A little searching will find you all sorts of such hits, like an officer tracking her domestic partner [0], an officer stalking someone after meeting on a TV set* [1], another officer tracking his ex partner [2], another officer tracking his mistress [3]. This is just a random sample.

* Note this scenario was not with Flock, which is important: there's more than one player in this space. Kill Flock and others might roll in; something broader is needed like, oh, I don't know, constitutional protections or something.

[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/atlanta/news/police-supervisor-accus...

[1] https://www.404media.co/footage-shows-cop-stalking-woman-he-...

[2] https://www.404media.co/cops-keep-getting-arrested-for-using...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byhWSvwz1Vw

Police are, in the most generous light, just as fallible and likely to abuse power as the rest of us. You can loosely define power as “Effect minus repercussion”. Massive effects like the nuclear football have massive repercussions like the end of civilization, so we tend to view them with a degree of balance. MAD has worked on this principle for decades pretty effectively. Even a tiny bit of Effect, with zero Repercussion, leads to unjust abuse, such as the diplomatic immunity issues in New York City. Nearly everything we have given the police has huge Effect, mostly by necessity, but more every day with tools like flock and the stripping of our rights. Endless military hardware, etc. Simultaneously we have ALSO been shrinking the repercussions for police. for decades. When sued the taxpayers pay for their defense. When they lose the lawsuits, the taxpayers pay the plaintiffs out and the police very very rarely face prison. Often times they can keep working in another department. They have extra protections nobody else has so they are less likely to lose those cases in the first place. There is next to ZERO oversight of all the tools we give them, to prevent the lawsuits. Federal police can remain anonymous when they commit obvious homicide or executions, apparently. We are very close to an effectively infinite power situation because there are next to zero repercussions. Even IF cops had no firearms, no armored vehicles, no flock, no palantir. They could still bust the door down to their ex girlfriend’s place and beat up their new boyfriend for any kind of flimsy excuse. Because what are you going to do about it? Sue them? You’re just offering them a free vacation.

We were hearing during the Snowden era about the abuse of NSA systems like XKeyscore and others through what was termed jokingly LOVEINT. Anything that's built will get abused in some way - sometimes its even best not to build such databases at all.

Here's CNN discussing NSA analyst abuse from 13 years ago:

https://www.cnn.com/2013/09/27/politics/nsa-snooping/

Here's an article from 10 years ago discussing the police doing it:

https://apnews.com/general-news-699236946e3140659fff8a2362e1...

This is 10 years old, but in 2016 the Associated Press did a massive public records request for police departments across the country. Between 2013-2015, they found over 600 cases where the police department actually did an internal investigation, found this kind of misuse, didn't cover it up, and handed over the records. About half of those cases resulted in a firing, suspension, or resignation.

This is clearly an undercount, and I'm sure it's only gotten worse since 2016.

https://apnews.com/general-news-699236946e3140659fff8a2362e1...

My only question is why you didn’t believe police could/would do this in the first place? My default perspective is that this is exactly what law-enforcement and other government officials would use this technology to do, especially if there are no guardrails or laws preventing them from abusing it.

If something can be abused, especially with little to no accountability, it will be abused.

>They won't use technology to find our lost/stolen phones

Our local sheriff’s department used Apple’s FindMy to search for my parent’s iPad that had been stolen from their car during a smash and grab. In this case, he found it in the possession of a couple that had found it tossed on the side of the street after the thief had stripped it for cash and credit cards, but it saved them the hassle and cost of having to buy a new one.

Anyways, there’s nothing stopping PDs from searching for stolen electronics. Maybe you should talk to your local city council and ask why yours don’t?

Check out the new Netflix doc, A Toxic Love Story. US Marshall at the center of it all (no spoiler).

Well known pattern: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT

Why don't they instead push for making abuses of law enforcement access illegal? That way we can both catch criminals and missing people along with avoiding abuse.

That’s the sad part. There was a nationwide trend to ignore misdemeanor theft so much so that now there is a new baseline and most police have taken this to heart and don’t even pretend to put an effort into misdemeanor theft -yes, I know many or perhaps most departments are understaffed but still. It’s irritating.

I was with you up until the very last line. Why do people imagine that the police are in the business of property retrieval? Once your stuff is stolen in almost all cases it's long LONG gone! Cars are sent to be broken down for parts, tools are sold to fences and so on. The typical thief isn't some mastermind who carefully holds on to what they stole, they rush to their nearest fence or dealer to trade it for what they need.

Police are there to report a crime and add that to area stats, and if the issue is more than a lone junkie then it eventually gets to a detective in whatever the local version of Robbery is.

"They didn't get my stuff back" isn't a realistic criticism, and it detracts from the many other points that are.

The Flock CEO Garret Langley called people that didn't want his unsecure surveillance state in their own communities "terrorists". A term that has a very loose meaning but is always used to invoke state violence. So he wants to create a strong police state and violence against regular people for money aka he's a fascist.

(but HN will flag me for "name-calling" a person promoting and creating violent state oppression)

Why, what a fantastic idea! Maybe a certain trillionaire would be interested...

"Politicians will be exempted from chat control"

> But a bit weird how a core American "surveillance = big no no" belief was thrown out in a few years.

I can't speak for China since I'm not as familiar with that culture, but as for the US, the culture has not changed, as you can see by protest campaigns like this and many similar types of protests (e.g. public destruction of Flock cameras). The culture in the US was founded on minimal government interference based on those trying to escape persecution elsewhere at that time, and that thread is still baked into many facets of US politics.

What has changed is the state. Surveillance has been growing constantly, to much of the disapproval of those who live in the US (e.g. Edward Snowden's revelations were very damning and the revealed surveillance was very much protested against, and likewise after the Cambridge Analytica leaks). But it's a bit of boiling frog syndrome for those experiencing it: the state can grow more controlling of our lives slow enough not to be perceptible, or to spin surveillance under manipulative politics, which is for example what led to bipartisan support of the Patriot Act. This makes it difficult to stop. Technology is especially a double edged sword for making this worse.

I would guess if you really put it up to the people many wouldn't be a fan of this sort of broad warrantless surveillance (or at least want more controls or limits on it). Good luck finding a candidate that matches this and your other values in one of the two political parties you have a choice between. Also good luck effecting any political change in whatever gerrymandered district you are in. I think the US government with a more actually representative democracy would look very different.

Yea, I am thoroughly unconvinced that protesting and asking nicely is really a way to implement political change. The people implementing these things and making these deals are sitting on their yachts and mansion balconies, sipping their martinis, and looking down at us little people with raised eyebrows, not caring in the slightest what we say. They are going to keep doing what they are doing, they're going to keep getting elected, they're going to keep getting appointed to their corporate boards, and they look at the protesters as just loud annoyances--if they even look at them at all.

Feels like every other site that AI generates. Hard to tell what the creators believe and what is just probabilistically generated.

This video is what led to the 404 media article I shared above.

I wonder if this is as efficient or as effective. The guy holding the skimmer was viral and garnered a lot of attention to the situation. This site, while something I support, probably won't. Maybe it'll be the place people find after learning about the guy holding the sign.

Now, if the guy holding the skimmer had a sign with the URL on it, then we're on to something.

Great hand over the links to your 24hour live stream of your home and neighborhood. I promise I will only watch you.

If you force surveillance on 10 people and even one of them doesn't consent, that's still a net bad. And this situation is probably closer to the inverse of those numbers, or at the very least 50/50.

And this isn't even to mention the criminal negligence of Flock, and the evils they have already enabled, as committed both by Flock employees and by government.

It's hard to gauge the sincerity of these beliefs, and even harder to tell if you've actually tested these beliefs against the reality of mass surveillance, especially when it's been used to arrest and stalk innocent people.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/georgia-cops-keep-get...

https://cambridgeanalytica.org/surveillance-privacy/police-f...

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/the-cop-investigating-a...

That's your right, but the problem is that cameras are in public and some people do mind this.

That's because you haven't thought it through. "We only want info on the bad people" might not alarm you personally until any government entity changes the definition of bad and now you're a "bad guy".

While such a surveillance system appears to (kinda) work in China, do you really trust American companies and the American police system to implement it at anywhere close to that level of competency?

It's not the cameras I mind per-se. They have legitmately been used to solve some crimes that might have gone unsolved otherwise.

But the problem is the cameras are pervasive. It's not like a red light camera, or a speed zone camera, or a toll road camera, that has a specific purpose in a specific location. And it's the building of a database, and correlation of data from point to point, and the potential abuse. We have documented cases of cops abusing Flock data to stalk exes, And history proves that any time you collect data about a group of people, it will eventually if not immediately be abused.

You can propose all the warrants and anonymizing and other restrictions that you might like to control who looks at the data and when, but at the end of the day it's all about trusting those in power who have control of the data, and that's not a good thing to do. The government does not (or should not) have the right to track the public to this degree as they go about their daily personal business.

Neither do the pedophiles in positions of power that want to watch you and your children.

Would you care to elaborate on why you don't mind individuals being stalked by employees with zero oversight or accountability, and why you don't mind protestors being monitored by the government? Since those are both part of "this type of surveillance", and are a pretty fucking crazy thing to state you're okay with with no argument for them. Do you perhaps lack the imagination to consider how this would affect your life if a government that did not agree with your political views came into power sometime in the future and were to use "this type of surveillance" against you?