> The Flock source added “Even if Flock took a stance on permitted use-cases, a motivated user could simply lie about why they're performing a search. We can never 100% know how or why our tools are being used.” A second Flock source said they believe Flock should develop a better idea of what its clients are using the company’s technology for.
In other words, why bother with safeguards when they'll just lie to us anyways?
I think this is a legitimate problem.
But...isn't this what warrants are for? With a warrant, the police have to say why they want to perform a search to a judge, under threat of perjury. They have a powerful incentive not to lie.
So...should warrants be required for this kind of Flock data also? Couldn't Flock set a policy that these searches are performed only under warrant? Or a law be enacted saying the same? I imagine it would make Flock much less attractive to their potential customers, and searches would be performed much less often. [1] So it's not something Flock is going to do on their own. I think we'd need to create the pressure, by opposing purchases of Flock or by specifically asking our elected representatives to create such a law.
[1] If I'm being generous, because of the extra friction/work/delay. If I'm being less generous, because they have no legitimate reason a judge would approve.
Based on another incident [0] I feel Flock's explanation for their actions boils down to:
1. "We are familiar with the customer the person claimed to be an agent for."
2. "We didn't know whether the person was doing something illegal with the data... And we don't want to know, and we don't try to find out."
3. "They didn't force us. They gave us money! We like money!"
As you might guess, I don't find these points especially compelling or exculpating. Certainly nothing that would/should stand up against state or local laws that prohibit the data being shared this way.
_____________
> We just need legislators willing to serve the public and ignore the lobbyists and executive.
It requires us, the people, to stop buying into their games of misdirection.
This is no easy task, but it is critical. They know they can throw a million issues at us and then we'll just argue over what's more important instead of actually solving things. So at this point I'll suggest a nonoptimal, but simple solution: stop arguing over what's more important and just concentrate on what you think is most important. If they're going to throw a million things at us we can be a million little armies. Divide and rule only works by getting those little armies to fight each other. If instead we are on, mostly, the same side then they lose power. They have to fight on a million fronts.
It's far from an optimal solution but it's far better than what we've been doing for the last half century. Because for during that time they've only grown and divided us even more. People are concerned that a small forward isn't enough. They're wrong. It isn't that by not making enough progress we're standing still, we're losing ground. We can't even take a small step forward, we need to first stop losing ground. Once we do that I think we can build momentum moving forward. But it's insane to constantly give up ground in order to maybe make small steps forward. That's certainly a losing battle
Yes.
Flock's entire business model is a flagrant violation of the 4th amendment. What Flock does for their core business is called "stalking", which is a crime.
The issue here is not that the law is inadequate to resolve this problem. The issue is that the current administration has chosen to collude with private corporations that flagrantly violate the law, thereby replacing our entire judiciary system with a protection racket.
Please don't be generous. Fascists depend on our patience to insulate them from consequences.
Why should contracting that out to a private company require a warrant?
Flock isn't say Google which collects location data because it needs it for Google Maps to function. Flock is only here because the local government paid it to setup equipment.
It's really an issue for the local community. Do you want your local tax dollars going to support parks or tracking individuals?
Correct. In your analogy, the Texas cop is being paid by your community to write down your license plate. (Otherwise, he has no authority to be operating outside his state.)
Having a barrier to accessing data can help prevent casual abuse in my opinion, so that officers can't look up say some ex girlfriend's license plate, but if they get a warrant they can look up some suspect's license plate.
Being able to scope out a small scale example of why something is ok is a very poor indicator of how it operates in a massive one.
I would say that there is an appreciable qualitative difference between a man using his eyeballs and a piece of paper to write down license plate numbers and a technologically sophisticated network of computerized surveillance apparatus installed over a geographically large area being used to track an individual.
Call me old-fashioned I guess
It was implied, both by our department and, more vaguely, by Flock, that sharing was reciprocal: if we didn't enable it, other departments wouldn't share with us. That's false; not only is it false, but apparently, to my understanding, Flock has (or had?) an offering for PDs to get access to the data without even hosting cameras of their own.
That obviously leaves Flock's own attestations of client data separation, and I get the cynicism there too, but basically every municipality in the country relies on those same kinds of attestations from a myriad of vendors, and unlike Flock those vendors have basically nothing to lose (since nobody is paying attention to them).
I think you can reasonably go either way on all this stuff. But you can't run these stacks in their default configuration with their default sharing and without special-purpose ordinances and general ordinances governing them.
I write this mostly to encourage people who have strong opinions about this stuff to get engaged locally. I did, I'm not particularly good at it (I'm a loud message board nerd), and I got what I believe to be the only ALPR General Order in Chicagoland written and what I know to be the only ACLU CCOPS ordinance in Illinois passed.
What’s an ALPR General Order and a ALCU CCOPS ordinance? How did you get them passed?
Flock is an ALPR.
CCOPS is a model ordinance that requires board approval for any surveillance technology deployments.
For instance, just making it a rule that they are not allowed to lie to you about how things are being used -- we know that won't work because if they're willing to lie they are also willing to ignore contract violations.
Instead, put in a rule that says misuse of the system costs $X for each documented case. Now the vendor has a financial incentive to detect misuse, and the purchasers have a FINANCIAL incentive to curb misuse by their own employees.
It's not a magic fix, but it's the sort of thing that might help.
Make a neutral third party liable for the cost and then that third party which is mostly disinterested gets to calculate risk and compliance procedures.
The only way we're really going to get data handling under control is to give the victims of data abuse financial beneficiaries of liability through the courts and insurance companies.
This all ends in corporate feudalism, doesn't it?
If the only way we can have rules is if they are 100% followed 100% of the time, then we wouldn’t have any rules to begin with. Very publicly revoke the licenses of people who break your rules. You can’t stop everybody, but you can do something. This is just a lame excuse for in action.
But oddly not for encryption ...
It's amazing to me that people will still trust police narratives.
Police behaviour in public inquiries (usually stonewalling and obfuscating) has been so bad that the government has just passed a law placing a "duty of candour" on the police and other civil servants, with criminal penalties for serious breaches.
That was less than a month ago so we'll see how it works.
Don't hold your breath.
(disclaimer, I'm one of the authors)
American conviction in religion has fallen ~20% since 2000 but that still leaves ~60% bought into skywizards as media owned by older more religious intentionally helps peddle Newspeak that obfuscates attempts to bring science to the masses.
For example, I trust NOAA or NASA, used to trust the CDC, would never trust the CIA or FBI (because cops).
I wouldn't care if they were at least consistent.
What I take issue with is that the same individuals will toss the official narrative if it contradicts their viewpoint. That is a personal moral failing.
In your answer, please stick to to concrete harms to actual people (living now or in the future) excluding any harm that is a harm only to an abstraction like Democracy or Freedom.
Solving crime is hard work, and dealing with criminals is dangerous work[1], and why would you work hard or risk your life[1] when you can do neither (and can instead brutalize or harass law-abiding people who won't fight back)?
In Seattle[2], emergency police response times are, on average, 70 minutes. Non-emergency response times are 3 hours.
(Meanwhile, the city's third-highest-earning cop was cited for falling asleep in their patrol car in a bus lane, while clocking in overtime. She should be breaking rocks with her teeth in state prison for overtime fraud, not given a badge and a gun... But the whole department is rotten to the core.)
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[1] Of course, America's cultural obsession with guns and violence means that cops often assume that anyone they are dealing with is actively planning to murder them... And are quick to pre-emptively use (in)appropriate levels of force.
[2] Which is not overrun by 'Rampant Crime' despite what professional liars on television zooming in on a single burning trash can might say.
My friend, the only thing that's going to diminish is public services that actually help people. The police state is the primary state organ dedicated to protecting people with political power from the hoi polloi, it's the one thing that's never going to go away.
If the past few thousand years of history is any indication, these people will wring every last cent out of you to pay a professional warrior class that will protect them from you.
I sold my car and have been at peace ever since. No more tickets. Believe it or not, but even when I lived in the distant suburbs, it was generally feasible to bike to the office, particularly if one lives very near to work. Now I live in more crowded suburbs where I can rely on Uber/Lyft or public transportation. If I had to purchase a means to transportation, it's most likely to be an ebike, potentially even a three-wheeled one. The main time when they aren't good enough is in deep winter when the temperature is about 10F or less. Always wear a helmet and highly reflective clothing when on these things, and mind the speed.
I deal with a lot of mentally-unstable people, and some of them are suicidal.
The thing to realize about suicidal people, is that they can be really dangerous to non-suicidal people.
"I'm not hurting anyone but myself." is a big fat lie.
I have friends that work for the railroad, and train engineers have to deal with folks that suicide by train. It's bad PTSD. In some cases, it may even cause the train to derail, which could injure or kill a lot of others.
Then, there's "suicide by cop." Those people tend to hurt a lot of folks, before they get their wish granted.
Not everyone just wanders off into the desert, or takes a bunch of sleeping pills (by the way, I invite anyone to ask the person that finds one of these "easy" suicides, how they feel about it).
And, then, of course, you have your suicide bombers, but they know what they are doing, and aren't telling themselves the "I'm not hurting anyone but myself." lie.
Ah yes, let's protect a suicidal person by charging them with a crime which they may eventually be able to expunge, but in the meantime will effect their livelihood. That will surely not create any problems which might complicate their lives and drive them further towards suicidal behavior.
That makes perfect sense.
Have you seen any examples of suicidal people being charged or prosecuted for attempted suicide? I can imagine that this could have opportunities for abuse, but not ones that are qualitatively different from probable cause writ large.
That's one view of justice anyway. I'm more inclined towards crimes being against specific persons or groups of distinct persons, in which case your thesis would be correct, but it's a minority opinion.
You shouldn't.
When a company spies on everyone as much as possible and hordes that data on their servers, it is subject to warrant demands from any local, state, or Federal agency.
> Avondale Man Sues After Google Data Leads to Wrongful Arrest for Murder
Police had arrested the wrong man based on location data obtained from Google and the fact that a white Honda was spotted at the crime scene. The case against Molina quickly fell apart, and he was released from jail six days later. Prosecutors never pursued charges against Molina, yet the highly publicized arrest cost him his job, his car, and his reputation.
https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/google-geofence-locatio...
The more data you collect, the more dangerous you are.
I would rather trust companies making a legitimate effort not to collect and store unnecessary data in the first place
But, given that those abuses exist and are ongoing, we should not hand the police state yet another tool to abuse.
> I weirdly actually trust Google's interests in surveillance more than I trust the government's
Turnkey tyranny is a horrific thing. One that I hope more people are becoming aware of as it's happening in many countries right now.[0]
This doesn't make surveillance capitalism good and I absolutely hate those comparisons because they make the assumption that harm is binary. That there's no degree of harm. That two things can't be bad at the same time and that just because one is worse that means the other is okay. This is absolute bullshit thinking and I cannot stand how common it is, even on this site.
[0] my biggest fear is that we still won't learn. The problem has always been that the road to is paved with good intentions. Evil is not just created by evil men, but also my good men trying to do good. The world is complex and we have this incredible power of foresight. While far from perfect we seem to despise this capability that made us the creatures we are today. I'm sorry, the world is complex. Evil is hard to identify. But you got this powerful brain to deal with all that, if you want to
That's all as may be, but you're ignoring the fact that governments are buying[0][1][2][3] the data being collected by those corporations. That's not "friction" in my book, rather it's a commercial transaction.
As such, giving corporations a pass seems kind of silly, as they're profiting from selling that data to those with a monopoly on violence.
So, by all means, give the corporations the "benefit of the doubt" on this, as they certainly have no idea that they're selling this information to governments (well, to pretty much anyone willing to pay -- including domestic abusers and stalkers too), they're only acting as agents maximizing corporate profits for their shareholders. Which is the only important thing, right? Anything else is antithetical to free-market orthodoxy.
People suffer and/or die? Just the cost of doing business right?
[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/us-government-buys-dat...
[1] https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/when-the-government-buy...
[2] https://www.congress.gov/118/meeting/house/116192/documents/...
[3] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/02/28/government...
> but you're ignoring the fact that governments are buying the data being collected by those corporations
>> Even if the government can get the data from those companies there's at least a speed bump. Even if a speed bump isn't hard to get over are we going to pretend that some friction is no different from no friction?
> giving corporations a pass seems kind of silly
>> This doesn't make surveillance capitalism good and I absolutely hate those comparisons because they make the assumption that harm is binary. That there's no degree of harm. That two things can't be bad at the same time and that just because one is worse that means the other is okay.
The reason I hate this is because it makes discussion impossible. You treat people like they belong to some tribe that they do not even wish to be apart of. We're on the same side here buddy. Maybe stop purity testing and try working together. All you're doing is enabling the very system you claim to hate. You really should reconsider your strategy. We don't have to agree on the nuances, but if you can't see that we agree more than we disagree then you are indistinguishable from someone who just pretends to care. Nor do you become distinguishable from an infiltrating saboteur[0].
Stop making everything binary. Just because I'm not in your small club does not mean I'm in the tribe of big corp or big gov. How can you do anything meaningful if you stand around all day trying to figure out who is a true Scottsman or not?
[0] See Sections 11 and 12. https://ia601309.us.archive.org/14/items/Simplesabotage/Simp...
- Crime is out of control, requiring deployment of active duty military to multiple cities.
- Police are so bored they are sifting through security cameras on fishing expeditions to maybe find someone accessing medical care.
The governor of my state went out of his way to ask Trump to come crack down on a few cities (all overwhelmingly or somewhat leaning blue) despite drastic drops in crime rates over the last five years. Ignoring the fact that he is the governor and has a super majority Republican legislature, meaning that ultimately he is saying “daddy Trump come save me I can’t do my job uwu,” he also very conspicuously left his home city off the list despite it sharing a similar population size and crime rate as another major city on the list.
It’s all a sham. The data does not bear their message out.
It could be possible that crime is out of control because police are doing these things instead of their actual job.
Compare the efforts police will go through to play with their toys vs the efforts they will go through to actually solve crime.
Despite living in a literal panopticon where the cops can buy infinite tracking information on anyone and even on just a query, violent crime clearance rates are abysmal.
Police just don't do their jobs.
edit: I do not actually believe crime is out of control, because it is not. I believe that cops are bad actors and liars.
https://projects.csgjusticecenter.org/tools-for-states-to-ad...
So naturally, our police budgets increase every year.
This is almost like hiring an off-duty police officer from your local police department to protect you from corrupt local police department.
The argument isn't take the site offline, it's to not use infrastructure that is openly recognized as being subservient to the same adversary the site's authors are trying to protect people from.
Or, you know, we could operate with an ounce of nuance and not oversimplify the complexities of the world we live in.
Accordingly, most US-based companies are not in a position for bulk data collection and assisting the totalitarian surveillance state.
Cloudflare, however, is, and does. They are not a trustworthy party here, no more so than Flock itself.
1. Create an open network of off-the-shelf cameras watching public roadways
2. Load up the database with license plate numbers of local politicians and/or law enforcement
3. Create a "Where is my senator?" web site that uses that data
4. Watch all hell break loose
5. Get distributed stalking without a warrant outlawed
Flock does not have an ALPR monopoly.
You fasten your seatbelt in a car and plane for your own (and others’) safety. Not because everything is a conspiracy.
Posting this because of the recent discussion about Flock technology.
> It’s bad civic hygiene to build technologies that could someday be used to facilitate a police state.
0: https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2009/07/technology_...
Neat!