Seems like something virtually everyone believes, and all that changes is where they draw the line of balance between intrusion and safety.
Then the data can be used for other purposes--no line prevents this.
So clearly we're allowed more nuanced takes than you think.
Not exactly true. This happened after the arrests and won't affect those arrests. This also doesn't prevent ICE from installing and using Flock cameras on federal properties (like the post offices). I would also bet that they could still comb the existing data if they wanted to, hence the shutdown of the cameras on the fear that they can't keep the data safe.
https://www.nwprogressive.org/weblog/2025/11/a-preliminary-v...
They're installing them in my mom's apartment complex after a vote.
Because im willing to bet a lot of answers would change when they knew the answer to those questions.
Even today, it's not necessarily hypocritical for someone to argue that states should do more X while the federal government should do less X.
No, you've got it half-backwards.
He's saying the democratic legislature shouldn't forever give up the citizens' collective Liberty to tax the ultra-mega-rich (Penns) in exchange for a one-time Security payment from those rich near-nobles.
https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famou...
There is no such thing as avoiding this trade off entirely.
It might not even take that long, at the rate we're progressing.
This is called "Salamitaktik" in Germany.
Don't forget the part where the useful idiots cheer because "I hate street racers and package thieves" or "I hate cults and drugs" depending on the decade
Stop acting like they're using the dragnet in the interest of the citizenry. They're not.
This new procedure will use existing technologies. How can you oppose it?
It's like saying I'm hypocritical for loving to write with pencils but being offended when someone else stabs me with one.
> Bro, you said you liked pencils, make up your mind!
Of all the poor thinking and rhetorical skills out there, the one that drives me the craziest is this insistence that ignoring context is not just acceptable but essential.
This shit was wholly foreseeable but they flew right into the sun, not too close to it, right the fuck into it, because they just couldn't stop lusting after the idea of sending the jackboot after someone for a crime that amounts to petty deviance (I'd like to say they were using it to go after petty thieves, but we all know they weren't doing that).
People are allowed to leverage trust in society to make tradeoffs. Or should we ban all forms of delivery because it can be abused at the extremes of the system to mug the drivers? Should every single store have every product locked behind glass and armed guards to light up any shoplifters, lest it be their fault for being robbed?
You're acting like they should have known the President would take complete control of the government and all other branches should cede while a Gestapo was deployed against the populace. And even then, they would only be buying time. The fascists will install their own mass surveillance anyway whether you like it or not. They're fascists!
Maybe blame every Republican and Republican voter for installing a fascist government instead of a city that had the audacity to think they could leverage stability to make their lives a little better.
And, for what it's worth, I know folk here like to pretend "this is just to spy on you", but that's just your rhetoric. The city doesn't care about where you go. But this kind of data is used frequently rape and murder cases, as traffic cameras are often some of the best evidence available. And the analytics collecter can be useful for all sorts of civil engineering, policy, and architectural decisions.
Now do I agree with the mass surveillance? Do I think the motivations were entirely pure? No, not really. But do I think you're being a bit of a drama queen and blaming the wrong people? Absolutely.
Karen (I actually have spicier thoughts about exactly who's at fault here but "Karen" will have to do) who provided the political will to set up the cameras is not the victim here.
Her hapless landscaper (or whatever) is the victim.
This was not unforeseeable. This was playing with fire. For years we build up the police state's capabilities and made it VERY cheap to run (with all these cameras and whatnot). Something like this was unenviable. If not the feds going whole hog on something that some states didn't agree with it would likely have been some states doing their own similar thing in some other policy area. Every government accountability group, every privacy group, they've been screeching for years. It's not like every warning wasn't sounded.
>The city doesn't care about where you go. But this kind of data is used frequently rape and murder cases, as traffic cameras are often some of the best evidence available.
This is a BS red herring. "serious" crime has been very solvable for years with cell location data, metadata, private security cameras, etc. But all that takes "work" (read: nontrivial amounts of money and labor the expenditure of which must be authorized and somewhat justifiable), a single unaccountable bureaucrat can't do all the heavy lifting of determining who to dispatch the boots on the ground to go after from the comfort of their desk
The entire purpose of the government having these systems like Flock is exactly what it's being used for. It's so that the .gov can still do jackboot things (like round up illegals, or whatever) without the oversight of Amazon, Verizon, etc, (companies with public images they care about) saying "hey man, this is too much, we don't like the look for our business" and pushing back. The only reason we're even hearing a peep is any strife here is because the local governments interests aren't aligned with the feds.
The city doesn't care where "I" go until I check the right (wrong) boxes and then they'll be waiting for the chance to harass me. The government didn't "care" until something flipped, and then the .gov was all over them. The same is true for you and everyone else.
And yes I'm being sloppy with with my wording and my reasoning, I could not be, but I don't really care to write to that high a standard.
"I don't respect facts I don't like" is not a very respectable point of view and makes me not want to engage at all.
> with cell location data, metadata, private security cameras, etc
I'm sure you'd argue that the government should have access to all of that data and it could never be used for "jackbooting"?
EDIT: Even if you did genuinely support all that, you're doing exactly what this city did! Making a subjective judgement call about where to put the proverbial line, but still giving the government the ability to use this data because you value its ability to benefit us / provide safety guarantees.
All that data can just as easily be stolen and abused by a fascist government.
> It's so that the .gov can still do jackboot things (like round up illegals, or whatever)
You are quite literally posting in the context of TFA about them turning them off explicitly because they did not intend them to be used for "jackboot things". FFS.
The police (local or federal) don't have integrations with private CCTV, historical location data, etc, etc. When they want that stuff they have to email someone, ask someone, have a reason, maybe even get a warrant, etc. Heck, even to snoop on someone's facebook they create a paper trail going through the law enforcement portal This is not a big deal for "real crime" but for stuff the public doesn't actually support serious enforcement of it's a big PITA, creates a risky paper trail they don't fully control, there's potential oversight, etc. All that constrains how far they can go without local public support.
Being able to just "go fishing" from your desk like you can with Flock (and to a lesser extent Ring), like the NSA can with all our emails and metadata, etc, etc, and all that other 1984 type dragnet stuff, is a categorical difference and nobody should have that power.
People should know Germany was a republic before the Nazis took control.
That's because the local authorities aren't the final customer. The final customer is the federal government, they want allllll the data.
Many times this isn't misleading, per se, but nudge nudge wink wink. "We trust you to follow your own data privacy policy. It's not our job to police how access to your data is configured." In Washington, for example, there is data that LE cannot collect, and LE cannot pay someone to collect directly for them to bypass that...
... but if someone just so happens to ALREADY be collecting it, they can pay to access it.
This type of use and expansion of scope was totally foreseeable by anyone paying attention to history. It always starts as some targeted thing, then it becomes the path of least resistance for similar subsequent things as the barrier to entry is extremely low.
This new technology will improve existing procedures. How can you oppose it?
This new procedure will use existing technologies. How can you oppose it?
Redmond is under no obligation to assist them.
This is the most foreseeable consequence I can imagine. It’s up there with “When I throw this baseball where will it land?”. It shouldn’t even require conscious thought.
But I guess if you elect judges pretty much all bets are off, no? Just find yourself a card carrying MAGA judge willing to sign off.
This is not at all comparable to appointed judges in other countries, where politicians usually don't have any input on the appointment process. Usually they are chosen by the current judges at that level, or by an entity like a bar association.
After all, how can you have a Trias Politica if the three branches aren't independent?
So the judiciary is completely isolated from external accountability?
I do not see how this is a superior approach.
Appointment is the most common method of selecting lower- and higher-court judges in common-law countries, and for supreme and constitutional courts in civil- and mixed-system countries. In most countries, this appointment is by the executive, but there are systems that assign the minister of justice and members of the judiciary a role in the appointment process.[1]
If the public wants to make life miserable for a certain class it will be done. Democracy and the rule of law only exists by the will of the people.
According to the article, it was foreseen. But the people who brought it up were ignored.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi
Back in a day, you did not have cameras yet, so one had to hire snitches. Luckily this is not the case anymore, as demonstrated by Chinese leading by an example:
Kinda funny if you think about it, the snitches are cut from the same cloth as the people clamoring for more cameras, more jackboot. If anything they should be pissed about being cut out.
In several other cities it has also led to all kinds of resistance by city councils and mayors in what can only be called an odd resistance against its own populace and constituents.
At least it seems that maybe something good will come of it when local people get more engaged and pay more attention and maybe even run for office against the corrupt narcissists of society that usually hold offices in local politics because people have not paid attention for a very long time.
Do you know your sheriff? Your city/county council members? The city manager? The mayor?
When you look at the deflock.me map and are astonished at how many cameras there are, you can thank people not paying attention in local politics and who their sheriff is, and you can thank the traitors at YC leadership who brought about this Orwellian system.
The police chiefs are usually the ones pushing the initiative. Have you ever voted for a police chief in your life?
Specifically interesting is the section "State and local law enforcement agencies may not provide nonpublicly available personal information about an individual..." which puts police in a bind with Flock data: if the data is public, anyone can request it (including ICE) and they have to provide it to all comers. If they declare it not to be subject to public records request, then they also can't share it with ICE -- which is outside their control in practice, since Flock independently sells access to AI summaries of the data. In the face of this contradiction, turning the things off seems to be the only way to stay legal until the courts get done chewing on this.
> The city suspended its Flock system because city officials could not guarantee they wouldn’t be forced to release data collected by those devices someday, she said.
Key part is "someday". Seems like the article is implying that flock may have shared this data with ICE which led to the arrests... but there is no proof supporting this...
> On Thursday, a Skagit County Superior Court judge ruled that pictures taken by Flock cameras in the cities of Sedro-Woolley and Stanwood qualify as public records, and therefore must be released as required by the state’s Public Records Act, court records show.
This is the more likely reason. What do folks here think about this ruling?
IMO it seems obvious that this should be public records/data, but would love to hear alternative positions to this.
At the very least I think any kind of face recognition should require probable cause.
The line here is a little different. I could point a camera out my window and record every license plate that drives by my house, and that would be allowed because its recording public activities, and the data I collect would be private—its mine from my camera.
The question here is if a public/government agency pays a private company to setup cameras in public, for the benefit of the public, then should that data collected by those cameras not also be public?
The courts seem to agree that it should be public, and I fail to see why it shouldn't be. Maybe I should read the opposition briefs on it.
This is how NASA operates with the data/images collected from the tax payer funded operations it runs. There is a period of exclusivity allowed for some projects to allow the people to work with the data, but anybody can go down load high res imagery once it has been released.
I assume it is/was similar with other data collected, like weather data/radar, oceanic current/buoy data, etc?
One of the great things here is that most of the teams are so focused on their specific criteria in the data, they sort of lose the forest in the tree. Once that data has been released to the public, more and more interesting things are being found in the existing data rather than requiring new observations. It's space, so most things only need to be imaged once per sensor. It's not like setting up a trap camera hoping to see big foot the one time he strolls past. The universe changes on a much slower scale so the data is still relevant for much longer.
> Once that data has been released to the public, more and more interesting things are being found in the existing data rather than requiring new observations.
Really highlights the value of the data being public, which I feel is often overlooked now a days. Hard to tie KPIs to value that comes like this.
License plates were designed to be read and visible and they show that the vehicle is registered, but what about inside the vehicle? Do we have privacy in there?
What exactly does 'in public' mean? And why shouldn't someone have privacy from being recorded and their movements tracked even if they are in public?
None of these things are a given. The rights we have are because we decided they were important. There is no reason we can't revisit the question as situations change.
They're demanding you show your "papers" registration at all times without articulable suspicion you've committed a crime/infraction. The fourth amendment arguably protects us from the government requiring us to show us our papers at all times when we're travelling in the most common form of conveyance.
Maybe you shouldn’t be allowed to do that. Permanent persistent recording of the public feels very different than taking a photo every once in a while, and I feel it’s an infringement of privacy even when a single person does it.
If you put up cameras on all the intersections on the way of say an ex went to work, and started logging when they were coming and going, it's hard for me to believe a prosecutor wouldn't be able to file that under some stalking-adjacent statute. The fact that they're doing the same thing en masse doesn't make it more generalized, it's just a larger scale of high specificity.
Sure. The expectation is that your every move in public is not being recorded and stored on a central system that the government, and by extension various kinds of bad actors, can access.
In a society where the government's role is to defend its citizenry rather than participate in their exploitation, this would be an easy choice.
US governments (both federal and local) face some challenges here, because "defend its citizenry" is not really one of its main goals.
Not parent poster, but yes!
What people expect are outcomes. The mechanics they know of for how data is/isn't available is merely how they reach their reasonable expectation.
I expect that almost nobody I meet in public is a Stasi informant.
We expect that our faces might be captured on someone's vacation photos in public, surviving as an anonymous and unconsidered background detail, and that we can take our own photos like that without getting permission from everyone in the background.
In contrast, we don't (didn't?) expect all the photos to feed into a mega-panopticon that that does facial-recognition on all subjects and cross-references us over time and space while running algorithms looking for embarrassing, criminal, or blackmail-able events.
There should be. I like how this is handled in Japanese media, where there is such an expectation - people's faces are blurred unless they opt in, and publishing photos/video without redating people's identities is not just a social misstep but grounds for a lawsuit if it causes distress for the subject. You need a release for any commercial use of photography, and non-commercial publication (eg Instagram or your art blog) can still get you sued if it infringes on others' privacy.
https://www.japaneselawtranslation.go.jp/en/laws/view/4241/e...
Japan has set about harmonizing its privacy laws with the GPDR and similar for business purposes.
Privacy isn't a mechanic, it's a capability, and most reasonable people DO expect, implicitly, that that they can travel unremarked under most circumstances.
I think most people would agree that a government drone swarm specifically tasked to follow you everywhere in public (loitering outside buildings) would be an invasion of privacy. Especially when it is illegal not to be wearing some equivalent of license plates.
> Redmond’s Police Department was not among those listed in the report, and has never allowed external agencies to access their Flock data without requesting and receiving permission from the police chief first, according to an Oct. 24 statement by Lowe.
So because the arrests were near a Flock Camera the "journalist" is connecting the two? Even with the statements an information to the contrary?
:(
So making the connection isn't a leap and seems like a pretty pragmatic action taken to reduce ICE's ability to surveil communities.
As an ex-Flock employee in my county alone, Flock's "Transparency Report" only lists -half- of the agencies using Flock.
I think the Skagit county ruling is likely to be appealed. There is a lot of information that governments can redact for a variety of reasons, despite FOIA or state/local transparency laws. It seems obvious that there’s a case for law enforcement to be able to access footage but to avoid handing over that kind of intelligence to the general public, where criminals could also abuse the same data. And I just don’t buy the argument that surveillance through cameras is automatically dystopian - we can pass laws that make it so that data is only accessible with a warrant or in a situation with immediate public risk. There are all sorts of powers the government has that we bring under control with the right laws - why would this be any different?
As for Redmond turning off its cameras - this is just fear-mongering about ICE. In reality, it’s just sanctuary city/state resistance to enforcing immigration laws. Redmond’s police department confirmed they’ve never shared this camera data with federal agencies, but that doesn’t stop activist types from making unhinged claims or exerting pressure. In reality, it’s activists of the same ideological bias as the soft on crime types that have caused crimes to go up dramatically in the Pacific Northwest in the last 20 years. They’re happy to see law enforcement hampered and the public put at risk - the ICE thing is just the new tactic to push it.
Yeah, why wouldn't I want that? Or Flock "helpfully" proactively flagging AI-generated "suspicious vehicle movements" to LE for investigation? What could wrong there?
> We all want safe cities and neighborhoods, right?
Was it hard not to end that paragraph with a "Won't somebody think of our children?"?
…and identify or track suspects?
For starters, we’re all suspects when those cameras are running. Granted, AI-driven facial recognition is 100% accurate, so if you have nothing to hide…
The problem with this is, that in the age of put-as-much-data-as-we-have-in-some-us-megacorp-managed-cloud this does not mean anything anymore. I may sound paranoid but it's just the truth. There is an abundance of general evidence for this, but even more, there is evidence that Flock data has been shared with parties in the US government who weren't "allowed" to access them.
Your sentence makes it sound like they have a document somewhere in their office that has not shared with anyone else. But that's wrong. They have a document on servers ran by a shady company (prob. AWS, Azure, Google), managed by another even shadier company (Flock). The police department has no idea who can see it, and who can't.
I can only speak for myself, but I do not have a problem with enforcement of immigration laws at all. What I do have a problem with is how it is enforced [1,2] and how the general surveillance is handled, especially by Flock [3,4] and the US Government [5], but, to be honest, in the whole US.
[1] https://www.hrw.org/report/2025/07/21/you-feel-like-your-lif...
[2] https://factually.co/fact-checks/justice/ice-power-abuse-cas...
[3] https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/flock-pushback
[4] https://www.forbes.com/sites/larsdaniel/2024/10/22/warrantle...
This video by Tom Lehto talks more about that court case that illustrates citizens can legally do FOIA requests for traffic cameras (e.g. Flock): https://youtu.be/1vQn4MWBln0
[0] https://mrsc.org/explore-topics/public-records/law-enforceme...
It’s an interesting case that pits privacy against transparency.
I absolutely want the cops to wear bodycams and I’d prefer they can’t even turn them off. But they also need to protect the privacy of victims, suspects, and witnesses. So they can’t just live stream to the Internet either.
How much is the redaction fee? How much would it cost to just pay it for everything?
Florida is a "sunshine state" [0] when it comes to public records which is why it's legal:
- to have mugshots and arrest records posted online
- which in turn leads to "attractive felon" style websites where mugshots are rated.
I'm generally for more privacy while at the same time getting why people push for transparency. Either way you get downstream and often unintended consequences.
0 - https://www.myfloridalegal.com/open-government/the-quotsunsh...
With shit like traffic cameras, I don't think redactions are necessary, although it would be nice if all license plates were automatically redacted and only accessible with a warrant. Turning the cameras off is an even better idea.
The only indicator that it was done right, is that the redactions are happening in real time at the camera, only the list of license plates that have full warrant cleared authority for should be leaving the camera itself. (or full car description: color, make, model, scratches, time of day) Otherwise there is a private company with a bunch of extra-legal tracking information they will monetize utterly illegally
If these controls don't exist inside the organization, they shouldn't exist for the public either.
But if the cops get the wrong address for their no-knock warrant, kick down my door, and find me jerking off in my bedroom - I would prefer the footage not be made public.
This community really turned around its stance on transparency and openness in the blink of an eye. It's baffling.
If they had to do this for all footage then the police department would likely respond by decreasing field officer counts to reduce footage, as well as shift resources away from law enforcement activities and towards redacting the massive volume of footage.
I know someone who until very recently worked for a major city's police department. He said there were people who would request every video they could think of, and it was his team's job to scrub through the video and blur/block out faces of children and things like that.
He said his team was absolutely overwhelmed with requests from randos all over the country requesting things in bulk. Even if his team (~10 people, full-time) didn't take the extra step to redact some images, they simply couldn't keep up with it. Essentially, a FOIA DDOS.
The stress was too much, and he left for a different career.
(Before anyone asks if the PD imposed a fee for video, I don't know. It's possible the fee wasn't high enough, or maybe there's a state law regulating the fee. But I'm not sure it matters since there are plenty of cranks in the world with very deep pockets.)
I can only speculate that it wants to put more cops on the street, instead of paying civilians to do paperwork.
The real world isn't like TV. Like everyone else, police departments have to work within a budget. People don't just magically appear from off-screen to do more work.
You can make your own copy of records for free; if you want them to make copies, they can charge actual costs.
Flock cameras, America's bipartisan issue?
You’re right. It’s a start. There’s also https://www.deflock.me
"On Thursday, a Skagit County Superior Court judge ruled that pictures taken by Flock cameras in the cities of Sedro-Woolley and Stanwood qualify as public records, and therefore must be released as required by the state’s Public Records Act, court records show."
I do think that's an important distinction though; if I have a camera and record a public space, that's not an issue. If the government sets up a bunch of cameras, that's an issue, whether or not it's ICE, the FBI, or someone else using the cameras. I can't imagine the government will set up cameras and do non-scary things with it.
They'll have to track me the old-fashioned way, by my phone.
But this is a good point, people get upset when government is perceived to screw them over and not upset enough when the private sector does it. In practice, the private sector screws over the public quite a bit.
Companies at least risk significant consequences if they start tear gassing children. For the most part the worst they can do is screw you out of some money, which is not great, but obviously better than imprisonment and the like.
Everyone with even a quarter of a brain can recognize that the extreme data collection is a ticking time bomb. This WILL be leaked. This WILL be used to deny people's rights. This WILL lead to financial loss for people.
It's only a matter of when.
[1] https://www.bts.gov/content/average-age-automobiles-and-truc...
How many vehicles are registered but never driven? According to what source?
The statistics said the average age of light vehicles was 12.8 years. The average age of passenger cars was 14.5 years. And Consumer Reports said 32 of 44 brands offered some form of wireless data connection in 2018.[1] This implied 12 brands or more offered vehicles without wireless data connections.
[1] https://www.consumerreports.org/automotive-technology/who-ow...
Once there will be a few high-profile cases around telemetry data being used, there will be much more outcry there.
And at the very least - why can't you search the Transparency Portal? You have to try each and every agency name. Let's try https://transparency.flocksafety.com/ ...
<Error> <Code>NoSuchKey</Code> <Message>The specified key does not exist.</Message> <Key>index.html</Key> <RequestId>[redacted]</RequestId> <HostId>[redacted]</HostId> </Error>
Has been like that for a year plus, at least.
Was it different in the past? It seems like it'd be beneficial to Flock and their customers to make obtaining this information as obtuse as possible, while maintaining the vaguest appearance of "transparency". If they could charge you $10 per search, they probably would.
As an aside - can I ask why you left Flock? I assumed that the people who would've wanted to work there would be fully invested into the idea. What changed your mind?
The Flock of my recruitment process would be a lot less problematic. There was discussion of the obvious, the surveillance "state". But everything was a high ground of ethics and legality, ideas were supposedly run through groups to discuss "not just whether we could, but whether we should", protecting individuals whose data was collected by Flock but had no safety or LE purpose, retention, sharing controls ...
... the reality was much more "mask off". "Eliminate all crime, using Flock". Very Airbnb'ish. "We know your jurisdiction doesn't allow you to share this data. It's not our job to enforce that on our platform; if you're sharing it, that's not our concern - you'll still have access to all the tools to do so." Sales worked with Agencies who weren't allowed to gather data themselves, weren't directly allowed to partner with Flock for cameras, were asked where they saw or believed they'd most want said cameras, and Flock would aggressively work with businesses, HOAs, other government entities in those areas, and get them onboard, and then go back to the Agency saying "Hey, guess what, we know you're not allowed to collect this, but these customers are, and you're able to share their data."
That didn't sit well with me - there was nothing actively illegal Flock were doing, but they were openly helping Agencies flout the spirit of laws constraining them while staying within the letter (in the above examples, HOAs and others would often get deeply subsidized, at least, installations, knowing that Flock would be able to get a bigger contract with an Agency that would otherwise have no over very limited means of working with them).
These things, coupled with Garrett's "vision" that, he emphasized repeatedly, was his literal vision, "Eliminate all crime with Flock", were too much (and I think lead to some of their even more troublesome initiatives now, like "Have AI look for potential suspicious vehicle movements, even without a reported incident, and have it alert officers to go investigate in realtime", with talk of that being extended to conversations and audio).
Evidence -> Crime -> Suspect
DoJ model:
Suspect -> Evidence -> Crime
Ideal model:
Crime -> Evidence -> Suspect
I live in a county where the county seat is <15k people (<40k in the entire county). There are two camera locations listed on deflock - four cameras total, since they face both directions. In the past month, I’ve discovered an additionally six locations (twelve cameras), all of which show signs of having been very recently installed.
I went to add them to Deflock, but their process requires an OSM account. I wasn’t able to do that on the side of the road, and haven’t gotten back to it yet.
If you find yourself with some time, there is now a DeFlock app that helps with mapping. It also includes locations where people suspect there might be a camera, though that is limited to about a third of the states so far.
Either way it doesn't make sense to me why hardware stores are the biggest private use case.
This seems like an unsupported assumption. Lots of people like them. Anyone who wants policing to be effective and cares about crime / public safety would like them to have the best tools.
This depends on what the “cost” is for this “safety,” no?
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety"
But surely, it's not the entire world that's suddenly experiencing these waves of perceived crises, right? The statistics to justify tough-on-crime enforcement are useful for the proponents, but it's not the statistics that prompted them to act. They have their own reasons, and some marketable justifications just happened to be lying around. If they weren't there, they would find some other numbers or some other category of criminals that must be urgently pursued, anything to justify the power grabs. Reducing crime won't stop them.
The reality, which might I remind everyone does not care about their opinion, is this: crime has been trending down for decades. Police budgets have been increasing for decades. Many police departments are over funded.
Ben Franklin's Famous 'Liberty, Safety' Quote Lost Its Context In 21st Century [0]
(it was about the legislature being able to legislate [taxes])
[0] https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famou...
It doesn't. Simply giving the police more stuff doesn't garuantee they will be more effective. They might be LESS effective, if they, say, have a culture of abusing their tools.
Don't agree with the company, but I don't find a suit here ridiculous. If my job put up cameras, and my form of protest was to deface and disable them, I'd get fired. This isn't a job, it's government, but it's similar in my head. The people with the authority to do something did it.
Part of putting shit in public is that it now has to interact with the public. If you want your stuff pristine, I would think you should not put it in public.
Maybe the law disagrees with me here, and it probably does because this country bends over backwards for companies, but that's how I see it.
If you interfere with the business model of a large company, they'll eventually figure out something to criminally charge you with.
Felony contempt of business model, and all that.
Isn't this a form of graffiti?
Removing paint takes a long time. Removing glue doesn't take a long time. Removing a sticky note takes almost no time.
If I leave a sticky note on your car, is that graffiti? Is glue graffiti?
Kudos to the guy, who single-handedly doing what almost all politicians miserably fail at.
Sweden also have traffic monitors that monitor highways around cities, border exists and tunnels, and also license plate readers for toll roads and bridges (also often used for parking). Those two generally have a much higher privacy cost than traffic cameras.
The obvious win in places like the US is that being pulled over is one of the most dangerous thing that ever happens to the common person, as they are exposed to a psychopath with a gun who is trained that the most important thing is to optimize every interaction to maximize his chance of 'making it home to his family' and if a policeman shoots everything that moves (up to and including, falling acorns) because he 'fears for his life' he will largely get away with it. So it is a nice alternative to that.
For those who downvote - lets just forbid movement to reach 100% reduce in movement related injuries, is that your strategy?
Cameras have been installed to fine cars running red lights. The city then reduces the length of the yellow to catch more people and offset the high cost of the cameras. The shortened yellows cause increased crashes and fatalities.
Net-net the track record in the states is not great.
One example https://www.koaa.com/news/news5-investigates/news-5-investig...
Now people can go faster while being safer.
The accident rate from before to after the installation of a camera has an average reduction of around 25% in reducing deaths in traffic. If someone don't believe it they can download the public data themselves and redo the math.
Sweden also do not have traffic cameras on highways, most likely because they are ineffective in reducing deadly outcomes at those speeds. The chance of surviving a frontal collision at 100km/h is highly unlikely, so the cost of installation a camera is better spent on roads with lower maximum speeds where the reduction in average speed actually have an effect on outcomes.
Try to forbid movement in the area and you can reach 100% reduce in deaths.
Statistics and data doesn't tell you the whole picture and often skewed.
Most crimes in Sweden are committed by "refugees" by huge margin, but good luck doing something about it or let alone talk about it publicly. But hey, lets install another camera to have everyone to slow down and exacerbate traffic conditions further down.
Its going to be unpopular but yes i think so. Traffic cameras, besides very few use cases, are completely useless (just like speed limits in general). Plus it's a huge temptation for local authorities to turn it into a cash cow and put it anywhere they please regardless of necessity. Italy is rife with those for example.
The reality is these guys are scared of us. And that's behind inane airport security, militarization of police, the ICE raids.
Years and years ago read a heretic economist that comment that highly unequal societies spend huge amount of money on security. Enough it has negative effects on their economy. This is really not a good thing for the rest of us.
I shouldn't have expected much more, though, to be fair. There's a reason I don't use nextdoor.
The funny thing is the people calling anti-Flock people "paranoid". Well, I don't believe in dash cams or ringing my house with surveillance cameras and peering at the footage all day and all night. I think _those_ are the paranoid ones. What happened to just living your life and not worrying about everything?
It's like having a Ring doorbell and sharing the feed with the police, which is also pretty popular in some areas. If you trust your local police to ethically fight crime, why not help them out?
Now that we've got someone willing to throw all rules and morals to the wayside in charge, they've understandably begun to reassess.
We've asked you multiple times recently to not post in the flamewar style on HN. It's not what HN is for, and eventually we have to ban accounts that keep doing it.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/ulez-cameras-van...
dredmorbius•2mo ago