Flock cameras are assisted suicide for dying neighborhoods. They don't prevent crime, they record crime. Cleaning up vacant lots, planting trees, street lighting, trash removal, and traffic calming like adding planters and crosswalks reduce crime.
I'm surprised the flock cameras aren't being disabled in a more subtle fashion.<p>All it takes is a tiny drone with a stick attached, and at the end of that stick is a tiny sponge soaked with tempera paint. Drone goes 'boop' on the camera lens, and the entire system is disabled until an expensive technician drives out with a ladder and cleans the lens at non-trivial expense.<p>A handful of enterprising activists could blind all the flock cameras in a region in a day or two, and without <i>destroying</i> them, which makes it less of an overtly criminal act.<p>Obviously not advocating this, just pointing out that flock is very vulnerable to this very simple attack from activists.
The goal here by activists isn't to directly physically disarm every camera. Like with any act of protest, it's at least as much about the optics and influence of public opinion. <i>Visibly</i> destroying the units is more cathartic and spreads the message of displeasure better. Ultimately what needs to change is public perception and policy.
If it's about sending a message, I think using a drone to defeat mass surveillance is quite evocative.
Sure, but por que no los dos.<p>One or two cameras getting bashed is basically a fart in the wind for flock, and I'd argue that it doesn't actually move the needle in any direction as far as public opinion goes. Those who dislike them don't need further convincing, those who support them are not going to have their opinion changed by property destruction (it might make them support surveillance <i>more</i>, in fact).<p>But hey, it's <i>provocative</i> I guess.<p>On the other hand flock losing their entire fleet is an <i>existential problem</i> for them, and for all the customers they're charging for the use of that fleet. Their BoD will want answers about why the officers of the company are harming shareholders with the way they're operating the business. Cities that have contracts with them may have grounds to terminate them, etc etc.
Why would I fly an expensive drone close to a camera, fumble about for a minute trying to get it painted like a renaissance artist, when I can get a paintball gun for much less?
So you can do it without your image being captured by the camera?
The camera doesn't have a 360 field of vision, besides COVID masks aren't uncommon now.
Where I am (Sydney Australia) we have fixed speed cameras that automatically create speeding fines to drivers going too fast (well, technically the registered owner of the vehicle via ANPR).<p>They eventually had to equip pretty much every speed camera with a speed camera camera, usually on a much higher pole to make vandalism more difficult.
Drones with a paintball gun attached?<p>Realistically that’s going to attract a lot of negative attention.
The use of a drone also ups the ante from a prosecutor’s perspective. Charging a vandal caught with a paintbrush and a ladder is nothing out of the ordinary. A routine misdemeanor.<p>Someone who has the wherewithal to jerry rig a paintball gun to a drone is someone <i>scary</i>. Plus, any officer who witnesses such a drone is almost certainly going to misidentify the paintball gun as an actual gun. I can imagine the operator would be charged with several felonies.
I don’t think they make commercial paintballs with hard to remove enamel or tempura paints.
Last I heard, putting a glock on a quadcopter was creating an "illegal weapon system" or similar fancy sounding BS but I wonder what the accusation would be for a paintball gun on a drone?<p>Must less recoil too.
I don't think there's a drone in this proposal.<p>On the list of "laws you don't want to screw with", National Firearms Act violations are high on my list. Regardless of whether something is or isn't a violation, I'm certainly not interested in paying expensive lawyers to argue they're not.
In Minecraft it’s well known that lasers of even moderate power can ruin camera sensors. Only in Minecraft though.
Somewhat related, I'm pretty sure there was a guy in China who did exactly this as protest against their surveillance. Seems effective.
You want to fly a multi-hundred dollar device loaded with radios that constantly broadcasts out a unique ID and possibly your FAA ID and use it for crime?<p>Or even better yet, get arrested halfway to trying to dip your drone into paint on a sidewalk?<p>Just throw a rock at the stupid thing.
Goring them is about sending a message.
> A handful of enterprising activists could blind all the flock cameras in a region in a day or two, and without destroying them, which makes it less of an overtly criminal act<p>No, that would likely end in a RICO or terrorism case if it continued. Just because the cameras aren't destroyed doesn't mean CorpGov won't want to teach a lesson.
You can put a garbage bag over them if you don’t want to sawzall the pole and dispose of the hardware.
Why wouldn’t you advocate it? A much easier way of doing this is using paintballs with the appropriate paint.
> Why wouldn’t you advocate it?<p>Because advocating things which are moral/ethical but illegal is often against the TOS :(<p>We need laws which are explicitly based on moral principles. Barring that, we should at least have laws which treat sufficiently large platforms as utilities and forbid them from performing censorship without due process.
>All it takes is a tiny drone with a stick attached, and at the end of that stick is a tiny sponge soaked with tempera paint. Drone goes 'boop' on the camera lens, and the entire system is disabled until an expensive technician drives out with a ladder and cleans the lens at non-trivial expense<p>Americans don’t care enough<p>Too busy enjoying S&P500 near 7,000 and US$84,000/year median household income
If you're in the bay area, on Monday at 6:30 there's a mountain view city council meeting where flock is on the agenda. If this surveillance bothers you, show up!!
There's a real distinction worth making here between surveillance infrastructure and investigative tools. Flock is mass passive collection -- camera on every corner, running 24/7, feeding a database law enforcement queries at will. What people are actually hungry for is the opposite: targeted, on-demand tools that regular people control. The same instinct that has people pulling down cameras is what's driving grassroots OSINT communities -- they want to be able to find things themselves without being watched by someone else's system. ghostcatchers.net
Here's a list of Flock's investors:<p>- Andreessen Horowitz<p>- Greenoaks Capital<p>- Bedrock Capital<p>- Meritech Capital<p>- Matrix Partners<p>- Sands Capital<p>- Founders Fund<p>- Kleiner Perkins<p>- Tiger Global<p>- Y Combinator
This will start happening to Ring cameras as well soon if it's not already.
Good. Throw a monkey wrench into their gears at every opportunity you're comfortable with. Don't let them get away with tearing down our basic needs for privacy and safety. We don't have to give in to Big Tech and its surveillance for profit goals.
Meanwhile, in Brazil, a market is growing for stolen surveillance cameras. Just think how lovely: a technology created to restrict crime is actually feeding it.
Ultra-based. Fuck these creepy things and anyone who installs them.
People always hated the cameras. It's just that now that people feel comfortable that the government won't move heaven and earth to come after them for <i>daring</i> to vandalize it's infrastructure they're finally acting up. But they wanted to all along.
Speed cameras next. Just another privacy violating device that is also a revenue source for irresponsible local leaders.
I remember when mp3 music first became available and sharing sites like Limewire popped up.<p>So many people were sharing music ( depriving artists of their pay ) that it looked like a real problem. How could they possibly deter all those music takers?<p>It turns out they only needed to catch a few, and fine the living daylights out of them. A fine of $100,000 was sufficient to scare everybody back to honesty.
Hmm, I think it was more the rise of streaming services which were more convenient and offered a better experience with less risk than illegally downloading music or movies.
That's not remotely true.
or you know... the rise of itunes/ipod at that exact time. present the public with an option that is not in a grey area and is not a massive inconvenience, and a large amount of them will happily go the legal route.<p>Its leaning that direction again, video streaming services are becoming a massive inconvenience, much like needing to buy a CD if you wanted 2 total songs off it. Doubt it will be as iconic of a moment in time as the limewire/napster era was, but who knows, im so bad at predicting the future i assumed nvidia was gonna be hard declining after the end of the crypto mining craze.<p>> sufficient to scare everybody back to honesty.<p>idk how you thought this would land here, but saying everybody was a rough choice of words.
I have similar and deep privacy concerns. But I also know that cameras have helped find criminals and assist crime victims. I don't want to let fugitives go without punishment. In fact, I must admit that cameras are a realistic choice given the current technology.<p>Flock Safety must be under public evaluation. Tech companies tend to hide technical specs, calling them trade secrets. But most internet security standards are public. What should be private is the encryption key. The measure to protect development effort is patents, which are public in the registry.
Why are tech specs relevant here? The problem with Flock is that once the data is collected, and once it's made accessible to law enforcement without any legal review, it's going to be used for solving heinous crimes, for keeping tabs on a vocal critic of the police commissioner, and for checking what the officer's ex-wife is up to.<p>If the cameras were installed and operated by the DHS or by the local PD, would that make you feel better? The data should not exist, or if it must, it shouldn't be accessible without court approval. The model you're proposing doesn't ensure that; in fact, it moves it closer to the parties most likely to misuse it.
> I don't want to let fugitives go without punishment.<p>There is a famous quote about this that needs to be updated for the modern age.<p>"I'd rather let ten fugitives go unsurveilled, than to surveil one innocent person."
The cameras aren't the problem, it's the companies behind them.<p>Everybody wants murderers and rapists in jail, nobody wants to 24/7 share their location and upload their every thoughts to palantir and other companies operated by degenerates like Thiel
Follow the money.<p>There's no money to be made arresting criminals. Sure you get a few police contracts, and you need to show enough results to keep them.. but your moat is mostly how hard it is to even submit bids.<p>There's a lot more money to be made knowing that Accountant Mary's Lexis is looking kind of banged up and she could be sold on a new one.
This has nothing to do with the actual problem, which is Flock itself.<p>The fact that Flock controls all of the cameras, all of the data and said data is easily accessible means police and the state have access to information that they should only get with a warrant. A business having a camera storing video data that's completely local isn't an issue. A business having a camera which is connected to every other business that has a camera is.