Or their app was configured to let other LE agencies access it without their knowledge in violation of state law (1). Only linked one case but afaik it happened in a number of CA cities.
> Last May, 404 Media obtained data revealing the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office conducted a nationwide search of more than 83,000 Flock ALPR cameras, giving the reason in the search log: “had an abortion, search for female.” Both the Sheriff's Office and Flock Safety have attempted to downplay the search as akin to a search for a missing person, claiming deputies were only looking for the woman to “check on her welfare” and that officers found a large amount of blood at the scene – a claim now contradicted by the responding investigator’s affidavit. Flock Safety went so far as to assert that journalists and advocates covering the story intentionally misrepresented the facts, describing it as "misreporting" and "clickbait-driven."
> Earlier this month, there was purposefully misleading reporting that a Texas police officer with the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office used LPR “to target people seeking reproductive healthcare.” This organization is actively perpetuating narratives that have been proven false, even after the record has been corrected. According to the Sheriff in Johnson County himself, this claim is unequivocally false. That sheriff has since been arrested and indicted on felony counts in an unrelated sexual harassment and whistleblower retaliation case. He has also been charged with aggravated perjury for allegedly lying to a grand jury. EFF filed public records requests with Johnson County to obtain a more definitive account of events.
There's no such thing as legal ownership of data. There's IP rights, contracts and innumerable data regulation laws, but not actual ownership. "Ownership" here just provides a vague cover that sounds like something definite but is not.
yep it's pretty easy to scan a frame and store the info as "blue car 17:25:36 20260805 WXC7868" and toss the video info if all you want is civilian tracking.
My point is theres no way theybregain the video as anything other than cost of holding terabytes.
Of course they save the analysis and only thinkpeople care about the video. The journalists and police speak the same language of uncritical privacy violations.
Lesbians too [0]. And people who don’t make much money [1]. And people who aren’t Asian [2]. And athletes, and people who like sports [3].
Applying group statistics to judge individual people is almost never proper, and lies at the root of an awful lot of inhumanity. I hope and imagine the women in question are capable of thinking (and judging) for themselves.
> A 2010 CDC survey compared domestic violence victimization rates between lesbian, bisexual, and heterosexual women. The differences between most forms of reported domestic violence rates between lesbian women and heterosexual women were found to be non-significant due to insufficient statistical power.
We aren't judging individuals here, we're talking about trends and probabilies. I know a couple cops that are fine, and pretty sure aren't abusing their spouses, but that doesn't invalidate the statistics that they have more instances of abuse at a much higher rate in marriages/partnerships than the masses taken as a whole
exactly, and while correlation does not imply causation or something of the sorts lol.to add to the fire, the SOLE cop i know is an abusive alcoholic...
I'm going to assume that commenter is referring to 'black crime rates' claiming that they make up 13% of the population while claiming that 85% of crime or some segment like violent crime is committed by them.
People who use the threat of violence and actual violence to control people at work being more likely to do so at home to their own family seems self-evident to me.
Not making any moral judgements, if I used violence professionally I’d expect myself to be more violent in general.
> Flock Safety acknowledged the issue in March, stating some California agencies “had their camera networks inadvertently accessible to out-of-state law enforcement agencies for a period of time,” according to a company statement. The company said it was “impossible to determine a specific cause” for the data breach.
Flock has been known to lie and there isn't any reason to believe they are telling the truth. Why would they? There isn't some duty for them to tell the truth in an article.
Trying to parse what that sentence means is useless. It isnt designed to mean anything. Their various mouth pieces have claimed every manner of excuse.
Semantic games are for everyone else to play and lose. Corporations always win.
> I assume this means that the police department deletes one local copy?
Ben Jordan got ahold of one of them and proved that they even had footage from the f'n factory they were made in! Flock is lying to cities and/or cities are lying to us
No, Flock plays a semantic game where data on Flock's servers os "owned" by the client, so Flock is not responsible for the content or management of the data.
I'm not familiar with North Dakota in particular, but at the federal level and in some states ALL works created by the government are exempt from copyright. The public paid for it, so the public owns it.
I don't see how that relates to any of this. If I record a video of a crowd in public, under US law I have copyright to that video. The crowd isn't creating the record, I am.
The issue of which group (Flock/police/city) has the real copyright versus an expensive license is interesting to contemplate, but that list doesn't include monkey-agency either.
I’m sure flock’s agreement with the Winona Police Department makes clear that they are only purchasing a license to use these cameras, so in fact the department’s cameras have not been stolen at all, they’ve merely been prevented from enjoying licensed use.
Because it’s a matter of public record. Thousands of executed contracts between flock safety and its customers are public. Here’s one which makes clear that flock retains ownership and is actually entering into a hybrid hardware lease and concurrent services agreement.
Humm, it's not particularly confusing to me. I guess i just dont get it. When I rent an apartment or car, I still refer to it as mine without conflating the two.
It's a news aggregator for tech and related news and discussion. I wouldn't want a highly politicized filtering of everything incoming, so you have to take the good with the bad (in your opinion)
The official YCombinator stance is that Flock was a huge success as an investment - which it seemingly was, given that they managed to sign deals with what seems like every tiny municipality/sheriff/government organization.
Because for police departments, they are a huge benefit and well worth the cost. A lot of crimes have been solved with Flock cameras. Stolen cars, or cars linked to criminal activity have been tracked and located. Missing persons have been found.
None of that justifies the massive invasion of privacy that these cameras represent. You don't have a right to not be individually surveiled in public, but that doesn't mean it's OK for the government to warrantlessly track everyone everywhere they go 24x7, or to do it by proxy with a private company such as Flock. The potential for abuse is just too high, and we've seen many cases of that too.
if you want to tackle the POV of the true believers at Y Combinator*: look, flock can't be that effective if all it takes is a guy with a ladder to defeat it, right? same thing with pervasive facial detection, you can wear a mask. you don't have to go into all this philosophical stuff to see how the promises will not be fulfilled.
*Garry Tan has been characterized as a True Believer, in that he sincerely believes Flock's vision will reduce crime and not be misused. on the flip side they don't invest in Palantir, Anduril, Applied Intuition, etc. or other defense stuff. so it's very exceptional for them.
And beyond this there are a number of defense-dependent companies like ProvenMetal (whose value proposition largely depends on a customer’s deep need to do onshore manufacturing)
It makes sense. From 2000-2015 it was pretty difficult for anyone to break into defense and really own a brand. Breakout companies like EOTech were really rare. Generally founders would be at the mercy/grace of the major defense incumbents ('primes'), getting scraps from their tables.
That’s changed lately. For a wide variety of reasons (political, technical, and on active battlefields) there’s a lot more room for startups to really own their own slice of the industry and build some moats of their own.
but. paul graham doesn't like defense stuff. there were plenty of great defense seed investments (palantir), and he runs the best seed venture firm in the world, always has, so his opinion matters. but it was out of a righteous place, it wasn't because he thought it couldn't make money.
y combinator is a much bigger fund now with lots of people in charge. the "2000-2015" era you are talking about: valuations of everything were 1/10th of what they are now. it's hard to make any definitive comparisons about venture trends.
For additional context, for first I've ever seen their rfs specifically asked for startups focused on military applications and warfare "The Future of American Defense" https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs
Disappointing to see this is the future they are trying to invest in.
Flock threads attract a narrow slice of hotheads on HN, just like anti-social media threads. It's not really possible to say anything definitive about the popularity of Flock in the broad HN community.
If you spend time in neighborhood groups like nextdoor and local facebook groups, you find plenty of support for Flock. I'd even go so far as to say a majority.
This doesn't have the scientific rigor of a random sample, but it's enough to convince me that the anti-Flock voices on HN are not representative of the public at large. And might not even be representative of HN.
John Oliver made his last episode of Last Week Tonight about surverillance with particular focus on Flock and its many abuses. Last I checked it had 1.5m views on Youtube.
Breaking Points had an episode on Flock yesterday featuring a member of the management calling anti-Flock people domestic terrorists. When I watched it on YT it had 80K views.
John Oliver is also one of the most biased sources of news you could possibly absorb. He's a comedian playing the part of an opinion news reporter. No different than Fox news hosts, which are equally biased towards their viewers preferences for ad money.
I respect John Stewart for moving more towards real politics than playing the "I'm just a comedian" role.
This is exactly right. I find John Oliver entertaining, but I'm acutely aware that he gets eyeballs by stoking outrage. And the few times he touched on subjects I know something about, I felt he was being misleading (at best).
John Oliver is popular in a certain political niche (which includes me, btw). I don't think he's representative of the population as a whole. I'm not representative of the population as a whole either.
30 cities have cancelled Flock. Thousands haven't. What lesson am I supposed to draw from that?
yet he backs up what he says with sources, unlike Fox Talking Heads shows. He clearly has a left bias, but at least he usually has firm grounding and examples, unlike the nuts on Fox, OAN, etc
What alerts are they getting so often anyway? It's a little town of 25k people.
I can understand the benefit of being able to track coming and going and criminal activity etc but there is no oversight and it is already being abused.
Keeping this data within the municipality and requiring bureaucracy to coordinate with others might be the best solution I've heard, since it prevents dragnets and builds in auditing as part of the process.
Small towns don't want people spying on them. Small towns also are prime targets for pushing over with your federal approvals to force them into giving you their tax money in the name of "safety". Someone got paid.
One can easily research if curious and/or interested with a $5 FOIA request using Muckrock if interested. FOIA request templates are available. I see no existing FOIA requests for this jurisdiction within scope of Flock as of this comment.
> Each camera is valued at approximately $3,000, putting the total loss at roughly $24,000. That cost falls directly on the Winona Police Department’s budget.
Are they contractually obligated to replace them? IIRC, some municipalities have been covering the cameras with trash bags because they cannot turn them off or remove them until their contract expires.
I think there is a difference between turning them off/removing and having them be stolen/destroyed. I would be shocked if they would be forced to repurchase them.
The city planning pyramid scheme: buy things you can't afford with bonds so that 20 years later when everyone is done raising their kids and moves out the people who move in have to debt service with crumbling infrastructure and schools.
Bonus points if you pass a bunch of laws and rules that make it nigh on impossible for the next generation to develop any commerce that could possibly pay back your debt right before cashing out all your equity and moving to Idaho or Florida.
Sure, if we're talking about total "wealth". Towns might put the cameras on their balance sheet (unless they're just leased in some way), but I strongly doubt that any towns are selling their flock cameras.
Moreover, the quote was about budget - it only hits the budget if they replace them. Likewise, if someone steals your car, it only hits your budget if you replace it or otherwise incur other expenses (taxi, etc). If you shrug because you have 4 other cars, or just walk and bike most of the time, its not really hitting your budget.
WINONA, Minn. (Valley News Live) - Every Flock license plate reader camera operated by the Winona Police Department has been sawed off and stolen in what investigators believe was a coordinated theft.
All eight cameras were taken Aug. 1, according to the Winona Police Department. A patrol officer first noticed the cameras had not sent any alerts in 24 hours. When officers checked the locations, they found the cameras had been cut from their poles and taken. The poles were left behind.
Two additional Flock cameras on the Mississippi River Bridge, owned by Buffalo County, were also stolen in the same manner.
Each camera is valued at approximately $3,000, putting the total loss at roughly $24,000. That cost falls directly on the Winona Police Department’s budget.
The eight WPD cameras were positioned at key highway entry and exit points throughout the city: near Highway 61 and Bundy Boulevard, Highway 43 and Homer Road, Highway 14 and Knapp Valley Drive, and Highway 61 and Highway 14. Two cameras were stationed at each location.
Flock Safety cameras are automated license plate readers that capture images of plates along with a vehicle’s make, model and color. Police use the technology to investigate crimes such as hit-and-runs and to locate missing persons. Camera data is owned by the police department and permanently deleted after 30 days.
The thefts are part of a broader national trend. Flock cameras have been vandalized and cut down in communities across the country. The technology has drawn criticism from civil liberties advocates who argue the cameras expand government surveillance and raise concerns about data being shared with third-party companies or federal agencies.
No suspects have been identified. The investigation is ongoing. Anyone with information is asked to contact the Winona Police Department.
I for one do believe that is their primary function. However good intentions don't justify violating our rights or accepting the (demonstrated) potential for abuse.
It might be their intended use (from a police department's perspective), but it's certainly not their intended function.
Flock collects these images, and uses them to train statistical models, and sells those models to police departments as a one-click crime solving solution.
That means that their primary function is to passively aggregate driver behavior into an automated judgement system, where the entire judicial system (designed to check and balance itself) is laundered away. Flock cameras exist to fundamentally replace police work, not to assist with it.
To me, it appears that Flock cameras are a mass surveillance tool and that fits in fairly well with the US becoming more fascist (e.g. ICE agents murdering civilians). It also seems very on-brand for police departments to lie and obfuscate.
It isn't a summary. It is every word of the original article copied and pasted. I can understand doing that in something that is paywalled, but I didn't have any problems getting to the article.
One thing I’ve learned from reading accounts of Flock camera thefts is that you shouldn’t do more than one per outing. This sounds like a group arranged to do them all at once which also works.
Heads up though: not every camera on that map is Flock. In my town, only a couple of Flock cameras are in place, on private property (Lowes is a big user). All the others are owned by my local police department.
> All eight cameras were taken Aug. 1, according to the Winona Police Department. A patrol officer first noticed the cameras had not sent any alerts in 24 hours. When officers checked the locations, they found the cameras had been cut from their poles and taken. The poles were left behind.
Wow so they did all 8 in in 24 hours. That's quite impressive
Maybe I'm overly confident in Flock's ability to triangulate, but wouldn't government agencies be able to know exactly who is cutting down Flock cameras? Isn't that the entire purpose of these things?
Seems these days the only cross-partisan agreement is resistance to Flock and Axon.
People don't want Big Brother. Politicians unironically trying to positively refer to them as an enhanced Big Brother is completely tone deaf.
And we know that police departments were working with ICE during Metro Surge:
> But the Star Tribune found law enforcement agencies around the country searched several Twin Cities suburbs’ camera data and labeled their queries as civil immigration enforcement — a mechanism used to detain those in the country illegally who have not committed other crimes. A vast majority of the searches were run on Fridley’s Flock Safety cameras as it had looser restrictions on its data than other agencies.
This dozen even get into the dozens of documented instances of officers using the system to stalk people... couple that with Stingray devices. It's not hyperbole to say we're existing under the thumb of Big Brother.
Resistance to or acceptance of Flock/Axon is going to be a big tipping point in an already over-surveilled country.
I just watched Benn Jordan's video about Flock's (numerous) vulnerabilities last night. Pretty crazy to think what people can do with these if they can get their hands on them.
I mean who cares about their vulnerabilities? I'm more concerned they simply exist and attempting to put 24/7 surveillance on everyone, the whole concept is rotten. I trust the hackers more lol
Does anyone actually know how the data is stored? They seem to _imply_ they're not storing images, merely license plates. Oh, and presence of bumper stickers bike racks and other vehicle metadata to create a unique fingerprint. So are they implying they merely store a descriptive hash, and discard the images?
Of course, until the revenue knob needs a little tweak, and they start hashing the human data....
It seems likely they retain the whole video for a bit, but that is a huge amount of data, so then it's better to finger print and timestamp and toss the video after x days.
I hope all the cool people doing all the cool things in current year are not doing cool vandalism just because its a cool thing-to-do that they saw on Reddit in current year. Other cool things cool people are into in current year; Cyber trucks are still on the road, and data centers are still being built.
The anti-camera things are also somewhat effective at getting rid of London's ULEZ cameras. Quite admirable that this coalition of quite disparate interests was able to form around opposition to the specific device used to manage different objectives.
One of my bigger concerns with this story, given the Flock CEO's public statements, and this Administration's attitude towards such things is how easy it might be to attempt to spin, or pursue, this as "domestic terrorism" rather than "vandalism".
The those in power that are the system are what matter. It doesn't matter most people believe or want because the corrupt, self-serving system and regime does whatever the hell it wants without a care. And because so many are passive and silent, they give consent to it.
I believe that the police with due dilligance will find that there has been a "behind closed doors" citizens plebisite to create a volunteer technical comittee to provide free service and down grades to varios publicy funded equipment as part of the future archiology initiativ.
Lets be clear, Flock itself is is also breaking the law and refusing to remove it's camera's from city's properties. The cities, apparently, have no recourse but to cover Flock's vigalante cameras with plastic bags to block their view. This is not a one sided case of illegal property damage and trespass. Flock corporation is acting illegally too. Only no one in government is willing to hold them accountable in a court of law.
That's probably way more effective, efficient, and destructive than aggressively fouling the solar panel. Hopefully, picture quality isn't something they monitor because it would be kind of difficult. And, it would be best to unlock a Flock camera to verify that damage is possible using a specific laser pointer, distance, and time period. Then, someone might think about doing it behind concealment and/or far away enough to be below the threshold of identifiable pixel resolution.
what if this was a ultra genius move to end authoritarianism by being so blatantly bad that we actually get a new amendment added for right to privacy and flock was a non profit all along
Yet to see anyone describe what to do once they are down. They for sure have all manners of wicked battery backed up trackers etc, I'm sure.
(This would be highly illegal to do and you should not do it, even to evil surveillance cameras that hoover up our lives to terrifying central databases, even if these are ragingly unpopular.)
an into a YouTube short testing how to cut down steel poles quickly yesterday, with battery powered tools.
Sawzall, 1m 15s, circular saw 1m, circular saw like 20s.
Manual pole cutters have existed for at least 100 years. No batteries. Almost zero noise.
You put one on the pole, walk around the pole once, and it's cut. They were used a lot in the 1970's when people were rebelling against parking meters.
I believe it's part of the opening scene of the film Cool Hand Luke.
not exactly right. the first is an abrasive disc. that's the right guy for steel, but doesn't work great in aluminum because its very sticky and melty. the third is a metal skill saw blade. I really wouldn't use this with steel at all, but you definitely want to cut aluminum and not grind it. the tool I would normally use for this is a portable bandsaw, with speed control that you would set high for Al and low for steel, probably pretty close to the skill saw.
Wikipedia and dictionaries are wrong. It has a different usage than "underdeveloped" and that usage at best doesn't have a clear meaning, and at worst does have a clear derogatory meaning
sorry, but no one is taking some random HN user's definition over established dictionaries on what a word means.
perhaps you can convince enough people that the word will evolve into whatever you imagine it to mean, and then the dictionaries will be updated to match.
The dictionary is an attempt at systematically defining the semantic meaning of language subject to cultural constraints in the same way that a writing system is an attempt at visually rendering a spoken language subject to technological constraints. I know from personal experience that the people who work on dictionaries have a less authoritative view about them than you do.
dictionaries and common usage (e.g. wikipedia, forums, news, etc.) are certainly more authoritative than a random person unilaterally deciding that a word has no meaning and declaring "dictionaries and wikipedia are wrong"
if you poll 100 random english speakers and the majority come back saying that they have no idea what "third world" means, or say that the term is meaningless, i will concede and donate $1,000 to a charity of your choice.
it is very unusual to share an opinion by starting with 'public service announcement'
and despite not explicitly claiming authority, when you declare normal authorities (dictionaries, wikipedia) as well as other commenters unequivocally wrong, you are implicitly claiming authority
If I'm ever on the jury of somebody charged with this, the prosecution has an incredibly high burden to convince me the poles and the cameras on them didn't die of natural causes.
Maybe if police weren't using Flock cameras to stalk their ex-wives [1][2].
There's an interesting angle to the Flock issue I heard recently. Some predominantly black communities prefer Flock cameras because they're over-policed, black men in particular are more likely to be pulled over on "routine" traffic stops and those stops have a skewed chance of ending in violence of death. As a reminder, US law enforcement kills over 1000 civilians every single year. Over half of those are black men and black men are only ~6% of the population.
But that's really a lesser evil type situation because the police simply shouldn't be killing so many people.
Black communities are underpoliced, not overpoliced. Black men commit a hugely disproportionate amount of violent crime compared to their percentage of the current American population - "13 commit 50" is a meme for a reason. We should expect that legitimate killings of dangerous criminals by cops who are in the process of investigating immediate criminal activity will skew towards black men; and that attempts to correct this racial discrepency will result in a greater risk to the public at large and also to cops themselves.
That's not to say that putting up Flock cameras in communities with large numbers of black people isn't a good idea - black people themselves are very often the victims of crimes committed by black men, and all the benefits Flock cameras have for making it easier for the police to arrest street criminals apply to predominantly black communities as much as anywhere else. I think that black people are as capable of complaining about being disproportionately captured committing crimes on Flock cameras as they are about being disproportionately pulled over by the cops; but there's still good reasons to like policing methodologies which reduce the need for car stops in general.
Think about it this way, let's say that black men committed more crimes per capita than men overall. That means one of two things:
1. There is an intrinsic reason. That's just racism. Black people are no different to any other people. What you're suggesting is that they're inherently violent, basically; or
2. There is an extrinsic reason. Put another way, there's a confounding variable. This part is true. The confounding variable is poverty. The link between poverty and crime has been known about for thousands of years.
It's ridiculous and unfounded to claim black people are "under-policied". They're 20% more likely to be stopped for a "routine" traffic stop ("driving while black" is a thing for a reason) [1]. This evidence is solid enough for this that when it's dark this number drops when the police can no longer see the driver in the car. The empirical evidence for over-policing is overwhelming (eg [2]). They tend to get longer sentences for the same crime and are found guilty more often, particularly when there's a racial disparity in the jury, which there often is.
>It's ridiculous and unfounded to claim black people are "under-policied".
You should try reading the book "Ghettocide." From heavily right-leaning </s> The New Republic:
"In this non-fiction murder mystery, Leovy’s central message is simple, contrarian, and extremely convincing: The plague of “black-on-black” homicide is the result of under policing. What’s troubling our criminal justice system, she argues, is not preventive policing techniques (e.g., stop and frisk), but rather an abominably low solve rate for black homicides. When the son of a black detective is murdered senselessly in South L.A., a relentless white detective is brought in to solve the case, and Leovy gets a riveting story in which to package her theme."
>The empirical evidence for over-policing is overwhelming
The study specifically agrees with the thesis of Ghettocide: "The second theme was Black youth’s experiences with the police cultivates mistrust and unsafety, with subthemes including police seen as more likely to harm than help, police not resolving injustices against Black people".
It wasn't private property. It belonged to the people and the people decided they didn't want it. It's bad to see people being forced to break the law to retain their freedom, but it's a good thing that folks are still willing to fight for it.
"but it's a good thing that folks are still willing to fight for it"
This is at least as likely to be theft as much as civic action. There are far easier ways one might permanently inhibit these cameras than cutting them down and taking them away.
A handful of thieves/activists are not "the people". A town hall, vote etc... would have the backing of "the people". If that happens and theyre still not removed, then perhaps actions like these might be justified.
Perhaps the activists were representing the people, but were unfortunately under a Makita/DeWalt NDA, and cannot make public their deliberations and actions just yet. Rest assured they are acting in your best interests.
Yeah, that tracks.
> Camera data is owned by the police department and permanently deleted after 30 days.
I assume this means that the police department deletes one local copy?