything about them.
The cringe-ier thing here is the clear message being sent by many commentators, incl. the author of this post, that nobody's ever thought of breaking surveillance cameras before. Y'all, this is literally a meme.
If someone represents me, then logically I should have the right to vote directly instead of him, or remove him at any point.
Can imagine hydraflock scenario. Like some people close bathrooms permanently after bad vandalism on one occasion, maybe a city council person orders that extra cameras be installed so every camera can be recorded by a second camera.
the behaviour most people seem to want is to have a polis driven by the will of the people at large, rather than a small cadre, of -for lackof a better word, liars.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. And I think it's fair to say that deterrence works similarly to prevention, in this context.
How does the presence of Flock cameras serve to deter (or prevent) the kind of behavior you describe?
Or, as a corollary question: How does the absence of Flock cameras serve to encourage it?
ICE is a proto-gestapo for what it's worth - including having a way to report unwanted ethnicities. They answer to the sovereign and are not accountable to the law of the people.
I'd bet any amount of money it will be approximately 0.
Both create an unaccountable set of elites who control the populace.
On the second point specifically, that's actually much more interesting! If one values the rule of law, then you would actually want your laws to be morally aligned! Otherwise, the conflict of the law with morality _devalues_ the rule of law. Valuing rule of law does not imply only some sort of legalistic value of laws unto themselves, but of the value of a society with good laws, enforced well. This incentivizes analysis and evolution _of the law_ and, to some degree, forcing conflict to bring about those changes.
My understanding is that they strongly believe in no false positives, so it's definitely possible to slip something by them but if it marks something as AI, it very likely is.
Who cares what they "believe" (or, more accurately, say they believe). What are the underlying processes that actually guarantee this, and what data supports it?
Their 99.98% accuracy claim[1] makes me doubt that.
Much more importantly, 9/10 dentists agree it's the best.
1: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.15654, linked from² https://www.pangram.com/blog/third-party-pangram-evals (the second section)
2: the third study they link there is based entirely around the assumption that Pangram is correct, and seems to have been a collaboration or something as they're included in the credits area.
I wonder if we are seeing what may be the result of a Reddit bot campaign to sway generative output.
I'll write to President Sanders about this issue straight away!
Shows lack of critical thinking and rigor.
Representational democracy is far superior. Decisions need to be weighed against both their popularity and their effect with input from experts and other affected parties.
That isn't to say we should use something other than representative democracy. I believe the best option is to fix the system rather than replace it. However, it does explain why people currently feel they have very little power of the laws that affect them.
And the pilot is not a random guy from the street with no education or at best a completely unrelated degree. And he's probably not 90 years old. And he's the engineer, mechanic, ATC, pilot, stewerd, advertiser, accountant and TSA in one person.
Direct democracy shouldn't be the only change, obviously. As you correctly point out the issue is when uninformed, uneducated and not sufficiently intelligent people make decisions for everyone.
The issue with direct democracy is that you're describing a highly dimensional vector (your opinion) by picking one of a small set of predefined points (the political parties). Some countries only have 2. That's obviously stupid.
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For example we should weight votes by how informed they are. How to determine that? That's a difficult question. But shooting down the idea does move us closer to a solution.
Making voting indirect only has the effect that all nuance is lost. You still get dumb people voting for populists, fascists, narcissists, rapists, etc.
Campaign finance reform would be the foundation for this, otherwise we will continue with legalized bribery.
The other need is for daylight and accountability. As much as I loath the Web3 cryptocrowd, having some sort of public ledger of government operations would be incredibly valuable. Anything and everything related to government actions should be public record with the small exception of sensitive information (which itself should have oversight on not being abused).
This is an easy problem to solve (on a technical level), but the established political base will always fight against it they like things the way they are.
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It's impossible for every person to have a well-researched opinion on everything. Opponents of direct democracy use this to shoot it down. But it applies to indirect democracy too.
The real issue we need to solve is how to make sure people (whether all citizens or representatives) only vote on what they actually understand.
I think votes weighted based on the score of a knowledge test would be a good start if the test is well-designed. But we need to figure out how to decide what the questions are (what is relevant, what is enough in-depth, what is too specific, etc.) and what the correct answers are (some topics are still a matter of debate even among experts). And that's hard.
It's hard in a cooperative environment (e.g. engineers deciding which factors are relevant to their proposed solution) and it's even harder in an adversarial environment like politics.
It's not a luxury belief to grapple with reality instead of subjecting yourself to a false dichotomy where you either have police prowling the streets or gangs doing the same. Don't give this "common sense" crap, you know very well that intuition fails all the time, especially when applied to incredibly complex topics like governance or social policy.
If direct experience and official stats conflict, it's usually the official stats that are wrong.
Yes, I agree things like murder has gone down (especially since it's recent peak in 2020/2021)
But in terms of lawlessness, there is a lot less law and order in most large cities. There were always homeless people in my lifetime, but the fentanyl zombies is relatively new. Or let me give you another example, consider Eric Garner who was killed on Staten Island in 2014 after a confrontation for selling loose untaxed cigarettes.
Today I walk by the same person parked out every single day, with a sign selling loose cigarettes along with weed. This is breaking a number of laws in a highly policed area in NYC. However there is no will to prevent do anything about it.
> It's not a luxury belief to grapple with reality instead of subjecting yourself to a false dichotomy where you either have police prowling the streets or gangs doing the same. Don't give this "common sense" crap, you know very well that intuition fails all the time, especially when applied to incredibly complex topics like governance or social policy.
No, this isn't a complicated issue. People get arrested regularly but they get let out to re-offend. here's a stat:
Among persons admitted to state prison in 2014 across 34 states, 77% had five or more prior arrests in their criminal history, including the arrest that resulted in their prison sentence... The number of prisoners that have had 15 or more prior arrests is over 26%
How about common sense policy, after your 15th arrest, you stay in prison until you're an old man and relatively harmless to society.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Eric_Garner
https://mleverything.substack.com/p/acceptance-of-crime-is-a...
It is a complex issue. Even now we simultaneously let KnifecrimesMcGee out after 15 arrests while also locking up non-dangerous pot smokers for years. This isn't a "we're too lax" or "we're too strict" issue, it's both in different areas. Putting in an absolute 15 strikes program is going to hand more jaywalkers a life sentence than dangerous criminals for the simple fact that people get arrested over minor offenses more often than serious ones. Heavy-handed nonsense solves no problems. You need to acknowledge when an issue is beyond simple solutions if you're interested in solving it.
Just because people want policing doesn't mean they want the kind of policing that we seem to be getting.
And that article you cite is a pretty good example of this.
The title is: Black Americans Want Police to Retain Local Presence
The bottom half is: Black Americans Lack Assurance Police Encounters Will Go Well
Police cameras are actually very popular, as is private security. I've even heard rich people voluntarily pay private security with guns (!) to protect them.
You're living in fantasy land my friend. No one outside of your bubble thinks about things this way. People are trying to live their lives and raise their kids. People don't like this chaos and have very little empathy for the few percent of people that terrorize their neighborhoods.
My "bubble" is that I read past the headline and got more than halfway through that article that you cited.
If Flock was simply a network of plate readers with some additional computer vision classification features (make, model, colour, vehicle type) which only saved data on vehicles matching an active BOLO, there would be far less concern.
But Flock is not that. It saves a timestamp and location of every single plate it sees. It is a mass surveillance machine, enabling gross privacy violations by collecting and making available to law enforcement movement data on anyone with a car.
Flock also shares data with the federal government, particularly ICE, even when the local PD has specifically signed contracts forbidding the practice. People who may otherwise be comfortable with Flock providing data to their local PD may not be comfortable when that data is handed to the Trump administration.
The CEO calling those who disagree with him "domestic terrorists" is also ample reason to be skeptical of Flock's mission.
Never underestimate 5D chess mastery of big money and big agendas.
I'd like to see more separation. If we are to keep indirect democracy, at least have separate representation for criminal law, economic decisions (taxes, healthcare, ...), social decisions (abortions, marriage, ...), etc. But even where to draw the lines is difficult. I think that too should be in some ways decided by voters.
Of course, in a country which can't get rid of FPTP/plurality, despite being objectively the worst voting system[0-3], that's never gonna happen. If you need to explain math to people to convince them, you've already lost, because people are not smart enough and definitely not educated enough.
[1]: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/aaron-hamlin-voting-...
Humans exercise judgement.
At least when humans lie they're usually doing it on purpose. When machines lie they don't know they're doing it.
For some reason, some people repeatedly defend machines that constantly do the same thing, and claim we should give it the benefit of the doubt.
The reality is the vast majority of social progress in the last millenium was achieved with force and threat of force. I find this weird revisionist "violence is never the answer" trope recited as a fact that needs no justification to be incredibly weird and unreliable.
Someone shoplifts $50 worth of stuff from Wallyworld and the cops come a runnin' (if they're not already there, because they station a cop full time there.)
Someone steals your $500 bicycle and cops tell you not to bother filing a police report because nothing will happen.
How did we start tolerating public employees not only discouraging people from making them do their jobs, but them justifying it by saying they're incompetent and nothing will happen?
And before someone screeches that wallyworld has cameras: so do many people now, too. The cops won't do anything even when a tracker like an airtag shows the bike is in a specific house. Facebook Marketplace and OfferUp and other forums are chock full of obvious stolen bike listings and people are easily tracing them to lost-bike posts.
There's a huge encampment under a bridge in my city that is known as the regional bike 'chop shop' where tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars of bicycles are being cut up for their parts and the parts sold through fences and the frames et al going out for scrap metal.
The cops do not give a shit.
Had France not been willing to subsidize an insurgent campaign to distract the British, it's incredibly likely those Acts would've remained in place for some time.
People who rush to using violence as an answer frequently do not consider the outcome if they've misjudged their opponents' capacity for it.
It's part of the fun of being an internet revolutionary. Eventually, though, most end up thinking things through.
I mean, that it... quite literally did?
Yeah, you can externalize enforcement of sanctions against you to drag other people into a conflict with you, but I wouldn't suggest getting caught making that argument.
By the way -- Where do you stand on throwing tea into the harbor? And where do you stand on the legitimacy of publicly discussing throwing tea into the harbor?
Let’s not call breaking a camera “violence”.
But why smash'em when you have the right to bear arms? I'd do target practice instead. Improve your shootong skills while getting rid of surveillance. Win-win.
The difference is so staggering I have trouble believing anyone who has spent more than about 90 seconds thinking about the issue could believe in good faith that they're in any way comparable. Happy to be proven wrong, though.
You do not have the right to own and operate something that infringes on my rights.
That being said, Ring cameras creep me out and I feel they have a powerful anti-social effect.
How long will it take the three of them to talk with leadership of those churches? Are they allowed to bring up off topic concerns at PTA meetings where they can tell parents to be aware of the bot farms? Did they already knock on some neighbors’ doors?
All of this is really hard and really time-consuming. The alternative is for those three people to start smashing cameras and we know they won’t finish with their freedom. The uphill battle is the one we must fight.
I don't think your arguing in good faith and you are getting called out on it by a few people. So you answer first, then I'll answer -- Was the boston tea party justified? Is civil disobedience ever justified? Is breaking the law a good thing sometimes if it's a bad law (e.g. Rosa Parks)?
If you can't answer those then I think you'll have convinced me and the rest of us that you aren't even trying to make a good-faith effort to make a point.
They are in favor of public vandalism such as that which was committed by the Boston Tea Party whereas you appear to be suggesting that you are vehemently against it.