Musician-turning-tech anarchist (?) Benn Jordan is making a very interesting series of videos about Flock cameras, their poor safety, and their gray-area interfacing with local governments:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMIwNiwQewQ" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMIwNiwQewQ</a><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB0gr7Fh6lY" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB0gr7Fh6lY</a><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vU1-uiUlHTo" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vU1-uiUlHTo</a><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp9MwZkHiMQ" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp9MwZkHiMQ</a><p>I recommend them.
Wow thank you for sharing this I had no idea this guy existed!<p>There’s more of us techno anarchists out there apparently!
Super worth a watch. Lots of technical tidbits also.
Someone complaining about local governments having data while directing them to YouTube, whose owner does surveillance at a scale far exceeding all local governments of all countries combined, is ironic.<p>Why don’t these people use Peertube at least. Fact of the matter is they’d like to personally profit off the same nonsense they complain about. This person has a million subscribers, they aren’t some random whistleblower. It’s a job, like all media, generating outrage.<p>If all of them used peertube maybe we’d have a solid competitor.
<a href="https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-somewhat" rel="nofollow">https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-som...</a>
???<p>It is very clearly because YouTube has a higher reach than any other platform in that space.
I'm surprised Garrett Langley still has a job, he seems wildly out of touch. For instance he really believes that his Panopticon as a service is the reason crime is down in cities, conveniently ignoring crime rates prior to COVID.
"Garrett Langley" sounds like what they renamed the villain in Le Mis for an American audience.
Does he really believe it or is it his job to say he really believes it?
He won’t for long. The backlash is just getting started. Left or right, no one wants their whereabouts subject to constant surveillance.<p>His only advantage is that the cops are on his side and won’t let go of these cameras without a fight.
Nah, he's just missing a good PR campaign, there's a 30% of the population that will eat whatever their supreme leaders say they should, I'm sure they can sanewash these cameras as well.
No one wants their whereabouts subject to constant surveillance, except everyone who carries a “normal” cell phone, in other words not a burner.
Do people who carry normal cell phones do so with the active desire to have their whereabouts subject to constant surveillance?
Yes but you can always leave your phone behind if you want to drop off the map. Flock makes that borderline impossible.
For those unfamiliar, you can read more about the flock safety cameras themselves here:<p><a href="https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Flock_license_plate_readers" rel="nofollow">https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Flock_license_plate_readers</a><p>And more about the company behind the cameras:<p><a href="https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Flock_Safety" rel="nofollow">https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Flock_Safety</a>
It's quite ironic to get an amazon ring video ad while viewing this article.
An obnoxious, autoplay-at-full-volume ad that took the page an extra 30 seconds to load and somehow bypassed firefox adblockers...
Ring is just as bad. Arguably worse because it comes with a convenience / personal security factor.
I drove into a very affluent subdivision this weekend, and like most others around here it had a flock camera recording every car on the way in. This camera, however, had the gall to advertise its presence as a neighborhood security measure. "Flock Safety watches this neighborhood" read the sign on the post, or some such. Of course the residents there had no choice but to accept its installation, as the local police support it. Nefarious framing and marketing in the name of "safety".
I saw the same thing in a Home Depot parking lot yesterday. I guess I'm glad there's some sort of notice about it, even if its intent is more, I dunno, branding? It took me a while to figure out what all the solar panel + camera on a post installations were as they popped up around my town. I even pulled over to inspect the hardware for signs of ownership and didn't find anything.
Someone in my hometown was arrested for vandalizing them. The media chose to say "city owned security camera". It's amazing how they will rush to defend private enterprise.
Funny that. Not everyone wants to live in an open air prison.
It's funny, if the company had just sold cameras to cities, they probably could have avoided this whole mess. But they just had to hit some keywords for Wall Street (like "AI" "cloud" and "SaaS"), which had the side-effect of making it appear (true or not) that they were part of a Palantir-style surveillance panopticon that tracks you everywhere.
It really is amazing how they managed to fit so much copper into those devices.
I realize how unpopular flock is, and I will first say that I have literally never personally looked into the privacy concerns. But one city you don’t see named here is SF, which has cited Flock as a primary driver of its 10x reduction in car break-ins, and 30% reduction in burglaries. Those were a quality of life plague while I lived there
Crime's been descending from the COVID blip for a while, everywhere, Flock or otherwise. My city saw zero murders in Q1; 2021 saw ~15 by now.<p>In other words: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSVqLHghLpw" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSVqLHghLpw</a>
Any evidence that the reduction is actually due to the cameras?
> which has cited Flock as a primary driver of its 10x reduction in car break-ins, and 30% reduction in burglaries<p>Are there reports or studies released which explains how the flock system influenced these reductions?
Would crime go up, down or stay the same if all surveillance cameras were removed? The answer to that is the only one that matters.<p>Ironically many people who whine about surveillance cameras have their video door bells or similar setups.<p>So which is it?
There are ways of doing this that don't require you to abdicate all of your privacy to a third-party SaaS company who makes it easy to share information with the police everywhere.<p>My camera system is not connected to the cloud and it has a retention policy of 4 weeks. I took pains not to aim them anywhere where I'd be collecting data outside of my own property. There's full-disk encryption in use. The police could maintain their own surveillance network and place their own cameras in a legally compliant way and it would be fine.<p>Flock and Ring are awful because they enable easy surveillance and search after the fact, not a priori because they are surveillance systems. If they required proof of warrant before letting the police execute a search I think a lot of people would be more comfortable with them. A police officer stalking an ex is like the basic example you get if you ask an ALPR vendor why we need audit logging and proactive auditing of all searches. But that's not the only way these tools enable invasion of privacy.<p>If you want proof that that's the problem with them, you should know that people have been building wired camera systems and ALPR systems for decades before Flock and Ring came into existence. So it's solely the cloud Search-as-a-Service business model that's the problem there.
> The answer to that is the only one that matters.<p>Is it, though? Crime would be super low if we were all confined to prison cells by default, too.
No it's not. Would crime go up, down, or stay the same if we had to get strip searched before entering airplanes?
The types of crime that would happen in an airplane would already be identifiable due to its constrained cabin, so I don’t understand the comparison.<p>Let’s use your example for say a concert. Is checking bags worth it? Would crime go up if there was no bag check? Why or why not?
I mean, that depends on whether you consider the warrantless, disproportionate search a crime.<p>It should be!
Crime would go down if everyone was executed. Your question is <i>not</i> the only one that matters.