I'm surprised the flock cameras aren't being disabled in a more subtle fashion.
All it takes is a tiny drone with a stick attached, and at the end of that stick is a tiny sponge soaked with tempera paint. Drone goes 'boop' on the camera lens, and the entire system is disabled until an expensive technician drives out with a ladder and cleans the lens at non-trivial expense.
A handful of enterprising activists could blind all the flock cameras in a region in a day or two, and without destroying them, which makes it less of an overtly criminal act.
Obviously not advocating this, just pointing out that flock is very vulnerable to this very simple attack from activists.
The goal here by activists isn't to directly physically disarm every camera. Like with any act of protest, it's at least as much about the optics and influence of public opinion. Visibly destroying the units is more cathartic and spreads the message of displeasure better. Ultimately what needs to change is public perception and policy.
One or two cameras getting bashed is basically a fart in the wind for flock, and I'd argue that it doesn't actually move the needle in any direction as far as public opinion goes. Those who dislike them don't need further convincing, those who support them are not going to have their opinion changed by property destruction (it might make them support surveillance more, in fact).
But hey, it's provocative I guess.
On the other hand flock losing their entire fleet is an existential problem for them, and for all the customers they're charging for the use of that fleet. Their BoD will want answers about why the officers of the company are harming shareholders with the way they're operating the business. Cities that have contracts with them may have grounds to terminate them, etc etc.
Why would I fly an expensive drone close to a camera, fumble about for a minute trying to get it painted like a renaissance artist, when I can get a paintball gun for much less?
Where I am (Sydney Australia) we have fixed speed cameras that automatically create speeding fines to drivers going too fast (well, technically the registered owner of the vehicle via ANPR).
They eventually had to equip pretty much every speed camera with a speed camera camera, usually on a much higher pole to make vandalism more difficult.
Where I live, the speed limit keeps getting reduced so the city can make money off of fines, especially because nobody follows speed limits that are ridiculously low for wide, straight roads where following the limit would make traffic ground to a halt.
The use of a drone also ups the ante from a prosecutor’s perspective. Charging a vandal caught with a paintbrush and a ladder is nothing out of the ordinary. A routine misdemeanor.
Someone who has the wherewithal to jerry rig a paintball gun to a drone is someone scary. Plus, any officer who witnesses such a drone is almost certainly going to misidentify the paintball gun as an actual gun. I can imagine the operator would be charged with several felonies.
Last I heard, putting a glock on a quadcopter was creating an "illegal weapon system" or similar fancy sounding BS but I wonder what the accusation would be for a paintball gun on a drone?
On the list of "laws you don't want to screw with", National Firearms Act violations are high on my list. Regardless of whether something is or isn't a violation, I'm certainly not interested in paying expensive lawyers to argue they're not.
You want to fly a multi-hundred dollar device loaded with radios that constantly broadcasts out a unique ID and possibly your FAA ID and use it for crime?
Or even better yet, get arrested halfway to trying to dip your drone into paint on a sidewalk?
Because advocating things which are moral/ethical but illegal is often against the TOS :(
We need laws which are explicitly based on moral principles. Barring that, we should at least have laws which treat sufficiently large platforms as utilities and forbid them from performing censorship without due process.
> A handful of enterprising activists could blind all the flock cameras in a region in a day or two, and without destroying them, which makes it less of an overtly criminal act
No, that would likely end in a RICO or terrorism case if it continued. Just because the cameras aren't destroyed doesn't mean CorpGov won't want to teach a lesson.
>All it takes is a tiny drone with a stick attached, and at the end of that stick is a tiny sponge soaked with tempera paint. Drone goes 'boop' on the camera lens, and the entire system is disabled until an expensive technician drives out with a ladder and cleans the lens at non-trivial expense
Americans don’t care enough
Too busy enjoying S&P500 near 7,000 and US$84,000/year median household income
> All it takes is a tiny drone with a stick attached, and at the end of that stick is a tiny sponge soaked with tempera paint
I (EDIT: hate) Flock Safety cameras. If someone did this in my town, I’d want them arrested.
They’re muddying the moral clarity of the anti-Flock messaging, the ultimate goal in any protest. And if they’re willing to damage that property, I’m not convinced they understand why they shouldn’t damage other property. (More confidently, I’m not convinced others believe they can tell the difference.)
Flock Safety messages on security. Undermining that pitch is helpful. Underwriting it with random acts of performative chaos plays into their appeal.
> flock is very vulnerable to this very simple attack
We live in a free society, i.e. one with significant individual autonomy. We’re all always very vulnerable. That’s the social contract. (The fact that folks actually contemplating violent attacks tend to be idiots helps, too.)
Flock cameras are assisted suicide for dying neighborhoods. They don't prevent crime, they record crime. Cleaning up vacant lots, planting trees, street lighting, trash removal, and traffic calming like adding planters and crosswalks reduce crime.
The vast majority of crimes are committed by a small percentage of people. The real issue is prosecutors who refuse to incarcerate repeat offenders. But having video evidence is a powerful tool for a motivated prosecutor to actually take criminals off the streets
If you're in the bay area, on Monday at 6:30 there's a mountain view city council meeting where flock is on the agenda. If this surveillance bothers you, show up!!
There's a real distinction worth making here between surveillance infrastructure and investigative tools. Flock is mass passive collection -- camera on every corner, running 24/7, feeding a database law enforcement queries at will. What people are actually hungry for is the opposite: targeted, on-demand tools that regular people control. The same instinct that has people pulling down cameras is what's driving grassroots OSINT communities -- they want to be able to find things themselves without being watched by someone else's system. ghostcatchers.net
This is cool and all but Ring is the vastly more important target.
I don't think we can pretend the definition of "public" didn't change, now that it means "something is likely recorded for all time and you have no control over where it goes and literally everyone in the world can see it."
Good. Throw a monkey wrench into their gears at every opportunity you're comfortable with. Don't let them get away with tearing down our basic needs for privacy and safety. We don't have to give in to Big Tech and its surveillance for profit goals.
Meanwhile, in Brazil, a market is growing for stolen surveillance cameras. Just think how lovely: a technology created to restrict crime is actually feeding it.
People always hated the cameras. It's just that now that people feel comfortable that the government won't move heaven and earth to come after them for daring to vandalize it's infrastructure they're finally acting up. But they wanted to all along.
I remember when mp3 music first became available and sharing sites like Limewire popped up.
So many people were sharing music ( depriving artists of their pay ) that it looked like a real problem. How could they possibly deter all those music takers?
It turns out they only needed to catch a few, and fine the living daylights out of them. A fine of $100,000 was sufficient to scare everybody back to honesty.
Hmm, I think it was more the rise of streaming services which were more convenient and offered a better experience with less risk than illegally downloading music or movies.
Would you like to claim a limited time license for a /s for your reply? The use of this /s can be revoked at any time. You may only view the /s on a limited number of your own devices. A public display of this /s without prior written consent immediately invalidates your license to this /s, and you may be subject to a lawsuit in a specific court in West Texas where you must show up in person at a particular date with 48 hours notice.
or you know... the rise of itunes/ipod at that exact time. present the public with an option that is not in a grey area and is not a massive inconvenience, and a large amount of them will happily go the legal route.
Its leaning that direction again, video streaming services are becoming a massive inconvenience, much like needing to buy a CD if you wanted 2 total songs off it. Doubt it will be as iconic of a moment in time as the limewire/napster era was, but who knows, im so bad at predicting the future i assumed nvidia was gonna be hard declining after the end of the crypto mining craze.
> sufficient to scare everybody back to honesty.
idk how you thought this would land here, but saying everybody was a rough choice of words.
I have similar and deep privacy concerns. But I also know that cameras have helped find criminals and assist crime victims. I don't want to let fugitives go without punishment. In fact, I must admit that cameras are a realistic choice given the current technology.
Flock Safety must be under public evaluation. Tech companies tend to hide technical specs, calling them trade secrets. But most internet security standards are public. What should be private is the encryption key. The measure to protect development effort is patents, which are public in the registry.
Why are tech specs relevant here? The problem with Flock is that once the data is collected, and once it's made accessible to law enforcement without any legal review, it's going to be used for solving heinous crimes, for keeping tabs on a vocal critic of the police commissioner, and for checking what the officer's ex-wife is up to.
If the cameras were installed and operated by the DHS or by the local PD, would that make you feel better? The data should not exist, or if it must, it shouldn't be accessible without court approval. The model you're proposing doesn't ensure that; in fact, it moves it closer to the parties most likely to misuse it.
The cameras aren't the problem, it's the companies behind them.
Everybody wants murderers and rapists in jail, nobody wants to 24/7 share their location and upload their every thoughts to palantir and other companies operated by degenerates like Thiel
There's no money to be made arresting criminals. Sure you get a few police contracts, and you need to show enough results to keep them.. but your moat is mostly how hard it is to even submit bids.
There's a lot more money to be made knowing that Accountant Mary's Lexis is looking kind of banged up and she could be sold on a new one.
This has nothing to do with the actual problem, which is Flock itself.
The fact that Flock controls all of the cameras, all of the data and said data is easily accessible means police and the state have access to information that they should only get with a warrant. A business having a camera storing video data that's completely local isn't an issue. A business having a camera which is connected to every other business that has a camera is.
All it takes is a tiny drone with a stick attached, and at the end of that stick is a tiny sponge soaked with tempera paint. Drone goes 'boop' on the camera lens, and the entire system is disabled until an expensive technician drives out with a ladder and cleans the lens at non-trivial expense.
A handful of enterprising activists could blind all the flock cameras in a region in a day or two, and without destroying them, which makes it less of an overtly criminal act.
Obviously not advocating this, just pointing out that flock is very vulnerable to this very simple attack from activists.
You want to evoke the people and not the state.
One or two cameras getting bashed is basically a fart in the wind for flock, and I'd argue that it doesn't actually move the needle in any direction as far as public opinion goes. Those who dislike them don't need further convincing, those who support them are not going to have their opinion changed by property destruction (it might make them support surveillance more, in fact).
But hey, it's provocative I guess.
On the other hand flock losing their entire fleet is an existential problem for them, and for all the customers they're charging for the use of that fleet. Their BoD will want answers about why the officers of the company are harming shareholders with the way they're operating the business. Cities that have contracts with them may have grounds to terminate them, etc etc.
They eventually had to equip pretty much every speed camera with a speed camera camera, usually on a much higher pole to make vandalism more difficult.
Just wait until you find out that paintball guns are considered firearms are require licensing in the aforementioned region.
Roads that are narrow in places where a lower speed is desirable.
Heavy taxation on vehicles with more mass and lower visibility.
Actual licensing standards other than driving down a couple of city streets and parking.
More crossings, with lights or bridges, instead of long four-lane arterial roads with nowhere to safely cross.
Realistically that’s going to attract a lot of negative attention.
Someone who has the wherewithal to jerry rig a paintball gun to a drone is someone scary. Plus, any officer who witnesses such a drone is almost certainly going to misidentify the paintball gun as an actual gun. I can imagine the operator would be charged with several felonies.
Must less recoil too.
On the list of "laws you don't want to screw with", National Firearms Act violations are high on my list. Regardless of whether something is or isn't a violation, I'm certainly not interested in paying expensive lawyers to argue they're not.
Or even better yet, get arrested halfway to trying to dip your drone into paint on a sidewalk?
Just throw a rock at the stupid thing.
Because advocating things which are moral/ethical but illegal is often against the TOS :(
We need laws which are explicitly based on moral principles. Barring that, we should at least have laws which treat sufficiently large platforms as utilities and forbid them from performing censorship without due process.
No, that would likely end in a RICO or terrorism case if it continued. Just because the cameras aren't destroyed doesn't mean CorpGov won't want to teach a lesson.
Americans don’t care enough
Too busy enjoying S&P500 near 7,000 and US$84,000/year median household income
I (EDIT: hate) Flock Safety cameras. If someone did this in my town, I’d want them arrested.
They’re muddying the moral clarity of the anti-Flock messaging, the ultimate goal in any protest. And if they’re willing to damage that property, I’m not convinced they understand why they shouldn’t damage other property. (More confidently, I’m not convinced others believe they can tell the difference.)
Flock Safety messages on security. Undermining that pitch is helpful. Underwriting it with random acts of performative chaos plays into their appeal.
> flock is very vulnerable to this very simple attack
We live in a free society, i.e. one with significant individual autonomy. We’re all always very vulnerable. That’s the social contract. (The fact that folks actually contemplating violent attacks tend to be idiots helps, too.)
Was this a typo? If not, what does "haste" mean in this context? (I'm not messing with you; I'm genuinely wondering.)
If they do it right. If they don’t, it doesn’t. And between the action and the next rain, Flock Safety gets to message about vandalism.
Sometimes judges contribute as well.
Sure. US prosecutors are so lenient that the US is the capital of incarceration
Bothers me, but not enough to drive to city hall
Doesn’t even bother me enough to send an email quite frankly
- Andreessen Horowitz
- Greenoaks Capital
- Bedrock Capital
- Meritech Capital
- Matrix Partners
- Sands Capital
- Founders Fund
- Kleiner Perkins
- Tiger Global
- Y Combinator
I don't think we can pretend the definition of "public" didn't change, now that it means "something is likely recorded for all time and you have no control over where it goes and literally everyone in the world can see it."
So many people were sharing music ( depriving artists of their pay ) that it looked like a real problem. How could they possibly deter all those music takers?
It turns out they only needed to catch a few, and fine the living daylights out of them. A fine of $100,000 was sufficient to scare everybody back to honesty.
Its leaning that direction again, video streaming services are becoming a massive inconvenience, much like needing to buy a CD if you wanted 2 total songs off it. Doubt it will be as iconic of a moment in time as the limewire/napster era was, but who knows, im so bad at predicting the future i assumed nvidia was gonna be hard declining after the end of the crypto mining craze.
> sufficient to scare everybody back to honesty.
idk how you thought this would land here, but saying everybody was a rough choice of words.
Flock Safety must be under public evaluation. Tech companies tend to hide technical specs, calling them trade secrets. But most internet security standards are public. What should be private is the encryption key. The measure to protect development effort is patents, which are public in the registry.
If the cameras were installed and operated by the DHS or by the local PD, would that make you feel better? The data should not exist, or if it must, it shouldn't be accessible without court approval. The model you're proposing doesn't ensure that; in fact, it moves it closer to the parties most likely to misuse it.
There is a famous quote about this that needs to be updated for the modern age.
"I'd rather let ten fugitives go unsurveilled, than to surveil one innocent person."
Everybody wants murderers and rapists in jail, nobody wants to 24/7 share their location and upload their every thoughts to palantir and other companies operated by degenerates like Thiel
It's so funny though that the majority of all people are doing exactly this, 24/7.
There's no money to be made arresting criminals. Sure you get a few police contracts, and you need to show enough results to keep them.. but your moat is mostly how hard it is to even submit bids.
There's a lot more money to be made knowing that Accountant Mary's Lexis is looking kind of banged up and she could be sold on a new one.
The fact that Flock controls all of the cameras, all of the data and said data is easily accessible means police and the state have access to information that they should only get with a warrant. A business having a camera storing video data that's completely local isn't an issue. A business having a camera which is connected to every other business that has a camera is.