Mountain View recently turned off their Flock installs after they discovered Flock had enabled data sharing without notice and other agencies were searching through MV data.
https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/privacy/2026/02/flock-came...
> A separate “statewide lookup” feature had also been active on 29 of the city’s 30 cameras since the initial installation, running for 17 straight months until Mountain View found and disabled it on January 5. Through that tool, more than 250 agencies that had never signed any data agreement with Mountain View ran an estimated 600,000 searches over a single year, according to local paper the Mountain View Voice, which first uncovered the issue after filing a public records request.
A different town (Staunton, VA) also turned of their Flock installs after their CEO sent out an email claming:
https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/flock-ceo-goes-...
> The attacks aren't new. You've been dealing with this for forever, and we've been dealing with this since our founding, from the same activist groups who want to defund the police, weaken public safety, and normalize lawlessness. Now, they're producing YouTube videos with misleading headlines.
The Evanston IL case is worse. They told Flock to deactivate and remove them. The cameras were re-installed and re-activated w/o permission, so the city had to come out and cover them all.
> The company took down 15 of the 18 stationary cameras by Sept. 8, only to reinstall all of them by Tuesday. This was apparently without authorization from city officials, who sent Flock a cease-and-desist order to take them back down. [1]
> Flock CEO Garrett Langley released a statement ... where he writes that “some of our public statements inadvertently provided inaccurate information” about the company’s relationship with federal law enforcement, confirming that there were “limited pilots” with agencies under the U.S. Department of Homeland Security focused on “combatting human trafficking and fentanyl distribution.” [2]
I'd like to see a database of municipalities that have passed an ordinance banning these systems (including 12 hour drone flyovers like they've been doing in Camden, NJ; drones are fine for specific or exigent circumstances, but flying them systematically is concerning!).
In fact, if anyone knows of municipalities that have done so let me know. I'd like to spend tourist money in those places that I haven't been able to spend in authoritarian-leaning locales as a reward for valuing freedom over suffocation of the constitution for little to no benefit.
> A statement provided by a Flock Safety spokesperson said, “Flock helps law enforcement, including hundreds of agencies around Illinois, solve crimes and make communities safer, and we are proud of the results we have achieved in partnership with the Evanston PD. We continue to be optimistic that we will have the opportunity to have a constructive dialogue to address the City’s concerns, and resume our successful partnership making Evanston safer.” [0]
Hows that for taking no as an answer? My god, we are in big trouble if this is going to be a regular thing. IMHO we need to shut this country down.
The liberty at stake here is freedom of movement without a permanent, searchable record. There's a meaningful difference between "a person can see you in public" and "a corporation logs your plate, location, and timestamp thousands of times a month and makes it queryable." The Supreme Court moved in this direction in Carpenter v. United States, when it ruled that accessing historical location records constitutes a search even when the individual data points were shared with a third party, because the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Some real-world examples of "the whole being greater than the sum of its parts":
- If your plate and another person's plate consistently show up at the same locations at the same times, that's evidence of a relationship. Now multiply that across everyone. You can map social networks, figure out who's meeting with who, identify affair partners, figure out who attends the same AA meeting every Tuesday.
- Regular trips to a mosque, a church, a union hall, a gun range, a protest staging area, a political campaign office. No single trip is meaningful, but the pattern over months tells you someone's affiliations and beliefs.
- Repeated visits to an oncology clinic, a methadone clinic, a fertility specialist, a psychiatrist's office. That's health information that would normally be protected under HIPAA if obtained through medical channels.
- When you leave for work, when you come home, what routes you take, when your house is empty. This is exactly the kind of information a stalker would want, and it's sitting in a database that (depending on the jurisdiction) may have minimal access controls.
The key point is that none of these individual observations are particularly sensitive. It's the longitudinal aggregation that transforms mundane location data into an intimate portrait of someone's life. And importantly, that portrait exists for essentially every driver, not just people under investigation.
You could argue that the 4th Amendment constrains state action, not corporate behavior. But it's not like Flock is collecting this data for some independent commercial purpose and the government occasionally subpoenas it. The product is government surveillance, just privatized. Outsourcing surveillance to a private contractor to avoid 4th Amendment scrutiny is arguably worse than the government doing it directly, because it bypasses the oversight mechanisms that keep the government in check (or at least, are supposed to do so).
Boomers and GenX benefited from freedom they are hellbent on taking away.
GenX? Yeah, it's not just the Boomers despite the memes.
Insurance CEO running a death panel until he got got? GenX
Musk, Thiel, may other notable big tech billionaires? GenX
Heather Bresch, CEO that jacked up price of EpiPen? GenX
School admins watering down education? GenX
Late-40 year olds to young 60 year olds manage the day-to-day at American universities, businesses, government. Zero self awareness. Little more than "line must go up!" automatons[1].
INTERVIEWER: Surveillance is becoming more prevalent everywhere. There's an organization called Deflock that's become fairly well-known in activist circles. They take an aggressive approach—counting cameras and maintaining a Discord channel where they discuss potential activities to move against surveillance expansion and stop organizations like Flock. What's your perspective on this organization and their methods?
FLOCK CEO: I see two distinct groups of activists here. There are organizations like the ACLU and the EFF that take an above-board approach to fighting for their viewpoint. We're fortunate to live in a democratic, capitalistic country where we can fight through the courts. I have a lot of respect for those groups because they engage in reasonable debate while following the law.
FLOCK CEO: Unfortunately, there are also what I'd call terroristic organizations like Deflock, whose primary motivation appears to be chaos. They're closer to Antifa than anything else. That's disappointing because I don't want chaos - I value law and order and a society built on safety.
FLOCK CEO: For those groups, I think it's regrettable they haven't chosen a more constructive approach to achieve their goals. They do have the right to their views, but that's why we have a democratically elected process. We're not forcing Flock on anyone. Elected officials understand that communities and families want safety, and Flock is the best way to create safe communities.
INTERVIEWER: Deflock probably wouldn't agree with the "terroristic" label you've applied to them, but...
----
Yeah. "They have a right to their views" buuut also, they are terrorists, and implicitly therefore deserve to have their freedom taken away because of said views. So giving the public a map of flock cameras and organizing to advocate against these being used in our communities is terroristic, I suppose. There's one party here that should be in jail here. Seems like that ought to be the creeps that are filming everyone against their consent, but I guess that makes me a terrorist...
Counting cameras and maintaining a discord channel. It's almost like someone doesn't like being surveilled. Maybe by his own logic, Flock is a terrorist organization.
the more prosaic (the bear case) POV is that physically mounted outdoor street cameras have the same enforcement limitations as most other enforcement support technologies. flock isn't really bringing "number of unseen crimes" down from 1 to zero, he's bringing it from like 1000 to 999. a flock being easy to disable by a lay person, and a street corner not having witnesses - they're the same thing, it just isn't as good of a technology as he says (or people imagine) it to be.
so at the very beginning, the thing that threatens him the most is: simple ideas that sound objective and that make Gary Tan wary of putting $50m instead of $25m.
that said, very few things do that, bring "unseen crime" from N to 0. for example, legalization of something does that! he has found a very successful business nonetheless. it's more interesting to explore why. if he wanted to level constructive criticism at Deflock, i suppose we should wonder: how do they disrupt enterprise sales? flock is just, yet another failed IT project. it shouldn't be too hard. obviously, the best thing you can do is getting elected, and simply putting it in the law to not adopt the technology.
Flock is just, yet another failed IT project. it shouldn't be too hard.
Well I think this is the issue. The value of Flock is not what it says on the tin, it's everything else. Solving petty crimes yeah sure, yadda yadda. Ever had your bike stolen and told a cop about it?
It's the tracking part. That's where the juice is. Well obviously it'd violate the 4th amendment to slap a GPS tracker on your car to see if you're going to [known antifa member's] house - we'd never do that, but gee, this private company just happens to have a database of everywhere every person's car has ever been ...
A sinister aspect of the US' collective paranoia about public transit -- not that there aren't cameras on the train, but i can also wear a mask on the train. "Masking" my car would be illegal on many counts.
> It's the tracking part. That's where the juice is.
how do you figure? everyone already has a perfect tracker carried around with them at all times, a cell phone. and i suppose, if someone is smart enough to not visit a thing with a phone, he'll be smart enough to not use a car, so... do you see what i mean? it still boils down to, "the technology is not really as good as it says it is." i mean i know that you say that it's not, it is. It is all about what it says on the tin.
That's enterprise sales. People have to stop making it about cerebral, academic political stuff. If municipalities understood that Flock is a waste of money, they wouldn't adopt it.
Fascists have argued for years, including today, that they've only "gone fascist" because their perceived left-wing opposition was so "insane."
At this point, I'm planning to tattoo my "terrorist" affidavit on my arm, assuming i survive the encounter after filming ICE through my window next time they tear gas a child in front of my house (which they did do, here in Chicago, but i don't want to be more specific than that for obvious reasons)
This is an excellent video documenting some Flock camera vulnerabilities by Benn Jordan, a security hobbyist/researcher: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB0gr7Fh6lY. It's a bit long, but worth it.
His work on this and similar topics is very good, he has deep technical insight and is a good communicator, but it's a bit funny seeing him referred to as a security hobbyist as in my mind he's a musical genius and one of the greatest living US musicians/programmers.
It's amazing at how terrorism has been re-defined. When I was a kid you had to blow up skyscrapers or planes (or both at the same time), set off bombs in a crowded area, or a specifically targeted mass shooter to be labelled a terrorist.
I’m not saying it is historically accurate, but I would encourage anyone who didn’t experience interactions with law enforcement pre-9/11 (in the US) to watch early seasons of Law & Order.
It is pretty informative, even in the dramatic context of the show, to see police interactions and the respect for / erosion of individual rights when you view the seasons before 9/11/2001 and after 9/11/2001.
Yeah, after the initial shock and horror of seeing the Twin Towers go down was an overwhelming sense of dread in how that was going to justify an aggressive police state.
Yeah really does show you how it's now (actually for some time) just a label, conveniently morphing over time for people/groups you don't like, losing any actual meaning because it's applied so liberally.
And it's ironic because there are clearly "real terrorists" (i.e. 9/11 guys).
"...and then unfortunately there is terroristic organizations like DeFlock, whose primary motivation is chaos. They are closer to Antifa than they are anything else."
"We're not forcing Flock on anyone..."
It is a short 1:32 video, I encourage people to watch it for themselves.
I thought DeFlock was just publishing locations of cameras and lawfully convincing local governments to not use Flock, primarily through FOIA requests.
Twenty-some years back, I attended a talk by a classicist who was talking about how the Romans, Caesar specifically I think, basically used "pirate" the same way.
Funnily enough, the currently airing Starz program, Spartacus: House of Ashur does this, has Caesar as a character and all political sides use “pirates” as a bogeyman to justify all sorts of things and stage false flag attacks while pretending to be pirates. It’s meant for entertainment not historicity but it’s kind of reminding me of Battlestar Galactica reboot touching political themes in this one aspect except with swords and prosethetics flying everywhere.
This would be a great point if antifa was some official org with fascist views.
It's not. Antifa is just a shortened form of the word anti-fascist. Anyone can call themselves antifa. And typically, only people who view themselves as fighting fascism call themselves antifa.
In short, saying "antifa are the real fascists" is like saying "vegetarians are the real meat eaters". It doesn't make sense.
I didn't say anything of that sort. North Korea calls itself "democratic people republic" and people who call themselves antifa claim they fight "fascists". In both cases, the claim is either completely made up or occasionally somewhat technically correct as they fight anything from corporations to corner store glass windows to journalists who happen to disagree with them and happen to find some fascist
Again, the DPRK is a singular entity. We can look at the behavior of the DPRK and analyze what its stance towards democracy is. We can see that it doesn't seem remotely committed to democracy, so being against the DPRK says nothing about one's views of democracy. Or even if the DPRK was truly committed to democracy, one could be against the DPRK for reasons completely unrelated to its democracy, and it would still not say anything about one's view of democracy.
Antifascism is just a political stance. It's shared by a wide range of disparate people who have nothing to do with each other. Just like vegetarianism is just the practice of not eating meat.
What does being anti-vegetarianism say about one's stance towards meat eating? Sure, you can look at any one guy or specific group of people who call themselves vegetarian, be against them for reasons unrelated to vegetarianism, and that doesn't say anything about your stance towards meat-eating. But being broadly anti-vegetarian?
...What does being broadly anti-antifascism say about one's stance towards fascism?
The difference is that North Korea is a place, with an organization that claims to be its government. You can point to it on a map.
Antifa is an adjective that people with no connection to one another self-apply. I'm antifa, and I imagine you are too, but it doesn't mean that we've ever met or coordinated with one another in any meaningful way.
The word "antifa" is basically meaningless altogether, since virtually every person since the end of WW2 claims to oppose fascism.
Wikipedia doesn't use the phrase "group of people", and cites a symposium as a source for the assessment that "it is a highly decentralized array of autonomous groups in the United States," so, I'm not sure this advances the discussion.
It's obvious that the vast, overwhelming majority of people consider themselves anti-fascist. So I really don't think it possible for this term to ever actually describe a particular group of people, excluding other groups of people.
These attempts to shoehorn the word "antifa" into some kind of distinct organization seem like they are just a lingual change to make it more difficult to use this phrase, or more difficult to advance critiques of fascist tendencies wherever they may appear.
This is evasion; in common use it's a noun not an adjective and refers to specific loosely knit movement, with a few organized groups in it. It's like a riotous far right group called itself patriots and said well if you're against them you must be country-hater.
Their real views and goals have little to do with any kind of "fascism" and is just violent leftism. And as much as i dislike fascism (actual, not whatever Teen Vogue doesn't like), I personally think Marxism is the worst ideology invented, so if eg rose city antifa was fighting some actually grotesque organization like aryan brotherhood, instead of whoever they usually fight, id grudgingly consider the latter to be a lesser evil.
> Being anti-antifascist just make you a fascist, or a fascist-adjacent supporter.
If a loose-knit ideology/movement called "Anti-Rapists" emerged that evolved into a cohort of various disconnected thugs who targeted homosexuals for violence, would being Anti-"Anti-Rapist" make you a supporter of rapists or rapist-adjacent supporter?
What has people who claimed to be antifacists done besides oppose facists? Because I have yet to see anybody except the the government and MAGA supporters claiming antifa has done anything else.
Obviously, in the scenario you describe, people will continue describe themselves as "anti-rapist" and everybody will understand that they mean that they are opposed to rape.
There is no "loose-knit ideology/movement" called "antifa" - there are groups like SDS and Don't Shoot PDX and a zillion others who describe themselves as "antifa", using it as an adjective. I'm aware of no person or organization who has attempted to proclaim that they are the one true antifa org.
But that's really the height of silliness. I can say that all people who describe themselves as 'anticapitalist' are actually capitalists, but that doesn't change anything about those people, the ideology in question, or the world.
Are some people who call themselves antifa secretly fascists? I'm sure they are. So?
Funny thing is that in my German neighborhood we have Antifa stickers pretty much on any other street lamp. Given the fascist tendencies all around it actually makes me feel safer...
> in my German neighborhood we have Antifa stickers pretty much on any other street lamp. Given the fascist tendencies all around it actually makes me feel safer
My Polish-German godmother asked me, as a kid, "who would you hide."
I didn't get the question. And 6-year old me wasn't ready for Holocaust with grandma. But it comes back to me from time to time.
Who would you hide. Who would you stake your wealth and life on to keep from undeserved suffering. The stickers are good. But they only mean something if you're willing to fight for them. At least in America, I'm unconvinced most sticker-toters are willing to sacrifice anything. (It's what makes Minnesota and Texas different.)
Ah yes, I too conflate bills written by organized lobbyists with a loosely affiliated group that says American shouldn't be ran by Nazi's. The Nazi's running America get very mad about that and ensure to flood the airwaves with how cities in the US are mile wide smoking craters due to people who don't like authoritarians.
The point GP was making, which holds as a general rule, is that simply adopting a moniker does not necessarily mean that it accurately describes you. Your argument pre-supposed that just because Antifa self-describes as antifascist, it inherently is, and that the CEO was expressing an opposition to the concept of antifascism, rather than simply expressing opposition to the specific group.
If Antifa’s record speaks for itself, then you don’t need to play these kinds of word games. If some CEO spoke unflatteringly of The Red Cross or Habitat For Humanity, that would say more about them than anything, not because they have virtuous sounding names (though they admittedly do) but because they’ve established a specific track record of public service.
I don't even know what antifa _is_ anymore, honestly. I only see it used as a boogie man by the right in discourse online.
But I _do_ know that when someone tags someone as "antifa" they are making a political statement and aligning themselves with a certain group that perceives "antifa" a certain way. "See, I hate those damn' antifa terrorists, I'm in the same camp as you! Please help my company make money!"
I've read your comment twice, and I can't make heads or tails of what you're trying to say.
> If some CEO spoke unflatteringly of The Red Cross or Habitat For Humanity,
Those are organizations. "Antifa" is a descriptive term that many people and organizations use, whether they have connections to one another or not. What is the comparison you are trying to draw here?
> If Antifa’s record speaks for itself, then you don’t need to play these kinds of word games.
You are using the possessive here, "Antifa's", in a way that seems grammatically incorrect to me.
"Antifa" is usually an adjective, but sometimes a known, like "vegan" or "blonde". Saying "if blonde's record speaks for itself", it seems like obviously broken English.
Usually you'd use this phraseology to describe a person or organization, "Joe's record", "Nabisco's record", etc.
What is the entity or entities whose record(s) you are trying to describe?
>Those are organizations. "Antifa" is a descriptive term that many people and organizations use, whether they have connections to one another or not. What is the comparison you are trying to draw here?
How's this different than say how "alt right" is pejoratively used by the left?
It's very much the same thing, there is no single unifying "Alt-Right" central headquarters, subscription fees amd newsletter, just as there is no specific Antifa organisation, just many people and a few groups that self identify as being against facism.
On the AltRight side people might point to, say, Steven Miller and his Nazi adjacent statements, or to Nick Fuentes and the Groypers, or to Andrew Anglin and The Daily Stormer for more trad. Nazi views.
To be honest I'm not entirely sure what the leading antifa groups in central north america might be.
In terms of the silliness / uselessness, you're right that they're similar - nobody compares "The alt-right" to the Red Cross, as if they had an office and an accountant on staff.
But plenty of people will say that they are traditional conservatives, and say "I'm not alt-right". Virtually nobody describes their own political views by saying "I'm not anti-fascist."
> The point GP was making, which holds as a general rule, is that simply adopting a moniker does not necessarily mean that it accurately describes you.
I'm deeply curious why you think someone would identify as an anti-fascist if they were not, in fact, anti-fascist. Do you think they just really like the flag logo or...?
> Approximately nobody is against "antifa" because they're fighting "fascists".
So, I will say that far right, comservatives and fascists are against anti-fascism of any kind. Whether it is the boogeyman antifa or anything else. And there are a lot of people like that. Including in goverment.
They do take issue with anyone who openly opposes fascism.
I know we're not supposed to talk about it, but what in the world is happening to this site? Mistaking 'Antifa' for 'the concept of opposing fascism' is not the kind of failure mode I expect here. And this kind of thing has become endemic lately- emotive noise and sarcastic dunks drowning out substance in every thread, especially since the beginning of December. Or am I just imagining this?
Fighting fascist is the primary way to oppose them. The fighting bit often requires violence. That's what it takes, because it involves fighting a group of people that are not a peaceful bunch and have very violent intentions.
Yes, exactly my point. And once you are picking targets and taking violent actions, you can no longer excuse your aim and your violence by saying your heart is in the right place. Antifa has, for many decades, done wrong actions with good intentions. You can oppose them without being fascist.
By physically opposing fascism, I assume you mean they are taking specific practical actions rather than becoming one with the platonic concept of opposition to fascism.
It may seem an obvious or insignificant point, but it is critical here. If they physically oppose fascism by following and filming ICE, I'm very much on board. If they oppose it by molotoving innocent local government buildings, I am against. If both of these actions are the concept of opposing fascism, what does it mean to be against that?
Antifa are belligerants. They undermine protests by having the maturity to die for a cause but not to live for one. One can be against that without being fascist.
Oh so Antifa is a single formal political party with card carrying members, a clear leadership structure and participation in mainstream public political life? I had no idea. Your analogy makes perfect sense. Where is the Antifa national headquarters?
Kinda funny, Noem claimed to have arrested the "Leader of Antifa" in Portland a few days ago [1]. Turned out it was just some guy who lived near I.C.E. HQ, who let nearby protesters use his bathroom and clean out mace from their eyes.
You don't even need to use examples that westerners find polarizing because they want to minimize or maximize their badness for political reasons.
Africa is full of factions with grand names doing less than grand things that nobody here has any attachmennt to and do not cause complexities when comparing to.
"Despite the name, The Party of Peace and Love is actually authoritarian and horribly repressive, as you can see from the millions of people they've killed."
"Despite the name, Antifa is not just 'anti-fascist' but is actually _________"
The blank is "the OTHER group". Like brown people, poor people, and (say it quickly so it doesn't get too noticed) women.
And anyone from the OTHER group is the enemy. Stop thinking, you have arrived to the conclusion. Now, here are some news ... I mean, entertainment, to make you fear them more.
__an identity claimed by people who are taking direct action against what they perceive as fascism, but currently more often the term is applied as an unthinking boogeyman by right wing authoritarians__
That's the intent but most people know it's not true. It's right up there with "woke" and "progressive" as generic, shapeless, boogeyman words. No real meaning besides "something bad".
Pretty sure most who claim the mantle of “Antifa” would welcome that Communist label, and plenty would endorse violence if it’s against the “right” people, so if the shoe fits…
They're kinda famous for punching people (physically) unprovoked at this point. There was a whole discourse around it that comes back up pretty regularly, I don't know how you could miss it.
You vote for my friends to be directly physically harmed, and you think it’s scary that some people respond to your violence with their own?
You’re not “better” because you vote for political violence, my man, though I get that brings up conflicting feelings for you.
It’s actually weird how often people try to pretend that their shitty actions (vis-a-vis making sure Grok can create CSAM, or that Facebook can more effectively give teenage girls depression) are morally neutral because they’re second order effects. You’re still a pretty shitty human being if you directly enable it, even if you’re not the sole cause. Some of y’all need to stop sniffing your own farts (or Elon’s/Thiel’s/etc.) and learn that.
The real question is where do you draw the line with these ideologies? I don't think anyone deserves violence just for thinking the wrong things, but we're currently seeing the result of when those thoughts inevitably turn into actions.
It doesn't seem like America ended up on the right side of the paradox of tolerance, so I'm curious how you think we could have avoided our current fascist leadership?
The air quotes around 'right' are interesting there. Yes, violence against Nazis and Fascists is acceptable. Do you disagree? I thought it was pretty much settled, we did a whole world war about it.
None of his views had anything to do with Naziism but failure to fall in line with all of the Left's current positions makes one "a Nazi" to them. And yes, much the same way as right-wing extremists like to paint all 'liberals' as "gun grabbing Marxists." The difference is you can find a lot more liberals who would happily glorify Marx than you can find Americans of any party who would glorify the Nazi regime or its acts.
In case it's unclear, I do not support Nazis either.
"A majority of individuals involved are anarchists, communists, and socialists, although some social democrats also participate in the antifa movement. The name antifa and the logo with two flags representing anarchism and communism are derived from the German antifa movement." [0]
It's wild what the perception is in the right echo chamber right now. I was talking with my brother, who I love, but who, through his practicing Christian faith is essentially pulled into this right-wing cultural environment and propaganda machine. So he was making the point that the politics in the US have drifted so much more to the left that the right is actually the center. My jaw dropped off the floor. How do these thing even get propagated? It's borderline ridiculous and I don't know how this firehouse of bullshit can ever be countered.
Right, but that makes it pretty much impossible to stop anyone from claiming to be antifa or anyone accusing someone of being antifa... a lot of people will accuse anyone who is doing anything they don't like as being antifa
I live in Portland. I've met many people that label themselves antifa. They're just protestors that are willing to be a little more aggro. That's literally it.
So when people talk about antifa as if it was the left wing equivalent of Osama Bin Laden's terror network, it's a self report they're forming their views based on strawman style propaganda, not engaging with the reality of it.
Theres no organisation but they are well organised in a distributed sense. Horizontally, theres lots of tradecraft and opsec details that get spread around to help people fight. Thing is, theres no central pillar you can break to stop that spread.
What gets me is how right wing protesters specifically eschew good opsec. "mask off rallys", visible tattoos etc. They love the police state and then look like idiots when that big police state they demanded rounds them up with absolute ease because they took selfies with their swastikas out during a protest.
eeeeeh comment requires some nuance tbh. I can think of enough examples. And there are rightish elements of a lot of movements that get slammed.
I think its more hubris than anything. Even right wing protesters who love the government have enemies that could hurt them. Opsec isnt conditional on the opposition being the government.
Is this the part where people list of left wing regimes and you sort them into "Actually did nothing wrong" and "They became right wing so it doesnt count"
That's a pretty weird and ultimately boring place to live.
> Antifa is commonly known as an ironically fascist organization that uses violence and intimidation to silence speakers — it's like how the "Democratic People's Republic of Korea" is not really democratic.
That's not "commonly known", that's the spin you'll get from the right-wing in the US who just happen to have heavy fascist tendencies.
I Googles that exact string and I can't say that I see even enough cases to count on one hand. Do you have any concrete examples that you think are representative for the behavior that you are referencing?
Googling “earth is flat” nets you thousands of results from very passionate people willing to share their experience and expertise. (I just did to verify)
Which SPECIFIC persons are being silenced and which SPECIFIC topics were they attempting to speak on?
It’s a huge diff between someone being ”silenced” for speaking their minds on bike paths versus being ”silenced” for indirectly or even directly promoting a new holocaust. And from your vague responses it is not clear.
A movement is better terminology than an organization, fair.
But okay - I'm confused what sources you would accept? There are "Antifa" groups on social media that literally advocate for doing this, I've seen it first-hand.
Ah yes, when the first result on Google is from a group known as a right wing think tank...
>American Enterprise Institute, a prominent center-right think tank in Washington, D.C., that promotes free enterprise, limited government, and individual liberty through research and policy advocacy in areas like economics, foreign policy, and social studies
I too can get paid think tanks to publish hundreds of reports on how communists are taking over America... Doesn't mean communists are actually taking over America.
Is there a general term for metastatic semantic overinclusivity?
Terrorist. Racist. Colonist. Fascist. Historically-rooted and precise terms that are collectively decohering in a self-amplifying and propagating way as everyone feels increasingly free to detach more and more words from their original meanings.
I think most people who are being described as racists, colonists, or fascists are racists, colonists, or fascists, but they're the same people who own the megaphone that tells you they're not. Can you bring specific examples?
you have seriously got to read and understand Eco's 14 tenets of Ur-Fascism [0] if you think that contemporary applications of the term "fascist" are inaccurate in describing what's happening right now in the US.
> if you think that contemporary applications of the term "fascist" are inaccurate in describing what's happening right now in the US
Didn't say that. I'm saying I've seen the term thrown around wildly to apply to all manner of things. Like the other terms.
The term is probably fundamentally fucked. If you asked Hitler if he's a Nazi, he'd say yes. If you asked Mussolini if he's a Fascist, he'd say yes. These were the words they used to describe themselves. The reason I'm describing the phenomenon versus blaming the folks using the terms broadly is because I don't think this is a personal failing by anyone as much as something that's linguistically happening.
There's also a pragmatic elephant in the room: By the time certain labels are perfectly and undeniably true to say, it's no longer safe for people to speak out and use them!
So our desire for word-correctness should be tempered by our desire for word-utility.
> that's a great way to side line people that are actually talking about real harms
Valid. This is a real linguistic process. But it absolutely debases the original term. I’m not convinced we have to choose between empathy, on one hand, and accuracy, on the other hand.
i think a great example to back your point is that the terminally online turn out in droves to apply the nazi label to all those not in favor of maximising immigration , rational discourse seems to have broken down and the resulting vacuum of meaning is filled by hyperbole as people scamble to feel heard in a world of weak voices & closed ears
Seems to me that "all those not in favor of maximising immigration" have largely turned out to be perfectly happy with revoking status from legal immigrants and using unnecessary violence to round people up. The line was always, "We're fine with legal immigrants," which turned out to be a lie, and "follow the law and you have nothing to worry about" which also turned out to be a lie.
How many of those people who got called Nazis are now fighting against the administration's lawless crackdown?
plenty of people get executed under regimes of parties both left and right , im referring to the idea at global scale not specific to any particular country
While I think the use of the term “terrorist” is unwarranted, I do think deflock is seeking political change. The decision to use flock is a government policy choice, right?
>> “I was stunned to learn late yesterday that after convening a task force of local and national experts, Mayor Johnston has been negotiating secretly with the discredited CEO of Flock Safety and signing another unilateral extension of this mass surveillance contract with no public process and no vote from the City Council or input from his own task force,” Councilmember Sarah Parady told The Denver Gazette.
There are tens of millions of people pirating software and media and blocking ads. There are not enough prisons to hold them all so the law is not enforceable at that scale.
Likewise there have always been and will always be effective non violent forms of resistance with sufficient systems of coordination and communication, because the public is always larger in number than the oppressors.
And yet, people do. Perhaps by slipping into some unsurveilled hidey hole, changing into a black hoodie, doing the crime, and running away before the police arrive
The fee for the first time you get caught without a plate on your registered vehicle is $10 (2nd is $20).
Trailer hitch balls do not "count" when considering whether a vehicle's plate is obstructed — I literally have one hung across my Camry, not technically obstructing the plate (but you can't see shit).
YMMV. Lasers might be a good offensive, but defense is more important.
Everything about his body language screams, "I'm doing something slimy and I know it, but here, listen to these words spoken authoritatively whilst I wave my hands around and forget about it."
"The media" in general, sure. They often still do. My point was just that one person not doing this in an intimidating 1:1 interview doesn't make that person spineless.
Their are documented cases of Flock cameras that can see into private residences. What if one of those cameras recorded an underage person? Would Flock be responsible for collecting and distributing CSAM?
We saw this with Twitter's child porn maker. When it was called out, did Elon turn it off? No he saw it was popular so he paywalled it. He got away with that, but he's only well connected in the US not in France so he didn't get away with it in France.
I wonder how he would feel about a competitor putting a flock-like camera outside his house so that anyone who wants to can learn whenever any car, perhaps his car, enters or leaves his home driveway.
Would he be happy with this, or would he become a "terrorist" by objecting?
I'm a deflock user - I'm a libertarian. These cameras are a huge privacy violation, its amazing how fast Flock has grown ubiquitous. There is a strong Fourth Amendment argument against Flock, they have a generous interpretation of the constitution that your car has no rights and neither does your license plate therefore you have no privacy while on the road.
I've also been on the receiving end of secret Federal subpoenas for private user information at a YC backed startup. They include gag orders and management does not question the orders - they simply comply. It happens more often than you think.
However you feel about the current administration, imagine this power in the hands of the other.
Flock isn't American in any sense of the word. We should work in our communities, through legal, procedural, and civil means to eliminate these terrible, terrible cameras. The cost is much worse than the benefits on offer.
I “like” how Overton window (??? I hope I use it right) shifted dramatically in USA.
- “law and order” is “good”, when _de facto_ most of constitution is not being applied for a year and laws or court orders are applied selectively. Not to say that “law and order” is vastly different depending on the size of your bank account;
- “terrorist” now is anything you don’t like, especially if it’s anti establishment. True freedom of speech is now apparently “violence” (and of course this dictatorial (adjacent) government would think that, as it’s biggest danger);
- “antifa” is apparently now a boogeyman, though I’d say he used it correctly as he is (apparently) fascist;
Also it is forced against people, how population can choose otherwise?
"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition...There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."
This statement essentially boils down to "The only right way to fight me is in an environment where I expect to win"
That's how you know the DeFlock strategy is effective. They aren't playing the game that the CEO wants to play, they are playing the actual game.
The actual game is minimizing the impact of cameras that are now everywhere.
Some individuals may take it upon themselves to vandalize the cameras, which can't be planned via conspiracy (that would be illegal), but those radical individuals can be "set up for success" through information.
This strategy of creating an environment where effective vandalism is easy, is also part of the actual game.
I'm honestly tired of all these knuckleheads. They've got a few bucks in their bank accounts and pretend that makes them smarter than everyone else. They're just gaming the system, nothing more, and they have every incentive to keep it alive.
He can shove his cameras deep in his ** as far as I'm concerned.
The "system" is not hapless or ignorant here. In fact, this company would not exist, if the "system" didn't have specific desires to effectively enslave the entire population.
Who wouldn't want to become a new age digital pharaoh? Wouldn't this be precisely the type of panopticon they would try to create?
"Thankfully, we live in a beautifully democratic and capitalistic society where we can fight in court."
Of course he's "thankful" for that, since in our "beautifully democratic and capitalistic" society, Flock can use their $658 million of VC funding [1] to wage lawfare against the have-nots with their armies of lobbyists and lawyers. [2]
It's pretty funny—the only think Deflock does is map out the locations of Flock cameras.
When Flock decides to track people's activities, they're "following the law" and "open to reasonable debate," but when people decide they want to track Flock's activities right back, that makes them terrorists.
It isn't even just about money. It's more apparent than ever that freedom, democracy, justice, human rights in this country are increasily reserved for those with the right political alignments.
Why not? They hold all the cards and have aligned one of the most powerful governments in the world with them, while wielding enough money to make almost any nation, let alone individual, more inclined toward doing what they need. They will only become more powerful.
In an authoritarian regime, it's all competition, no co-operation. Whoever the big dog is gets to say what happens, right up until a bunch of the little dogs drag him down and then fight each other to replace him. If he's lucky and skillful he'll have worked this out and kept the little dogs at each other's throats so they don't gang up on him.
The whole operation of government becomes about "who's the boss?" and the boss gets to run the government to favour himself and his cronies, acquiring more power and wealth.
Any pause to consider the ordinary folks caught up in this is a weakness, that will be taken advantage of by the other wannabe bosses.
It's not a utopia for any of them because of the constant paranoia and fighting. Try to rest on your laurels and enjoy the spoils of what you got for a second, and boom; you get thrown out of a window.
Nah, billionaires understand class solidarity (not intentionally, but coercively, because they have to to get where they are). They'll carve out fiefdoms where they don't step on each other but step on all us (for a tech example, see ISPs)
On the way up, yes. But once they're there, no. As soon as the only way of getting more power is to take over someone else's fiefdom, all that class solidarity disappears.
See the recent purges of the military leadership in China. Or Putin's cronies continually accidentally falling out of windows. It's not safe near the top.
Authoritarian regimes don’t run on facts. They run on the primacy of Authority. Cameras record factual information. Facts are inconvenient for Authority. You know, 1984 Department of Truth style.
Facts _are_ weapons for them though. If they have the video they can pick out the 12 seconds that looks like what they want, or if it's all bad just hide it.
You're talking about partial facts and misrepresentations at this point. You're also saying it yourself, facts aren't their primary concern, sure they can be convenient, anything can be made convenient if you're allowed to cherry pick. But the bigger problem is they also have no problems lying and making shit up. Not what I would call caring about facts.
I'm specifically saying that them having access to thousands of random cameras is to their benefit, and not because it will lead to accurate law enforcement.
Yes, they can take advantage of privacy violations, being able to misrepresent facts, and pointing to an infallible technology stack even though it is not.
You will need a lot of evidence to make such a counterintuitive claim, when surgically eliminating your enemies without bothering anyone else is such a logical strategy.
I don't think fascists are that smart, they will go after those that get in the way and those who they perceive as weak. They are bullies who are cowards and all that.
Yes, that if, the most powerful government stays intact. But as it turns out, tech CEOs want to dissolve the nation state and its government to implement their vision of a utopia. The same nation state, the same government that protect their interests and assets, and make lawfare possible in the first place.
I know about these plans, but even if they end up happening to their fullest extent, I don't see why people are so unanimously predicting that they'll definitely fumble the bag. By the time this can happen, they will almost certainly have the most advanced weaponry available and enormous groups of people working on defending them. Again, they can buy anything. In their dream world, power descends directly from them, making their governments obsolete. The direct power of the governments isn't just erased, it'll transition into their hands.
Tech CEOs are not statesmen, even if they consider themselves smart enough to govern. Nor are they warriors, and historically speaking, feudal lords were trained from early childhood in both the art of war and the art of governing. What I mean by that is that these people have no experience of governing, nor do they have any experience of violence and the horrors of war, i.e. they do not have the competence for being feudal lords, and network states or libertarian communes are essentially feudal-like arrangements. What will they do, if they are confronted with large nation-states such as China or Russia? What will they do when other small states don't respect the libertarian non-aggression principle? Will the Andreessens, Thiel and Zuckerbergs of this world be respected by the military, or will they shit their pants when
confronted with a military coup, or worse, the enemy's military?
I mildly disagree mostly because I can’t get hard evidence, but everything’s I’ve heard from faang workers is that they are basically run like nation states on a logistical level. Complete with their own forms of courts to handle interdepartmental disputes and PMCs that they like to keep very quiet about.
The US military is famously a logistics network that dabbles in shooting things, and companies like Amazon are already very very good at that.
When people feel they have nothing left to lose they will happily drag everyone else, especially those of means, down into the mud with them, even if it costs them their own life because they already think it is worthless.
Cards that only work because of the current system that they are hacking away at. Revolutions tend to eat their young, wannabe American oligarchs should check on how things turned out for the majority of post-soviet Russian oligarchs.
Nikolai Yezhov held all the cards under Stalin, right up until he got purged by Beria. Then Beria held all the cards until he was ousted and shot in turn. In a dog-eat-dog world, the top dog is the biggest target.
Cards can always be taken with violence. Chaos is progression to a state of all versus all, where the most important thing is having the biggest wrench: https://xkcd.com/538/.
And they will almost certainly have the biggest wrench. Before you consider the sheer difficulty of making mass violence happen (especially in a world where tech can be used to regulate a sufficient portion of people's worldviews as required), at some point they'll probably just have the upper hand militarily. As military tech gets better, wealth will be able to shift directly into physical power, amplifying their abilities against a comparatively powerless populace.
If you own everything, and you bomb the populace, you bomb your own stuff.
If everybody works for you, and you bomb the populace, you bomb your own serfs.
And those faceless individuals who are actually holding the weapons, and actually know how they work, and actually know, in a detailed, hands-on way, how to do coordinated violence with them? It turns out they're secretly members of the populace. You'd better make sure they think it's in their interest to keep using the weapons the way you want them to.
Yeah this is why the US fails everytime they try to keep "boots on the ground."
You can bomb people into oblivion but if you actually want to control them, most of the things that give superiority to a fixed group of rich are useless. Violence is still democratic if you're trying to get anything useful out of the people you seek to control. If you have 5 people and 3 of them are slaves with an AK-47 and a donkey, you have 0 slaves not 5 slaves.
Obviously the rich/powerful can't stay that way in a glass desert with no plebs to do their bidding, at least for now, so most of the technology the government and rich have are useless for subjecting a hostile populace.
> And they will almost certainly have the biggest wrench
Tech CEOs can easily outlive their usefulness once the machinery is built, and can easily find themselves labeled "terrorists" if they try to fight back with whatever feeble power they have.
Political factions, purges and patronage is what comes next, amd despite their inflated egos, they won't be the patrons.
> Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov (Russian: Николай Иванович Ежов, IPA: [nʲɪkɐˈlaj ɪˈvanəvʲɪtɕ (j)ɪˈʐof]; 1 May 1895 – 4 February 1940), also spelt Ezhov, was a Soviet secret police official under Joseph Stalin who was head of the NKVD from 1936 to 1938, at the height of the Great Purge. Yezhov organized mass arrests, torture, and executions during the Great Purge, but he fell out of favour with Stalin and was arrested, subsequently admitting in a confession to a range of anti-Soviet activity including "unfounded arrests" during the Purge. He was executed in 1940 along with others who were blamed for the Purge.
This guy was head of the secret police, didn’t help him out when he was purged aka murdered.
..That said, what you're saying could be true. I think the truth is that we don't know, and I'm pretty sure we would've felt the same way about the people in the above pictures.
Money and power don’t usually make you smarter, in fact they usually make you dumber. You can have every anti social belief and the intentions of the antichrist, but if you’re smart and run your system well everyone will still benefit.
Yes the rich have "all the cards" but the thing about societal reorganization is things get completely flip-flopped and the fact society recognizes you as owning a mansion and a screw factory today doesn't mean that they won't recognize Castro's lieutenant as controlling it tomorrow.
Possessions that are "yours" are only yours insofar as you can either defend it or others recognize it as yours. Thus you end up with situations like "Barbeque" in Haiti owning the streets and much of the rich's land/assets are now magically in the hands of barbeque or his crew and whatever money that one thought they could use to resist that turned out to not be their money anymore. The "rich" thus still hold all the cards but who is rich and who isn't isn't the same as when it started.
Which also tends to lean on a political set. But poor people will be deprived of their liberties be them left or right. For those useful to power it will take just a little bit longer to notice.
Same as it's ever been. When the founders of this country cried about freedom, they meant for themselves to not pay taxes that would cover their debts, not freedom for their slaves or lower-class Americans. After all if you are at the top, then you are literally free to do as you wish
Apple has more cash reserves on hand than most countries do and yet its CEO had to scramble to stand behind Trump during the inauguration and offer a million-dollar tribute to stay in his good graces. Power > money.
He didn't have to do a single damn thing. He did the cost-benefit analysis and chose to cozy up to a corrupt administration.
Given how much the typical Apple consumer skews left and has extreme brand loyalty, if Apple got tariffed simply because Tim failed to bow down, Apple would be in a stronger position to fight it than any other tech company. They could have stood up, but chose not to.
I think your forgetting that governments can just shut a company down, or even worse completely take it over and nationalise it. At the end of the day sovereigns rule over all else. Money means nothing when a gun is pointed at your head.
The rich are increasingly uninterested in keeping up appearances.
And really, why should they? We've learned now that there was actually a worldwide network of child rapists purchasing girls from other wealthy child traffickers in positions of power in seemingly every Western nation, and the consensus thus far is to do exactly nothing about it.
Has anyone filed a CCPA-related lawsuit against Flock for retention and sharing of this data? How about a civil action for stalking? I assume it will just take one creative individual to find the right tort and then Flock will be buried under lawsuits.
Too many people are focused on the criminal aspects of this (4th amendment) and government surveillance. The fact that this is a corporation may give you more options.
Moments later (~1:13) he also said "we aren't forcing Flock on anyone"
False, he is forcing Flock on EVERYONE
No one has permitted themselves to be surveilled. And no, under the radar agreements with local cops and govts do NOT constitute my permission to be surveilled. If they want to go in with fully informed referendums in each community, then I'd accept it. But that is not Flock's business model.
> If they want to go in with fully informed referendums in each community, then I'd accept it.
I might accept it for this specific case. But, in general, just because the majority wants to do something doesn't mean it's legitimate to force everyone to accept it.
> But, in general, just because the majority wants to do something doesn't mean it's legitimate to force everyone to accept it.
I mean, isn't that the literal definition of democracy? I tend to agree that "tyranny of the majority" can have some pretty bad outcomes, but that is what a democracy ultimately boils down to, is it not?
> No one has permitted themselves to be surveilled
As much as I dislike Flock, this is bad logic. There's no such thing as opting out of surveillance in public spaces. Public spaces are defined by being public, in that everyone (even governments/corporations!) is free to observe everyone else in that same setting.
So in reality, everyone has permitted themselves to be surveilled, purely through the act of being in public.
This idea that there's some kind of difference between me watching you in public and Flock watching you in public is, quite frankly, bogus.
I can't imagine that the authors of the Constitution predicted always on, AI enabled facial and license plate recognition on every street corner in America.
If this is what they thought was possible, why write the 4th Amendment?
Unreasonable search and overbearing government was one of the key issues of the American Revolution.
> I can't imagine that the authors of the Constitution predicted always on, AI enabled facial and license plate recognition on every street corner in America.
They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety - Ben Frank
I know this is supposed to be some kind of "gotcha", but I'm legitimately curious: what essential liberty is someone giving up being surveilled in public?
public surveillance cameras erode personal privacy because there were no cameras with ID and tracking before. Widespread camera networks with tracking, ID and record keeping in a networked environment that is accessed by many varied agencies (e.g. federal immigration related) constitute new government surveillance. The US Constitution's Fourth Amendment provides explicit protection against unwarranted searches and seizures. Socially, constant monitoring creates a chilling effect on free behavior in public spaces, undermining individual liberty. For example, three teenagers dress oddly on Saturday night in association with a music culture. Authority officers show up with weapons, bright lights and harsh questions? That happens more than once. Is that "chilling" ?
Mission creep and abuse are major concerns. Examples are documented where systems introduced for limited purposes — like traffic enforcement or terrorism prevention — expand into broader, unchecked surveillance by multiple agencies, commercially and maybe gray or black markets, too. Imagine cameras initially deployed in work zones may later be used citywide, enabling mass tracking of individuals without probable cause.
Lack of oversight and due process further fuels opposition. Automated systems, such as those issuing speeding tickets without human review, deny individuals fair recourse. The absence of judicial warrants and transparency in deployment is seen as enabling government overreach and hidden revenue generation, disproportionately impacting low-income communities. Long-term record keeping may contain errors, omissions and misjudgements that remain uncorrected.
Financial and civil costs are real. Surveillance systems are expensive, yet studies show limited effectiveness in actually preventing crime or terrorism. Civil libertarians argue that resources should instead support community-based safety solutions that respect constitutional freedoms.
Ultimately, strict legal limits or outright bans on public video surveillance are in effect right now in many places, and those cases can be discussed among an informed voting public.
There's a ton of difference between a random person noting my presence at a single point in space-time and a commercial entity tracking and storing my movements all the time.
Being okay with people watching me in public does not imply being okay with someone aggregating the information about my whereabouts 24/7 even though it's "the same" information.
Btw it's a fallacy similar to the one debunked in "what colour are your bits". The context matters, not just the abstract information.
This is an unfortunate thing about a whole lot of legal precedent in the US.
Courts made a pretty reasonable set of tradeoffs around the 4th amendment for search warrant vs. subpoena, police officers observing you, etc.
During the 19th century.
Unfortunately, modern data processing completely undermines a lot of the rationale about how reasonable and intrusive various things are. Before, cops couldn't follow and surveil everyone; blanket subpoenas to get millions of peoples' information weren't possible because the information wasn't concentrated in one entity's hands and compliance would have been impossible; etc.
> This idea that there's some kind of difference between me watching you in public and Flock watching you in public is bogus
Okay: Just how long would you permit someone to follow you around with a camera, recording everything you do?
The thing about a stranger watching you in public is that eventually you go somewhere else, and they can't watch you anymore. A surveillance organization like Flock, however, is waiting for you wherever you go. In this sense they're much more like a stalker following you around than a stranger who happens to see you.
This analogy bears out in practice: Cops have used Flock data to stalk their exes.¹
> Okay: Just how long would you permit someone to follow you around with a camera, recording everything you do?
Probably not long. I might also make it clear I'm not a fan, but at the end of the day, they're generally within their rights to record me in public. Sucks, but not much I can do.
> The thing about a stranger watching you in public is that eventually you go somewhere else, and they can't watch you anymore. A surveillance organization like Flock, however, is waiting for you wherever you go. In this sense they're much more like a stalker following you around than a stranger who happens to see you.
I mean, I don't buy this argument, because a stranger can legally follow me to all the same places where Flock is present. I mean, surely if I get into a car and drive away, they can get into a car and follow me. So long as we're both in public roads, they're within their rights to do so?
Granted, if they keep it up long enough, I can probably file charges for stalking. Perhaps the same can be done against Flock? Hell, this would even be a situation where Flock would be useful: proving that someone was following me around all day, thus supporting my bid for a restraining order or something.
> This analogy bears out in practice: Cops have used Flock data to stalk their exes.¹
Indeed, and this is where oversight, strict rules around usage and retention, and effective penalties for violations are needed.
Banning Flock is not the only solution! I mean, I would be in favor of banning Flock specifically (because they've demonstrated a willingness to act in bad faith), but I would not support a ban of ALPRs entirely. They do provide benefits, and coupled with the right rules, can be a net benefit to society.
> Probably not long. I might also make it clear I'm not a fan, but at the end of the day, they're generally within their rights to record me in public. Sucks, but not much I can do.
You should not test this. If you record someone for hours or days in public, you may find yourself with a restraining order, a ticket for stalking (or assault), or a civil suit for invasion of privacy or IIED or something similar. This depends on the jurisdiction and the person you are recording, but what you are citing about not having an expectation of privacy is mostly meant with regards to point-in-time instances (one photo), not ongoing continuous surveillance.
Yes, the only distinction between any and all of these things and a legal recording is the length of time and the invasiveness of the collection of data. No, there is no bright line where you are definitely guilty or definitely safe (few things in law have one).
As the owner of a moral person (a company), I disagree.
There are even weirder stuff than companies being considered a "moral person". For example if a person speeds way too much in France (say more than 50 kilometers/hour above the speed limit on the highway, e.g. 180 km/h // 111 mph instead of the 130 km/h // 80 mph)... Well then that person gets arrested. And his driving license is confiscated on the spot. But here's the absolute crazy thing: even if the car belong to someone else, to a company, to a rental company... Doesn't matter: the French state consider that the car itself was complicit in the act. So the car is seized too (for 8 days if it doesn't belong to the person who was driving it and potentially much more if it does belong to the person driving it).
Companies are persons and cars (I'm not even talking about self-driving cars) have rights and obligations. That's the world we live in.
"Company" is a generic collective noun. "Corporation" is the legal term directly referencing a constructed singular entity with a corpus/body to be treated like a natural person.
I don't understand this argument. How is Flock "collaborating" by selling their product? Sure they're happy their product is selling. How does that imply collaboration?
I mean, you're welcome to buy an Apple Vision Pro, but you making poor decisions with your money doesn't make Apple responsible for that.
> This idea that there's some kind of difference between me watching you in public and Flock watching you in public is, quite frankly, bogus.
If you followed me around all day taking photographs of my every move for no other reason than you felt like it, I would very likely have recourse via stalking and harassment laws.
There is no difference to me that some company does it via technology.
If I'm interesting enough to get a warrant for surveillance of my activities - fair game. Private investigators operate under a set of reasonable limits and must be licensed in most (all?) states for this reason as well.
It's quite obvious laws have simply not caught up with the state of modern technology that allows for the type of data collection and thus mass-surveillance that is now possible today. If you went back 50 years ago and asked anyone on the street if it was okay that every time they left the house their travel history would be recorded indefinitely they would talk to you about communist dystopias that could never happen here due to the 2nd amendment.
>There is no difference to me that some company does it via technology.
There is a difference, the company is doing it to everyone, technology enables new things to happen and laws don't cover it. Before it was impractical for police to assign everyone a personal stalker but tech has made it practical.
By default if something is new enough it has a pretty good chance of being legal because the law hasn't caught up or considered it in advance.
But Flock doesn't "follow you around"? It's fixed location cameras. If you avoid the locations, you avoid the cameras, and thus the tracking.
> There is no difference to me that some company does it via technology.
I feel like it's telling that no one has yet taken this logic to court. I think that means that while there may be no difference to you there is a difference according to the law. This gets at your later point.
Speaking of:
> If you went back 50 years ago and asked anyone on the street if it was okay that every time they left the house their travel history would be recorded indefinitely they would talk to you about communist dystopias that could never happen here due to the 2nd amendment.
I think you're doing a subtle motte-and-bailey here. As far as I'm aware, Flock has strict retention policies, numbering in the low single-digit months (Google says 30 days "by default"). There is no "recorded indefinitely" here, which significantly changes the characteristics of the argument here. This is roughly on par with CCTV systems, to the best of my knowledge.
I don't disagree that laws haven't caught up yet, but I also think a lot of the arguments against Flock are rife with hyperbolic arguments like this that do meaningfully misrepresent their model. I think this leads to bad solutioning, as a consequence.
I'd much rather have good solutions here than bad ones, because ALPRs and other "surveillance technologies" do drive improvements in crime clearance rates/outcomes, so they shouldn't be banned--just better controlled/audited/overseen
But Flock DOES follow you around, in the sense that you can't really escape being observed by a series of ALPRs on a highway network.
Read some cases of who's suffering now. Cops (or ICE) can choose a passing vehicle to run a ALPR search on, finding out what states it just passed through. When they consider it "suspicious", said driver gets stopped, searched, and even detained.
Look at how ALPR is being used and whose rights are being violated as a result. Hint: it's not criminals.
If you're only reading the stories of the false positives or the abuses of power, you're making your judgements on only a fraction of the available information.
I think the suffering/abuse is able to be reasonably controlled through increased/better oversight, more publicly available information, and more strict regulations around the use of the data produced by these devices.
I also think they're able to impart a whole lot of good on their communities. If they contribute to an increase in the number of arrests and convictions for crimes, that might end up being a net good.
I think starting from the assumption that they are net bad, and then telling me I should only look at the negatives is an uncompelling argument.
I need not look further than the testimony of people who used to commit crimes in areas with increased surveillance (i.e., San Francisco), and I see a compelling argument for their upsides. Now I have to weigh the positives and negatives against each other, and it stops being the clear-cut argument you're disingenuously presenting it as.
> If you're only reading the stories of the false positives or the abuses of power, you're making your judgements on only a fraction of the available information.
If you're only reading the stories of the homosexual people in Germany in the 1940s, you're making your judgements on only a fraction of the available information.
> But Flock doesn't "follow you around"? It's fixed location cameras.
This is a really silly thing to say. It’s the “stop hitting yourself” of surveillance bullshit. Come on. Calling them “fixed cameras” so you can ignore the intent in the original comment is middle school shit.
What if I run my own cameras, my own local models, and my own analysis? All from the privacy of my own home... Is that okay?
What if I recruit a few friends around my town to do the same, and we share data and findings? Is that also fine?
What if I pay a bunch of people I don't know to collect this data for me, but do all the analysis myself?
Where do you draw the line? Being able to concretely define a line here is something I've seen privacy proponents be utterly incapable of doing. Yet it's important to do so, because on one end of the spectrum is a set of protected liberties, and on the other is authoritarian dystopia. If you can't define some point at which freedom stops being freedom, you leave the door wide open to the kind of bullshit arguments we see any time "privacy in public" comes up: 100% feels, and 0% logic.
Because it seems clear to me that if an individual was to surveil and build up a dossier on any random stranger as much as an entity like Facebook or Google does that this would be considered stalking.
I've never been able to quite figure out why incorporating and doing it to basically everyone some how makes it legal. I think the secret ingredient is money but I'm not exactly sure how that works.
> This idea that there's some kind of difference between me watching you from a park bench in public and hundreds of thousands of clones of me watching you from every street corner in public is, quite frankly, bogus
To paraphrase the quote, quantity has a quality of its own.
>This idea that there's some kind of difference between me watching you in public and Flock watching you in public is, quite frankly, bogus.
The idea that me an individual observing you, and a large, well funded company allied with the US government observing you has no difference, quite frankly, leads me to conclude* you are arguing in bad faith.
You can make an ideological argument that is the case, but not one based on fact and reality.
> The idea that me an individual observing you, and a large, well funded company allied with the US government observing you has no difference, quite frankly, leads me to conclude* you are arguing in bad faith.
I mean, in both cases, I'm being observed in public, with unknown intent. Until that observation becomes action of some kind, there is no difference to me.
That tells me it's the concrete result of the surveillance that makes the difference, not whether or not it's an individual or a government doing the surveillance.
As far as I can tell, if no one searches for my vehicle in Flock's database within 30 days of being observed, whether or not Flock observed me becomes moot. For the vast majority of individuals observed by Flock, there will not exist any permanent record of their movements.
Now, all that is assuming they're above board with their retention policies, which they may well not be! I trust them about as far as I can throw them, but I haven't seen any evidence that they're lying about their retention practices, or that they're engaging in "dragnet-style" surveillance. I'm optimistic that any lawfare they engage in will out any bad behavior in that regard, thanks to discovery.
This does pose an interesting question: is an individual with perfect memory, who regularly sees you in public and who could recall every detail of every time they've ever seen you, better or worse than Flock, which "forgets" you after 30 days?
they could instead be limiting flock to private places.
> This idea that there's some kind of difference between me watching you in public and Flock watching you in public is, quite frankly, bogus.
if you followed me everywhere and took pictures of me everywhwre i went outside from my door in the morning to my door in the evening, id want to get a restraining order on you as a stalker. this is stalking
The idea that a single CCTV feed is at all comparable to aggregatable Flock data is a deeply unserious position. I’m not clear why you think you can pretend that single cameras and a network of cameras are either similar or comparable, in this context? Or why traffic cameras aren’t essentially identical, if they’re used identically?
I’d like to give the benefit of the doubt, but it feels very sea-liony and intentionally disingenuous.
I'm not positing the idea that a single CCTV feed is the same? Most places that run CCTVs run many, so there's already some element of scale. I mean, I literally said "traffic cameras", which are ubiquitous and often elements of sets numbering in the hundreds or even thousands, depending on the size of the jurisdiction.
If you can't refrain from immediately strawmanning the argument, I would argue that you are the one with the "deeply unserious position".
In the 1300s you could be broke but if you had the blue blood you still had power.
People today can become wealthy, and wealthy people can lose wealth, much much easily than nobility was created or revoked under feudalism.
There's objectively more social mobility. That's an improvement. Don't confuse "it's an improvement" with "it's an acceptable and desirable end state".
I still argue that our current capitalist system is nothing more than an extension of the Norman system. Only capitalist executives see even less of the humanity of their ‘customers’ and the damage from their policies/maximal extraction than medieval lords saw in the serfs of the village that their policies/maximal extraction impacted.
"Thankfully, we live in a beautifully democratic and capitalistic society where we can fight in court [(...) where we can bankrupt the opposition even if we can't win the case.]"
Does anyone have a template for a network audit that one could request of a local police department that would disclose access logs for Flock Safety data?
A lot of jurisdictions actually require the data to be public! For example, ctrl-f "download csv" on this page for central LA PD: https://transparency.flocksafety.com/central-la-pd- . Not all jurisdictions require this, but if you can guess the URLs (https://transparency.flocksafety.com/<DEPARTMENT ID>) you can find quite a few, or just Google "YOUR PD flock safety portal". (EDIT: You'll want to regularly download these if you're trying to build a comprehensive record. The PDs I've been monitoring are only required to keep data for 30 days, so the CSVs are just a rolling window cut off at EXACTLY today minus 30 days.)
They are building a surveillance state, LOL. The AI, Datacenters, the flock cameras, slow social media ban, the private police, etc. West, especially USA is slowly getting the taste of their own medicine.
This guy gives all villain vibes you see in futuristic movies, funny how he resembles a young version of “Fletcher” in minority report movie, a movie about mass surveillance to provide a “safer community” to all.
Flock btw isn’t just an ALPR, it is a car finger printing technology, I have seen some videos of police IDing cars with no plates and they knew the owner by using flock cams.
These clean-shaven wide-eyed SV types give me the uncanny valley heebie-jeebies. Everything, from their tone of voice, to their appearance, to (most importantly) the way they phrase things... there's an almost AI-generated quality.
The thing is the billionaires are terrified of US. The point of these surveillance systems isn't to make us safer. Because we're actually pretty safe already. We're not going to be assassinated, kidnapped, or beaten because we pissed someone off.
It's to make people like Garrett Langley feel protected from us.
> The thing is the billionaires are terrified of US.
Are they though? The odds of any kind of coordinated response that could seriously threaten the billionaires seem next-to-none. Flock seems to be a lot more offensive than defensive - it enables the targeting and mass surveillance in order to find and punish the 'right people', as well as mass tracking to create yet another datapoint to understand the way people move, think and coordinate. The defensive side is already covered through internet services, like social media. They don't have much to fear. I reckon that a powerful/rich enough person could kill a stranger on the street in plain view of a huge crowd and have absolutely nothing happen to them.
No he didn't. Luigi turned out to be an anomaly. He proved the public didn't have the stomach for revolution because none was forthcoming. He was reduced to a meme and thrown in prison.
He allegedly murdered a CEO — regardless whether it was him or not, a bloodthirsty CEO was murdered by a random member of the public. Other bloodthirsty CEOs no longer feel safe from the public.
Friend of mine used to work for a single digit billionaire. No one you know. His name barely comes up in a search. He said he found out after a few years that the guy had been kidnapped and held for ransom.
Dehumanizing other people as terrorists without applying the scholar definition in order to defame them should be called terrorism. Oh wait, defamation is already a thing. Let's just call it that, and it may end up being libel/slander, but the bar seems to be pretty high for that in USA and Europe as well.
Anyone aware of people doing something like over here in Europe? And how legal/illegal it might be? I'm talking about putting government-operated security cameras on a map, for the general public to be aware of their locations.
The TV series Person of Interest [1] becomes more on point as years go by, even though by now it has been 15 years since its S1. One of the scenes [2] from that series where "terrorist" are shown as being in control over ghoulish CEOs like the one from this posted video.
Genuinely hilarious that this is banned off the front page. A YC alum is calling people who publish data terrorists and the fascism apologist bros are like "this site isn't for politics"
These wretched wastes of skin that contribute to the surveillance system need to have the full brunt of that same surveillance apparatus turned toward them full time, published for all to see. This should include elected officials that voted for and paid for these systems as well. You don't want a system that allows more anonymous movement? You want that data collected and stored and collated and analyzed without end? Ok, pull down your pants and have yourselves offered up as the first and most prominent ones to be tracked and then see if you change your tune.
Good luck trying to subject them to the same level of scrutiny. They live in places with high walls and armed guards, a lot of them don't even drive themselves if they drive at all. Even when using helicopters or planes their private ownership means a lower level of scrutiny. "The plane" was a big part of how Epstein was able to do what he did. Obviously, these types never step foot on public transit.
Even if hypothetically speaking you could support volunteers to follow them around and film them, I would think the asymmetry of resources would practically make it impossible. It's not about privacy, it's about wealth. Take their wealth away and then they'll actually have to live the way they tell you to. They don't care because they don't live in the world they are creating, you do.
Seems like “terrorists” = citizens standing up for their rights. We aren’t past the point of no return but we are rapidly approaching it. What will it be Americans? Liberty or death?
This is a social problem. So long as people want to see Orwellian enforcement on their preferred petty issues (examples abound on HN and elsewhere) this type of activity will ping pong around enforcement subjects likely only growing and ratcheting tighter. Until people get so sick of it on the 11/12 issues they don't like, they're willing to give up the dream of Orwellian enforcement on the thing they do care about.
Our city council voted 5-0 to install more. A unanimous vote which includes democrats who ran on disrupting a council that had the same members for decades.
What's Flock? What's Deflock? Why should I care? There's absolutely no context but just another smug American with that same accent as all the other smug American dickhead CEOs speaking in that exact American CEO way they all do (is there like a school or something they all go to?).
It was originally shortened in German from ”Antifaschistische Aktion” and ”Außerparlamentarische Opposition”. Then that carried over to other languages as a common name. Feel free to go back to the roots! ;)
disregarding the history of the term, you see that even posters on Hacker News Dot Com dispute the accuracy of the term "fascism" as applied to contemporary american politics, so what difference would it make? people who are okay with fascistic politics will not distinguish opposition with a name change.
I swear, every fascist has the same playbook. They use the same phrases, same accusations, same lies, sometimes even same wordings. It is like they have a single hive mind - for which everyone else is the enemy and is subject to destruction or enslaving.
The Epstein files are revealing a web of surprising connections. Epstein's network knew about 9/11 and made stock trades beforehand. He was personally involved in some UK corruption to lower taxes on bank executives.
I didn't even know about flock, and I still don't quite understand what it is, other than that they seem to want everyone being spied upon every second of their lives they're outside the hose, or something. For our protection / against crime / terrorism / pedophiles / communists / zombies or whatever. Usually it's governments and their law enforcement arms that push for that, but in the US private enterprise is king so I guess in this domain as well?
Anyway, assuming I've gotten the gist of it - I support De-flocking and de-surveillance'ing and will be happily to carry the label of an antifa terrorist all day long :-)
If i were the kind of person to say "i told you so" (and i am), i would point out that people have been screaming since like 1994 that the term "terrorist" is a tool of the state to punish anyone they find inconvenient.
Unfortunately for me i was born in 1991 and so i wasn't actually screaming in 1994 or 1998 or 2001 or 2003 but god damnit EVERYONE just decided "ah, typical left wing cranks" and said fuck it, let's let the president do whatever he wants, it's fine?
Obama executed a US citizen without trial on allegations of terrorism. I was absolutely screaming then.
That figure is straight from Flok's own press release. There were deep deep methological flaws in the calculation of that figure.
https://archive.is/7iNyQ - this is an excellent piece breaking down the many many flaws in that figure and quotes the 2 academics involved who later said highlighted the issues.
->"“This 'study' rings a cacophony of alarm bells: the closer you look at it, the more it looks like a marketing scheme than data science,” Dave Maass, director of investigations at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told me. “Nobody should be repeating the claims until the data can be verified and the conclusions replicated by independent data scientists without a direct tie to the company that stands to benefit."
That's a claim Flock makes. They poison their own well a bit when they then also claim that Deflock are terrorists. One might point out that one claim was made off the cuff while the other is has a white paper detailing why they're making this claim but said white paper has a number of it's own issues. See, unless perhaps you think they're a terrorist news organization: https://www.404media.co/researcher-who-oversaw-flock-surveil... which quotes one of the consulting academic researchers as saying:
>The researcher, Johnny Nhan of Texas Christian University, said that he has pivoted future research on Flock because he found “the information that is collected by the police departments are too varied and incomplete for us to do any type of meaningful statistical analysis on them.”
Well then... let's eliminate any due process and fourth amendment protections, maybe requiring something sensible like "officer suspicion", or maybe just a program of "random" searches.. you know keep everybody on their toes. I also bet that real crimes (whatever that means) goes down...
Just because something works doesn't make it right. Personally, giving up what the law is suppose to protect (individual rights) in the name of the law is something I can only see as a fool's bargain.
has anything ever good come out of silicon valley or the wall street? one greedy capitalist after another and you wonder why the world has turn to a shithole! the inequality between the rich and the poor is reaching the level of ambani vs. mumbai slums.
https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/privacy/2026/02/flock-came... > A separate “statewide lookup” feature had also been active on 29 of the city’s 30 cameras since the initial installation, running for 17 straight months until Mountain View found and disabled it on January 5. Through that tool, more than 250 agencies that had never signed any data agreement with Mountain View ran an estimated 600,000 searches over a single year, according to local paper the Mountain View Voice, which first uncovered the issue after filing a public records request.
A different town (Staunton, VA) also turned of their Flock installs after their CEO sent out an email claming:
https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/flock-ceo-goes-... > The attacks aren't new. You've been dealing with this for forever, and we've been dealing with this since our founding, from the same activist groups who want to defund the police, weaken public safety, and normalize lawlessness. Now, they're producing YouTube videos with misleading headlines.
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