Remember that scene from "Men in Black" where K watches surveillance video feed of his ex? In the movie it was meant to be wistful and cute, I guess. Now that such systems are getting closer to reality, you realize the potential for abuse in enormous.
>>Flock and law enforcement regularly cite documented cases where LPR helped solve violent crimes, recover stolen vehicles, and locate missing persons. Those outcomes are real.<p>My opposition wouldn't change regardless but are those outcomes real?
In Seattle at least, the majority of homicide cases are solved with the assistance of surveillance cameras (though what % of said cameras are specifically Flock, I'm not sure): <a href="https://spdblotter.seattle.gov/2026/03/05/new-analysis-rtcc-triples-the-odds-that-a-victim-receives-justice/" rel="nofollow">https://spdblotter.seattle.gov/2026/03/05/new-analysis-rtcc-...</a>
Cops can politely ask owners of private cameras for access for things like murder investigation. If the polite answer is no (most people will say yes), they can go to court for a subpoena. This has happened for a long time. This is how it should work. If the cops are too lazy or chicken to ask a judge while investigating a murder, they don't deserve the footage.
This is very doable when what you're dealing with is a Major Crime That Gets Full Institutional and Individual Attention.<p>What about a bike theft, a jacked car or a stolen parcel though?<p>There is a price to having information easily available to the law enforcement. There is a price to not having this information easily available to the law enforcement too.
Even with Flock, police aren't solving those crimes.
If only we had an amendment in the original bill of rights that drew the line here.
The majority of crime is committed by a relatively small number of individuals. If citizens feel crime is out of control they need to vote in politicians and judges who sentence repeat offenders to long sentences or involuntary commitment.
Long sentences are far less effective than reliable enforcement. Something that seems to be very true in practice. If you steal or vandalise something in China, there is an extremely high chance you will get caught, you won't get a massive penalty, but it will be enough to cover the damages + some.<p>If you for example knew that stealing had a penalty of 100% of the item value + 10% fine, with a 100% chance of getting caught, you'd never steal anything again even though the penalty is so much smaller than what it is currently in most countries. And then if you make a dumb decision as a teenager or in a lapse of judgement, it won't ruin your life.
Doesn't matter, they should have to follow the same process.<p>Cops, at least where I live, don't give af about any of those crimes though. Bike gets stolen? You'll be lucky if they even show up at all, let alone do anything about it, surveillance data available or not. They largely don't even get prosecuted when caught.
They can get a subpoena for that, too. The bike and the parcel are already long gone by the time police do anything. (Nor will they do anything other than file a report if you are lucky.)
Right and what if lots of crime happens in a place where there are not many businesses? Hardly an implausible scenario given that crime is bad for business.<p>The city can set up its own camera for its own use. Is that really that wild of a proposal?
What if what if what if?<p>That whole premise of "what if lots of crime happens" -- already false.<p>Did you know that most places in America are at historically low crime rates in most of our lifetimes? It is garbage to say this needs deep societal focus right now. I don't give a shit about the hypothetical hurt feelings of small town cops whining that they don't have always-on spy equipment.
What if lots of murders happened in bathrooms?
The hopefully we'll be able to at least narrow down the list of suspects to the people who entered the bathroom around the time they the murder took place.<p>Surveillance often doesn't directly capture crime on camera, but is rather used to identify who traveled to and from the crime scene around the time of the incident
In America, yes.<p>Obviously in other places, no.
That is not this, however. This is the city hooking into a private, nationwide surveillance network.<p>You didn't think these cities actually <i>own</i> these Flock cameras, did you?
They pay to have them installed and maintained, they're not different in that sense from subscribing to Office 365 licensing, it's a subscription product.<p>They key difference is not whether they own their cameras but the automatic data sharing with other agencies and their cameras. Arguably law enforcement does this casually on request anyways but the drastically reduced friction of an automatic system enables easy abuse.<p>An officer may hesitate to ask a neighboring agency for data on their girlfriend, and would likely be very hesitant to file actual paperwork to request it. But a search in Flock's interface is probably all of the same legal peril in a venue which doesn't feel as intimidating or risky to do and doesn't see the same level of human review or scrutiny.
That's not what that says though.<p>>technology and professional analysts with helping detectives make arrests in 53%<p>"technology and analysts" "help" "make arrests" not surveillance, not convictions and only the implication that they wouldn't have made the arrest otherwise.<p>Like look at the example: somebody calls in an OD and a guy sees that the dude ODing matches (the clothing of) a suspect in some other crime and so they arrest him.<p>Once again an arrest is not a conviction but also what part of that needed/used pervasive surveillance?<p>ALSO a conviction is not the same thing as truth.<p>ALSO ALSO by basic subtraction the panopticon wasn't even helpful 47% of the time.
Yes. Prior to flock, my city trialed LPRs attached to the local power company’s poles. In the first month, they recovered more stolen cars than any prior years total recoveries. I’ve got mixed feelings about Flock, LPRs, and what it allows people and governments to do.<p>I’m 100% sold on the results.
The problem imo is the usage and laws rather than the technology. Security cameras used for public good is good. But it needs to be heavily limited to preventing crime, with strict access logs and penalties for misuse.
Imagine if the police had the names and faces of every marcher in every protest. They too would be (are) 100% sold on the results.
guess what prolific career criminals do with crime cars?<p>they look for a car that is very similar if not exact make and model of thier stolen vehicle, then they "clone" the victims license plate with a sheet of embossment copper and a stylus, apply paint at thier shop and affix the imposter to the crime vehicle. that buggers the whole LPR thing.<p>they can replicate dozens of plates in a day and offer the service for contras.
That seems like a lot of effort when you can just take the license plate off and if you're really worried print off a convincing temporary license and tape in the back window.
its effort well worth it, and really is not a lot of effort. if you stole the plate, the theft is evident, when there are duplicates then it becomes difficult to know which one to suspect, and that also presupposes knowledge of the duplication.<p>you would have to realize, it is not feasible for a car to be in location 1 thenbe in location 2 many miles away in a few minutes.<p>the odd thing about criminals is thier effort to perpetuate crime is often far greater than getting a job, but is somehow the preferable option.
> you would have to realize, it is not feasible for a car to be in location 1 thenbe in location 2 many miles away in a few minutes.<p>You say that but just last week there was a post here about how LPR claimed that the same car was in two locations in a timeframe that would have required the car to have been traveling non-stop at 160mph for 20 minutes through suburban streets, and even then authorities and proponents were defending it as plausible, or that the LPR was right, but there might just have been timing issues, or, or, or.
i think i saw that post, i think we're both describing what happens when someone copies plates and doppelgangs people to throw off the surveillance.<p>i think in this case the LPR was right, the same plate number was in two different places, the assumption of how many plates were involved needs review.<p>160mph for 20min through suburban streets, that kind of attracts attention, there would be a lot of complaints and witnesses if that happened
Not really because it flags an anomaly where the same plate is found in two places that are impossibly far to reach in the time span. Then police can just pull over that plate when they see it with a 50/50 chance it's the stolen car.<p>The more cameras in the network the faster and more likely a duplicated plate will be spotted.
I have no doubt that provided a vast camera network covering every ingress and egress into a city, and every major intersection, plus a database of when and where a license plate was last seen, cops can find their suspect<p>It used to be that news articles would claim that the police used “CCTV from local businesses” to catch a crook. Even back then I knew this was cover for Ring, Flock and who knows what else. they just didn’t want the bad press.<p>At this point you don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to understand that parallel construction happens all the time. They have more tools that we know about, and they want to keep it that way.<p>Everyone should throw some money to 404 media. They are independent and doing the best work right now to keep these things in the public eye.
Flock's position, statistically, is that if during the course of an investigation into a crime, a detective queries Flock, and the crime is later solved, that Flock "helped solve a crime", regardless of the merit or value of the query. "Saw a vehicle, look it up, "nope, unrelated", but still "helped solve".
The AI slop in that quote sure is real.
Ultimately, there’s a sort of homeostasis in people’s tolerance for crime. If you need video evidence for prosecution, those who want it prosecuted will produce video cameras. If you make warrants impossible to produce in a timely manner, the camera search will be warrant exempted.<p>Attempts to damage state power to ensure crime isn’t prosecuted will be likely met with methods that are immune to them.<p>Given the constraints we operate under, the ideal number of unsolved crimes is not zero and the ideal number of crimes committed using state apparatus is also not zero. So being informed that either is non-zero is not of use to decision making in my opinion.
Check your town's website for correspondence with your state's chapter of the ACLU in regards to Flock cameras. If your police chief (not an elected official) is installing them then contact your local ACLU chapter about it. These are 4th amendment violations.
To the contrary, little of what Flock does would be restricted by the 4th amendment. The cameras are in public, and neither the government nor individual citizens need authorization to film people in public.<p>Many Flock cameras are also privately owned, too.
All flock cameras are privately owned, by flock. They install them at a charge per the jurisdiction that orders them and pays the subscription costs… those subscription fees allow Mr Local Law Abuser to lookup any license plate it has read, when, where, with a picture of the vehicle.<p><a href="https://deflock.org" rel="nofollow">https://deflock.org</a><p>You’d be surprised how many there are.
<a href="https://www.wired.com/story/carpenter-v-united-states-supreme-court-digital-privacy/" rel="nofollow">https://www.wired.com/story/carpenter-v-united-states-suprem...</a>
<a href="https://www.eff.org/cases/us-v-jones" rel="nofollow">https://www.eff.org/cases/us-v-jones</a>
There has been plenty of past rulings that indicate long term collection of data is not something that the fourth amendment had baked in.
The case you linked isn't about the government filming people in public, though. Carpenter vs. US was a case about the government demanding private information about users' locations from cell service providers. By comparison, the 9th circuit concluded that the plain view doctrine means electronic license plate readers are legal :<a href="https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2020/05/04/18-10341.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2020/05/04/1...</a><p>An officer doesn't need a warrant to sit at a cross section and write down license plate numbers. A device doing the same thing is also legal.
it's not about filming in public. it's about systematic data collection by law enforcement, using private infrastructure present by its nature in public. that's why the Carpenter decision is relevant.
The year is 2026 and the 4th amendment only means what the currently sitting justices say that it means, and the executive branch was literally given a pass to violate any law on the books that they want.
Wrong. See Carpenter v US.
Yes. Let's restrict police and take away every possible tool they can use to solve and fight crime. Not all criminals are bad criminals. They don't use Flock to spy on their ex-girlfriends but every cop in America has done it.<p>At least according to the internet which knows everything.
Nit: the police chief was also stalking and harassing at least one man
Yes this is how freedoms are restored. Next we need a story of flock tracking a reporter or political figure. Put that 4th amendment into sharp focus.
So glad we got them kicked out of Mountain View.
When flock data was FOIAd the state just exempted the data from FOIA.
The fact police can go in and just look at camera footage without warrant proves your point precisely, officers have used it to stalk family members, etc.
And they ALL do it(according to this thread and the internet)!!!
This type of thing is definitely real. A friend of mine went on a date with an NYPD cop back in the 90s. She refused a second date, and the stalking began. It wasn't 'tech stalking', like today, but the cop started asking interrogating questions to her landlord and co-workers; she started getting weird/false parking tickets, etc. The only way she made it stop was that her cousin was a veteran with NYPD, and well, he had a little chat with the young, stalking cop. But who knows where it all would've ended up if her cousin wasn't also a cop???
Regular reminder that their CEO called Deflock a terrorist organization. I hope they go out of business and their cameras end up as e-waste.
This problem is 99% cops and 1% flock.
As far as I can tell from the news, Flock is only used to commit crimes.
Can I set up my own camera on the side of the road (in a public place) to scan people's faces and license plates, link them up to one of the many data brokers (or leaks) and use a big display to show the drivers' pictures and something like "Hey Rick Larsen, it's the 24th time we've seen you this week. We'll let our clients know there's no one home at 2930 Wetmore Avenue, Everett most weekdays between 8 and 4!", and then place them somewhere like oh, I don't know, in close proximity to a capitol building?<p>We can pay the regular fees that advertisers pay to have billboards up.<p>And if we're not allowed to do that, why is Flock?
No one has the right to privacy in a public setting. That's why street photographers can roam around and take photos of anyone and publish them. Whether you can publish personally identifiable information based on that, I don't know.
Yes, you are allowed to set up a camera, as long as you own the land you're putting the camera on or you have permission from the landowner.<p>Again, I'm surprised by how many people don't realize that it's legal to film people in public.
You can probably do that, so long as you're doing it on property you own.
Random people at your workplace likely know others with access and use it to spy on their own coworkers. I know of cases where they report the smallest details to Human Resources.
> Important subject<p>> Uses slop AI art<p>Fastest way to make something into a farce.
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