You're right. People trying to make money should be held legally accountable for the impact of their investments.

The law is properly a limit on behavior, not a grant for acceptable behavior. It defines in which situations the state will ultimately employ its monopoly on violence to compel compliance.

This is a vastly smaller set of situations compared to what a health society would consider acceptable.

> Change the law

There is a huge gulf between what the law allows, and what being a decent person requires, and that gulf is called "being a scumbag."

We should not alter the law to prohibit everything in that gulf, because it would create an authoritarian society ripe for abuse, relying on controls like mass surveillance and the erasure of civil liberties.

However, we can and should name, shame, and socially/commercially outcast people who gleefully engage in the art of being a scumbag.

> trying to make money

It is indeed possible to make money without funding evil things.

They are more than a accessory. You wouldn't say someone who funds a contract killing is merely an accessory to murder. VCs should likewise be considered as principal offenders, unless there is proof that the company was not transparent with the VCs.

They're more than accessories, that nearly writes them off as being innocent looped-in bystanders. Y Combinator has a vested stake, they want to encourage a maximalist Flock-centric police force. They directly profit off police that are incapable of doing their job without extreme, abusive tools at their disposal.

You could argue that YC has more of a conscience than other investors like A16Z. But I'm not sure how much I believe that seeing Gary Tan's moral indifference towards startups that are the incarnate equivalent of the Torment Nexus.

The cuts can be illegal if one doesn’t have the authority to cut it and/or violates the procedures required.

Government funding must be approved by Congress. If Congress already approved funding the NSF, then it has to be Congress that removes the funding.

My understanding is that congress chooses how much money should be distributed to each organization (e.g. NSF) each year, and preventing that money from being distributed is not legal. If I understand correctly, your table is of appropriation from Congress, not distribution[1]. I am open to being corrected if I am wrong.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-02574-6

1. It's lack of accountability because nobody involved seems to have been fired or even disciplined.

2. It's lack of public oversight because an attorney filing a complaint about an unlawful arrest noticing a suspicious photograph from a month after the incident and then compelling the police to turn over evidence isn't oversight.

Accountability would have started with the officer, who knew very shortly after arresting the victim that the arrest was unlawful, being placed on leave almost immediately. But since it progressed to this point, accountability would look like literally any administrative action being taken whatsoever once the improper use was discovered.

Public oversight would have looked like that audit trail actually being read internally to determine whether there was a legitimate use for the searches in the first place. An audit trail that never gets looked at unless you're getting subpoenaed isn't "oversight".

This is disgusting, and I continue to argue that we should not excuse Flock Safety for this kind of misbehavior. They created the tech and marketed it to police departments without providing good protections against this kind of thing. Making something cheap and automatic changes how people use it. If this cop had to tail the guy around himself, maybe he wouldn't have done it.

But the far worse problem IMO is that this cop is dirty, corrupt, untrustworthy, and should be punished for stalking this man, and yet he surely will not be. Worst case, he might catch some administrative sanction or maybe be fired - he won't go to jail like he should for this misbehavior.

If you have 1 dirty cop and 100 who ignore his bad behavior, you actually have 101 dirty cops. We need a way to deal with this in our society without resorting to the absolutes of "defund the police" or "back the blue".

> Then that officer tracked him thru flock over 100 times for some personal vendetta.

That's not quite accurate according to the article. It was actually worse: There were over 100 searches and some of them were done by officer in question, but some were done by other officers. This was due to lieutenant's order in connection with Jones' citizen complaint. So it wasn't just one officer abusing the system.

Pretty cut and dried civil liberties case there

Surveillance tech very much can be and is going away in plenty of places

321 down, Dallas: https://thehill.com/policy/technology/6065838-dallas-police-...

150 down, El Paso: https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/public-safe...

ALL on state roadways, Florida: https://www.tallahassee.com/story/news/state/2026/09/01/whic...

A dozen agencies cancelling Flock in Wisconsin https://www.fox6now.com/news/flock-camera-pushback-fond-du-l...

Anything can be made to go away.

Maybe have something on the plate that prevents reading from certain angles? There was a ticket dismissed in Quebec a few years ago for an "unreadable plate" because the car had a bike rack hiding the plate but the ticket had the plate number on it so it was not unreadable

We need an actual democracy(not rich people's puppets). In this country almost 75% of voting population are against the war in Iran and yet most of congress supports that war.