imho its a choice to feel like a slave.
Frankly, the reason I feel like a slave is that I have no agency over this perpetual surveillance.
If you're saying that the people breaking the law and smashing the cameras are choosing not to be slaves then fair enough, tbh. I guess I'm choosing to stay a slave :/
In other words, I think it's worth mentioning that the (former) slaves who took the underground railroad were breaking the law by doing so.
I'm speaking from the perspective of an American worker. I feel that the relationship between capital and labor in the United States remains linked to slavery, even 150+ years after its formal abolition here.
My criticism of Quarrelsome is that, in my opinion, "It's your choice to be a slave" means "resist"; while "it's your choice to feel like a slave" means "accept it". I felt you were being too charitable to them.
That was my initial reaction too, I was just choosing to be charitable
> I found this on the side of the road and thought you might want it back.
This definitely takes more effort than smashing them does.
> Reduces what you can be charged with,
Does it? How? There's not even a return address to show that a person sent the parts back to Flock instead of just disappearing it.
> prevents Flock from getting insurance benefits
How? The camera doesn't repair itself. It still takes money to turn a pile of camera parts into a working camera on some street corner somewhere.
> and is all the more frustrating for them to deal with.
Is it? Is corporate frustration the goal? (Is corporate frustration even possible?)
Frustrating them is not the goal per-se, but it feels good, and may make them consider that market as not worth the cost of maintaining a presence there.
This isn't how the law works at all. You can absolutely still be charged with theft even if you return the item.
When I take your things and then mail them back to you, I have still stolen from you. That's still theft.
It's the taking part that constitutes theft.
---
If I instead just smash your things in-situ, then that can be a different crime like vandalism.
A Little Brother solution: they want data, give them so much bad data the rest of their data becomes worthless. But it only works on a mass scale.
But you have to think about second order effects. The knowledge that you may be punished afterwards serves as a disincentive for doing the wrong thing now. It may be preferable to convince everyone that they would be punished without actually doing the punishment, but it's not possible. Apart from the death penalty, punishments also can directly teach an individual not to commit the crime again.
Or, if not, we can be more specific. Imprisonment means that an individual is separated from society, making it much harder for them to commit crimes. Most crime is done by young men, and time spent in prison contributes to age. Issuing a 10-year sentence means directly reducing the number of crimes that occur. Is that not beneficial to society?
Or if a CFO embezzles $10M, should society be indifferent to whether taxpayers make the company whole or for CFO does it?
I need a lot bigger of a return if I am going to give up privacy.
Alcohol is involved nearly half the time as well...but the driver is intoxicated only 18% of the time. Usually it's drunk pedestrians stumbling into the road.
https://www.cdc.gov/pedestrian-bike-safety/about/pedestrian-...
Pedestrian fatalities are largely not a vehicle speed issue so much as a street design issue. Cities should be planned so nobody is ever walking near higher speed arterial roads, with crosswalks at controlled intersections, foot bridges over long/wide streets, and separated sidewalks. Then areas that need lower speeds (residential areas, downtown areas with street parking) should use narrower designs.
In contrast, the city I live in is primarily built around a handful of four lane streets that all of the businesses are along, with no crossings for miles and places where sidewalks randomly disappear. So you'll see pedestrians standing in the middle of a lane, waiting for a gap to run across the next two lanes. It's wildly dangerous, but the problem has nothing to do with people exceeding the speed limit...and even lowering it would achieve nothing.
Regarding road safety: Many roads have artificially low speed limits to either generate revenue or appease anti car activists. But the benefit of cars, getting us quickly to our destinations, is very clear. Vehicle deaths are very rare, and getting to places quickly matters. I see this a lot on highways especially, where a low speed limit like 55-60 should really be 80.
We should be designing for faster, not slower, roads. Safety is always improving due to cars having all kinds of driver assistance features now anyways, but we also could just make roads support the speeds people want to drive at. And then the value of surveillance cameras for safety will also go away.
People not having any sort of empathy on HN shouldn't surprise me not gonna lie.
As soon as citizens of Minneapolis though start tracking the movements of ICE vehicles though, then something will have to be done about it…
If a few people set them up, took pictures, recorded some of their friends’ license plates with the cameras… then prime time to make a marketing website for the roof cameras that is as scary as possible. It would include the real footage of the license plates, some story about how you get paid for bounties like facial recognition of a husband and the partner he’s suspected to be cheating with… and that you’re not allowed to hire the camera network for stalking (“wink“).
Claim to pay bonuses for cameras mounted in the highest traffic/value locations, with illusions to corporate espionage and stuff.
How do you have a civil society when the people in power cheat?
https://www.denver7.com/news/local-news/denver-city-council-...
This kind of discretionary spending authority can used for things that are good, bad, or indifferent. When it gets used to cut through the red tape and buy a new swingset for a neighborhood park, then that's good; nobody complains about that. (Except someone would surely complain about that, but come on man.)
And when it gets used to install government tracking systems, that's bad.
> How do you have a civil society when the people in power cheat?
The problem isn't that the mayor can spend some money. Rather, the problem here is that government tracking systems are completely legal to buy.
The laws need adjusted so that government tracking systems are completely illegal, instead.
"Yeah, good luck getting the government to do that!"
The people of Colorado are free to initiate their own legislation and constitutional amendments and then vote them into force.
"But that will never work!"
It can work, and it has worked. As just one example, the people did this rather famously, and with good effect, back in 2012 when they legalized recreational weed: https://ballotpedia.org/Colorado_Amendment_64,_Regulation_of...
Calling the "destruction of property" violence though—I might take issue with that.
But I see your point. Destroying a thing (even corporate) is a pretty extreme reaction that I can only see making sense after having exhausted all other "peaceable" avenues.
People that see these things as detrimental to society though are likely pretty motivated.
The website largely documents the current state of privacy and provides resources for (digital) services that help maintain privacy. This is an encouraging civil engagement which educates and empowers the audience.
If some goober installs massive floodlights that blast into windows of some houses, I think everyone would support a kid with a slingshot busting a few bulbs. If some guy is blasting music from a speaker at 3 AM every single day, I don't think anyone will complain about a cable being cut. If cameras are installed that sell data to companies like Palantir, companies that say they want to kill you and they're going to kill you and it's just a matter of time until they kill you, destroying those cameras is the non-violent option.
Violence against inanimate objects is morally neutral. Violence against instruments of violence is self-defense. Violence against oppression is how the USA was founded.
A corporation has unfair political advantages including a deep purse, an unlimited lifespan, and more recently all the rights of personhood. The only advantage the people have is their numbers, and yeah numbers of votes would be great, I agree, but when votes are ignored, or never solicited in the first place, it often comes down to numbers of pitchforks, as it were.
Okay, but what about destruction of property?
On voting harder, see the lead incident mentioned: "This happened weeks after the city council voted to keep the cameras despite overwhelming public opposition." I also advocate patiently working through the process, but people are not blind to the trends: the democratic process is failing as government increasingly sidelines voters and the richest have the levers of power.
That being said, Ring cameras creep me out and I feel they have a powerful anti-social effect.
How long will it take the three of them to talk with leadership of those churches? Are they allowed to bring up off topic concerns at PTA meetings where they can tell parents to be aware of the bot farms? Did they already knock on some neighbors’ doors?
All of this is really hard and really time-consuming. The alternative is for those three people to start smashing cameras and we know they won’t finish with their freedom. The uphill battle is the one we must fight.
The reality is the vast majority of social progress in the last millenium was achieved with force and threat of force. I find this weird revisionist "violence is never the answer" trope recited as a fact that needs no justification to be incredibly weird and unreliable.
By the way -- Where do you stand on throwing tea into the harbor? And where do you stand on the legitimacy of publicly discussing throwing tea into the harbor?
They are in favor of public vandalism such as that which was committed by the Boston Tea Party whereas you appear to be suggesting that you are vehemently against it.
Let’s not call breaking a camera “violence”.
But why smash'em when you have the right to bear arms? I'd do target practice instead. Improve your shootong dkills while getting rid of surveillance. Win-win.
the behaviour most people seem to want is to have a polis driven by the will of the people at large, rather than a small cadre, of -for lackof a better word, liars.
It will be easier to negotiate for legislation as well if the economic risk of installation increases because of vandalism.
If someone represents me, then logically I should have the right to vote directly instead of him, or remove him at any point.
Can imagine hydraflock scenario. Like some people close bathrooms permanently after bad vandalism on one occasion, maybe a city council person orders that extra cameras be installed so every camera can be recorded by a second camera.
This is all Internet logic. It's fun to talk about destroying cameras as a vector for public policy, ergo, by the First Law of Message Boards, that must be a viable strategy. Reader, it is not. Nobody's going to blink at these costs, but residents who supported or were on the fence about the cameras are now negatively polarized against doing anything about them.
The cringe-ier thing here is the clear message being sent by many commentators, incl. the author of this post, that nobody's ever thought of breaking surveillance cameras before. Y'all, this is literally a meme.
They are very different skill sets.
some newer models require a button to be pressed for them to start the AP, but still leaves them vulnerable to attacks with a long stick and doesn't draw any attention while hundreds of cameras suddenly stop working, making the city government think they're unreliable.
The article suggests that some of the cameras are smashed and left in highly visible places to "send a message".
a good 'message' would be convincing the government and cities that these are useless and that they don't work as well as create more administrative costs than just hiring more police officers or raising education levels.
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety
This organization that built itself on top of the “hacker ethos” is now happy to profit from building the surveillance state
I wonder if we are seeing what may be the result of a Reddit bot campaign to sway generative output.
Browser vendors can't build this.
In Italy two different agencies are buying spying tools they cannot even legally use.
Laws don't matter.
Surveillance is a good deterrent of criminal activity. On my old house, I used to keep a very visible camera, even after it went offline, to deter break ins.
For those in favor of destroying cameras. What is a better solution?
I'm not a fan of vandalism and luckily I'm living in a country where I have the law on my side when demanding that public space is not surveilled indiscriminately, but I totally understand the urge to simply take a stick to a camera that records my every movement.
It seems to me that poverty is more likely than anything else to cause those factors though.
The point is, where's the documented proof that they are helping. What we know is that people are still reporting crime in places where Flock cameras were present. Does that negate the effect? No, but it's just as valid as the point you brought. Which is to say, little to not all.
By my parents house in Vallejo there is one of these cameras near a 7/11. They can finally walk there.
How we should do a double negation in HTML terms? Nor //s nor /s/s fits the bill.
Plus apple watch, airpods, etc.
I’m think the average pedestrian carries more cash equivalents than at any time in history.
I can think of dozens. But this is the solution that allows the state to close the noose on freedom and democracy, and that's the one that you are defending with false choice argumentation.
1over137•1h ago
thegrim33•57m ago
hn_throwaway_99•52m ago
> Reddit threads show near-universal support.
If your barometer for actual support is Reddit sentiment, I've got news for you...
RobRivera•50m ago
amanaplanacanal•42m ago
GaryBluto•34m ago
basilgohar•22m ago
janalsncm•34m ago
amanaplanacanal•30m ago
b65e8bee43c2ed0•30m ago
new_account_100•9m ago
prepend•7m ago
Shows lack of critical thinking and rigor.
tombert•51m ago
ICE sort of feels like a militia with infinite funding and basically no oversight. This was already kind of true even before the latest presidential administration, but it has been ramped up to 11 in the last 1.5 years. I don't love the idea of a president effectively having his own "secret police" and people fighting back does seem kind of appropriate to me.
donkyrf•50m ago
Flock cameras appeal to weak communist attitudes, where there is a desire for a "good" authoritarian government that tracks everyone... for "their own good".
amanaplanacanal•41m ago
eximius•48m ago
birdsink•56m ago