Apparently there is scraping of public data + keyword matching + moderators filtering the matches.
An example that he shows a bit earlier in the video comes from this page, which has an RSS feed: https://www.cityofsanbenito.com/AgendaCenter/City-Commission...
The video says it's open source but I can't find the source.
I also gave a talk on this concept that walks through the whole process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtWzNnZvQ6w
The short answer is: there's no common API for any of these sites, and even the ones that do have an API are sometimes misconfigured. It's why I wrote all the scrapers by hand.
I'm certain that had the 2024 election gone a different way, we'd still have our Flock cameras.
There's Eugene and Springfield, OR; Cambridge, MA; a few in TX; Denver and Longmont, CO; Redmond, WA; Evanston and Oak Park, IL; etc.
Oak Park is 4.7 square miles. All our surrounding munis have rolled out more ALPRs after we killed ours.
Further: because of the oversight we had over our ALPRs before, they weren't really doing anything, for something like 2 years. OPPD kept them around because they were handy for post-incident investigation. We effectively had to stop responding to alerts once our police oversight commission ran the numbers of what the stops were.
Which is to say: our "de-Flocking" was mostly cosmetic. We'd already basically shut the cameras down and cut all sharing out.
I'm just happy for any sort of critical analysis or attention being brought to every municipality's use of this technology as so often people have no idea at all, though. Because there are a lot of counties which are far worse, and almost none of the public is even aware; I suspect there is at least some gap between people who would care if they knew, and people who care now.
[0]: https://alpranalysis.com/virginia/206807
[1]: https://transparency.flocksafety.com/williamsburg-va-pd
I also didn't personally get the contract cancelled --- in fact, I (for complicated reasons) opposed cancelling the contract. But I can tell you the sequence of things that led to the cancellation:
1. OPPD made the mistake of trying to deploy the cameras as an ordinary appropriation, without direct oversight, which pissed the board off.
2. We deployed the cameras in a pilot program with a bunch of restrictions (use only for violent crimes, security controls, stuff like that) that included monthly transparency reports to our CPOC commission.
3. Over the pilot period, the results from the cameras weren't good. That wasn't directly the fault of the cameras (the problem is the Illinois LEADS database), but it allowed opponents of the cameras to tell a (true) story.
4. At the first renewal session, an effort was made to shut off the cameras entirely (I was in favor then!), but the police chief made an impassioned case for keeping them as investigative tools. We renewed the contract with two provisos: we essentially stopped responding to Flock alerts, and we cut off all out-of-state sharing.
5. Transparency reports about the cameras to CPOC continued to tell a dismal story about their utility, complicated now by the fact that we (reasonably) were not using them for alerting in the first place; we had something like 5 total stories over a year post renewal, and 4 of them were really flimsy. The cameras did not work.
6. Trump got elected.
7. A push to kill the cameras off once and for all came from the progressive faction of the board; Trump and the poor performance of the cameras made them impossible to defend.
8. OPPD turned off all sharing of camera data.
9. The board voted to cancel the contract anyways.
Is the argument that Flock cameras are used for mass surveillance defensible, or just paranoia, and if it is real, does anyone have a good idea of whether the same argument would apply in the UK?
Its always defensible - think of the children!/terrorists! - and always in the same dystopian direction. Just believing yourself to be being tracked, changes behaviour. Just as in large cities, people moderate their behaviour.
Given that crime rates are generally higher the more densely populated an area is (in the US, at least), I'm not sure this is true
4D AI speed/behaviour cameras (Redspeed Centio): multi-lane radar + high-res imaging; flags speeding, phone use, no seatbelt, and can check plates against DVLA/insurance databases.
AI “Heads-Up” camera units (Acusensus): elevated/overhead infrared cameras (often on trailers/vans) to spot phone use and seatbelt/non-restrained occupants.
New digital fixed cameras (Vector SR): slimmer, more discreet spot-speed cameras (sometimes with potential add-on behaviour detection, depending on setup).
Smart motorway gantry cameras (HADECS): enforce variable speed limits on motorways from gantries.
AI-assisted litter cameras: council enforcement for objects/litter thrown from vehicles
Our definitions of mass surveillance must differ for you to ask this. Flock cameras are marketed and purchases for mass surveillance expressly.
That doesn't mean the cameras are good; I think they aren't, or rather, at least in my metro, I know they aren't.
Flock will just start putting cameras up on private property and selling the data to the Federal government. Municipalities can do very little to stop this, and local governments are pretty poor at keeping their true reasons out of public forum deliberation. Loophole methods of prohibition ("Can't put up camera masts") are easily thwarted in court.
In the vast majority of cases this means: "enforcing immigration law." A presidential administration deeming it politically expedient to import illegal immigrants via turning a blind eye doesn't change the law of the land.
> that they're entitled to the ALPR data collected by municipalities in order to accomplish this goal
"Entitled" to purchase something that is being sold on the market for a fair price? Why wouldn't they be entitled to purchase this info if a vendor wishes to sell it to them?
They were initially deployed without discussion as it would have tipped their hand. The coverage back then was on the main roads around major cities, criminals with enough knowledge could have used minor roads, or used fake plates.
Discussions in the UK in meetings would be about the benefits of them, what arrests the use of ANPR have enabled. Councils have regular scheduled meetings about crime. There would be no real in depth discussion about new ones; that either never happened or happened before many of us (and many of the politicians discussing them!) were born.
99% of the population is voluntarily carrying sophisticated tracking devices with self-reporting always on
even if the signal is off it catches up later
with SEVERAL layers of tracking
not just your phone carrier but Google+Apple stores have your location as the apps are always on in the background
even phone makers have their own tracking layer sometimes
we know EVERY person that went to Epstein Island from their phone tracking and they didn't even have smartphones back then
Flock is just another lazy layer/databroker
Judges require warrants to put a GPS tracker on your car. Now that Flock cameras are so ubiquitous in many cities, this gives them access to the same data without a warrant.
But, I do not think it's reasonable for an automated system to systematically capture, store, and analyze all of my movements (or anyone else who is not suspected of a serious crime). If they suspect I have done something illegal, they should have to get a warrant and then the system can be triggered to start tracking me.
I understand the desire for the data... sometimes I would like to know if my kids are following the rules at home, but I have a stronger conviction that I don't want my kids to grow up in a home where they feel like they are under constant surveillance. It's a gross feeling to be under constant surveillance, like you're living in a panopticon built for prisoners, which is an unfair side effect when you've done nothing wrong. Mass data surveillance of everyone is a totalitarian dystopian that I don't want to live in.
The fact that driving is a 'privilege' doesn't negate your rights to be secure in your papers, the police should have to have articulable suspicion that your car is unregistered or unlicensed before they can demand you to display your plate.
I want strict, strict guardrails on when and where that occurs. I want that information erased as soon as the context of the citation wraps up. I want every company/contractor in this space FOIA-able and held to as strict or stricter requirements than the government for transparency and corruption and other regulation. I don't want every timestamped/geostamped datapoint of every law abiding driver passing into any juncture hoovered into a data lake and tracked and easily queryable. That's (IMHO, IANAL, WTF, BBQ) a flagrant 4th amendment violation, and had the framers been able to conceive such a thing, they'd absolutely add a "and no dragnet surveilance" provision from day 1.
If that seems hypocritical, my line starts with "has a crime occurred with decent likelihood?" "Lets collect everything and go snoopin for crimes" is beyond the pale.
2. Consent
3. Accountability (e.g. A government agency needs a warrant to use your cell phone location data against you).
Does that imply that Android settings lie about which apps have accessed location data?
Judging by the downvotes, there are a lot of surveillance state apologists/quislings in here! Oops, I mean "founders".
It's also not uncommon for police officers to use their tools to stalk women.
Now we're given the same untrustworthy officers full profiles of an individuals travel history without a "need to know". If you can't see how that's dangerous, I don't know what to tell you. In the US if someone is threatening your life, you can typically shoot them if you're out of options. You usually can't do that with an officer, even if they're off duty. The rest of the cops will stand behind that thin blue line and harass you.
And Flock specifically has already been used for this multiple times.
This video here literally catches a K-9 officer faking a drug hit just to harass this guy over an expired inspection sticker. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cv5kXxiJiMA
When nazis kill jews that is bad.
When jews kill nazis that is good (arguably (it used to be obvious but now it is only arguable)).
Symmetric situations are not equivalent.
https://www.king5.com/article/news/investigations/investigat...
The common reaction to surveillance seems to be similar to how we diet. We allow/validate a little bit of the negative agent, but try to limit it and then discuss endlessly how to keep the amount tamped down.
One aspect explored/hypothesized in Rainbows End, is what happens when surveillance becomes so ubiquitous that it's not a privilege of the "haves". I wonder if rather than "deflocking", the counter point is to surround every civic building with a raft of flock cameras that are in the public domain.
Just thinking the contrarian thoughts.
I’ve considered making this a commercial reality, but we’ve seen that ubiquitous cameras don’t necessarily stop cops or authoritarians from kneeling on your neck, if they don’t feel shame.
1. Amazon blink is an interesting hardware platform. With a power-optimized SoC, they achieve several years of intermittent 1080P video on a single AA battery. A similar approach and price point for body cam / dash cam would free users from having to constantly charge.
2. If you're designing cameras to protect human rights, you'll have to carefully consider the storage backend. Users must not lose access to a local copy of their own video because a central video service will be a choke point for censorship where critical evidence can disappear.
Well, for certain fringe definitions of “sense”.
The last thing I want is only a few individuals having that data, whether it be governments, corporations, or billionaires and their meme-theme goon squads. Make it all accessible. Maybe if the public knows everyone (including their stalker/ex/rival) can track anyone, we'd be more hesitant to put all this tracking tech out there.
I feel like at some point we need to recognize the futility of solving this issue with technology. It is unstoppable. In the past we had the balls to regulate things like credit bureaus -- would we still do that today if given the choice?
We need to make blanket regulations that cover PII in all forms regardless of who is collecting it. Limits on how it can be used, transparency and control for citizens over their own PII, constitutional protections against the gov't doing an end run around the 4th amendment by using commercial data sources, etc.
Cool, change the First Amendment first. Your face and name aren't private under our existing framework of laws - no standard legislation can change this.
It says nothing directly about privacy, for or against, let alone surveillance dragnets. I would contend it strongly implies in fact laws should protect and also not chill your ability to:
- go to and from a place of worship - go to and from a peaceful assembly - conduct free speech activities - conduct press/journalism - petition the government
If anything, the existing framework of laws implies a gap, that data should not be able to be hoovered up without prior authorization, since the existence of such a dragnet with a government possibly adversarial to certain political positions (e.g. labeling "AntiFa" terrorists) has quite the chilling effect on your movement and activity. US vs Jones (2012) ruled a GPS tracker constitutes a 4th Amendment search. If I have no phone on me, and a system is able to track my location precisely walking through a city, does it matter if the trace emitted by that black box is attached to me physically, or part of a distributed system? It's still outputting a dataframe of (timestamp, gps) over a huge area.
Freedom of the press is directly related to privacy: if I can see something in public as a private citizen, I can report on it, and you may not create any laws abridging this.
I'm not commenting on surveillance dragnets or how the government uses the data or if the government is prohibited from using it by statute or case law - the First Amendment doesn't apply there (Fourth and Fifth do.)
Doesn't mass surveillance plausibly violate the First Amendment, by having a chilling effect on speech and freedom of association? Or is the argument that it's private entities and the Constitution only limits the government?
Even in the latter case, at least we could do something about the government using private data collection to do things they are not otherwise permitted to do under the Constitution. That's some BS we should all be on board with stopping.
> Doesn't mass surveillance plausibly violate the First Amendment, by having a chilling effect on speech and freedom of association?
Plausibly, but no relevant case law I am aware of makes this interpretation.
We can prohibit the government from utilizing and collecting the data: absolutely, but you cannot prevent the people from doing the same.
That gets you as far as distributing the license plate, location, and time. But if you combine that data with other non-public data, then it is no longer a First Amendment protected use.
As an aside, if we cannot figure out a way to make this fit with the First Amendment as written today, we need to make updating that a priority already. The founders had no idea that we would end up with computers and cameras that could automatically track every citizen of the country with no effort and store it indefinitely. "No reasonable expectation of privacy" rests on a definition of reasonable that made sense in the 18th century. Our technological progress has changed that calculus.
This is a commonly echoed sentiment for the Second Amendment too ("These idiot founders! They could never have imagined so much individual power - We need to take rights away!"), and I am in hard disagreement for both.
I cherish the fact that our legal system is so intentionally slow that these types of "progressive" efforts to reform the Constitution are basically impossible.
License plates are explicitly designed for legibility and are legally mandated by every state to be displayed in public view. The entire purpose of this object is to be seen and create accountability. An SSN is a private, individually-issued piece of information that isn't intended for public view - and courts are still saying publication is okay.
Law in the United States isn't an autistic, overly-rigid computer system where edge cases can be probed for "gotchas:" judges and case law exist to figure out these tough questions.
> Law in the United States isn't an autistic, overly-rigid computer system where edge cases can be probed for "gotchas:" judges and case law exist to figure out these tough questions.
That’s obvious, and you seem to be going against yourself here. If some details are considered too sensitive for publication then it would follow that a judge may be able to interpret the law to prevent mass publication of even sensitive public or semi-public data by creating an interpretive carve-out. But if you can publish SSNs then there’s little to no hope for that. It almost seems that the law is “autistically” tilted in favor of data brokers.
Someone ought to set up a tracker that updates a list of known HNW individuals with last detected location based on license plate data and/or facial recognition. Maybe also a list of last detected million dollar+ supercars. That will get some bills started.
Maybe not a speed leaderboard, that just seems like a challenge to choon heads. But perhaps a "violation count". Also toss in a dB meter for loud exhaust (again dont make it a contest).
Edge compute with alpr/face/gait/whatever object detection at the camera is basically solved. Genie is out of the bottle. I think the most fruitful line of resistance is to regulate what can be done with that data once it leaves the device.
The law is a bit old and seems like it was written under the assumption that normal people wouldn't have access to ALPR tech for their homes. I suspect it gets very little enforcement.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...
So far the only legal area that matters is the government itself being regulated in how they use ALPR since they are the entity that can actually infringe upon constitutional rights.
The best part about publishing? You have no right to question when, how, or if I am going to do it - that discretion is also free speech.
You don't have to have a physical, lead-type printing press to be protected by Freedom of the Press, and you don't have to physically vocalize to be protected by Freedom of Speech.
This a shitty argument from a time where mass surveillance wasn't possible. If you have "no expectation of privacy in public spaces" than Governments could force you to wear an ankle monitor and body camera at all times since you have "no expectation of privacy".
Can you correct that typo? I've been thinking about what you mean for a while and I can't figure it out.
edit: Thank you
You (personally) can't stop me from photographing you in public, Ms. Steisand.
And Freedom of Speech has no sensible connection to being forced to carry objects. Your argument also assumes no one ever goes into private houses, where 1A doesn't apply.
"Never sharing it?" What? Free speech is literally defined by the fact that you can distribute information. Publishing your video feed (a la news helicopters, etc.) is clearly a protected activity - possibly even more so than collecting the data to begin with.
I expect there are plenty of cases where you can't publish your video feed.
Copyright is "mostly" civil law, not criminal.
> can't run into an airport and yell that you've got a bomb.
Right: now try and argue that a license plate intentionally designed for public visibility is somehow subject to the same restrictions. All 50 states have legislation requiring public display of these objects: what tailoring of the First Amendment would legally be consistent with past case law?
> I expect there are plenty of cases where you can't publish your video feed.
Legally these cases are few and far between, and none of these exceptions apply to the situation being discussed. You're welcome to try and cite a case or explain relevant case law - good luck.
Freedom of the press is extraordinarily broad and is one of the more difficult things to limit using criminal penalties.
> Copyright is "mostly" civil law, not criminal.
Does that matter? Seriously - doesn't the 1st Amendment also protect against the government raising civil complaints?
I think the better point here is: Disney suing you for copyright violations is not a First-Amendment case, because Disney is not the US government - so this isn't a Free Speech issue at all.
One cynical aspect of Colorado law I learned about going down the ALPR rabbit hole: in Colorado it is a higher class misdemeanor than regular traffic violations to purposely obfuscate your plate to interfere with automated plate reading. The law is “well written” in that there is little wiggle room if they could somehow prove your intent. Meanwhile it is a lesser class violation to simply not have a plate at all. Their intent feels pretty clear to me.
Absolutely agree... but the CA law is clear that tracking license plates get special treatment! It being public space doesn't matter. It's wild to me that how you analyze the video is regulated. Also that no similar regulation for the regular public doing facial recognition exists. Just ALPR.
I wonder how I'm supposed to comply with the law if I were to take a public webcam feed, like one from a highway[0], and run ALPR on it myself. I obviously can't post any notices there. And I'm not the camera operator so can't comply with anything related to that. But I would be doing ALPR which does require I follow rules. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Will be interesting to see what happens to the law. It feels outdated, but I'm doubtful any CA politician is going to expend karma making ALPR more permissive. So I bet it'll stay on the books and just go largely unenforced.
They still might be able to regulate it for all practical purposes.
In the US, they are everywhere - apartment buildings, houses, business. Amazon's Ring might the most popular, but there are many vendors.
(the point, though, is you don't need a lot of GPU power to do say YOLOv8 inference on the pre-trained models) and OpenCV makes this all pretty darn easy.
All dragnet surveillance done by law enforcement or given to law enforcement by private entities should be public. (Targeted surveillance by law enforcement is a different thing.)
We should all be able to "profit" from this data collected about us. There are likely a ton of interesting applications that could come from this data.
I would much rather independently run a "track my stalker" application myself versus relying on law enforcement (who have no duty to protect the public in the US, per SCOTUS) to "protect" me, for example.
It might be that such a panopticon would be unpalatable to political leaders and, ideally, we'd see some action to tamp down the use of dragnet surveillance (and maybe even make it illegal).
I found it really interesting he frames privacy, surveillance, and power through the lens of information asymmetries.
You can FOIA the cameras outside your local police station today, if you like. Private company data like Flock's is the new grey area.
FOIA isn't the same thing as having the data at my fingertips like LE does. I think the public deserves the same access LE has. If they can run ad hoc searches so should the public.
Personally I'd rather see all dragnet surveillance just go away.
I think the public would be entitled to the specific data that was purchased or accessed by the government, but absolutely not the entire corpus of broadly available data. What if law enforcement were required to "pay per search" a la PACER or journal subscriptions?
My immediate reaction is that it changes the nature of the surveillance enough to require further reflection. It would put a time-bounded window on the ability of law enforcement to abuse the data (albeit assuming the ALPR companies actually removing data per their stated policies).
I appreciate your comment, for sure. I'll have to ruminate on it and see how it meshes with my more-strongly-held-than-I'd-like reactionary (and probably not well thought out) beliefs. >smile<
FWIW, what I want is the non-IME/PSP "¡hecho en Paraguay!" chips from the book.
Like what are we doing as a society? Stop trying to build the surveilance nexus from sci fi. I don't want to live in a zero-crime world [1]. It's not worth it. Safety third, there is always gonna be some risk.
[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/flock-cameras-lead-col...
[1] Edit to add: if this raises hackles, I encourage folks to think through what true zero crime (or maybe lets call it six-nines lawfulness) entails. If we had literal precrime, would that stop 99.9999% of crime? (hint: read the book/watch the movie)
Privacy and liberty advocates are unlikely to win in council meetings by sheer numbers. They get some leverage with campaign donations, especially recently that Bitcoin made a lot of such people rich.
So the feds just put their flock cameras anywhere they had a little piece of federal property, and there is no way to vote those ones off. They have little patches that cover the highways and some main thoroughfares. It's everywhere.
If public servants funded by taxpayers don't like it, maybe they shouldn't be forcing it on the populace and breaking the forth amendment.
What stance would you recommend? You're one of the folks here i recognize immediatedy and have a wealth of wisdom.
Realism isn't very palatable. Most folks want to stay in their little rat race lane and push their little skinner box lever and get their little variable interval algorithmic treato, and they are content with that. That's fine. It's just a shame they gotta tighten the noose around absolutely everyone else for a morsel of safety.
Every aspect of cybernetics (whether it be engineering, society/politics, biology) involves deliberate tradeoffs. In metaphor, we have a big knob with "liberty/crime" on one side and "surveillance/safety" on the other. It's highly nonlinear and there are diminishing returns at both extrema. Everyone (subconsciously) has some ideal point where they think that crime-o-stat should be set.
I'm saying don't turn it up to 11, and it's already set pretty high. It's increasingly technologically possible, and I think it's a bad thing to chase the long tail. I'm pretty happy with where we are at the present, but corporations keep marketing we need more cameras, more detection, more ALPRs, more algos, more predictive policing, more safety, who doesn't want to be more safe? I think it's very precarious.
I reiterate: it's uncomfortable, but I don't want to live in a world with zero crimes because everyone has probably committed crimes without even knowing it. The costs, both fiscal and in terms of civil liberties, of chasing ever-decreasing-crime are far higher than finding some stable setpoint that balances privacy and liberty with measures that justly deter crime. Let us not let the cure become worse than the disease.
That's about the worst, most inflammatory way possible to make your point. I agree with you 100%, but I am begging you to learn to frame your ideas better, in order to get people on your side. If you say that to any voters you will lose them instantly
I'm not a politician. I'm a systems thinker. If someone can't reason their way through what a "zero-crime world" actually entails, I doubt my other ideas will get through to them. Zero crime. Zero. No speeding, no IP infringement, no "just this one time". Zero.
That's also why I like asking "why stop there?" We've basically solved surveilance. It's an engineering problem. We have the capacity to track everyone (who does not make a VERY concerted effort to stealth) all the time, almost everywhere.
Exactly, I like this. Thanks for helping me rephrase.
We're living constantly in the scene from Fahrenheit 451 where the government asks everybody to go outside at once and report any suspicious activity. We have made it potentially not OK for kids to push boundaries or make mistakes.
The idea was to seek spots in the city where public web cams are pointed at, and paint QR codes on the ground at those spots (using a template), linking to the camera stream. So when curious passerbys scan the code, they see themselves in a camera stream and feel "watched".
I'm only aware of boring rooftop weather webcams where obv you can't see yourself.
Any examples for what you speak of?
You can even take a selfie with them!
Quality isn't great, but you could likely see yourself recognizably.
Just search for "<your city> webcam" and see what you can find.
Gotta tag some political organization on the banner which makes it illegal to remove.
I don't think many of us would object to video surveillance actually doing that. So, it's not even an immoral thought to many of us.
The problem is LE using it for almost any other purpose whatsoever.
That's about the difference between eating sodium chloride and eating sodium.
Those guys always obsess over CVEs and privacy and they’re always wrong about everything but have learned to mimic the language of people who know stuff. “There’s some evidence” / “here’s a source”. Ugh. Can’t stand it.
Welcome to prison planet, the silly conspiracy theory that only weirdos believe in 1990.
And then the agents run out of the office and get to that part of the city in a couple minutes, as if they were in Mayberry instead of NYC.
Just to put it into perspective, not a single of Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day worst regimes of the 20th century were even able to dream about just the depth and breadth of surveillance and control that basically all regimes of the whole west hat already implemented at this point, let alone are actively and aggressively implementing. Sure, they haven't started. murdering people in overt ways, but they have already started doing so on the small scale and covertly.
Those were all things that people were starting to connect the dots about in around the 1990s as networking/www and technology was starting to come into maturity. Arguably, I could have also said the 2000s, but it's only ever gotten worse with every decade, so it seems more relevant to identify a kind of change over, not an incremental evolution.
This is what "Oh By Codes"[1] are for.
Instead of trying to paint a QR code, which is difficult, you can just chalk a 6 character code.
Further, you can create them on the fly without using a special tool - just a textarea on a simple webpage.
You can encode up to 4096 characters or a single URL redirect.
[1] https://0x.co
It's certainly not for every use-case ...
And this post uses wire screen to make a stencil https://www.instructables.com/Simple-QR-Code-Spray-Paint-Ste...
The YouTube account is no longer around, but you can still watch it on archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20190220131525/https://www.youtu...
I know more recent cameras are using AI analysis to constantly track and catalog people which is more worrying but the old school surveillance cameras don't bother me as much.
I like the OP's idea for an art project more because it's showing your what is really happening (rather than convincing people that filming someone on a 4k camera is the same as CCTV surveillance) - CCTV cameras are constantly monitoring and many can be publicly accessed.
-Me
In other words, the "we're trustworthy we'd never do that" folks ought to be perfectly fine with harsh criminal penalties for misuse they're already promising would never happen.
This would also create an incentive for these companies to lobby for the creation/continuation of such a law at the state level, as a way to unlock (or retain) their ability to do businesses in the localities.
And 404 from https://civic.band/why.html
Few questions:
- is the stack to index those open source?
- is there some standardized APIs each municipality provides, or do you go through the tedious task of building a per-municipality crawling tool?
- how often do you refresh the data? Checked a city, it has meeting minutes until 6/17, but the official website has more recent minutes (up to 12/2 at least)
- The framework for crawling is open-source. https://github.com/civicband
- There is absolutely not a standardized API for nearly any of this. I build generalized crawlers when I can, and then build custom crawlers when I need.
- Can you let me know which city? The crawlers run for every municipality at least once every day, so that's probably a bug
Where in the repos can we find the plugin/scraper for given municipalities to help contribute when they seem to be broken? As looks like the last meetings and agendas scraped for Cook County are from March/April of this year
I also fixed Cook County
https://civic.observer/auth/login
I am interested in monitoring local legislation in Clark County, WA
first the came for the turkeys...
You might be terrified the number of municipalities that are still posting PDFs of scans of printouts of their minutes, which were originally a word document, and round and round we go.
Part of why I haven't guaranteed results building CivicObserver is because of how hard search context is. Maybe making this an MCP helps, but I'm not actually sure it does.
1. You have no expectation of privacy in public.
2. People carry surveillance devices in their pocket.
It is somehow simultaneously bad that the government uses public surveillance, but completely fine the public does. I don't think it's acceptable these target "flock". It's completely useless doesn't solve the greater problem. The greater problem in my eyes is:
1. I can't move around my own neighborhood without being recorded by 200 personal cameras whose data is uploaded an analyzed by various security companies.
2. I can't go to someone's house without their internal cameras recorded my every move and word.
3. I can't go outside without some subset of morons, that seem to always exist, bringing out their pocket government tracking device to record everyones face, movement, location, and action.
4. I can't say or do anything in public without risking some social justice warrior recording me, cutting it up, and using it to destroy me.
The greater problem is the proliferation of surveillance devices in every day life. Flock is such a small player in the grand scheme of this. These websites are simply art pieces and do nothing to solve the actual, pervasive, problem we face.
So do we just stop at Flock and raise the Mission Accomplished banner? Or do we forget this nonsense and target the real problem.
As an example, see the recent case of the woman who was arrested simply for driving through a town at the same time as a robbery occurred. That sort of thing is why people care.
If the data collection is performed by a private entity and then sold to the government, that is government surveillance. I agree that this is more widespread than Flock and other big names. However, Flock and its ilk currently stand to do far more damage in practice. They offer integrated turnkey solutions that are available to practically any law enforcement, from shithead chud officers in tiny shithole towns to the NYPD and all its grand history of institutionalized misconduct, and we are already seeing the effects of that.
See, also, the recent case of a teenager who was arrested because a Flock camera or similar thought a Doritos bag in his pocket was a gun. I'll let you guess what color his skin was.
To be honest flock seem like the perfect distraction from the larger surveillance state we live in. I feel like most of the writing I have seen on this acts like this some new, disgusting, pervasive thing. The truth is law enforcement has been using everything available because there’s nothing stopping them from subpoenaing or straight buying the data.
The larger problem is law enforcement needs to be curtailed (good luck unless we bust their union which the pro-union left won’t do), and then cameras need to be removed from phones and homes.
Cars are weapons. They kill people quickly with momentum, and slowly with pollution and a sedentary lifestyle. We need to start treating them as such
My town is "densely developed" (key phrase) residential with nearly no commerce to speak of. The largest employer is the school district, which isn't that big.
The nearest city with major employers is 45 minutes away outside of commute hours.
Now if you say "What about all the crazy drivers??" think about this: have you ever considered that you might be the crazy driver? Maybe not 100% of the time, but maybe one day you're stressed so you speed up to get through a red light, or you really need to read this text because it's important. You only need to be a crazy driver for 30 seconds to end someone's life. Something that's almost impossible to do on public transportation or on a bike.
The problem is, cars are extremely useful to most people in the US, public transit has very real inherent downsides, and local policies that disincentivize car use are very unpopular when actually implemented. Voting citizens get mad when the price of gas goes up and demand that their elected officials do something about it (also electrification of cars, which is proceeding apace, makes gasoline prices less important for ordinary people and also reduces some of the real negative externalities of cars).
I have used both urban public transit and cars regularly to get around, I'm personally familiar with the upsides and downsides of both, and while I definitely do want public transit infrastructure to be good, I frankly do not trust the motives of anti-car urbanist activists. I think they are willing to make the lives of most people on aggregate worse because they think private car ownership is in some sense immoral and so overweight the downsides of cars and underweight the downsides of public transit.
Also using drive-by shootings and car-break-ins as an anti-car argument is pretty disingenuous. This is a problem with criminals committing directly-violent crime or property crime against ordinary people, not with cars per se. Criminals absolutely commit crimes against people using public transit, and indeed one of the major problems with public transit is that it puts you in a closed space with random members of the public who might commit crimes against you (e.g. the Jordan_Neely incident, the random stabbing of Iryna_Zarutska, the less-widely-reported random crime incidents that happen regularly on urban public transit systems). One of the most important public policy measures that could be enacted to make public transit better is severe and consistent policing of public order crimes on transit - and of course more severe policing is also a potential solution to car drive-bys and break-ins.
If you're lucky. Sometimes you just get anti-car. I'd love to not need a car at all, but where I am now it would mean Ubering instead because they've made driving worse while transit isn't expanded to fit the gap.
The rise in enthusiasm for ALPR is mostly a consequence of this asymmetry. Previously you'd have law enforcement go around patrolling to keep safety but the number of drivers in the US is growing faster than the number of LEOs and LEOs are expensive and controversial in certain areas.
I advocate for traffic calming all the time. But the asymmetry is real and, honestly, quite frustrating. A single distracted driver can cause you to panic brake on your bike and fall off and hurt yourself.
The first is the person who has no concern for surveillance. He believes that if you aren't doing anything wrong, you have nothing to fear. You see more of these people in older generations, when institutional trust was irrationally high.
The second is the person who responds rabidly to any form or application of surveillance. This is the sort of person who believes that all surveillance is abused, public or private, and if it isn't, that it inevitably will be. Slippery slope fallacy is his motto.
A reasonable range of opinion can exist on the subject between those two extremes.
Personally, I have no problem with traffic cameras per se. First, we are in a public space where recordings are generally permitted. Second, no one is being stalked or harassed by a fixed camera. Third, there are problems that only surveillance can reasonably solve (loud cars, dangerous speeding).
My concerns would have to do with the following.
1) Unauthorized access to accumulated data. You should have to have some kind of legal permission to access the data and to do so in very specific ways. For example, if you neighborhood is being disrupted by loud cars, you can use complaints to get permission to query for footage and license plates of cars identified as loud. Each access is logged for audit purposes.
2) Data fusion. You should not be able to combine datasets without permission either. And when such combination occurs, it should also be scoped appropriately. Queries should then be subject to (1).
3) Indefinite hold. Data should have an expiration date. That is, we should not be able to sequester and store data for indefinite periods of time.
4) Private ownership. The collection of certain kinds of surveillance data should belong only to the public and fall under the strict controls above.
The non-specific and general fear of abuse is not a good counterargument.
Not the camera, no, just the eyes behind it -- namely police officers who have been caught stalking exes via Flock.
> Third, there are problems that only surveillance can reasonably solve (loud cars, dangerous speeding).
In many jurisdictions in the US, police must personally witness the events to intervene. /Traffic/ cameras are one thing -- they only record those who violate the laws (red light, speeding). But continual monitoring of all persons passing falls into another bucket, like a Stringray device would.
> The non-specific and general fear of abuse is not a good counterargument.
The abuse of this data is already happening. It's not a hypothetical.
(This is a hypothetical because obviously in reality there's no easy philosophical through line from ideas to policy.)
We don't! I mean, the police don't do so today. No tabs? OK! Expired tabs? OK, too! No license plates? Who gives a shit? Not the police.
And that dives into more impactful crimes such as property theft which when reported to police nothing comes from it.
Hell, I have dashcam of a cop going home roughly at 11 pm going 80+ on a 60mph highway in his cop Ford SUV. But everyone routinely speeds, 7+ over post-COVID. The legislature is trying to do something about it, but no one really cares.
State Patrol is likely the only ones performing any real traffic enforcement anymore.
If your solution is to continuously neuter the police because you perceive them to be ineffective then I'd challenge you to think of the endgame of that logic. If you think it can't get worse than it is now, well, we politically disagree.
Police aren't ineffective, hell they kill unarmed individuals on a regular basis. That's damn effective to ending any form of future crime!
Indeed.
Abusus non tollit usum.
To elaborate on the general problem, I am not claiming that abuse cannot occur, or that it doesn't occur, as some people seem to think I have (and for which I was no doubt downvoted). I am not naive. My family lived behind the Iron Curtain where the police were significantly more brutal than what we have in the US. I am also aware, more than most, how methods of control in democratic states operate (tl;dr. they need to be more sophisticated, relying more on information control and psychological techniques than physical brutality, in order to shape the "consent" needed to legitimize rule). I am the last to deny that power can be abused and that it can be an awful thing.
But I do find the liberal tradition of obsessive paranoia tiresome. Yes, governments can go wrong, and they do. Anyone who denies that is a fool. But that doesn't mean they go wrong all the time and it doesn't mean that abolishing imperfect institutions or rendering them impotent is a solution. Yes, you must be prudent about such things, but you aren't left with a better situation through institutional castration or by creating institutional Mexican standoffs. Justice doesn't just materialize or emerge magically without intention, because we have created a separation of powers (a common myth unsupported by the actual evidence). Justice requires authority, that is to say, the marriage of justice with power. When authority is abolished, we are left with naked power. Naked power is what is destructive, but it is also self-destructive. You need at least the appearance of authority to keep up that ruse.
We can see how things actually work in the current arrangement. We have separate institutions (intended to limit institutional power through some alchemy of opposition), but nothing in principle prevents them from colluding, and because there is a considerable gap between institutional interest and personal interest, what you are actually left with is partisan jockeying for power.
Instead of operating from some kind of anabaptist or Quaker presumption of corruption, it is better to presume virtue on the part of an institution and deal with corruption as it occurs, as instances of shameful failure. The advantage is that this presumption sets a norm and an expectation against which the people in that institution are judged. They stand to disappoint us, as it were. To quote Baldus, “No authority whether of the emperor or the senate can make the emperor other than a rational and mortal animal, or free him from the law of nature or from the dictates of right reason or the eternal law. Nothing is presumed to please the emperor except what is just and true." This isn't some New Right brand of nihilism that believes that might makes right or that justice is meaningless or merely a mask for power. No, the presumption of the "emperor's" virtue is just that: a presumption. That, by itself, is a psychologically and socially powerful force, as we can see in the examples of Vespasian, Henry V, or Louis IX, sophistic, dissolute, or ill-tempered in their youth before assuming the throne.
Lord Acton's famous quip that power corrupts as some kind of rule is not actually borne out by the evidence. Maybe sometimes it does, and certainly corrupt people are more likely to seek out power, but power itself does not systematically corrupt.
They do, in fact, go wrong all the time, or at least, all the times that the actors involved are sufficiently confident that they think they can both gain something and get away with it.
Which is why the price of freedom is eternal vigilance, both to limit the occurrence of the conditions in which they go wrong, and to identify and correct the points where that prevention fails before they become a positive feedback loop.
I do not believe you will be able to force overexposure of lettered areas using IR diodes alone. License plates are designed with intentionally high reflective contrast in the offset areas.
Even if you could put enough energy into that area, these cameras have switchable IR cutoff filters that are used during the daytime (making this approach only viable at night.)
Another idea: a visible-spectrum laser + camera on a tracking gimbal? Absolutely could block (or even destroy!) these types of imaging efforts on a small scale.
I couldn’t imagine living in a country where you can shoot someone in the street and drive off, and nobody knows where the car went.
The system you’re defending is a list of flagged plate numbers and a way of comparing seen plates against that list, and a way of reporting matches to the local police.
The actual system logs all cars seen, saves the information forever, and reports the data to a third party who can share it with anyone they want.
This is a pervasive piece of misinformation. False statements only discredit you and others who choose to repeat it.
Privacy is a human right. Sacrificing your human rights just for a bit of "safety" is just short sighted.
I also track Puerto Rico, but only at the Senate level: https://senado.pr.civic.band/
Sounds like the cameras are working? Seems like a reason to put up more cameras: vandals can't take out any two as easily/simultaneously.
The legal system tends to react even more negatively to those directly attempting to undermine enforcement efforts - such as vandalizing cameras. You're not just doing "bad," you're constructively preventing evidence of your misdeeds from being gathered.
Perhaps we all should just live in a massive prison. The cameras should be on us 24/7. Society is nothing without hard rules, by just rulers. Ideally, kinetic enforcement applied for any misdeeds, large or small.
This isn't about "hard rules" - make laws prohibiting government use of privately-obtained data if you like - but vandalizing or prohibiting a privately-owned Ring camera is absolutely a matter of my rights being abridged.
Privacy must be created - and is quite expensive.
No, again that's easy enough to avoid.
But you're being obtuse on purpose (and ignoring the actual content of my very short comments) obviously because you want an argument, and this is waste of my time. Have a great life :)
It's amusing that circumvention is your go-to: I watch my cameras almost every moment I'm awake, vandalizing a $1k+ item (a felony in my state) would be met with immediate armed response.
Stay safe out there!
What for? I don't understand why you want to record some stranger jogging, drinking coffee, smoking, eating or simply walking and minding their own business. What am I missing?
No, the vast majority of the use case is stopping crime that today we can't stop. I want the crime to stop.
https://apnews.com/article/chinese-surveillance-silicon-vall...
The way I see it, there are bad people everywhere (even in the government).
https://local12.com/news/nation-world/police-chief-gets-caug...
And, in a safe country like this one (I am in the United States but most developed countries are pretty safe), if a little petty crime is so scary to them that they need a mass surveillance network to sleep at night... I don't see any reason why the public should have to sacrifice potential freedoms for that weakness.
Which is actually a thing in Star Trek - they literally solve crimes by tracking exactly where people are and check transporter logs for where people go.
What immigration enforcement are you speaking of here? Legal? Illegal? If the latter, wouldn't this system be solving crime?
1. they can get away with it, or 2. they don't agree with it.
This isn't a question of ideals; it's addressing the uptick in illegal actions by immigration officials during the current US administration. It's addressing the selective application of the law to further conservative agendas.
Yes, some immigration enforcement is legal. Congratulations.
Does selectively not enforcing immigration law further liberal agendas?
- House seats (and therefore electoral votes) are determined by census - which includes illegal immigrant populations.
- If you can waddle across the border at 8.5 months pregnant, you can birth a citizen with no further requirements.
Ergo, "sanctuary cities" and other intentional lack of enforcement allow states to pump up their representation in Congress and increase government handouts.
However, I would suggest others consider what an evil leftist, for example, could do with the same technology.
What are some things that could they do?
Right-leaning policy in 2025 typically leans towards enforcing the laws as written: in this case, immigration law is being bolstered by surveillance technology.
Which laws are liberals going to theoretically now start radically enforcing that conservatives were turning a blind eye to? Flock cameras don't exactly help the IRS make the rich "pay their fair share."
If you want specific examples, I'd point to the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act. The left wants to throw people in prison for years for protesting while the right wants to pretend it doesn't exist and allow women seeking abortions to be intimidated. I'd also point to the levels of technology deployed to catch the January 6 perpetrators. I live in DC and have a hard time doing a both-sides here since the experience of living in a city under attack is still rather raw; whatever your views, you can't describe the right's response as "enforcing the laws as written."
Sure, the House is almost evenly split, so a few seats here or there would have an impact. But the net result would probably be further mitigated by gerrymandering, other population shifts, and so on.
One other thing I appreciated from this article is how it touches on comments about simply following the law. Just because something is legal, does not make it morally questionable (at best). From the article:
> The apportionment of seats in Congress is required by the U.S. Constitution, which says that the census will be used to divide the House of Representatives “among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State,” except for enslaved people, who, until the late 1800s, were counted as three-fifths of a person, and certain American Indians.
The defense industry is something of a foregone era. Most capital has been allocated to surveillance capitalism since last decades, providing very powerful tools to influence and measure the personal lives of the population. But things are shaping up for more active forms of control; as the finance sector is putting all their eggs in the next iteration, LLMs, which is being accepted by the public as a means for thought generation. I am totally not surprised to learn that the government now needs to a) sponsor this business model and b) needs to pull this horse inside government and executive branches.
Sure, there are positive use cases to be thought of for LLMs. But lets not be that naive this time, shall we? I mean, Grokopedia anyone?
So for solving crimes.
I'm in favor, then!
We should compensate those who are improperly arrested and quickly correct these violations, attempt to prevent them in the future, reprimand those involved if necessary, but absolutely keep pushing ahead at full steam on law enforcement efforts otherwise.
Hot take: some small number of unlawful arrests aren't the "neener neener neener, you can't stop illegal immigration" that folks seem to think they are.
Why? And separately, do you believe that people wrongly arrested in the US are being compensated accordingly? The justice system in the US isn’t known for being easy or cheap to navigate, and I don’t think getting a warrant before detaining people is that huge of an ask.
I'm not advocating to "move fast and break things," but that it's very easy and cheap for illegal immigration maximalists to advocate that society should "move never so nothing breaks." This type of obstruction is actually a form of conservative policy, but "it's for the causes I like so it's okay."
> don’t think getting a warrant before detaining people is that huge of an ask
The law doesn't require a warrant before detaining people - and shouldn't. This doesn't even make sense: "Hold on Mr. Bank Robber - I'm not detaining you, but pretty please don't go anywhere, I gotta go get a warrant first!"
I’ve heard this argument in the context of capital punishment, and I find it incredibly unconvincing.
This is more or less a false dichotomy.
Capital punishment is by definition irreversible, so mistakes aren't tolerable.
Being arrested is legally and reasonably far more correctable with few lasting consequences: we can absorb these mistakes in the rare events they occur.
Capital punishment just takes all of them instead of few-to-tens of percent of a life (often the most valuable years).
You do realize that due process exists after an arrest?
This is on my town and seems like strange wording. What the heck are private flock cameras?
>The City and Flock have negotiated a Right-of-Way Use Agreement, which will grant Flock a non-exclusive license to install and maintain certain private cameras within the City's ROW. The agreement is for a period of twenty (20) years and may be renewed for up to two (2) successive five (5) year terms. Flock will be responsible for paying the permit and inspection fees for existing private cameras within the City's ROW and for any newly installed private cameras within the ROW as well as for an annual ROW usage fee on a per camera basis for the right to install cameras within the City's ROW.
20 years...
I noticed recently that the city installed a flock camera pointed directly at this crosswalk, and while I'm generally opposed to this kind of surveillance, and I wish they would implement other measures to make this safer, I really would love nothing more than for drivers speeding through here and not stopping for pedestrians to get ticketed. It's unclear still whether that's actually happening (and not that it matters once you're dead), but I'm finding myself empathizing with the argument for more surveillance for the first time in my life.
What I wish proponents would accept is that it won't just be used for those use-cases.
It's not an easy situation, especially when you consider the myriad other issues that feed into this.
Unfortunately, as much as I empathize with your position, as long as there is so much potential for abuse, and so long as trust in public institutions continues to erode, I cannot support stuff like this.
We track City Councils, Boards of Supervisors, really any municipality we can get our hands on. I'm very open to how to make this better!
In our city people vandalized speed cameras all the time, so eventually government gave up and just banned them in the whole province. I'm not sure they did that because of being vandalized, but at least there was direct actionable push back.
I've thought that license plates themselves are such a persistent unique identifier, but one that we sort of didn't notice until the recognition and storage technologies got cheaper.
The original motivation for license plates seems to be about enforcing safety inspections of cars (maybe also liability insurance?). Nowadays we also have a lot of other uses that have piled up. The top two I think are very popular: allowing victims of crimes involving motor vehicles to identify the vehicles reliably, and allowing police to catch fugitives in vehicular pursuits. Maybe these were actually even considered part of the original motivation for license plate requirements. Below that, still fairly popular, you have allowing non-moving violation citations such as parking tickets; allowing police to randomly notice wanted persons' vehicles that happen to be nearby; and allowing government agencies another enforcement lever for other stuff by threatening to cancel previously-issued plates. (Oh yeah, and nowadays also paying for parking online!)
I could imagine more modern approaches that would put more technological limitations on some of these things, but I guess any change would be controversial not least because you're intentionally taking some data away from law enforcement (which I think is a normal thing to want to do). The one that's really hard is the "victims of crimes easily identifying vehicles". If you replace license plates with something that's not easily to memorize or write down, the reporting gets a lot harder.
Maybe we could try to have license plates change frequently using something like format-preserving encryption (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Format-preserving_encryption) so they still appear like existing license plate formats, and then prevent law enforcement agents or agencies from directly receiving the decryption keys, so they have to actively interact with the plate issuer in order to answer specific investigative questions about specific vehicles. If police receive a report of a crime they can ask to find out what the involved vehicle's displayed plate will change to on specific dates.
This would have the problem that a partial or mistranscribed or misremembered plate would be pretty useless (you couldn't easily search for, or detect, a partial plate match). You could add some error correcting codes to the plate numbers, but I don't think existing plate numbers are long enough for that. Also, if the plate numbers didn't change very frequently, you could probably partially deanonymize ALPR datasets based on recurring patterns of locations over time.
The best lesson is probably that, if you make a new technical system, you should be very cautious about the identifiers that go into that system, as they may still exist decades later, and used for new kinds of tracking and new kinds of surveillance that you didn't anticipate.
“really scaring someone on a bike vs driving on a sidewalk in general”
There are already stories of abuse, here are a few: https://www.aclu-wi.org/news/what-the-flock-police-surveilla... (Many more can be found with a quick Google search.)
The ALPR situation is trivial by comparison. Transportation privacy is a historical oddity. You can’t drive down the road in a major metro or walk down an airport concourse without being identified and tracked by your facial geometry.
The US federal government seems to be entirely hellbent on accumulating facial biometrics on the entire population.
https://nypost.com/2025/12/11/us-news/sf-rapper-dreamllife-r...
I see some issues in the map display I would like to fix.
Mentions "flock" when referring to a flock of turkeys - not flock cameras
> Surveillance under Surveillance shows you cameras and guards — watching you — almost everywhere.
ChrisbyMe•1mo ago
Any interesting technical details? Getting the actual data from govt meetings looked like it was the hardest part to me.
toomuchtodo•1mo ago
https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2025/apr/16/keeping-l...
https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2024/mar/27/automatin...
https://youtube.com/watch?v=pX_xcj-p0vA
https://documentcloud.org/add-ons/MuckRock/Klaxon/
https://documentcloud.org/
https://muckrock.com/
phildini•1mo ago
tptacek•1mo ago
During our last election cycle, I did this for all our board meetings going back to the mid-aughts, using 'simonw's LLM tool to pass each agenda item to GPT 4o to classify them into topical buckets ("safety", "racial equity", "pensions", &c), tying them back to votes, and then doing a time breakdown of the topics (political opponents were claiming our board, which I support, was spending too much time on frivolous stuff).
That's a pretty silly use case, but also a data-intensive one; the things you'd actually want to do across municipalities are much simpler.
You could probably have Claude one-shot a municipal meetings notification service for you.
phildini•1mo ago
Legistar and CivicClerk have actual APIs, which is nice, although it's extremely easy for the City Clerk's staff to trip and make the Legistar API unusable.
My experiments with using LLMs to write crawlers for these has been extremely mixed; it's good at getting first page of data and less good at following weird pagination trails or follow-on requests.
All of this led me to build CivicBand (which tracks all the municipalities I can get my hands on) and CivicObserver (which is generalized full-text search alerting for municipalities via email, mastodon, bluesky, and slack webhook)
tptacek•1mo ago
phildini•1mo ago