Every time law enforcement is given surveillance tools the same thing happens, the people with legal and approved access will abuse it.
Politicians are completely naive in their understand how people works, if it's abused, the system isn't locked down enough or that one person circumvented the procedure. They completely fail to understand that there exists people to whom you cannot grant access and screening people in advance probably impossible. Some cop checks all the boxes, gets access to databases, then their partner leaves them and they are now no longer safe to grant access.
I don't understand why it's hard to grasp that surveillance tools are dangerous and rather using them to protect others, law enforcement will use these tools to do bad things. It's as if that we assume that cops are better people and follow rules better. Even in countries that actually train their police force this isn't remotely true.
The US might be different, I doubt it, but society is getting increasingly SAFE, there is less and less need for these tools.
> Politicians are completely naive in their understand how people works, if it's abused, the system isn't locked down enough or that one person circumvented the procedure. They completely fail to understand that there exists people to whom you cannot grant access and screening people in advance probably impossible. Some cop checks all the boxes, gets access to databases, then their partner leaves them and they are now no longer safe to grant access.
I don’t think it’s naïveté. I think it’s an acceptable byproduct to them. It’s collateral damage in their war on ??? crime? insecurity? or in their lobby kickbacks.
This is a great point, and one that really isn't played up because it doesn't fit the whole profit-from-attention narrative that literally every media surface seems to be following.
It almost seems as if law enforcement 'need' these additional tools to keep them busy; find new, more trivial crime that's been hiding behind no one reporting it or being hurt by it.
Maybe if law enforcement resources could be applied to more corporate crime, that'd keep em busy till the cows come home.
I have this conversation with neighbors almost weekly, and I’ve had a bunch of them just say that I’m wrong with no real evidence or, and this is verbatim, “it doesn’t feel safer.”
This conversation is usually about how no one lets their kids play outside unsupervised anymore, but it applies to police as well. In Georgia they had to pass a law telling police they couldn’t arrest parents who let their kids go outside by themselves. The inciting incident literally had a police officer lecturing a mother about how many sickos are out there and then putting her in cuffs because her 10-year-old was a mile away by himself. Even since then, DFCS has been caught bullying parents into signing an agreement saying they were negligent and agreeing to a restrictive safety plan because they let their kid go to a nearby playground by themself.
It is insane and depressing about how people willingly restrict their lives and their kids lives because of the mistaken belief that the world isn’t as safe as it was when they were a kid. Not only that, but if you let your kids play outside without you, then you risk your neighbors calling the police on you and having to deal with whatever bs comes from that.
I have feeling that how safe you feel is correlates strongly to your media diet, and weakly to your surroundings. I'd be curious to see what studies have been done.
Indeed, in my experience all these tools do is offset policing to "easy" crimes and the harder problems continually get ignored. It's largely been accepted in my city, for example, that traffic enforcement no longer happens.
A "fun" observation I've had is that politicians and police tells us that they are focusing on crimes that increases the perception of safety. Then for some reason they spend time on petty drug deals, gangs that mostly fight internally and other crimes that the average person would never experience.
If they wanted to do something to increase feeling of safety, and justice, they'd crack down on bike theft.
Yes, we also have a local politician who is very much into the appearance of "tough on crime" and has done vanity work with police like catching homeless shoplifters attempting to resell food on the street. The police also love bragging about impounding unregistered scooters and dirtbikes.
As someone from the UK, all these points seem ridiculous to me, are they really valid elsewhere?
I get that point 1 is extremely valid in a place like the US where everyone can have a gun.
Do other countries not enforce fines?
In the UK you can have your car confiscated on the spot if the automated number plate recognition in a patrol car flags you don't have insurance. Fines are enforced, but escalating that to non-payment of fines seems like something they could do (people might complain, but only the ones not paying their fines!)
The rules and numbers are allowed to be what they are so long as mass tasteful/mild noncompliance is tolerated. The second you start robotically (electronic robots vs meat robots in uniform does not matter in this case) fining people for taking lefts on red arrows at 1am or exceeding the speed limit a bit in the base case you will see politicians pandering to voters by changing those rules such that the typical person can behave typically without any particular care to abide by them and generally not break them.
I don't expect many people to be okay with justice being enforce by the average citizen.
People will always have conflicts from time to time, the only question is whether we let them deal with it themselves or have an authority with a uniform and a badge who is supposed to be trustworthy enough to handle it.
>what happens when society solves its issues and theres no need to 'keep them busy' :(
Look at the engineering and surveying firms over the past 50yr. Cops will likely see something like that. Like they'll get written into all sorts of laws and processes despite the scope of the "value" they provide being narrower than ever.
It'll turn into a low effort make-work job. Like Realtors(TM) with extra steps to justify their existence.
Like no amount of 1080p Ring footage of your door getting kicked in will suffice, the insurance company will not believe your house has been broken into until a certified license holding cop shows up and signs off on it.
There's a whole host of laws that people break daily. Even a book about it "3 felonies a day".
Most of those 'crimes' shouldnt be. And thats what parts of the jury nullification movements are all about; judging the law BEFORE judging the person.
Also the more data captured about every human, the more criminality can be found, especially in things that shouldnt have ever been criminal. And having higher "bust" numbers and proof of evil criminality element (regular humans doing normal things that are criminalized by the elite) then allows them to write bigger checks for more pervasive surveillance.
Its the classic long tail, and exponential cost increases for of a logarithmic decay of detection.
Our society could restart with a good review of all laws. And those laws with nobody else harmed should be scrapped.
Law enforcement largely exists in the US to protect Corporate crime. Has done since it's beginnings as an institution, finding roots in the south in slave patrols, and roots in the north in protecting private property.
The cops are not now nor have they ever been an institution to protect the people, they are there to protect the Peace. What's the Peace? Largely seems to be whatever makes the rich people happy.
The police protect "property owners" and "property rights."
And this is why the homeless remain homeless.
No matter where they stand, its someone elses property, and they have little to no rights.
You can't feed yourself if you are forced to keep walking.
DeShaney v. Winnebago County Department of Social Services (1989) held that the Constitution generally does not require the government to protect people from harm inflicted by private individuals.
Town of Castle Rock v. Gonzales (2005), held that a woman did not have a constitutional entitlement to police enforcement of a restraining order.
You are forced to pay taxes for service that you may/may not actually receive.
You are forced to tell the truth to people who are allowed to tell you lies.
The system is designed to protect the system, and we are just passing through it while we are alive.
This seems like a pretty abstract claim to me. What does "protect the people" mean vs "whatever makes the rich people happy"? There are laws on the books which the police enforce.
Now, I agree that the police are not your friends, and they are incentivized to find crimes when there may not really be any at times, but I disagree with the notion that they are simply the lapdogs of the wealthy. In fact, it seems like in a lot of places in California it's the law-abiding, wealthier citizens that are hassled most by the police for minor infractions, because they know they can actually extract revenue from them.
You work at a retail store. You take $100 from the till. They have you on camera. Management calls cops, and has you arrested for misdemeanor theft. You spend night in jail.
You work in retail store. You log in at 9am. And your manager was told to cut payroll and edits your (and 9 other peoples) timecards to the tune of $1000. You catch this. Management refuses to correct it and/or punish the manager. Nobody is arrested. You're told this is a civil issue.
Wage theft is larger than all other theft combined, but treated as a civil, not criminal matter. I wonder why.
You secured your expensive road bike ($2000) cause its your primary transportation. You put a gps tag on it, so if its ever stolen, you can make the appropriate report and retrieval. The lock was cut, and the bike taken. Its at a nearby house. You report it. Cops wont take report and wont get the stolen property. You even have definite proof. They dont care, and they dont have to.
Target (retailer) has a policy to let people steal from them, and to do facial recognition until a thief surpasses the statutory felony limit (usually $1000). THEY send a report to the police, which isnt ignored, and the police go do the corporates' dirty work and arrest the alleged perpetrator.
During the 1980's there was well known pushes (by Biden etm) to criminalize cocaine severely. But the cocaine they punished wasnt the white powder. That was used predominantly by executives. Instead, the heavy criminalization focused on crack cocaine, which was used predominantly by the lower (poor, black) people. Punishments were upwards of 10x disparity against the poor classes.
The misattributed quote "If the penalty for a crime is a fine, then that law only exists for the lower class" (to Final Fantasy Tactics, not true attribution), is something we see all the time.
Anthropic - mass for-profit copyright fraud against the public? Fine.
All insurance - if you lie? Insurance fraud. If they lie, get rekt and die or something.
Banks - guilty of mass laundering and made $50B? Oh, $2B fine. $48B profit. If a human did that, theyd go to jail for decades.
These disparities exist everywhere in "law". Law only defends elite, wealthy, donor class, and well known monied local elites. It almost never defends the average wronged citizen.
Exactly my thought. It is so naive to think that this is not going better than planned. Imagine having dozens, if not hundreds of crimes, and still get away of all of them because you got a new job.
> The US might be different, I doubt it, but society is getting increasingly SAFE, there is less and less need for these tools.
Crime rates could be going up, that still wouldn't justify broad, warrantless spying on the public. We have rights and they aren't conditional on crime rates.
IANAL but the warrant part of this will probably not be what will get them. Unauthorized access for the husband and conspiring on the part of the wife seems like the logical path.
Using third party systems like Flock for warrantless police work has not been fully tested in courts yet. With the current SCOTUS, I fully expect them to find it constitutional somehow if it lands there.
> Politicians are completely naive in their understand how people works, if it's abused, the system isn't locked down enough or that one person circumvented the procedure.
That's being charitable. Complicit is far more likely, any system like that plays to benefit of the ruling party as you can use it to suppress the people that would vote you out.
LEOs being a certain type of people is a big part of the problem. Compare to corporate IT, who have huge surveillance powers within their companies, but virtually none of them use it beyond their actual job duties.
You don’t need to wonder what they are thinking. The Palantir CEO put out a manifesto that spells it out pretty explicitly. He literally says, in plain English, more surveillance on the underclass, less scrutiny on the owning class. This is the prevailing ideology among those in power.
As a general rule, every policy and system should be designed with the worst possible user in mind.
- German address registers with religious affiliation were a good idea until the Nazis came to power.
- Pegasus spyware was developed and sold to governments to fight terrorism and serious crime — until it was used to spy on journalists, human rights activists and political opponents, including in authoritarian states.
- Rwandan identity cards listed ethnicity for administrative purposes — until militias used them to identify and execute Tutsis at roadblocks during the 1994 genocide.
Bottom line: Even if you trust the current administration (do you?), are you sure you want 5o give that power to all future ones?
There was a time in the US I really thought we were different. I genuinely didn’t fear our government. I didn’t think the types of people that did such atrocities existed in numbers and that they’d immediately be removed once it was determined they snuck into office.
Now I fully believe it can happen here and that those people are in office now and that a non-trivial percentage of the US public would be Ok with those atrocities happening in the US.
We have really turned into the opening act of a terrible dystopian movie.
It’s such a shame that media (social and traditional) really plays up loss aversion. My local news is basically fear mongering. My local social media page is filled with people who have nothing better to do with their time than complain about all of the negative stuff happening in this town. They take every isolated incident and project it as some major pattern. It’s really sad.
To some extend I'd argue that even true crime shows are complicit. Hour long "documentaries" about obscure murders 40 years in a place you're not entirely sure exists. The streaming services just keeps digging deeper and deeper for anything that could lure in viewers, covering crimes that you wouldn't have known of 20 years ago.
My local news just did a whole special program on high profile plane issues/crashes. Modern ones, like over the last few years. I saw an ad for it yesterday I was just so grossed out by the flagrant fear mongering. Pieces like that have real world consequences.
They aren’t doing hard hitting journalism exposing negligence, they are making people terrified of planes. They’re stressing people out about something that is not reasonably within their control AND it’s not a real risk for us all. The numbers don’t support scaring people over this.
Have you considered the possibility that the politicians know this, and also don’t care?
I think you’re misunderstanding that they think are part of the populace. They do not. They do not think they’re at your level. That’s why they got in the politics. That’s why they’ve been successful at it.
Go spend some time around with police higher ups if you don’t think that they also believe that they’re a class of nobility.
The constitution bars titles of nobility, so to achieve the status of nobility, you print the title you want on a business card, and attend group meetings once a week, where your perceived status and nobility are reinforced by an institutional echo chamber that will dispose of you in a heartbeat to save itself.
The purge movies are interesting to me. They came out when I was already and adult, so I missed the cultural moment. If you watch the movies, the plot is patently stupid (if not emotionally gripping) -- so stupid, that I was really surprised to find out how much they resonated with people. Governments don't benefit from violence, and normal everyday people wouldn't want to be violent one day year. Most violent people are regularly violent; they beat their girlfriends for years, and finally kill one of them. They have a long, long rap sheet or an active warrant while they fight the police after being pulled over. etc. Further, general mass violence is extremely destabilizing to governments because most people abhor it, and a government that cannot prevent mass violence is a government with no validity.
The idea that a movie could get so many basic things so badly wrong, that it could float a scenario that made zero sense, but still gain such cultural traction was one of the first times I felt old. It's speaking to a youth with crazy and new ideas. They're ready to make their own grand and terrible mistakes, which a future youth will one day hate them for.
I feel like maybe you missed the point? The concept of the Purge movies is the government is using the Purge as a smoke screen to eliminate the people it considers undesirable. It's supposed to be like Kristallnacht with plausible deniability.
What I think everdrive is saying is that for it to be a smokescreen, there needs to be smoke: if it was only the government participating in the Purge to eliminate undesireables, it'd be extremely obvious and rallied against. But it's not, regular people are engaging with it in droves, which is what they believe to be the unrealistic part.
But most people don't participate, they just hunker down and wait it out. It's a small minority who are aligned with the government who do most of it. The prequel makes this very clear, where the government sent masked mercenaries to participate in the test purge to give them the results they wanted. The movies aren't high art or anything, but their message is pretty clear that they think the average person wouldn't be violent.
You need to consider that what regular people consider normal depends on little more then social consensus. Once you recognize this, the unrealistic part does not sound as unrealistic.
Rally round the flag accounts for "violence done by others against us" and not "random violence against ourselves" so I think it's completely meaningless in the case of this conversation.
With regard to human sacrifice, how much violence have you been involved in? Maybe a few fist fights in middle school or high school? Do you know anyone who has committed real violence? I'll bet you don't. It's exceedingly rare these days compared to historical norms. People might disagree on why its become so rare, but the general rarity is a fact. Even for areas with high violent crime, there is usually a small minority of violent re-offenders, rather than a large majority of people committing random violence.
Does years of domestic violence count? What about shootings I've witnessed but wasn't a part of? There's a school nearby and kids carry guns around here.
> Do you know anyone who has committed real violence?
I don't hang out with the violent types in the first place, so the question makes no sense.
>Does years of domestic violence count? What about shootings I've witnessed but wasn't a part of? There's a school nearby and kids carry guns around here.
No, I mean, per capita, how many people as compared to the number of people you know total, have perpetrated violence.
>I don't hang out with the violent types in the first place, so the question makes no sense.
But if violence were ubiquitous, you wouldn't be able to avoid it. I don't know any violent people either. My point is just that most people (per capita) do not commit violence most of the time. The idea that everyone's just chomping at the bit to perpetrate violence is at odds with reality.
most people's exposure to philosophical concepts is through narrative abstraction, you may be an exception but if you want to interact with laypeople this is inevitably going to be your experience.
The Purge was a terrible movie in so many ways but its message is still extremely resonant. It's also about as subtle as a brick wall, yet I'm afraid that it might have been still a tad too subtle.
I think calling them ideologues is overly generous for most American politicians. They're vehicles for influence via bribery (which is usually done in a technically legal fashion).
> (which is usually done in a technically legal fashion)
Alas, the Roberts court effectively ruled that it's not really a bribe if it falls short of the third party saying they want the government official to vote/rule a particular way for a particular price, the government official does as asked, and he/she sends the third party a written invoice for services rendered.
Even should that happen, I'm pretty sure Justice Thomas would find the larger offense is that the invoice failed to include sales tax.
Remember our Supreme Court's recent bribery scandal wasn't that a number of justices were accepting gifts but rather that they hasn't disclosed them properly. We're perfectly OK with third parties bribing the judges on our highest court so long as the judges fill out the correct paperwork.
Im all for fighting for digital privacy rights. But referencing the purge with a smile begs the question, are you yearning for a purge-like scenario? Some fantastical idea that you’ll be the main character in an anarchic chaos?
People will need to come together and fix the system.
If a definite majority wants to do so, the system will change. Until then the oligarchs will keep playing one side againts the other, as can currently be seen with Trump amplifying the hate in the population, in order for his cronies to steal more money, start more wars and so forth. He will lose the upcoming elections but he will continue to worship theft and destruction.
> Politicians are completely naive in their understand how people works
They understand exactly how people work. You are naive for thinking that they aren't aware of this. Their entire job is essentially a popularity contest in which they promise you things, that they almost never deliver on.
Like they deliberately want a system that can be abused, or that they actually know that it can and will be abused, but not voting for it would make them appear soft on crime?
Honestly I think the majority aren't smart enough to do the cost benefit analysis of these system, so they just ignore the warning.
> Like they deliberately want a system that can be abused, or that they actually know that it can and will be abused, but not voting for it would make them appear soft on crime?
They don't care either way. They do whatever they think is popular to garner support. If it was popular to bring slavery back, they would advocate for that.
> Honestly I think the majority aren't smart enough to do the cost benefit analysis of these system, so they just ignore the warning.
I honestly wonder why many of you keep on giving these people the benefit of the doubt. Please don't quote Hanlon's razor at me. There's another side of it that often isn't discussed.
Nefarious individuals know (if they can't verbalise it) that most people will assume a mistake is made rather than malice and they will routinely use this to their advantage. Anyone that is in the political space, I automatically assume malice.
Michael Corleone: "Oh, who's being naïve, Kay?"
put the cynical aside.
I would not say they are all liars. some of them sure have good hearts and want to make the world better. sometimes, they promised things they weren't sure, but they said things anyway.
<< The US might be different, I doubt it, but society is getting increasingly SAFE, there is less and less need for these tools.
Oh man, I have to assume you live in a nice little enclave and are reading old statistical reports. I have the misfortune of sometimes having to travel into the city. I can assure you, it is not getting safer. In fact, just last week I saw first sign of Chicago turning into Philly.
This chart is up to 2024. If you look up 2025 and 2026 data for the US you will see that it has continued to decline YoY.
Judging by your comment I assume that you have personally witnessed some criminality recently and are drawing conclusions about the entire US, if so I’m sorry you had to endure that, but that doesn’t mean that your conclusions apply to the general trend in the US as the GP was referring to.
Sure, sure, just a major metropolitan area in the midwest and not a barometer for anything at all. One would think that either stats are misleading or my population sample is wrong.
But I have no need to convince anyone. It is just weird to me that I need to explain the obvious.
I agree the data says that. Also weird that as long as the people responsible for statistics were replaced by new appointees the data shifted direction almost immediately.
What could have been going there?
Maybe just a coincidence. I'm sure it is just a coincidence.
For real
> Harpe accepted responsibility for sharing her credentials but argued that firing her was excessive.
> In her appeal, Harpe said her husband was a certified federal law enforcement officer and that every search was conducted for law enforcement purposes.
> “The violation occurred because I gave my husband, who is a certified law enforcement officer with the Department of Homeland Security, access to my Flock account,” Harpe wrote. “Every search he conducted was for law enforcement use only and not for personal gain.”
There seems to be a subset of law enforcement officers who fundamentally don't understand privacy, checks and balances, and responsibility. They believe they should have unrestricted access to everyone else and that they are above us all.
Firing her was not excessive, it is the bare minimum. Officers should be held to a higher standard, not lower. She and her husband should be in a jail cell.
This was also surprising to me, I'd think the firing would be automatic and then it'd be a legal case about unauthorized access of govt computers, which is generally taken pretty seriously.
You can't make the same argument with financial systems by giving someone at a different bank access to your bank just because you're both "financial professionals", and that's arguably much less sensitive data.
When Batman created his sonar system we cheered because he needed it to fight "the bad guy". It took Alfred to explain this was too much. "The bad guy" has been used for hundreds of years to escuse simple solutions under the premise that we're "the good guys".
It's almost never like that. Usually some team collaborates with some other team and sets something up with approval from departments A, B, and C with director X signing off. There's rarely one person you can point to. Also, wait a year and all those As, Bs, Cs, and Xs have switched to different roles or don't exist.
The dichotomy of our current age. On one hand, all knowing super thinking machines are just around the corner. Meanwhile, this. Almost seems like a feature and not a bug.
it seems everyone in this thread is focusing on the wrong issue; the problem was not that "sign-in procedures are too lax", it's that these individuals have access, period - or that the system exists in the first place.
People understand that. I think Flock needs to be dismantled but I'm also a bit shocked (as much as one can be these days) that the login procedures are just a username and password from anywhere. Netflix has stronger access controls.
Myriad ways, pretty standard on most corporate networks, to restrict access to corporate devices. I cannot access any of my client's resources, including Web apps, without their laptop.
Simple method is IP whitelisting, easy in some ways painful to keep updated. Vpn is another easy option. But then you can have client side certs, hardware tokens, and endpoint security mechanisms which are probably more robust. Either way, it's not a weird unique thing, it's pretty ubiquitous :)
I think the idea of Flock (and all modern software, pretty much) is not just to offer a service, but to offer it as dirt-cheap and lazily as possible with the intent of creating reasonable margins for a product that otherwise shouldn't even be profitable in the first place.
Doing things, "correctly" is sort of no longer the place of software. The idea is to build solutions that are comprised of toothpicks and sticky tacky so you can force out whatever the alternative was and make money for the shareholders at the same time.
I have to be logged in to azure vpn to access the development environment of the web application I work on because heavens forbid if our users stumble upon a non-production version of the application on the Internet and yet these people just put everything out there for everyone to see. At least I think it should require a CAC card or a PIV card to access sensitive data like this, shutting down immediately if the card presence is not detected somehow.
Probably the department's fault for not using (presumably) Entra Conditional Access to restrict SSO to corporate devices / corporate subnets.
This is why if you're building a product, please give SSO for free (see sso.tax) - you shift responsibility, requirements and posture to the tenant's IdP.
Unfortunately that will make you a lot less money. The whole premise of the sso.tax seems based on that it's not intentional.
It is intentional and deliberate price discrimination to charge enterprises more. One example: why do you think enterprises don't just stack consumer/teams Codex or Claude subs with significant subsidies; given that all enterprise seats are API/PAYG now? SSO/IdP + ability to opt out of training globally
SSO is a core security feature, not a value add. I do not mind charging extra for say SCIM or advanced RBAC. I have a different view to business than most SaaS apps, and feel when you bring value and delight to the customer, they take you as a trustworthy partner and want to grow with you. Trust is very important and I feel so bitter paying Bitwarden, Adobe, and all the other enshittified stacks that 30-100% uplift on the base plan to get SSO. I also love my homelab stuff and it's a sour taste when I need to set up some system with local auth. yeah, maybe some nerd's A/B test show charging SSO makes more money, that's a shame and I think long term it's simply harmful (and probably less profitable due to my comment on stickyness and delighting customers being good business sense).
Only a tech nerd would think the solution to massive overreach by government organizations and illegal use of mass surveillance tools is more technology from one of the participating technology companies...
In addition to the other things mentioned, some very sensitive applications in my organization must be run from a virtual desktop, which is itself must be run from a locked down corporate laptop.
We typically use VPC Endpoint Services or equivalent for enterprise customers, ie connect our private VPC with their private VPC. Pretty much the best way to do this, no VPNs to manage or IP whitelists to maintain and all traffic is local to the cloud provider.
I can’t run any web apps from my employer unless I’m on one of their computers. Tokens are only generated on corporate systems. IP access only allowed from corporate VPN.
In Chatrie v. United States (June 2026) the SCOTUS ruled that individuals maintain a reasonable expectation of privacy in their digital location history and that geofence warrants constitute a search under the 4th Amendment. It's only a matter of time until a similar case involving Flock comes before them and they rule that a search of the Flock database constitutes a search under the 4th Amendment and that every single search requires a specific warrant.
I think there have been a positive number of cases gone in favor of digital privacy recently. This being one of them. It’s unfortunate, but it’ll just take time for these manners to go through the courts.
I’m quite naive regarding the details of the legal system, wonder why we can’t expedite certain cases when a SCOTUS precedent has been established, or some form of expedited legal notice. We shouldn’t have to wait for a perfect case of a flock violation, then wait for someone to be brave enough to spend the money (or if pro bono just their time/reputation) to file a case and go through the system for the next x years
It's hope that Chatrie v. US automatically implies Flock searches require a warrant, but this is definitely not guaranteed - SCOTUS could easily go either way on this. For example, in his concurrence with the decision, Gorsuch relied on property rights, namely that Chatrie's agreement with Google regarding location history made this a warrant-required search. Obviously that doesn't apply in Flock's case.
SCOTUS has held for a long time that people don't have an expectation of privacy when visible in public. Digital recording and powerful search features certainly change the calculus on that, but there is a fundamental difference between a location tracked by a cellphone you purchased and own vs. just driving around where anyone can read your license plate.
Police regularly slaughter those they swore to "protect and serve" and since they have qualified immunity nothing can ever happen to them. The purpose of a system is what it does.
Who do you expect to charge the woman with a crime: the local prosecutors who are basically cop-adjacent, Georgia's attorney general who supports the lawless ICE, or a federal prosecutor working under the Trump administration?
I mean, maybe you'd like to do something about it via a civil lawsuit, at which point you ought to acquaint yourself with something called "qualified immunity."
And a great big poisoned tree for anything that comes from the data. But it’s not like the Americans have been following the rules when deporting people anyways.
That rule only applies in courtrooms. As ICE doesn't really do courtrooms, the rule is moot. (Not a joke. ICE moves prisoners around so quickly specifically to avoid dealing with courtrooms.)
The regime has figured out that the people don’t like certain things, but not nearly enough to do anything uncomfortable about them. Now they’re calibrating on the best ways to do things without stirring the people up too much. Apparently if you make gas cost too much that’s where Americans draw the line. And who says capitalism doesn’t work!
You can make gas cost too much if your media bubble says it's someone else's fault. Their target audience is people who only watch Fox News, and they will never connect the gas prices to the president unless he's a democrat.
I also do not understand how this doesn't break stuff like CFAA.
If I worked at a company and gave my work login credentials to a friend and that friend used it to access my work's network then I'm pretty sure I'd go to jail.
Most of the federal government predates the current administration. They really do want to follow the law. It's their job, not an ideology.
ICE is the President's personal force, screened for their loyalty to him. They have no interest in the law. The rest of the government doesn't like them any better than you do.
Voting data says there are large portions of the population loyal to Trump with no interest in the law, and even larger portions in the law enforcement agencies. If I was working in those departments, I would assume at least 2/3 (the portion of the general population fine with Trump's behavior) is not going to be on my side.
Its funny how nobody was making this argument when it was Obama ignoring international law to launch drone strikes on weddings and 18 yr old American citizens.
I guess the way I'd put it is that we've been increasingly allowing and not punishing privacy breaches and government/authorities overstepping and after 20+ years of boiling the frog the latest, most extreme variant has pretty much pushed it over the edge of dystopian.
So it's not all Trump, but his administration has definitely pushed the lack of accountability to new heights and combining it with the new wave of surveillance tech with limited oversight or legislation it's all just become ingrained with nobody to fight it.
There are probably systems that even if they should exist (debatable for some), they should do so only in secured facilities that the government worker must badge into physically to access.
This would at least reduce some of the avenues for abuse.
Wonder how many low level Lowes or Home Depot asset protection employees would also happily hand their credentials over for nationwide search access, too.
I have Home Depot employees using Flock announcements to shadow me now.
Last two visits, some guy named "Victor" shadowed me, and made it a point to call me by my first name twice.
I spend as little money at Home Depot as possible now.
The flock system is being abused by every organization across the entire country, because thats where peoples heads are at today.
2 out of 3 adults in the US are not considered "psychologically mature" by psychologists.
Nation of adult children + spying and tracking technology ... of course its being abused. The only question is how much, and Flock isn't going to tell us the truth of it, ever, because they dont track abuse, they track victims.
Home Depot was also one of the major backers of Cop City, sitting on the Atlanta Police Foundation [0] and pushing through a wholly undemocratic construction of a training facility [1] that resulted in the razing of the fourth largest remaining greenspace [2] in Atlanta so the cops could practice their swatting techniques.
Home Depot and Lowes are the 2 largest US home store ( construction materials, appliances, etc ) retail chains in the US.
They have Flock cameras installed on mobile trailers, parked in their parking lots. The cameras track your vehicle as you are parking, and issue alerts for anyone that has been flagged in the database.
In my case, I have classmates from school, who have friends at the local county EMS operations center, who are using the system to stalk me.
Just 3 days ago, I tried to have a quiet conversation with my girlfriend at a little park, in a small neighborhood. Less than 10 minutes after arriving, a car with 4 or 5 people showed up, positioned themselves within ear shot, and then began making fun of us in order to prevent us from thinking and discussing issues clearly. This event by itself seems innocent and random, except, it happens like clockwork, in multiple locations, and its an established pattern in my life, making it decidedly non-random. The "actors" think of it as street theatre, the police think of it as "policing", and what you get as the target is pure psychological hell.
When a victim begins to try and explain verbally what is happening to them, they relive the trauma of the events that have been "staged" and people assume the victim is mentally unstable. It is the same strategy as kicking a dog in the head repeatedly, until it becomes an agry mad dog, and then putting it down because it was dangerous. Create the problem, then appear to solve it.
What may have started out as a joke now has them guilty of human trafficking, so they have adopted a strategy of "running me out of town" via harrassment.
They know if they emotionally destablise people, they will voluntarily leave or self destruct via drugs, stress, acting out, etc.
This is what "community policing" now means.
There are any number of videos on youtube of people having meltdowns, claiming they are being 'gangstalked', etc. and they seem very disturbed. This is why this works. They disturb you, then dismiss any allegations as you being disturbed.
Watch the movie "Closetland" for how psychological abuse works.
It sounds like you have a good basis for some lawsuits (and criminal charges if you can convince someone), hopefully at least one of which will be financially worth it. Of course you need to gather good evidence first. Consult with a lawyer first.
There is an entire "targetted individual" community on the internet.
You can tell that something has happened to them, but its ephemeral, because its psychological, and what do all of us do when we don't understand someone ?
We dismiss them. We other them. We isolate them. We walk away.
Not as a group decision, but the outcome of our collective individual decisions.
Abuse someone long enough, psychologically, and if they are not educated and self-aware, their behavior becomes erratic and they lose all social support.
It's not unlike veterans of a war, who understand what each other went through, when the public doesn't.
Just to be clear, they don't have access to the "full package", only the cameras on their property, right? Or is it cross referenced with vehicles flagged by others?
That is fucking insane. I'm also separately sorry your friends are being stalked. I'd like to give a perspective here without sounding holy. Yes we have ANPR (what you'd call ALPR). There are national police databases and I am sure the cameras are very effective, but every search would require a justification of proportionality and access is not sold to the highest bidders. I think the furthest stretch of users would be the tax authorities' investigations departments. That a private company can profile citizens' movements like this is insane.
I think you may have misread. I am being stalked. My friends are not.
My "former classmates" due to some grudge, are using their friends in power, to abuse me. The two classmates spearheading it, know everyone who is anyone in this county, because one was the President of a womens organization, and the other has been a bartender downtown for 20 years.
I'm being harassed by the digital good ole boy network. This behavior isn't new, its just morphed into a sci fi dystopia.
Sorry, I did misread that. Stay safe I guess :/ I just find it bizarre this whole thing is a private company with a sales@ email the Home Depot etc can contact. I won't be political but a) unlike many countries you can elect your sheriffs, remind them who they work for, b) you have a thing coming up in a few weeks, remind your lawmakers who they work for too.
I'd be happy to complete a test for you, that demonstrates im not paranoid, and merely repeating what I am observing in my life.
The Flock system has these risks built into it, no matter what its proponents claim. A person with one too many beers in them, in any downtown area, in any city, in any country, could say something to offend the wrong person. A person with access to Flock, who happens to be a police officer, who then stalks them.
Your reality is composed of what you have observed, what you have experienced, and what people tell you is real, and people tell 9 lies a day.
Your reality, some part of it, is not what you think. If you place a person in a reality that you control, and then execute a "rug pull" where you drop the veil and reveal a different reality, it causes stress, and stress kills after enough of it.
It's alright if you can't accept that this is happening to other people, but you are doing so because the idea scares you, and its not happening to you, so you reject it, and that is why it works.
Its the new digital Jim Crowe era, and US history is repleat with stories of people whos rights have been abused by others.
For every black person who was denied a seat at a diner in the 50's, there were 10 white people who love the diner and get excellent service every time.
We share a planet, and a country, while our experiences, even in the exact same place, are different.
The wealthy are fine protectors of the status quo, because it serves them. The poor have problems with the status quo, because it doesn't serve them. Same set of rules, 2 different outcomes, for 2 different groups of people.
The comment described a plausible scenario of how flock could be used in the described stalking. Instead of assuming the commenter is paranoid and delusional, we should make sure that surveillance cameras cannot be used in that way, especially given that there are actual documented cases of flock being used for stalking and no apparent safeguards to prevent it.
It can be a bit of both. There are subreddits full of people claiming to be gangstalked. Who is paying these people to follow this person around? Or they just have enough free time/no job and do it for fun?
Lowes and Home Depot, two retailers of tools and home repair supplies, got Flock cameras for all their parking lots after a wave of organized thefts in multiple states. By tracking license plates, they were able to end several rings of thieves who had been stealing millions of dollars worth of goods.
But this sounds like a policing problem not a private enterprise problem. By all means let them have an ALPR reader at the parking lot egress. 'Hi 911 yes we saw this pickup truck XX1ABC steal our shit at 2359hrs this evening', not 'cool we'll play cops & robbers with highly sensitive PII and no accountability or due process'
At it's basics, it's a camera software suite like any other security software like Genetec or the open source Frigate that companies can buy. Obviously the access allowed for a private company like home depot would be limited to only their cameras but home depot could then make those cameras available to law enforcement sort of like how Fusus allows private businesses to set up their local Police department with access to their camera system through a Fusus access box just that with Flock it's built into the software and isn't a third party add-on.
Correct. Lowes and Home Depot pay for "private" Flock cameras for asset protection purposes.
They use the licence plate hotlist internally to track when "organized retail crime(tm)" shows up and get pings when "thieves" come back to the store.
Thus, any Lowes/HD asset protection employee/manager can log into Flock, and see all of the ones "owned" by their corporation (which is nationwide, and installed well beyond the confines of the store property, often covering entire shopping plazas or parks where they're located). They won't be able to see outside of those bounds, but that's still a SUPER powerful tool if you consider ~1700 Lowes and 2000 Home Depots in the US alone.
And of course, combined with "small town" mentality and "backing the blue", of course someone with a modicum of power (the mall cop AP employee) will LARP up and want to whack out with ICE/the local PD and be happy to help them if it means getting a challenge coin!
Well this slightly (but only slightly) makes this a little better. So Cory at the Home Depot cannot stalk his ex by tracking the nationwide Flock network, but _in effect_ has a mini nationwide network available to him because he can see any Home Depot/Lowes which is a huge dragnet anyways?
Ironic that defending "justice" makes them to break several laws.
It is almost like they are always on the verge of not respecting the laws anyway until they are the ones controlling the laws.
What could possibly go wrong?
@Americans who laugh at China and Russia thinking you're still much better off in freedom and rights: That is exactly how you look like to the rest of the world.
Anything that can be abused through collusion in a wide scale scenario will eventually happen.
This is not a contingent issue, it’s a fundamental integrated flaw of any system that put general totalitarian spy as an aimed outcome. Whatever the way it’s green-washed over safety tradeoffs won’t change this obvious fact.
> Interim Maj. Max Nowinsky sustained the allegation and recommended an eight-hour suspension
Lots of explanations provided for wanting to go easy on her. Is the same logic applied for the many victims of a police department? If it's preferential treatment then maybe Interim Maj. Max Nowinsky should also be kicked to the curb.
> Tyler Harpe, a federal ICE agent
Federal ICE agent Tyler Harpe, may you enjoy your new found fame.
I'm not completely opposed to 'camera, cell, solar, battery on a pole'. Its pretty low tech honestly... But there absolutely be a minimum standard of search warrant approval in front of a judge before using it. AND it should be a criminal offense to use it without a search warrant.
However there's this whole problem of "illegal for government to do it but whitewashing through for profit company to do illegal thing".
I've said it before and I'll say it again, the abuse is tangential to the fact that "the system working as intended" is designed to comprehensively and cheaply subjugate us all to the whims of whoever or whatever has the ear of government at any particular minute.
If you wave a magic wand and fix the abuse you will not fix the very nature and purpose of these systems. 1984 would not magically become acceptable if cops couldn't stalk their girlfriend or creds could not be shared among agencies off the books.
A large enough to be a problem subset of the people decrying abuse fancy themselves an armchair central planner (the more self aware ones fancy themselves armchair despots). In the back of their mind they're thinking "if only we got rid of the abuse then the public would buy into this Orwellian system then I could get the government enforce my pet policies with an iron fist and get minimal pushback". Beware of these people. They are the true evil. They all seek to take a bite out of your day to day freedom and it doesn't take all that many of them getting their way before there is nothing left. The politicians feeling emboldened to sign contracts with Flock or any other surveillance vendor only feel emboldened to do so due to the existence and frequency of these people.
Abuse or not these systems are rotten and incompatible on a fundamental level with a free society.
> the abuse is tangential to the fact that "the system working as intended" is designed to comprehensively and cheaply subjugate us all to the whims of whoever or whatever has the ear of government at any particular minute.
I'm reminded of a "hah hah, only serious" joke/slang popularized by EverQuest players: Broken as intended.
This used to be called "running a date" by law enforcement when checking up on some pretty face. That abuse is part of what led to the Driver's Privacy Protection Act. When I worked for my state's motor vehicle agency, there were training videos about what was and wasn't allowed. It won't happen under this administration, but ALPR systems should be legislated as covered by DPPA.
And ICE in turn guns down US citizens, as is already documented.
This is literally a repeat, with modification, of Europe in the
1930s. It is not 1:1 comparable, also in part because the US
justice system, even if undermined by orange scumbag loyalists,
works to some extent still. I am not saying all of it works, but
on youtube you can often listen to discussions by several judges
discussing issues at hand. I forgot which one it was, but it was
linked in "Audit the Audit", and the judges there asked very good,
and very objective questions. In the end they denied a cop immunity
by default, based on very logical arguments they made. I was quite
surprised when I listened to that. It also means that the Trump
oligarch team is not able to kill all of the US justice system,
even though they placed their agents into it already.
I’m less surprised that such things are happening (much worse has been happening for over 20 years) than by the fact that many people seem to genuinely believe that voting, protesting, or calling some representative is going to get us out of this.
A rollback here and there only delays the inevitable. There has been no meaningful progress in individual rights in a Western country in at least 30 years.
They're taking the more nihilistic stance that progress now is just a delay, and the outcome is treated as inevitable. Honestly, it's hard to see it going any other way: plenty of towns, cities, and counties are just waiting out the storm of public opinion and will move on once people get tired of protesting the same thing over and over.
Doesn't mean I don't think that protest and outrage over surveillance aren't good things, just that these things require constant vigilance or else we're stuck with them. Personally, what I see happening is a further bifurcation of American life, where we see communities opposed to constant surveillance contrasted with those that embrace the panopticon.
People thought the same thing about nuclear proliferation. Turns out we can do hard things if we make the effort as a populace. I’m all for being a realist but 1984 is not inevitable, it’s just very difficult to prevent.
I think a generous interpretation of this comment is that voting, writing reps, and protesting (likely the permitted kind) are somewhat ineffectual at the level of policy change especially if the goal is federal-level change.
Even at the state level, you're still reined in by the fact that America operates on the slave economy logic that land represents people which results in rural communities that have a few hundred in population with the same table stakes as a rep in a million+ constituent district. You can write to your rep all you want but if Bubba from Farmtown, USA says trans people should be barred from youth sports [0] and he can get a dozen of his other buddies from the depopulated rural localities to co-sponsor it, it doesn't matter what your rep says or does.
The end result is that effective organizing has to be hyperlocal - this means showing up to county/municipal council meetings, sitting on neighborhood planning groups, broadening awareness in your community via doorknocking and public events.
Specifically to that point against protesting, some forms of 'protest' that seem pervasive with groups like No Kings and 50501 are effectively self-neutered. The vast majority of those protests are permitted with police escorts.
On it's face, these 'protests' are similar to those of the past - people show up, they wave signs, they chant. But like a child imitating being a fighter pilot, it accomplishes nothing real. The point of a protest is disruption - economic disruption, traffic blocking, etc - because that disruption buys you leverage with the local government. When you can say 'I can shut down your arteries at any time so meet me halfway with our demands or face millions in economic damage', you have an effective protest. This is how the Europeans do it between burning down their Supreme Courts to piling up tons of manure outside of Parliament - and that gets actual results.
Asking your local government liaison for permission to say mean things about a federal official does nothing except give them a chance for easy points with the crowd. Nothing changes, all that energy and labor that goes into organizing a safe protest dissipates, and the status quo remains fixed, even consolidated now that the already limited shared pool of movement labor has been siphoned off into a performative act.
I'd assume that the Plutocrats, their loyal politicians, and the Creep State have worked very hard to convince people to "fight back" with ineffectual tactics.
Which is not to say that voting can't be extremely effective, if organized at suitable scales over time. Trump wasn't re-elected because all the swing voters who'd replaced him with Biden in '20 were overjoyed with how Joe and his Dem's had handled things.
Trump and his predecessors have all been advancing mass surveillance on an unimaginable scale. This particular topic is probably the strongest argument against the power of voting.
It started under bush jr. That mass surveillance was illegal and then-respected media outlets like NYTimes and WaPo knew about it prior to the 2004 elections and deliberately covered it up until after that election. Congress then retroactively legalized that illegal activity in order to protect bush & themselves.
Against the power of n=1 voting, or the against the power of "we got 53%" voting?
I was pointing out that the former is virtually meaningless, but the latter tends to be decisive.
Yes, mass surveillance is a huge problem. But most of the time, most of the voters do not behave as if they meaningfully care about most of the aspects of mass surveillance. That's pretty much the same rule as for the Pentagon buying $5,000 screwdrivers, and bizarre loopholes appearing in the tax code to benefit a few billionaires who are extremely "generous" to their good friends in Congress. Both R's and D's may loudly denounce those practices - but they know that actually fighting against them, where it counts, will not be good for their political careers.
Is this any different, legally, than sharing your Netflix login etc?
Because the data is purchased, most jurisdictions don't require a warrant. The only legal issue I can see currently is that Flock lost revenue from having another subscriber.
What if sharing of Netflix passwords could lead to bodily harm or an “illegal” activity that wouldn’t hold up in court? Probably the one sharing Netflix password wouldn’t remain unscathed, legally speaking?
A lot of downvotes for this comment but I think it's an interesting question and shouldn't be downvoted.
It's easy to argue (as lot of people have in this thread) that there is a huge moral difference between sharing access to a streaming service and sharing access to a mass surveillance tool.
But was any criminal law broken? Is it just a violation of Flock's ToS and the biggest consequence is the police department losing access for violating the contract?
It's an important question, because if there isn't really any legal consequences for any of the parties involved then it's worth understanding that and, hopefully, addressing!
If we interpret OP's question in good faith, I don't think they are implying that it should be legal, just asking if it is.
I think the annoying part is that it is clearly illegal under most understandings of the Fourth Amendment but because our legal processes are so byzantine and stuffed full of moldering corpses of prescriptivism past, it's unlikely we'll see any legal recourse here.
The additionally annoying aspect about the question is that this is something privacy advocates have been going on about for years. Ever since I started following the EFF in 2012, they've been warning about the rise in private sector mass surveillance and how it would lead to government CCTV. And now here we are, with Ring doorbells sharing data with LEOs and Flock everywhere.
So to hear 'is this illegal' says to me, at minimum, that a dearth of basic internet sleuthing has been done about this issue and the question was posed out of a complete lack of curiosity and self-driven exploration. Especially now with LLMs, research like this is vanishingly easy to do (as is the adversarial review of it, and the eventual dialectical synthesis). To not do so seems lazy, at best, and that's not addressing how the 'if it's not illegal, it's fine' thought-terminating cliche has been pervasively used to justify detention centers, military black sites, NSA wiretapping, police brutality, etc in a way that seems to universally be a bad faith practice.
I don’t think anyone is implying that it not being illegal would make it ok.
It doesn’t seem like any criminal charges being brought in this case. So sure, an argument could be made that this violates the 4th amendment, but under the current application of the law this seems legal. Which means all and ICE agent needs to get access to flock data is a friend with access. Surely trying to understand that isn’t lazy or justifying anything?
I've heard bad faith 'if it's legal, it's fine' quite a few too many times to see it as anything except either intellectual laziness or simple bad faith. This is a rhetoric that always seems to pop up whenever anybody advocates for the ethical practice.
I also think it's a pointless exercise to understand the legality of it. Unless you're an actual civil rights attorney, a legislator, or some kind of judge, you, me, and everyone else here has effectively zero power over how the law is interpreted. We can debate all we want but it's a dance in the ivory tower, removed from realworld consequence.
The only real way to push against these forces is to join up with a community organization local to you, volunteer groups that often struggle with basic tech setup and resource tracking. Folks from HN could be a huge boon to the movement if they simply had the initiative to get involved.
Your employer probably would, and Anthropic as well.
—
In any case, these Netflix and LLM subscription comparisons are utterly beside the point, the equation is hilariously different when it’s a surveillance tool used by
the state violence monopoly that we’re talking about. The standard should be absurdly higher than "no big deal, everyone shares their Netflix".
In this case, the customer utilizing the data without authorization also is known for killing Americans, and the data facilitates stalking their victims and their families.
We should be advocating for more accountability from the government and its representatives, not less.
Politicians are completely naive in their understand how people works, if it's abused, the system isn't locked down enough or that one person circumvented the procedure. They completely fail to understand that there exists people to whom you cannot grant access and screening people in advance probably impossible. Some cop checks all the boxes, gets access to databases, then their partner leaves them and they are now no longer safe to grant access.
I don't understand why it's hard to grasp that surveillance tools are dangerous and rather using them to protect others, law enforcement will use these tools to do bad things. It's as if that we assume that cops are better people and follow rules better. Even in countries that actually train their police force this isn't remotely true.
The US might be different, I doubt it, but society is getting increasingly SAFE, there is less and less need for these tools.
I don’t think it’s naïveté. I think it’s an acceptable byproduct to them. It’s collateral damage in their war on ??? crime? insecurity? or in their lobby kickbacks.
This is a great point, and one that really isn't played up because it doesn't fit the whole profit-from-attention narrative that literally every media surface seems to be following.
It almost seems as if law enforcement 'need' these additional tools to keep them busy; find new, more trivial crime that's been hiding behind no one reporting it or being hurt by it.
Maybe if law enforcement resources could be applied to more corporate crime, that'd keep em busy till the cows come home.
This conversation is usually about how no one lets their kids play outside unsupervised anymore, but it applies to police as well. In Georgia they had to pass a law telling police they couldn’t arrest parents who let their kids go outside by themselves. The inciting incident literally had a police officer lecturing a mother about how many sickos are out there and then putting her in cuffs because her 10-year-old was a mile away by himself. Even since then, DFCS has been caught bullying parents into signing an agreement saying they were negligent and agreeing to a restrictive safety plan because they let their kid go to a nearby playground by themself.
It is insane and depressing about how people willingly restrict their lives and their kids lives because of the mistaken belief that the world isn’t as safe as it was when they were a kid. Not only that, but if you let your kids play outside without you, then you risk your neighbors calling the police on you and having to deal with whatever bs comes from that.
If they wanted to do something to increase feeling of safety, and justice, they'd crack down on bike theft.
2. Automated enforcement is generally in the form of fines, which habitual violators ignore.
3. Confiscating vehicles as an escalating consequence of automated enforcement is so unpopular no one will even suggest it.
I get that point 1 is extremely valid in a place like the US where everyone can have a gun.
Do other countries not enforce fines?
In the UK you can have your car confiscated on the spot if the automated number plate recognition in a patrol car flags you don't have insurance. Fines are enforced, but escalating that to non-payment of fines seems like something they could do (people might complain, but only the ones not paying their fines!)
The rules and numbers are allowed to be what they are so long as mass tasteful/mild noncompliance is tolerated. The second you start robotically (electronic robots vs meat robots in uniform does not matter in this case) fining people for taking lefts on red arrows at 1am or exceeding the speed limit a bit in the base case you will see politicians pandering to voters by changing those rules such that the typical person can behave typically without any particular care to abide by them and generally not break them.
what happens when society solves its issues and theres no need to 'keep them busy' :(
People will always have conflicts from time to time, the only question is whether we let them deal with it themselves or have an authority with a uniform and a badge who is supposed to be trustworthy enough to handle it.
Look at the engineering and surveying firms over the past 50yr. Cops will likely see something like that. Like they'll get written into all sorts of laws and processes despite the scope of the "value" they provide being narrower than ever.
It'll turn into a low effort make-work job. Like Realtors(TM) with extra steps to justify their existence.
Like no amount of 1080p Ring footage of your door getting kicked in will suffice, the insurance company will not believe your house has been broken into until a certified license holding cop shows up and signs off on it.
Most of those 'crimes' shouldnt be. And thats what parts of the jury nullification movements are all about; judging the law BEFORE judging the person.
Also the more data captured about every human, the more criminality can be found, especially in things that shouldnt have ever been criminal. And having higher "bust" numbers and proof of evil criminality element (regular humans doing normal things that are criminalized by the elite) then allows them to write bigger checks for more pervasive surveillance.
Its the classic long tail, and exponential cost increases for of a logarithmic decay of detection.
Our society could restart with a good review of all laws. And those laws with nobody else harmed should be scrapped.
The cops are not now nor have they ever been an institution to protect the people, they are there to protect the Peace. What's the Peace? Largely seems to be whatever makes the rich people happy.
The police protect "property owners" and "property rights."
And this is why the homeless remain homeless.
No matter where they stand, its someone elses property, and they have little to no rights.
You can't feed yourself if you are forced to keep walking.
DeShaney v. Winnebago County Department of Social Services (1989) held that the Constitution generally does not require the government to protect people from harm inflicted by private individuals.
Town of Castle Rock v. Gonzales (2005), held that a woman did not have a constitutional entitlement to police enforcement of a restraining order.
You are forced to pay taxes for service that you may/may not actually receive.
You are forced to tell the truth to people who are allowed to tell you lies.
The system is designed to protect the system, and we are just passing through it while we are alive.
Now, I agree that the police are not your friends, and they are incentivized to find crimes when there may not really be any at times, but I disagree with the notion that they are simply the lapdogs of the wealthy. In fact, it seems like in a lot of places in California it's the law-abiding, wealthier citizens that are hassled most by the police for minor infractions, because they know they can actually extract revenue from them.
You work at a retail store. You take $100 from the till. They have you on camera. Management calls cops, and has you arrested for misdemeanor theft. You spend night in jail.
You work in retail store. You log in at 9am. And your manager was told to cut payroll and edits your (and 9 other peoples) timecards to the tune of $1000. You catch this. Management refuses to correct it and/or punish the manager. Nobody is arrested. You're told this is a civil issue.
Wage theft is larger than all other theft combined, but treated as a civil, not criminal matter. I wonder why.
https://www.tcworkerscenter.org/2018/09/wage-theft-vs-other-...
You secured your expensive road bike ($2000) cause its your primary transportation. You put a gps tag on it, so if its ever stolen, you can make the appropriate report and retrieval. The lock was cut, and the bike taken. Its at a nearby house. You report it. Cops wont take report and wont get the stolen property. You even have definite proof. They dont care, and they dont have to.
Target (retailer) has a policy to let people steal from them, and to do facial recognition until a thief surpasses the statutory felony limit (usually $1000). THEY send a report to the police, which isnt ignored, and the police go do the corporates' dirty work and arrest the alleged perpetrator.
During the 1980's there was well known pushes (by Biden etm) to criminalize cocaine severely. But the cocaine they punished wasnt the white powder. That was used predominantly by executives. Instead, the heavy criminalization focused on crack cocaine, which was used predominantly by the lower (poor, black) people. Punishments were upwards of 10x disparity against the poor classes.
The misattributed quote "If the penalty for a crime is a fine, then that law only exists for the lower class" (to Final Fantasy Tactics, not true attribution), is something we see all the time.
Anthropic - mass for-profit copyright fraud against the public? Fine.
All insurance - if you lie? Insurance fraud. If they lie, get rekt and die or something.
Banks - guilty of mass laundering and made $50B? Oh, $2B fine. $48B profit. If a human did that, theyd go to jail for decades.
These disparities exist everywhere in "law". Law only defends elite, wealthy, donor class, and well known monied local elites. It almost never defends the average wronged citizen.
The real revelation comes when you realize this is not true.
Crime rates could be going up, that still wouldn't justify broad, warrantless spying on the public. We have rights and they aren't conditional on crime rates.
That's being charitable. Complicit is far more likely, any system like that plays to benefit of the ruling party as you can use it to suppress the people that would vote you out.
- German address registers with religious affiliation were a good idea until the Nazis came to power.
- Pegasus spyware was developed and sold to governments to fight terrorism and serious crime — until it was used to spy on journalists, human rights activists and political opponents, including in authoritarian states.
- Rwandan identity cards listed ethnicity for administrative purposes — until militias used them to identify and execute Tutsis at roadblocks during the 1994 genocide.
Bottom line: Even if you trust the current administration (do you?), are you sure you want 5o give that power to all future ones?
Now I fully believe it can happen here and that those people are in office now and that a non-trivial percentage of the US public would be Ok with those atrocities happening in the US.
We have really turned into the opening act of a terrible dystopian movie.
"The police officer is your friend."
What else did we do immediately ? We learned to pledge our allegience.
5 year olds .... pledging allegience to an ideology they can't possibly comprehend.
It was always right there in front of us.
It’s such a shame that media (social and traditional) really plays up loss aversion. My local news is basically fear mongering. My local social media page is filled with people who have nothing better to do with their time than complain about all of the negative stuff happening in this town. They take every isolated incident and project it as some major pattern. It’s really sad.
Fear keeps people from starting their own company, so they'll return to work on Monday.
See it for what it is. Another system of control.
"Disturbed - The Vengeful One (Official Music Video) [4K UPGRADE]"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nW-IPrzM1g
They aren’t doing hard hitting journalism exposing negligence, they are making people terrified of planes. They’re stressing people out about something that is not reasonably within their control AND it’s not a real risk for us all. The numbers don’t support scaring people over this.
I think you’re misunderstanding that they think are part of the populace. They do not. They do not think they’re at your level. That’s why they got in the politics. That’s why they’ve been successful at it.
Go spend some time around with police higher ups if you don’t think that they also believe that they’re a class of nobility.
The constitution bars titles of nobility, so to achieve the status of nobility, you print the title you want on a business card, and attend group meetings once a week, where your perceived status and nobility are reinforced by an institutional echo chamber that will dispose of you in a heartbeat to save itself.
Some are, others aren't. They just accept it willingly.
Just as in the Purge movies politicians are exempt ;-)
The idea that a movie could get so many basic things so badly wrong, that it could float a scenario that made zero sense, but still gain such cultural traction was one of the first times I felt old. It's speaking to a youth with crazy and new ideas. They're ready to make their own grand and terrible mistakes, which a future youth will one day hate them for.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rally_%27round_the_flag_effect
> normal everyday people wouldn't want to be violent one day year
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice
Rally round the flag accounts for "violence done by others against us" and not "random violence against ourselves" so I think it's completely meaningless in the case of this conversation.
With regard to human sacrifice, how much violence have you been involved in? Maybe a few fist fights in middle school or high school? Do you know anyone who has committed real violence? I'll bet you don't. It's exceedingly rare these days compared to historical norms. People might disagree on why its become so rare, but the general rarity is a fact. Even for areas with high violent crime, there is usually a small minority of violent re-offenders, rather than a large majority of people committing random violence.
Does years of domestic violence count? What about shootings I've witnessed but wasn't a part of? There's a school nearby and kids carry guns around here.
> Do you know anyone who has committed real violence?
I don't hang out with the violent types in the first place, so the question makes no sense.
No, I mean, per capita, how many people as compared to the number of people you know total, have perpetrated violence.
>I don't hang out with the violent types in the first place, so the question makes no sense.
But if violence were ubiquitous, you wouldn't be able to avoid it. I don't know any violent people either. My point is just that most people (per capita) do not commit violence most of the time. The idea that everyone's just chomping at the bit to perpetrate violence is at odds with reality.
I will never understand the reason of mentioning works of fictions to make a real life point
We should engineer a society immune to that.
Not Starship Troopers, though.
Alas, the Roberts court effectively ruled that it's not really a bribe if it falls short of the third party saying they want the government official to vote/rule a particular way for a particular price, the government official does as asked, and he/she sends the third party a written invoice for services rendered.
Even should that happen, I'm pretty sure Justice Thomas would find the larger offense is that the invoice failed to include sales tax.
Remember our Supreme Court's recent bribery scandal wasn't that a number of justices were accepting gifts but rather that they hasn't disclosed them properly. We're perfectly OK with third parties bribing the judges on our highest court so long as the judges fill out the correct paperwork.
If a definite majority wants to do so, the system will change. Until then the oligarchs will keep playing one side againts the other, as can currently be seen with Trump amplifying the hate in the population, in order for his cronies to steal more money, start more wars and so forth. He will lose the upcoming elections but he will continue to worship theft and destruction.
They understand exactly how people work. You are naive for thinking that they aren't aware of this. Their entire job is essentially a popularity contest in which they promise you things, that they almost never deliver on.
Honestly I think the majority aren't smart enough to do the cost benefit analysis of these system, so they just ignore the warning.
You'd be shocked how many people cannot process basic hypotheticals. I've been in countless dialogues like this one:
- How would you feel now if you had not eaten breakfast?
- But I did eat breakfast.
They don't care either way. They do whatever they think is popular to garner support. If it was popular to bring slavery back, they would advocate for that.
> Honestly I think the majority aren't smart enough to do the cost benefit analysis of these system, so they just ignore the warning.
I honestly wonder why many of you keep on giving these people the benefit of the doubt. Please don't quote Hanlon's razor at me. There's another side of it that often isn't discussed.
Nefarious individuals know (if they can't verbalise it) that most people will assume a mistake is made rather than malice and they will routinely use this to their advantage. Anyone that is in the political space, I automatically assume malice.
These people have us arguing about nonsense while they line their pockets.
Stop assuming that these people have your best interests at heart. Cynicism is warranted because their class has earned the (poor) reputation.
Oh man, I have to assume you live in a nice little enclave and are reading old statistical reports. I have the misfortune of sometimes having to travel into the city. I can assure you, it is not getting safer. In fact, just last week I saw first sign of Chicago turning into Philly.
This chart is up to 2024. If you look up 2025 and 2026 data for the US you will see that it has continued to decline YoY.
Judging by your comment I assume that you have personally witnessed some criminality recently and are drawing conclusions about the entire US, if so I’m sorry you had to endure that, but that doesn’t mean that your conclusions apply to the general trend in the US as the GP was referring to.
But I have no need to convince anyone. It is just weird to me that I need to explain the obvious.
Maybe just a coincidence. I'm sure it is just a coincidence. For real
> In her appeal, Harpe said her husband was a certified federal law enforcement officer and that every search was conducted for law enforcement purposes.
> “The violation occurred because I gave my husband, who is a certified law enforcement officer with the Department of Homeland Security, access to my Flock account,” Harpe wrote. “Every search he conducted was for law enforcement use only and not for personal gain.”
There seems to be a subset of law enforcement officers who fundamentally don't understand privacy, checks and balances, and responsibility. They believe they should have unrestricted access to everyone else and that they are above us all.
Firing her was not excessive, it is the bare minimum. Officers should be held to a higher standard, not lower. She and her husband should be in a jail cell.
You can't make the same argument with financial systems by giving someone at a different bank access to your bank just because you're both "financial professionals", and that's arguably much less sensitive data.
Simple method is IP whitelisting, easy in some ways painful to keep updated. Vpn is another easy option. But then you can have client side certs, hardware tokens, and endpoint security mechanisms which are probably more robust. Either way, it's not a weird unique thing, it's pretty ubiquitous :)
Doing things, "correctly" is sort of no longer the place of software. The idea is to build solutions that are comprised of toothpicks and sticky tacky so you can force out whatever the alternative was and make money for the shareholders at the same time.
Authenticate with SSO > IDP checks for Device fingerprint > IDP Approves Login if Device is whitelisted
This is why if you're building a product, please give SSO for free (see sso.tax) - you shift responsibility, requirements and posture to the tenant's IdP.
It is intentional and deliberate price discrimination to charge enterprises more. One example: why do you think enterprises don't just stack consumer/teams Codex or Claude subs with significant subsidies; given that all enterprise seats are API/PAYG now? SSO/IdP + ability to opt out of training globally
I think you’re overestimating the amount of enterprises that don’t have cloud computing.
If the authorities want people to accept systems like Flock etc. then they need to severely punish abuse like this.
I’m quite naive regarding the details of the legal system, wonder why we can’t expedite certain cases when a SCOTUS precedent has been established, or some form of expedited legal notice. We shouldn’t have to wait for a perfect case of a flock violation, then wait for someone to be brave enough to spend the money (or if pro bono just their time/reputation) to file a case and go through the system for the next x years
SCOTUS has held for a long time that people don't have an expectation of privacy when visible in public. Digital recording and powerful search features certainly change the calculus on that, but there is a fundamental difference between a location tracked by a cellphone you purchased and own vs. just driving around where anyone can read your license plate.
Assuming that’s true, why wouldn’t he have his own flock account to do his searches?
[reality] It's just the police, beating us with better batons, same as it ever was.
Why is that the case? Logged in from DE atm.
It's sad how the internet is getting worse by the day.
And while federal crimes are legal now, couldn't it be against state law too?
Who do you expect to charge the woman with a crime: the local prosecutors who are basically cop-adjacent, Georgia's attorney general who supports the lawless ICE, or a federal prosecutor working under the Trump administration?
I mean, maybe you'd like to do something about it via a civil lawsuit, at which point you ought to acquaint yourself with something called "qualified immunity."
Living in a police state is fun, right?
If I worked at a company and gave my work login credentials to a friend and that friend used it to access my work's network then I'm pretty sure I'd go to jail.
And just about everyone in the position to prosecute them actively wants this, so this is just another example of laundering the blame.
ICE is the President's personal force, screened for their loyalty to him. They have no interest in the law. The rest of the government doesn't like them any better than you do.
The president has always ignored the law.
So it's not all Trump, but his administration has definitely pushed the lack of accountability to new heights and combining it with the new wave of surveillance tech with limited oversight or legislation it's all just become ingrained with nobody to fight it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%BChrerprinzip
https://gizmodo.com/cop-fired-for-letting-her-ice-agent-husb...
This would at least reduce some of the avenues for abuse.
Last two visits, some guy named "Victor" shadowed me, and made it a point to call me by my first name twice.
I spend as little money at Home Depot as possible now.
The flock system is being abused by every organization across the entire country, because thats where peoples heads are at today.
2 out of 3 adults in the US are not considered "psychologically mature" by psychologists.
Nation of adult children + spying and tracking technology ... of course its being abused. The only question is how much, and Flock isn't going to tell us the truth of it, ever, because they dont track abuse, they track victims.
We are the victims of Flock.
[0] https://roughdraftatlanta.com/2023/06/30/atlanta-police-arre...
[1] https://truthout.org/articles/despite-116000-signatures-atla...
[2] https://insideclimatenews.org/news/08032023/atlanta-cop-city...
We spend most of our money at ACE or just order directly from manufacturers online.
Home Depot and Lowes are the 2 largest US home store ( construction materials, appliances, etc ) retail chains in the US.
They have Flock cameras installed on mobile trailers, parked in their parking lots. The cameras track your vehicle as you are parking, and issue alerts for anyone that has been flagged in the database.
In my case, I have classmates from school, who have friends at the local county EMS operations center, who are using the system to stalk me.
Just 3 days ago, I tried to have a quiet conversation with my girlfriend at a little park, in a small neighborhood. Less than 10 minutes after arriving, a car with 4 or 5 people showed up, positioned themselves within ear shot, and then began making fun of us in order to prevent us from thinking and discussing issues clearly. This event by itself seems innocent and random, except, it happens like clockwork, in multiple locations, and its an established pattern in my life, making it decidedly non-random. The "actors" think of it as street theatre, the police think of it as "policing", and what you get as the target is pure psychological hell.
When a victim begins to try and explain verbally what is happening to them, they relive the trauma of the events that have been "staged" and people assume the victim is mentally unstable. It is the same strategy as kicking a dog in the head repeatedly, until it becomes an agry mad dog, and then putting it down because it was dangerous. Create the problem, then appear to solve it.
What may have started out as a joke now has them guilty of human trafficking, so they have adopted a strategy of "running me out of town" via harrassment.
They know if they emotionally destablise people, they will voluntarily leave or self destruct via drugs, stress, acting out, etc.
This is what "community policing" now means.
There are any number of videos on youtube of people having meltdowns, claiming they are being 'gangstalked', etc. and they seem very disturbed. This is why this works. They disturb you, then dismiss any allegations as you being disturbed.
Watch the movie "Closetland" for how psychological abuse works.
That sucks though.
You can tell that something has happened to them, but its ephemeral, because its psychological, and what do all of us do when we don't understand someone ?
We dismiss them. We other them. We isolate them. We walk away.
Not as a group decision, but the outcome of our collective individual decisions.
Abuse someone long enough, psychologically, and if they are not educated and self-aware, their behavior becomes erratic and they lose all social support.
It's not unlike veterans of a war, who understand what each other went through, when the public doesn't.
My "former classmates" due to some grudge, are using their friends in power, to abuse me. The two classmates spearheading it, know everyone who is anyone in this county, because one was the President of a womens organization, and the other has been a bartender downtown for 20 years.
I'm being harassed by the digital good ole boy network. This behavior isn't new, its just morphed into a sci fi dystopia.
And you blame the "adults of America" that supposedly are "psychologically inmature", which to me looks like an absurd and unsubstantiated claim
The Flock system has these risks built into it, no matter what its proponents claim. A person with one too many beers in them, in any downtown area, in any city, in any country, could say something to offend the wrong person. A person with access to Flock, who happens to be a police officer, who then stalks them.
Your reality is composed of what you have observed, what you have experienced, and what people tell you is real, and people tell 9 lies a day.
Your reality, some part of it, is not what you think. If you place a person in a reality that you control, and then execute a "rug pull" where you drop the veil and reveal a different reality, it causes stress, and stress kills after enough of it.
It's alright if you can't accept that this is happening to other people, but you are doing so because the idea scares you, and its not happening to you, so you reject it, and that is why it works.
Its the new digital Jim Crowe era, and US history is repleat with stories of people whos rights have been abused by others.
For every black person who was denied a seat at a diner in the 50's, there were 10 white people who love the diner and get excellent service every time.
We share a planet, and a country, while our experiences, even in the exact same place, are different.
The wealthy are fine protectors of the status quo, because it serves them. The poor have problems with the status quo, because it doesn't serve them. Same set of rules, 2 different outcomes, for 2 different groups of people.
They use the licence plate hotlist internally to track when "organized retail crime(tm)" shows up and get pings when "thieves" come back to the store.
Thus, any Lowes/HD asset protection employee/manager can log into Flock, and see all of the ones "owned" by their corporation (which is nationwide, and installed well beyond the confines of the store property, often covering entire shopping plazas or parks where they're located). They won't be able to see outside of those bounds, but that's still a SUPER powerful tool if you consider ~1700 Lowes and 2000 Home Depots in the US alone.
And of course, combined with "small town" mentality and "backing the blue", of course someone with a modicum of power (the mall cop AP employee) will LARP up and want to whack out with ICE/the local PD and be happy to help them if it means getting a challenge coin!
They are allowed to lie to you.
They are allowed to fabricate a false reality for you.
The moment you do the same to them, you are a criminal.
Divide and conquer. It's not new, and it still works.
The police have seen "The Matrix."
Flock is the console, you are Neo, and they are Agent Smith.
This is not a contingent issue, it’s a fundamental integrated flaw of any system that put general totalitarian spy as an aimed outcome. Whatever the way it’s green-washed over safety tradeoffs won’t change this obvious fact.
Lots of explanations provided for wanting to go easy on her. Is the same logic applied for the many victims of a police department? If it's preferential treatment then maybe Interim Maj. Max Nowinsky should also be kicked to the curb.
> Tyler Harpe, a federal ICE agent
Federal ICE agent Tyler Harpe, may you enjoy your new found fame.
I'm not completely opposed to 'camera, cell, solar, battery on a pole'. Its pretty low tech honestly... But there absolutely be a minimum standard of search warrant approval in front of a judge before using it. AND it should be a criminal offense to use it without a search warrant.
However there's this whole problem of "illegal for government to do it but whitewashing through for profit company to do illegal thing".
If you wave a magic wand and fix the abuse you will not fix the very nature and purpose of these systems. 1984 would not magically become acceptable if cops couldn't stalk their girlfriend or creds could not be shared among agencies off the books.
A large enough to be a problem subset of the people decrying abuse fancy themselves an armchair central planner (the more self aware ones fancy themselves armchair despots). In the back of their mind they're thinking "if only we got rid of the abuse then the public would buy into this Orwellian system then I could get the government enforce my pet policies with an iron fist and get minimal pushback". Beware of these people. They are the true evil. They all seek to take a bite out of your day to day freedom and it doesn't take all that many of them getting their way before there is nothing left. The politicians feeling emboldened to sign contracts with Flock or any other surveillance vendor only feel emboldened to do so due to the existence and frequency of these people.
Abuse or not these systems are rotten and incompatible on a fundamental level with a free society.
I'm reminded of a "hah hah, only serious" joke/slang popularized by EverQuest players: Broken as intended.
https://wiki.c2.com/?HaHaOnlySerious
> if cops couldn't stalk their girlfriend
This used to be called "running a date" by law enforcement when checking up on some pretty face. That abuse is part of what led to the Driver's Privacy Protection Act. When I worked for my state's motor vehicle agency, there were training videos about what was and wasn't allowed. It won't happen under this administration, but ALPR systems should be legislated as covered by DPPA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driver%27s_Privacy_Protection_...
This is literally a repeat, with modification, of Europe in the 1930s. It is not 1:1 comparable, also in part because the US justice system, even if undermined by orange scumbag loyalists, works to some extent still. I am not saying all of it works, but on youtube you can often listen to discussions by several judges discussing issues at hand. I forgot which one it was, but it was linked in "Audit the Audit", and the judges there asked very good, and very objective questions. In the end they denied a cop immunity by default, based on very logical arguments they made. I was quite surprised when I listened to that. It also means that the Trump oligarch team is not able to kill all of the US justice system, even though they placed their agents into it already.
Doesn't mean I don't think that protest and outrage over surveillance aren't good things, just that these things require constant vigilance or else we're stuck with them. Personally, what I see happening is a further bifurcation of American life, where we see communities opposed to constant surveillance contrasted with those that embrace the panopticon.
Look, I get it, we're clearly in the backsliding zone right now, but midterms are here.
Town canceled their contracts, the stock went down.
Two measurable metrics
Even at the state level, you're still reined in by the fact that America operates on the slave economy logic that land represents people which results in rural communities that have a few hundred in population with the same table stakes as a rep in a million+ constituent district. You can write to your rep all you want but if Bubba from Farmtown, USA says trans people should be barred from youth sports [0] and he can get a dozen of his other buddies from the depopulated rural localities to co-sponsor it, it doesn't matter what your rep says or does.
The end result is that effective organizing has to be hyperlocal - this means showing up to county/municipal council meetings, sitting on neighborhood planning groups, broadening awareness in your community via doorknocking and public events.
Specifically to that point against protesting, some forms of 'protest' that seem pervasive with groups like No Kings and 50501 are effectively self-neutered. The vast majority of those protests are permitted with police escorts.
On it's face, these 'protests' are similar to those of the past - people show up, they wave signs, they chant. But like a child imitating being a fighter pilot, it accomplishes nothing real. The point of a protest is disruption - economic disruption, traffic blocking, etc - because that disruption buys you leverage with the local government. When you can say 'I can shut down your arteries at any time so meet me halfway with our demands or face millions in economic damage', you have an effective protest. This is how the Europeans do it between burning down their Supreme Courts to piling up tons of manure outside of Parliament - and that gets actual results.
Asking your local government liaison for permission to say mean things about a federal official does nothing except give them a chance for easy points with the crowd. Nothing changes, all that energy and labor that goes into organizing a safe protest dissipates, and the status quo remains fixed, even consolidated now that the already limited shared pool of movement labor has been siphoned off into a performative act.
[0] https://ltgov.georgia.gov/press-releases/2025-04-28/lt-gover...
Which is not to say that voting can't be extremely effective, if organized at suitable scales over time. Trump wasn't re-elected because all the swing voters who'd replaced him with Biden in '20 were overjoyed with how Joe and his Dem's had handled things.
I was pointing out that the former is virtually meaningless, but the latter tends to be decisive.
Yes, mass surveillance is a huge problem. But most of the time, most of the voters do not behave as if they meaningfully care about most of the aspects of mass surveillance. That's pretty much the same rule as for the Pentagon buying $5,000 screwdrivers, and bizarre loopholes appearing in the tax code to benefit a few billionaires who are extremely "generous" to their good friends in Congress. Both R's and D's may loudly denounce those practices - but they know that actually fighting against them, where it counts, will not be good for their political careers.
Because the data is purchased, most jurisdictions don't require a warrant. The only legal issue I can see currently is that Flock lost revenue from having another subscriber.
I am not a lawyer, just curious.
But even if it were legal, this only shows the core problem:
That data should not be available to anyone at all.
It's easy to argue (as lot of people have in this thread) that there is a huge moral difference between sharing access to a streaming service and sharing access to a mass surveillance tool.
But was any criminal law broken? Is it just a violation of Flock's ToS and the biggest consequence is the police department losing access for violating the contract?
It's an important question, because if there isn't really any legal consequences for any of the parties involved then it's worth understanding that and, hopefully, addressing!
If we interpret OP's question in good faith, I don't think they are implying that it should be legal, just asking if it is.
The additionally annoying aspect about the question is that this is something privacy advocates have been going on about for years. Ever since I started following the EFF in 2012, they've been warning about the rise in private sector mass surveillance and how it would lead to government CCTV. And now here we are, with Ring doorbells sharing data with LEOs and Flock everywhere.
So to hear 'is this illegal' says to me, at minimum, that a dearth of basic internet sleuthing has been done about this issue and the question was posed out of a complete lack of curiosity and self-driven exploration. Especially now with LLMs, research like this is vanishingly easy to do (as is the adversarial review of it, and the eventual dialectical synthesis). To not do so seems lazy, at best, and that's not addressing how the 'if it's not illegal, it's fine' thought-terminating cliche has been pervasively used to justify detention centers, military black sites, NSA wiretapping, police brutality, etc in a way that seems to universally be a bad faith practice.
It doesn’t seem like any criminal charges being brought in this case. So sure, an argument could be made that this violates the 4th amendment, but under the current application of the law this seems legal. Which means all and ICE agent needs to get access to flock data is a friend with access. Surely trying to understand that isn’t lazy or justifying anything?
I also think it's a pointless exercise to understand the legality of it. Unless you're an actual civil rights attorney, a legislator, or some kind of judge, you, me, and everyone else here has effectively zero power over how the law is interpreted. We can debate all we want but it's a dance in the ivory tower, removed from realworld consequence.
The only real way to push against these forces is to join up with a community organization local to you, volunteer groups that often struggle with basic tech setup and resource tracking. Folks from HN could be a huge boon to the movement if they simply had the initiative to get involved.
—
In any case, these Netflix and LLM subscription comparisons are utterly beside the point, the equation is hilariously different when it’s a surveillance tool used by the state violence monopoly that we’re talking about. The standard should be absurdly higher than "no big deal, everyone shares their Netflix".
We should be advocating for more accountability from the government and its representatives, not less.