Second, the page barely mentions ice, title is begging for clicks.
> “We take privacy seriously…
You cannot legally use it to rob a bank, though. Specific uses of that system are forbidden.
But you can't buy one at Wal Mart, and be trusted to only pull that trigger in situations when the uses of that system are legal! We don't sell them to consumers because the anticipated and obvious outcomes are harmful.
Flock Safety generated a treasure trove of highly sensitive data. In theory, there's nothing wrong with collecting that data, or even using it to investigate specific crimes with searches of limited scope under a judicial warrant. It's only harmful when used inappropriately... but no one should be surprised when that happened.
If you're gonna be angry at someone be angry at the people among us were in favor of the creation of this data set because they foolishly thought it would be used to combat mundane property crime or because perhaps they thought that subjecting motorists to an increased dragnet would be a good thing for alternative transportation, or some other cause, think that they have done no wrong despite warnings of the potential for something like this being raised way back when the cameras and the ALPRs were being put up.
These things will keep happening until it is no longer socially acceptable to advocate for the creation of data collection programs that are a necessary precondition.
As an example, the Feds can round up marijuana users in California, if they like. They can't require California's law enforcement to help.
There's no law prohibiting local agencies helping feds.
The law prohibiting exactly that is linked in the article.
"Under a decade-old state law, California police are prohibited from sharing data from automated license plate readers with out-of-state and federal agencies. Attorney General Rob Bonta affirmed that fact in a 2023 notice to police."
ETA: It’s complicated, but having you give up actually weakens the rule of law even more.
One or two cops locked up for it can also work wonders. But somehow the western world has come to believe that lots of pretty laws with no consequences for transgressions is a wonderful thing. I think not.
Excuse me. While a minority of rabid Anarchists might agree with you, the vast majority of people in Denmark happen to really like our police force.
This is largely an American problem. Don't blame it on "the western world".
So you have to prove actual harm. You have to identify the individual person who caused the harm. You have to prove they knowingly caused the harm. You have to quantify the harm in monetary terms. Then you can sue them for actual damages + attorneys' fees.
If I build a sidewalk curb, there's a perfectly legitimate use case for it. It can also be used to curb-stomp someone to death.
Can't we build the curb and forbid curb-stomping at the same time? Shouldn't that be our right?
Flock built a surveillance data repository with convenient sharing mechanisms. Someone then used those mechanisms as designed for their intended purpose.
The cops - public servants, in theory - then blatantly violated that law.
Do be angry at the people misusing the systems. Don't be angry at the people building them for good.
I could go into my car right now and plow through a bunch of people. I'm still allowed to own a car. We've made the actual harmful act illegal, not the thing that theoretically made it possible.
For ALPRs? I’d make queries public with a short delay, including with a unique identifier for the cop initiating the query. Data automatically deleted within an interval.
Won't that likely victimize people who are presumed innocent of crimes until convicted?
Don’t see why. My plate could be scanned because I’m a criminal, or because I’m a witness or a victim.
The issue is being brought up by the state auditor. This article is literally what would happen anyway if your pet policy was enacted. The police would ignore your little policy, and the standard would have to write an article about the abuse. Hopefully that article would drive public opinion enough for change to happen.
This is the system working.
Sorry, I meant to make it technically impossible to query the data without producing a public log.
As part of a Flock search, police have to provide a “reason” they are performing the lookup. In the “reason” field for searches of Danville’s cameras, officers from across the U.S. wrote “immigration,” “ICE,” “ICE+ERO,”Two, those queries aren’t automatically public.
then what is the proof for the title of this post
> Oakland cops gave ICE license plate data; SFPD also illegally shared with feds
How does stopping them from writing "fuck you" in the field (which they provably didn't, considering they found the queries), or giving you access to it, help in any way in this situation? You're going to have to make an argument here for it to make any sense.
As everything in life, it's a trade-off, but a good trade-off can only be found if people are fully aware of the consequences. It seems to me, people regularly underestimate the negative consequences of data collection (or realize that these consequences will not affect them, but others).
It is on us to be realistic about how the systems we create will actually be used. I think we lost sight of that in the last couple decades, or figured it wasn't our problem. And the chickens have come home to roost.
I am angry because the same people who've argued for years against the kinds of education systems that teach actual social systemic thinking and who've called me naive and cynical for suggesting their pretty toy is going to get people killed are now throwing up their hands and saying "how could we have known?"
Because we fucking told you, that's how.
Edit for clarity this is not a misuse of Flock.
https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/2023-dle-06.pdf
> Importantly, the definition of “public agency” is limited to state or local agencies, including law enforcement agencies, and does not include out-of-state or federal law enforcement agencies. (See Civ. Information Bulletin 2023-DLE-06 California Automated License Plate Reader Data Guidance Page 3 Code, § 1798.90.5, subd. (f).) Accordingly, SB 34 does not permit California LEAs to share ALPR information with private entities or out-of-state or federal agencies, including out-of-state and federal law enforcement agencies. This prohibition applies to ALPR database(s) that LEAs access through private or public vendors who maintain ALPR information collected from multiple databases and/or public agencies.
That's why you don't just go to the cops and say "find $1B in your budget to cut". You give specifics.
All the more reason to reduce their funding!
This was tried. It generated a generational backlash against the left as petty crime and visible homelessness rose.
To the extent police reform has historically worked, it’s been by rebooting a police department. (Think: replacing the Mets with the NYPD.) Not replacing police with a hippie circle.
Chesa Boudin. New York with cashless bail and non-prosecution of petty crimes. That fuck in Chicago.
Defund the police was a marquee policy and messaging failure that underlined why radical minorities capturing the Democratic Party cause it to lose elections.
What does that have to do with "defund the police"? Bail money doesn't go into their pockets.
In New York they were one and the same. The latter simply representing the most extreme expression of the former.
I remember dropping into a leftist conference in Philadelphia years ago where several folks who would become the face of post-Covid police reform were there, including Boudin. At the end of the day they all conceded that their goal was abolishing this, that and the other thing.
As a NY resident: lol.
I don't doubt you'll find activists espousing both "defund the police" and "end cash bail" policies at the same time. That doesn't make them the same policy.
Oh, they’re totally different policies. But they’re basically the same politics. And they both generated a backlash, one against messaging (because it was too stupid to implement) and one against policy (because it created more visible crime).
And that’s why I supported it. But for every one of the latter there are many of the former because they started cycling through arrests so fast.
Keep the recidivist bastard in jail, on the other hand, and they are incapacitated for the time being. I’ll admit I didn’t see the utility of that until it was too late.
>>This was tried. It generated a generational backlash against the left as petty crime and visible homelessness rose.
>Chesa Boudin.
Chesa Boudin is not a police budget, that's a completely unserious nonsequitor. SF's police budget rose throughout the defund the police movement, just not as high as initially allocated. https://abc7news.com/post/sfpd-budget-defund-the-police-depa...
Murders didn’t rise. Petty crime and open-air drug use absolutely did.
> prison owners are noticing they might lose their cash cow
This is nonsense.
> Nearly 90% of people in ICE custody are held in facilities run by for-profit, private companies. Two of the largest, Geo Group and CoreCivic, are working to increase their ability to meet the administration's demand.
CoreCivic used to be called the "Corrections Corporation of America". GEO Group used to be "Wackenhut Corrections Corporation".
It should be unsurprising that the folks who make money building and running large, secure facilities to detain people would be interested in doing the same for ICE.
I'd imagine they do their fair share of lobbying and "crime scary!" PR, though.
(We see similar crime trends in other countries without BLM/George Floyd/police reform movements during that time period.)
Crime has been on a downward trend for a generation, outside of a few areas. In San Francisco specifically, crime also increased due to police officers quietly going on strike against policies they disagreed with. Now that police officers are actually doing their jobs again, shockingly, crime is rapidly falling.
What has actually increased is sensationalist coverage in the media, which you're right, has created a significant political backlash.
If I recall correctly it was the DA refusing to prosecute just about anything.
SFPD hadn’t been doing their jobs for far, far longer than Chesa’s tenure. I moved here in 2013 and their non-enforcement practices were already legendary. Blaming Chesa for being in office for like 10 months in 2019-2020 is a hell of a cop out (pun intended).
Even if it were true, it wouldn’t in any way excuse the police for choosing not to do the job they’re paid to do.
The obvious cause of the increase was the pandemic job losses and general societal decay. Oh and the cops quiet quitting because they were upset people hate them.
It was a combination of the weird post-Covid crime boom. And the various police reform efforts cities experimented with in the wake of George Floyd.
Is it a crime to be mentally ill in public in your world?
Police forces across the US have never seen higher funding rates.
With "the left" you mean the SF DA?
We don’t send the police for medical emergencies or house fires. We send personnel with dedicated training for those types of events.
And frankly, the folks who turned "liberal" into a dirty word can make any branding into a branding fuckup. That's what they have Fox News for.
Like, more proactive work for less policing is not some sort of lunacy.
Making them sound naive is so easy. Especially if you choose the protagonists.
No, we can judge by the actions and results. Police reform in New York was a failure. Education priorities in San Francisco were a failure. The entire activist-interest group orientation is broken.
> proactive work for less policing is not some sort of lunacy
It’s not. But the people who attempted it were lunatics.
Defunding the police is dumb. Rebuilding police departments from the ground up is not. Unfortunately the latter requires being realistic about the occurrence of crime and criminals in a population. (They’re not all victims of circumstance. And they can’t all be community organised into a sculpting job or whatever.)
Police budges were trimmed. Police forces were cut. Police remit, in the form of decriminalisation, was reduced. No jurisdiction just abolished law, sure, but I’d say those count as defunding the police to an extent. But you’d expect to see some of the promised benefits (and lack of the downsides) in these initial approaches.
Instead, these measures lead to disaster. Shockingly quickly. Shockingly powerfully. They’ve pretty much all been reversed in landslides.
I seriously hope what is happening right now finally radicalizes the rest of the population that law enforcement as it is right now does not work for the public interest.
As another commenter posted, its about not allowing the creation of the data set in the first place.
We really need everyone in this country to go read "Nothing to Hide" by Daniel Solove, because thats how this crazy shit gets through in the first place: innocuous citizens go "Sure, I got nothing to hide"
At the same time, it's also absolutely goddamn unnacceptable that we've come to just accept that our LEOs are just going to act like unaccountable criminal gangs, and that that mentality has crept so far into the police forces that a thin blue line punisher sticker is an acceptable bit of kit for a cruiser. There are systems that are intended to hold these groups accountable, and we need to keep pressing until they do, because throwing up our hands and just saying "Boys will be boys" ain't cutting it.
I’m genuinely curious for data on whether these data have been helpful with property crime in San Francisco and Oakland.
Well, they are unaccountable state-sanctioned gangs.
They can legally steal (forfeiture).
They can 'smell something' and legally trespass.
They can shoot and kill you for basically any reason. But they can fall back and say 'I thought they were reaching for a weapon'.
SCOTUS, even with more liberal justices, have repeatedly said they are shielded from 'official capacities', and that they have absolutely no requirement of protecting and serving.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_LASD_deputy_gangs
https://knock-la.com/tradition-of-violence-lasd-gang-history...
Porch thefts: 25,000 Cops: 2000
Obviously not all of those cops are on duty simultaneously, let’s assume they do a 12 hour shift every single day: they would have 25 porch thefts each to solve!
This isn’t a US centric phenomenon either: 70,000 cell phones were stolen in London last year.
You have to catch the much smaller number of people who are committing 25k crimes. One porch pirate will steal lots of packages.
For any dataset you collect, think about how it can be miss-used. Because in all likelihood it will. Maybe not by you. But maybe by your successor. Or the hacker.
People making parallels I feel have been inaccurate, as the parallels right now are much closer to Europe's 1933 happenings, and people act like 1945's happenings is what will happen the very next day
Not sure what to make of that, just noticing that these particular "resistances" didn't have a prior allegory to watch, and made these choices eventually, and still how late into the story we know that these things occurred
And I don't want to make a point here about current political affairs. My point is that data collection has serious dangers, independent how good you think the current collectors are, how good the intentions of the data collection are, and how good the benefits of the data collection are. We should not pretend that at least some data collection has benefits. But we should also not pretend that any given data collection doesn't have the risk of misuse.
It's up to politics (in the end, us), to make sure that these risks are valued correctly, for example by making sure that data collectors take over some of the risk in a serious way. "The data was protected according to industry standards" is not enough.
It’d be very interesting to survey people and see how people’s mental models reflect reality. I imagine very few Americans would identify what was going on in 1933 at all, never mind that Hitler’s first attempt at a coup took place nearly 20 years before the US entered the war.
Clearly we all need to be thinking much more deeply on these issues.
In many respects, the attitude of "we'll fix this one day" is exactly why we don't think deeply about these issues. Client-side scanning was proposed only a short while ago, and you can still read the insane amount of apologists on this site who think that unmitigated data collection can be a good thing if you trust the good Samaritan doing it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28068741
It will take an utter catastrophe before the deregulation bloc sees what's at stake. This is far from over, despite the unanimous desire to put security in the rearview mirror.
Alternatively, ask them how accurately an email need to describe their medical history before they believe it's real and fall for a scam.
What do you base this on? How can you be sure that it's not a major impediment to the ambitions of certain political actors, and that their impact wouldn't be far worse if they had access to centralized sources of data?
Once again I do generally agree with the desire to limit the abilities of the government, especially pragmatically in the context of the current situation. And politically I do think the general topic is being used to drive support for fascism rather than earnest policy fixes (eg killing bipartisan immigration bill, in favor of this).
But in general there is an American blindspot of fallaciously seeing system layers as something like a gradient of less-to-more control rather than a yin-yang where diminished control in one area makes it pop up in another.
Can you provide some examples of this phenomenon?
There are many more-specific examples of this, but maybe a straightforward one is how the (incumbent) electronic payment networks ban a whole host of types of users, and do so basically in lock step, despite those users not doing anything illegal. That is private regulation, not even accountable to the democratic process by default. And it avoids becoming accountable with a narrative of "avoiding regulation".
There are many people on fixed social security that can't afford missing a payment, let alone the 3 it would take at a minimum if it all works out to get this fixed. By that point they could be homeless, their credit could be ruined. These aren't easy things to fix if you are 80+ and depend on Social Security and renting.
Concentrated power even for the best on intentions (in this case deciding in the 1930s 'old people shouldn't have to eat dog food') is extremely easy to abuse.
I highly suggest visiting it! Sorry for the lack of an online source.
So does the license plate data. It is used to find and bring justice to criminals. Does that not make us all safer?
> If you mandate getting rid of encryption, bad actors will still break the law and use encryption to carry on business as normal.
Laws are pointless because the criminals will just break them is a silly argument that can be used against most laws. Why should we have any laws about gun control, money laundering, or drugs if the criminals will just do whatever they want anyway.
And the flip side of this argument should also be considered. Do we think the Nazis would have given up on their genocide if they didn't find this data?
I'd say that one thing inherently different about datasets is that they are continually used badly, including by well-meaning actors. Data is frequently misinterpreted, with good intent, to draw bad conclusions.
You might hit your thumb with a hammer. That hurts! People would be a lot more careful if misinterpreting data had such clear, immediate effects on them.
Also, there are many different groups with different passionate opinions in any community as large as this one.
To use this specific example of the license plate dataset, this is a tool used to find and bring justice to criminals. How is it any different from any other tool at the disposal of law enforcement? Isn't this system just a scaled up version of a cop with a camera?
Nobody denies that collection of datasets can have upsides. But the downsides are often not seen/evaluated accurately. And negative effects don't necessarily scale with the same power as positive effects.
Yes and no. I think radiation is a big differentiator, but absent that, I don't think it is better morally or ethically to level a city with conventual bombs than it would be to do it with a nuclear bomb.
>Nobody denies that collection of datasets can have upsides. But the downsides are often not seen/evaluated accurately. And negative effects don't necessarily scale with the same power as positive effects.
I'm not disagreeing with this. I'm asking why this same logic is not applied elsewhere.
I could pour BILLIONS into social programs and we'll still have sociopaths ghost riding or sitting on their phones doing 45 in a 30 zone. The cops have been useless from the get-go.
These cameras have been the last line of defense. The solution is obviously to take the cameras out of the hands of the cops and put them behind elected judges.
I also know that we cannot afford to keep letting criminals run this town and destroy public property and kill people on the roads and get away with it
Sidenote: As per the article, this is already illegal and was a mis-step on the part of SFPD and CHP searching OPD's database (OPD didn't give ICE anything). It sounds like whoever did it will be prosecuted.
https://www.oaklandca.gov/Public-Safety-Streets/Traffic-Safe...
Yes, this is an argument for not giving them more authority than necessary, but it's also an argument for holding them accountable when they do act out of bounds.
To this point, any law that gives power to government officials also needs to have explicit and painful consequences for abuse of those powers. Civilians who break the law face punishment and penalties, but government employees are almost never held to account. That needs to change.
It was predictable that law enforcement agencies would... try to enforce the law?
By breaking a different one?
I mean, yeah, it's predictable. But it's not great.
ICE is often operating in a racist and dehumanizing way, but it is nowhere near the level of organized atrocity that it is regularly compared to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madagascar_Plan
The Holocaust involved quite a bit of large-scale deportation to concentration camps.
https://www.theholocaustexplained.org/how-and-why/how/deport...
> In the autumn of 1941, approximately 338,000 Jews remained in Greater Germany. Until this point, Hitler had been reluctant to deport Jews in the German Reich until the war was over because of a fear of resistance and retaliation from the German population. But, in the autumn of 1941, key Nazi figures contributed to mounting pressure on Hitler to deport the German Jews. This pressure culminated in Hitler ordering the deportation of all Jews still in the Greater German Reich and Protectorate between 15-17 September 1941.
There is something in common though: that very dangerous belief that lying and ignoring the law is justified by the end goal. Speaking of lies, where did you get this statistics that 50% of expulsed immigrants are criminals? Even their own statistics (https://www.ice.gov/statistics) show that a small minority have ever been convicted (and I would assume that most of those convictions would not be very serious crimes)
The root issue here is that the government is no longer able or willing to control and bind their own law enforcement agencies. Agreed that this program was a bad idea, but the wider issue that law enforcement agencies can and do wantonly disregard direct orders from the state. There's the direct issue of impact on people as a result, and the more intangible idea of the questionable legitimacy of a government that is not able to control its own enforcement agencies.
This needs to be met with swift repercussions for both the individuals that participated, as well as the agencies that allowed it. Lacking that, it seems a reasonable inference that enforcement agencies are no longer bound by the will of the people and are in fact the ruling government.
That’s not going to happen. Cross out that sentence and reason as if we’ve already asked for that and it failed. We’ve heard this song too many times to pretend we don’t know the first verse.
As someone who works with sensitive healthcare data, I can tell you that the mere existence of a dataset doesn't guarantee its misuse, nor it does it absolve anyone who interacts with that data of responsibility for proper stewardship.
Yes, you are right that we should think carefully before creating a sensitive dataset. If we insist on creating such a dataset, the people involved must put in place guardrails for stewardship of those datasets. But the stewards of that data, past, present, and future, also share responsibility.
Of course if the incentive structures don't line up with concern for mitigation of harm to vulnerable people as is the case with law enforcement in the US, then all of that is out the window.
Anyway, what you have written implies that we need not think about accountability for those who misuse of datasets after they are created, which is clearly absurd as I and anyone else familiar with healthcare data can tell you.
I heard CA built up a large amount of money anticipating a lot of litigation against Trump 2.0.
Sadly I dont see a realistic stop to the databases. If there are none, law makers will just dictate the creation of it. If there is one, they will argue terrorism or cold cases to start the process of getting access. If car manufacturers get gps logs, those will sooner or later end up being available to law enforcement. They currently have access to every call, when where and to whom. Every internet use. Every movement mobile phones does. Every payment through a credit card, where and to whom. Mass transports get more and more into personal tickets, and those get logged.
I hope we will see unreasonable searches to be expanded/enforcement against trawling of data, but i dont have any hope left to the idea that databases wont be created. Not even gdpr in eu stops law makers from dictating that databases must be created, or stopping law makers from trawling it.
I think it's okay to be angry at public servants for "following orders" too.
We didn't let the Nazis get away with that bullshit for a good reason.
The criminals are, sadly, running the circus, and they are acting like they'll never lose power.
The only implication that your information was ever safe in America was marketing. Programmers should have been able to read the privacy-destroying tea leaves a decade ago.
The local executive is breaking legislature's law.
The governor should be ordering state police and lawyers to prosecute these local officials, or else the legislature should impeach the governor.
The only feasible response to lawlessness of those empowered to uphold the law is to periodically remind them that legal authority is derived from the will of the people. Thomas Jefferson said this more elegantly than I could.
State and local attorneys general.
In this case, an individual harmed may also bring civil claims under California law.
Probably the same as it is at the federal level - voting out of office. During the Biden/Harris term there was a complete dereliction of duty when it came to border enforcement. Actually it was worse than that - they helped people illegally cross the border, even flew them in on the taxpayer dime. This is why we have President Trump today.
If you wanna do something about it then help turn the surveillance spotlight back at them: https://app.copdb.org/
My local police department just recently got a grant for these and is in the process of setting them up, and I'm working with a number of local technologists and activists to shut it down. We are showing up at every police commission meeting and every city council meeting and keeping actively engaged with local press. I spent almost three hours yesterday having coffee with a police commissioner and I have meeting requests from a number of other local officials. There are similar efforts ongoing in other cities across the U.S.
An interesting one to keep an eye on is Cedar Rapids, which includes a neat teardown of one of the devices: https://eyesoffcr.org/blog/blog-8.html
Immediately after setting up the system -- before all of the devices were even fully online -- our local PD began sharing access with departments in non-sanctuary states. When we asked questions about it, they hid that section from their transparency page. We are cooking them publicly for that.
Flock is VC-funded commercialized mass surveillance.
What's aggravating is they knew the state law was meaningless and passed it anyways. Now CA has license plate readers and those who complained probably got fact-checked and censored despite being right.
Constitution trumps Federal law.
Tenth Amendment:
> The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
The Feds are welcome to enforce immigration law. They cannot require California to participate. https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/amdt10-4-2/AL...
This is absolutely not true in general, and the constitution explicitly circumscribes the jurisdiction of federal law.
I think we've been playing "everyone gets along" for far too long, and it's become obvious to the meek that people are gaming the system whilst pretending to get along. A correction is necessary, and that's precisely what you're witnessing here.
The federal government and DOJ has declined to prosecute Marijuana, but they definitely have the right to do so.
If you have ever gone backpacking for any length of time, you will have met large numbers of people all over the developing world from Europe, Australia and America who are living there and working illegally. In general the result of being caught is being asked to leave and come back with a new visa, and not being violently arrested and thrown into a concentration camp indefinitely.
I'll give you a hint: none.
States are not obligated to participate in the enforcement of federal law, and are entitled to control the official conduct of their own officers and agencies.
If a state has a law that prohibits local police officers from furnishing data to federal agencies, that law is completely valid, and officers that act contrary to it are in violation of state law.
California law also makes it illegal to do federal enforcement with state resources and specifically makes sharing this license plate information with federal investigators by state and local police illegal.
This has nothing to do with the supremacy of federal law over state law. It has to do with who does the enforcement of these laws. It is similarly illegal for me to enforce federal law, but I am certainly bound by it.
Having been hit twice by non-insured, non-licensed drivers with no paperwork or legal status, they got off free while I had to pay for their crimes, damage and increased insurance rates for years. No sympathy at all for cheaters. Arrest them and confiscate their cars.
How about tracking the vehicles of people who have similar names as supposedly illegal immigrants?
How about tracking the vehicles of people who are legal immigrants?
Does this mean it wasn't exactly to Oakland Police that violated state law, but rather other CA based law enforcement entities?
For example if the law says "plate reader records cannot be shared" and the CHP just confirms the presence of the records , and does not share the records, no violation occurred.
You did a good job reading the article from bottom to top. The headline and lead are usually misleading.
There are many many such cases and they are obviously not limited to the current regime. Governments will collect all the data they are permitted to collect without a harsh public response, and they will always have a 'good' reason -- just ask them! After all it's for your own good!
Datasets with personal data create a target for crime and for abuses. The problem is these datasets exist at all, thereby reducing humans to numbers. People are not resources and not material not matter what HR says. Reducing people to numbers is to reduce them to something less than they are -- no dataset (model trained on it) captures everything.
We need real privacy laws not the ridiculous current situation. There should be clear consent required without coercion for any data collection -- a necessarily very high bar.
Unauthorized collection of personal data (i.e. without explicit consent not tied to any benefit bait) should be a federal crime and the organizational leadership should always be held to account. That and that alone will curtail future abuses. Otherwise we are just always complaining after the fact and it will keep happening.
That said, good luck getting any government in this world to go along without a revolution.
Example: Alabama was the last state to remove its ban on interracial marriage from its statutes in 2000, though this was largely symbolic as interracial marriage was legalized nationwide by the Supreme Court's ruling in Loving v. Virginia in 1967.
There is probably a specific federal law enforcement authority that may or may not be in conflict with the state law. It's unclear if this is a 10th amendment violation for the state or if federal law enforcement is granted this authority
A 10th amendment violation would be if the feds require the state to perform federal law enforcement.
Federal authority is relevant if they e.g. raided state law enforcement offices to take the data without consent, but in this case they are just given the data by state officers.
[1] “The clause relating to fugitive slaves is found in the national Constitution, and not in that of any State. It might well be deemed an unconstitutional exercise of the power of interpretation to insist that the States are bound to provide means to carry into effect the duties of the National Government nowhere delegated or entrusted to them by the Constitution.” Prigg v. Pennsylvania https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/41/539/
[2] “Congress may not simply ‘commandeer the legislative process of the States by directly compelling them to enact and enforce a federal regulatory program.” Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association https://www.oyez.org/cases/2017/16-476
Edit: I get it. America first, second and third. You all buy into it. Fuck everyone else!
Sure.
The article in question even links to it. https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/bills/ca_201520160sb...
California's AG:
https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/2023-dle-06.pdf
> Importantly, the definition of “public agency” is limited to state or local agencies, including law enforcement agencies, and does not include out-of-state or federal law enforcement agencies. (See Civ. Information Bulletin 2023-DLE-06 Code, § 1798.90.5, subd. (f).) Accordingly, SB 34 does not permit California LEAs to share ALPR information with private entities or out-of-state or federal agencies, including out-of-state and federal law enforcement agencies. This prohibition applies to ALPR database(s) that LEAs access through private or public vendors who maintain ALPR information collected from multiple databases and/or public agencies.
Seems like the law was explicitly written to allow sharing data with other law enforcement agencies then narrowed down by Code, § 1798.90.5, subd. (f). https://codes.findlaw.com/ca/civil-code/civ-sect-1798-90-5/
> “Public agency” means the state, any city, county, or city and county, or any agency or political subdivision of the state or a city, county, or city and county, including, but not limited to, a law enforcement agency.
Notably: Not federal.
As part of a Flock search, police have to provide a “reason” they are performing the lookup. In the “reason” field for searches of Danville’s cameras, officers from across the U.S. wrote “immigration,” “ICE,” “ICE+ERO,”
The type of crime common here is nearly impossible to address without technological assistance. People steal cars, drive into neighborhoods, then break into other cars and houses. They're gone sometimes before a 911 call can even be made, and far before the police arrive. The criminals know this and are just incredibly brazen about it. They'll finish the job with people watching and recording because they know there's no way for them to be caught. People get followed home and held up in their driveway. The criminals are often armed, and people have been shot and killed for even the mildest of resistance. One guy was killed a block from where I was standing for knocking on the window of a getaway car of some guys stealing another car in broad daylight.
Leaving aside broader and more fundamental fixes for crime, which are much longer term projects, the only near-term thing that actually reduces this kind of crime is arrest and conviction rates. In SF, drones have helped reduced car break-ins, because they've actually caught some crews. Oakland doesn't have drones that I know of, but Flock cameras have enabled enough tracking for police to sometimes actually find these people quickly, even several miles away, and make an arrest.
Those are just the plain facts of the situation. It's understandable that people want some kind of solution here. Without at least starting from that understanding, it'll be very difficult to convince people that a solution that is having a positive impact already is not worth the other costs and risks.
And to me, this is the core conflict at a really high level: the economic and societal fixes for crime are usually opposed by the same people who abuse these kind of surveillance systems for authoritarian purposes. To me it's no coincidence that their preferred solution to crime just happens to help them keep an eye on the whole population.
ICE is deporting people to death camps (e.g. CECOT), not giving people due process, operating masked and with military support. ICE is a gestapo in all but name.
By all means, find ways to get your community police departments to address crime in your communities. Work with systems outside of police to fix the systemic root causes (crime doesn't "just happen", it's a symptom of other problems). But you don't need the secret police to fix car jackings and break-ins.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Laws
"The two laws were the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour, which forbade marriages and extramarital intercourse between Jews and Germans and the employment of German females under 45 in Jewish households; and the Reich Citizenship Law, which declared that only those of German or related blood were eligible to be Reich citizens."
The Holocaust was, broadly speaking, legal under German law at the time. The Gestapo were frequently enforcing laws with their actions. Eventually, Jews were deported to concentration camps; they were made "illegal".
"Legal" and "moral" are sometimes related, but not always. The Gestapo didn't start with the killings.
They're like the gestapo because they act in secret and hide their identities. They arrest dissidents because they say things the administration doesn't like. See Mahmoud Khalil. They're like the gestapo because hateful people get to just make people "illegal" at their own discretion. Half a million Haitians fleeing violence were here under temporary protected status, the executive branch is choosing to make them "illegal" and lying that Haiti is safe now. Half a million people were legal. Now they're "illegal". https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/27/haiti-temporar...
They do not follow due process which is guaranteed by the constitution to all persons in the US (not just citizens).
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2025/jul/13/rosie-odonne... Trump wants to make Rosie O'Donnell "illegal". What are your thoughts on this?
There’s just zero legal issue here.
No, they don't. The parents (who were illegal aliens) were deported, and they took the children (US citizens) with them.
You just loose all credibility with this outrageous rhetoric.
The Supremacy Clause is regulated, in part, by the Tenth Amendment, which states…
> The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
And the article doesn't specify which results were shared.
So it's clear Oakland didn't violate the law, and there is reasonable doubt that the other agencies didn't violate the law either.
Judgements come from judges, not journalists.
They are aware this is happening and are taking no action. They are as culpable as the other agencies.
perihelions•3h ago
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety
josefresco•2h ago
I've heard of "startup founder hubris" before but this is a new level.
barbazoo•2h ago
I'm honestly surprised they weren't too woke for them.
lupire•2h ago
barbazoo•2h ago
Ar-Curunir•1h ago
int_19h•2h ago
> Please tell us about the time you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage.
Gormo•55m ago
pj_mukh•1h ago
What HN thinks YC I asking: "how they cheated a system for personal gain"
lol.
Source: Me, I got into YC by answering the question that way.
JumpCrisscross•2h ago
Do we have a list of their clients?
EDIT: Apparently my town installed them in 2023 [3]. Inciting a couple council members over for dinner this week.
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/05/she-got-abortion-so-te...
[2] https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/statement-network-sharing-u...
[3] https://atlasofsurveillance.org/search?vendor=Flock+Safety
aprilthird2021•2h ago
bigyabai•1h ago
The more I look back on it, working for a YC-funded company will forever remain the black eye of my resume. I don't feel even a lick of pride "solving" the "problems" that YC perceives to be important. The greatest minds of my generation are looking at China and envying the confidence of their state.