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.
There has been a pattern in the UK of destroying speed cameras for the same reasons - including in some cases throwing an old car tire around the pole and setting it on fire.
Those are not "speed" cameras, they're to enforce daily payment (or fines) for driving in "Ultra Low Emissions Zone" areas in non-compliant vehicles. The area covers all 32 London Boroughs, around 1,500 km² (580 square miles), - affecting approximately 9 Million people.
>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
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.
This happened in my hometown. Arterial roads that were 40mph when I was a kid are posted at 25 today and they just passed legislation to make the automated speed cameras near school zones active 24/7.
We have most of that in <pick some European city/country>, and the statistics show it makes a big difference compared to the USA, but drivers still exceed the speed limit, run through red lights etc and cause injuries and death to pedestrians and cyclists.
Removing automatic enforcement of speed limits would not improve the situation.
Ownership of paintball guns is regulated under the state-level firearms act in most (all?) states and territories.
You can use them under the direct supervision of the licensed owner, but it's still quite restrictive. If you were to take one and shoot at cameras on the street it would vandalism plus firearms offences, most of which start at inversion of innocence, massive fines and move pretty quickly into prison time.
If you actually purchased one yourself in Queensland, you would need a Cat A firearms license, genuine reason, permit to acquire, safe storage etc as for a firearm.
NSW used to be similar, but a few years ago the state government had a rare moment of common sense and did away with most of that pointless bullshit.
A paintball gun might not invoke the federal government to hunt you down; an over-powered laser absolutely will. The FAA has a very low tolerance for that sort of thing. Do not ever, ever, ever use lasers in open air that are capable of damaging the human retina without the appropriate licenses. The last thing cities need right now is another federal agency going on a witchhunt. Firing eye-damaging lasers into the air would just serve them that excuse on a silvered platter.
The CCDs in cameras can be damaged with low-power lasers, or so I thought. No need for anything crazy. And the FAA won't become involved unless you're pointing them skyward. Pointing them across the street, or anywhere not visible from the air isn't going to sic federal agencies on you.
> And the FAA won't become involved unless you're pointing them skyward.
The point here is that 'skyward' is where the laser's beam goes when you're trying to aim it at a camera up on a pole. It's practically impossible to point a non-fixed position laser at something a non-trivial distance higher than you without spilling a large amount of laser beam into whatever happens to be behind your intended target; which is very often the sky.
"In NSW, paintball is classified as a "prohibited firearm" under the Firearms Act 1996. However, it can still be legally played under strict licensing conditions. Unlike in some states where it is more loosely regulated, players and operators in NSW must comply with a range of legal requirements to ensure safety and legality."
These rules have changed, I think back before COVID they reclassified them as sporting equipment instead of firearms, but still brought in a whole bunch of licensing rules and requirements similar to gun ownership.
You can't just walk into KMart and walk out with a paintball gun here. |Or paintball markers.
I remember reading about that back in the 90s as a kid here in the USA, in Action Pursuit Games magazine. They said semi-automatic paintball guns were illegal in Australia. I was like what kind of hellhole dystopia is that? Meanwhile at the local paintball field I remember this hillbilly had a fully automatic Angel when they came out. (The first electronic paintball gun.) He walked over to the treeline and emptied a hopper full of Brass Eagle paintballs into a tree in like 5 seconds. They all hit the tree at the exact same spot and vaporized into pink mist. Freedom, baby.
So your thesis is that this hillbilly was likely to take his fully automatic paintball gun and shoot up a school with it?
Or that his possession and use of this gun might somehow serve as a sort of "gateway drug" to Harder Weapons that he would then use to the same end?
Neither one appears to have actually happened. In fact, I've never known a single person who has been involved in a school shooting, or heard of one happening here at all, ever. It just doesn't happen, regardless of whatever is supposedly happening on the glowing box in the corner of everyone's living room that's always portraying doom and danger everywhere.
Indeed, I don't recall a single one of my paintball playing friends (who all nonchalantly used illegal in Australia and super dangerous semi-automatic paintball guns against each other) who later went on to be involved in any kind of gun related incident.
I'm sure you've got some kind of excellent response prepared however, so we will now hear the details of how wrong I am and how Paintball Guns Are In Fact Really Dangerous Because Reasons And the Australian Government Nannies Are Right.
Sounds like a new remit for the NRO. Park a billion dollar satellite over an area to keep an eye out for petty vandalism. Then the sheriffs office can team up with Space Force: papers will be served immediately by LEO MIRV deployment, which may also count as execution depending on visibility and aim on the day.
/s - but it wouldn't surprise me at the rate things are going.
In the mid-2000s the company I worked for in Glasgow fitting microwave links to buildings (broadband wasn't readily available outside cable TV aerials) had a pile of ODUs that had been shot off roofs.
Mostly from one particularly benighted area, Easterhouse. If you extensively gentrified Easterhouse back then, it would look like Detroit in the 90s. It's improved a little since then.
Which Aeroflot flights were hijacked and flown to West Berlin? I've never heard of this. Funny though that Windows Copilot believes this happened and says that:
"On December 12, 1978, two Soviet citizens hijacked an Aeroflot Yak‑40 on a domestic route and forced it to fly to West Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport, which was under U.S. control."
But then, when asked about any reference to this event, gives this:
"1. LOT Polish Airlines Flight 165 (30 August 1978)
A LOT Tupolev Tu‑134 was hijacked by East German citizens seeking asylum and forced to land at Tempelhof Airport in West Berlin."
I once called my Dad out about Chinese nationalists setting bombs on ships in the 60s. He reckoned his ship had come to the rescue of one where they'd found a bomb and the command crew had posed with it for a photo and it had gone off, killing or wounding all the crew capable of actually navigating the ship.
No mention on Wikipedia of these terrorist activities, nothing in the history I could find online. He was a bit of a tall tale teller so I called him out on it.
He was quite upset and ended up showing me his ship log book. With the ship name and the rough date, I actually found two news articles that had been scanned by Google scholar conforming that it had really happened.
I bet there's a lot we don't know that happened behind the iron curtain, I wouldn't doubt this just because you can't easily find any references with a quick Google.
If you want the rest of how they saved the ship, they tried to get a junior officer over in a sort of swing. If they'd have succeeded they'd have actually all been entitled to a salvage payment. But it was too rough so in the end they just got the other ship to follow them back to port.
When the pilot came out to dock the ship, he found another bomb.
West Berlin was a part of Germany under US/UK/French occupation, I have not heard anybody referring to it as being "behind the iron curtain" before. What would be the reason for the above countries to completely erase multiple hijackings of Aeroflot planes from history? While still popularizing other hijackings, to the point of making a Hollywood movie about the LOT flight I've mentioned [1]. And why the Soviet Union would have joined the West in this conspiracy, while being open about other hijackings (mostly attempted)?
The story is ridiculous on its face: why fly to West Berlin where you'd need to get another flight to get anywhere? The popular targets of hijackers in the USSR were Turkey, Israel and Sweden. "Spetsnaz" is not some organization, it's just an abbreviation of "special designation" similar to English "spec-op", multiple military and law enforcement organizations have their own specnaz as they had in the USSR. Aeroflot was not one of them though, its flights were protected by the "air militia" - a department of the Ministry of the Interior, which was also in charge of the airports security. And, judging by multiple hijacking attempts, there were rarely armed agents on the plane or they rarely decided to engage, which makes sense, since fights on a flying plane would put lives of all passengers into mortal danger. Putting TWO teams of armed soldiers on each plane is something only an LLM could hallucinate in my humble opinion.
That sounds like a typical kind of Soviet genre of joke; Like the guy leaving the breadline in disgust to go kill Gorbachev, but he comes back when he finds that line is even longer...
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.
Yeah like we gotta be serious here, US cops and courts are out to screw people over because that is how they increase their budget, pay, and bonuses. If they think they can twist some law into giving you a felony, they will, regardless of the spirit of the law.
Attaching any kind of potential weapon on a drone has no real precedent so they can dig through 19th century law and combine it with some 21st century law and punishment and screw your life over with bull crap unless you got $100K+ sitting around to throw on a good lawyer. The risk of being caught may be a bit lower, but the potential punishment if caught could be absolutely enormous.
Also, you are dropping something from the aircraft which is a different violation (even if it is moving at 100m/s horizontally while falling at 9.8m/s²).
About ten years ago a company started fitting CCTV cameras to the illuminated advertising hoardings in bus stops, initially to discourage vandalism and then using frankly fucking creepy targetted advertising that used fairly crude machine vision stuff to guess the demographic of people at the stop.
The advertiser's operators could actually look through the camera and shout through hidden speakers at people vandalising their adverts, usually by writing on the specially-coated toughened vandal-resistant glass that ink or paint didn't stick to.
The local wee wannabe gangsters took to filling bingo markers with the stuff they use to etch frosted glass, and tagging the displays with that.
Filling paintballs is very hard and specialized and would probably be limiting to 99 out of 100 people if not more.
Gluing two fragile gelatin halves (designed to dissolve and break easily) once you’ve filled them perfectly full of paint and then making sure they’re almost perfectly round takes specialized equipment.
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.
Or use a powerful enough laser pointer. Bonus points if you use infrared since other humans can't see the beam and won't know what you're up to.
Though you either need a laser powerful enough to harm human eyes or lots of patience. Hong Kong protesters innovated a lot of these sort of resistance using lasers
IR camera but if the beam is powerful enough it could in theory use a few bursts in rapid succession from a roof mount on a generic looking vehicle with the plates covered. Not suggesting anyone try such things but the camera is not guaranteed to catch the location of the busts.
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.
You think we should give people being moderated on a forum due process? How would we ever run forums if every contentious and necessary moderation action could lead to a 5k-50k legal bill.
> 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.
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?
Drones over 250 grams or for any drone operated commercially under part 107 registration is required. But, its easy to just build your own or desolder the id chip if you dont want it.
It’s easy to build your own, but it’s impossible to build one to be as stable as a DJI one, or as cheaply. E.g. with an FPV drone hitting the lens would be much harder (but you could use spray instead of a stick to make it easier). Removing remote id ‘chip’ is plain impossible since it’s implemented by the same radio that does video link.
In 1950s UK every country kid had a catapult in their pocket. Maybe that is what we should do. Give the kids catapults and tell them not to use them on Flock cameras. That is usually effective at making kids so stuff
What is the threshold for eye vs sensor damage and am I correct in assuming that duration is a factor. Basically less juice for a longer duration ruins a sensor but humans blink? For science.
I picked up an Axis security camera rated for ALPR use (the Q1700 series) and it has a safety warning telling me I shouldn't look at the built in IR LEDs for more than a minute...
> 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.)
The point of resistance is commonly to harm the counterparty in a fashion that the perpetrator finds morally acceptable such as to disincentivize them not convince them.
Vietnamese vs US Grunts not cute useless protestors holding signs that threaten to hold different signs longer.
You're both partially right, and that highlights the difference between nonviolent and violent resistance. You are incorrect in saying that a resistance is always trying to disincentivize the counterparty. Even in your example, the NVA didn't overrun their counterparty (the US military); they convinced enough of the US voting public (which is very much a separate entity from the US military) that "Peace with honor" was a viable, preferable option.
That would be detectable by the FAA and they would send the FBI after you, unless you used a junk toy drone but that would not cover much distance between charges.
Because destroying them sends a different message. People want them gone, not merely disabled. They're not joking or messing around with drones and tempera about it. Using a firearm to wreck the camera lens before tearing the whole thing down would be nice though.
I wouldn’t suggest doing that, it will result in more regulation restricting drones. I joined before few workshops that included the government too, and there were discussions about requiring a whole license every time you modify the drone, not limited to the airframe, but the flight purpose and payload. So you can imagine in the future, modding or repurposing your drone could be a “federal crime” if you don’t go and re-license the drone every time you change the payload.
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
The real problem with prosecutors is that they don't want to prosecute. When I was on the grand jury in my city a couple of years ago, there was a slow morning and the assistant DA said that there were about 4000 cases per year and that they brought 30 of those to trial. He didn't think anything of it, for him it was a story about how they loved trials because "they were so much fun". But if they were so much fun, why are less than 1% of cases going to trial?
Plea deals.
Plea deals subvert justice for both those innocent who are bullied into pleading out, and for those who are wickedly guilty and get a big discount on the penalty exacted. Plea deals give the system extra capacity for prosecution, encouraging the justice system to fill the excess capacity, while simultaneously giving an underfunded system that doesn't have enough capacity the appearance of being able to handle the load. Bad all around.
there exists evidence proving that a fraction of individuals commit the majority of violent crime. thus, incarcerating those particular individuals would inherently reduce the majority of violent crime. is something missing from this equation?
If you’d like to have an informed opinion, at least engage with the academic material. Otherwise you come off sounding naïve, insisting that complex problems have simple solutions.
Edit: maybe my ears are a bit sensitive, but I can’t help but hear a faint whistle in the wind, maybe only at a frequency a dog could hear. But no, surely not here in gentlemanly company.
That’s not what I’m disputing, of course. I’m disputing that the grandparent’s assertion that if we (by your stats) simply lock up 1% of the population that violent crime would drop by 60%.
I mean, trivially, using our brains for a nanosecond, what if that 1% of the population is almost always 16-18 year olds when they commit those violent crimes. The 16-18 demographic is roughly 4% of the US population (Google). That would mean locking up 1 in 4 high school students for 6-20 of their most formative years, and thrusting them back into society with a “Mission Accomplished” banner hanging behind you.
Play with the numbers a bit (maybe it’s 1 in 20), but the point stands. Using imprisonment to try to quarantine a demographic that is perceived as irreparably violent is a barbaric, sophomoric idea that has very little evidence of success in the modern era.
Don't jail criminals because maybe they're young, that's your argument? Sounds like a something that's already part of the sentencing policy, leniency of first time offenders.
I was tipsy when I typed that out, tbh. But yeah, there’s a strong case to be made that jailing youth while simultaneously divesting in their communities causes a pretty significant hollowing out and sense of hopelessness.
The reason I brought up youth is because, unsurprisingly, most violent crime is performed by people who don’t have a fully-formed prefrontal cortex. Feelings of invincibility and a sense of not having much to lose.
oh so you did have a point , why didn't you just say so ! do you have any hard evidence to back you assertion that the majority of recidivism occurs in minors ? coz that would definitely make for a better discussion than calling each other names
There are two ideas here - locking up actual criminals and locking up people who happen to fit the pattern of a criminal even without committing any crime. You're arguing against the latter, but I don't think anybody was proposing that.
you are accusing me of virtue signalling without discussing the evidence. this in itself is a virtue signal. I'm not trying to insult you by saying this ... you are behaving hypocritically. lots of people don't treat that gently, I genuinely suggest you be careful towards whom you act that way. if you have an actual point I'm happy to chat about it, however my tolerance of snippy snappy rhetoric is running low
Nah man I’m going to continue to proudly call out people who skirt the line of racism by advocating for the same policies that racists have championed since the fall of the Confederacy. Say it with your chest next time, there’s a reason that it’s not tolerated in polite company. I guess maybe some of YCombinator would enjoy it though, judging by their investments and the rhetoric of those they are associated with.
it sounds to me like you would prefer moral grandstanding about north american politics instead of sharing discussion. not interested, thanks for the opportunity to practice my patience
I read that as questioning whether better evidence would actually help. Which I assume is a reference to some prosecutors ignoring certain crimes as a matter of policy, for example there was news a bit ago about CA choosing to ignore shoplifting under some amount.
Depends a lot on the city/state.
Check super blue cities like Seattle or San Francisco, and the people there complain that the justice system doesn't work as repeat offenders are let go, for one reason or another.
The big incarceration states are most likely deep red states.
I live in Canada, to me the US is a whole. I am pretty sure one can find close to crimeless areas there along with something totally opposite. does not matter from the outside.
The incarceration rate of every single US state is higher than that of every country in the European continent except Belarus, Russia and Turkey. Each state's incarceration rate is also higher than that of every country in the OECD (a club of mostly rich countries) except Chile, Costa Rica and Turkey.
Of the exceptions I have listed, Turkey has the highest incarceration rate of 366 per 100k. Even so, it is still lower than that of 41 states, falling between Hawaii (367) and Connecticut (326).
We spend $80 billion a year on incarceration in the US, and have the highest incarceration rate in the world. Your plan increases both. Do you honestly think that if we spend $160 billion or $240 billion a year and double or triple our incarcerated population that we'd solve crime?
Look at places and countries with low crime. They don't have the most Flock cameras, the most prisoners, or the most powerful surveillance evidence because while those may solve a crime, they don't solve crime as a whole.
From the outside, it looks like the US's society and culture fosters an unusually large criminal class compared to other western countries? If people had access to education, healthcare, jobs that aren't shipped overseas, minimum wage that wasn't laughable, etc, there wouldn't be so much problems? Arguing over severity of punishment while ignoring systemic issues is silly.
Non-developed countries do not have functional law enforcement and they are highly corrupt, so any statistics outside of developed countries should be ignored.
For developed countries, none but America have such high levels of immigration nor the racial diversity America has. It is much easier to convince society to promote high-trust empathetic solutions when society is racially homogenous and shares cultural background. It’s impossible to compare America to any European country, although soon it may be possible if immigration continues
How are you measuring that? There are plenty of developed countries with a higher immigrant share like Switzerland and Australia. If you're taking about visible minorities then Canada has a higher proportion of the population.
I don't think you can make a facile pronouncement that European countries and ethnically and culturally homogenous any longer. We can't have a High-trust society in the USA when politicians scapegoat immigrants, in spite of their being more law-abiding on the whole. We can't avoid having a demoralized populace when corporate funded politicians of both parties drag their feet instead of giving citizens of the most productive and wealthy country in the history of the world parity with less wealthy countries, in terms of healthcare, education, housing, retirement and lack of life precariousness, like going into bankruptcy over medical debt...
Who do you think those people are that are incarcerated in the USA?
I come across this rather frequently among people from sheltered backgrounds like those who graduated from mom and dad taking care of them, all the way through to Mega Corp/university taking care of them, and absolutely cannot fathom why everyone doesn’t just eat cake.
I have a working theory that this effect, whatever one wants to call it, of people being too abstracted from reality, is ultimately the source of collapse of all kinds of organizations of humans… including civilizations.
It is, for example also why America can have so many vile warmongering people, because not only do they not have to lead troops into battle, have their children drafted into the front lines, or pay for the invariable disaster and murder they perpetrated and orchestrated; but in the most grotesque way, they profit from it and immensely; usually also combining it with other types of fraud like “money printing”, i.e., counterfeiting, which they use to plunder the wealth they accumulated through murder, mayhem, and fraud.
This isn't a new complaint. People have been identifying this group as the source of a lot of bad stuff at least as far back as Marx. The petty or petite bourgeoisie, the professional managerial class, Karens, the name changes with the times. But the constant derision for these groups is rooted in people observing that these groups are disposed to the sort of "driving society off a cliff" behavior you are listing examples of.
Now you're getting it. You have exactly identified the problem.
Instead of identifying and addressing the real problems--mass unemployment, homelessness, hopelessness--your dystopic "solution" is simply more and bigger jails, more and better armed cops with surveillance cameras attached, more laws, more weapons, more bondage and discipline, more "you will do what I say or else."
Doesn't work. Never works.
Read the essay "Fate of Empires" by Sir John Glubb to see how things this time are not in fact any different than what came before.
I agree. There needs to be a non racist president that just sweeps in and does a El Salvador type cleanup of the streets. I bet the 80%+ of normal black people in crime ridden cities like Baltimore, St. Louis, Memphis, Detroit, New Orleans would be in full support. Let’s be honest, young black gangsters are the main criminal element in these places. Trump can’t do this because he is a piece of shit with no integrity.
El Salvador doesn't have the type of Constitutional rights that America has. That type of sweep would not be legal.
And that doesn't even get into jurisdictional issues. The federal government doesn't have jurisdiction over local crimes that do not cross interstate boundaries.
Every single one of my ancestors who were in the war--except one--fought for the Confederacy in the War Between the States. (Or the War of Lincoln's Aggression, according to some. Yankees call it the "Civil War.")
Going further back, my Cherokee forefathers (the Chickamauga) were equally unimpressed by what they saw and experienced of this entity (they viewed it as a malignant tumor) that calls itself the "United" States of America.
I believe my ancestors are envious that I get to see the day when the truth of the Empire of Lies is finally exposed in front of all the world.
What was it about? By the time the Democrats were crowing that he was a felon, no one eve remembered. Did Trump see or sign this paperwork? Didn't much matter to anyone. If he saw it or signed it, would he have known what it was? Did he read it first? Probably not.
With a tiny little wall of text, you might even manage to tell me why you think the paperwork was so horrible that he should be in prison for it, I suppose. But no one would read your wall of text, because if it takes you a wall of text to explain it, they figure it's all bullshit anyway. And this is why he won in 2024, and why his successor will win in 2028, and likely in 2032. It's why this November is going to shock you even though there's virtually no room left for surprises. Just remember, it's like 96% certain Hillary's going to beat him if you need to fantasize about a better time...
To answer the question you avoided. The "paperwork" was classified materials that make the Hillary's emails outrage of magats look like nothing at all in comparison.
No. The so-called 34 felonies were about "falsifying business records". So you don't even know, that figures. You should've left room for being able to claim I'm wrong with a snarky non-answer.
You lie thru your teeth. Trump is far more guilty of mishandling classified material than let's say Hillary Clinton .... And in his own words. She belongs in prison. What does trump deserve then?
In June 2023, a federal grand jury indicted Trump on 37 counts, including violating the Espionage Act, false statements, and obstruction, regarding documents kept at Mar-a-Lago.
You are hitting on the fundamental difference in political views.
Half of this country believes problems are systemic and can be fixed. The other half believes they are a natural consequence of culture, race, and invisible flying creatures that tempt you to do bad things.
100% agree. Interestingly, the only politicians who talk about removing Citizens United or even just strengthening consumer protections are considered "far-left" in this country.
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!!
flock safety were in one of y combinators incubator programs but to be fair, saying you want to make a camera company to improve public safety but then being used in a dystopian way... well it should have been foreseeable shouldn't it? Im conflicted in this, I love camera tech and its probably not going away any time soon, but wonder how it could be used responsibly for public safety only.
Id argue they run this site as a forum for tech discussions, because that alone gives them a huge boost to their image and name recognition, without any need for meddling.
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.
Yeah right. Destroying cameras owned by a HOA in a wealthy area is one thing, destroying people's private cameras is another. A good way to get in a fight, though, if you're into that.
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.
Is funny reading this from the UK because this ship sailed here years ago, you just have to assume if you drive a car anywhere except small roads in the countryside you are potentially being tracked by ANPR.
Of course, actual serious criminals who are actively committing serious crimes just use fake plates so they aren't affected, it only really helps catch people who commit crimes on the spur of the moment (while also obviously eroding every "normal" person's privacy)
> except small roads in the countryside you are potentially being tracked by ANPR.
They do put them specifically whereever those roads join major roads though. Meanwhile the crime stats in the UK make chilling reading, as the focus on replacing Police officers with cameras, replacing courts with... nothing has lead to many crimes skyrocketing, especially those that are not associated with driving a car.
Yep, I mean "proper" countryside - I grew up out in the villages (all little B roads and unclassified roads) and it's still like the Wild West out there really.
A lot of people still habitually drink drive (not getting completely smashed, but a few pints at a country pub then drive home) and realistically as long as you don't crash you could do that for decades and probably get away with it.
There's almost no cameras and also almost no actual police
There's almost no cameras and also almost no actual police
That is starting to change. Porch pirates incentivized a lot of people to invest in cameras and placing them in discrete locations. Some are getting clever making them look like owl nest boxes on poles, bird feeders and other benign boring objects.
Big difference though is that in the UK these cameras are publically owned, and the data feeds into a publically owned ANPR database. Whereas Flock cameras are owned by flock and all the ANPR records are stored on their own infrastructure
We have (a relatively recent phenomenon) elected Police and Crime Commissioners. They are elected with a tiny turnout. Next election in your area see if a candidate is anti-surveillance and run a campaign to support them. 10,000 extra votes to any of the mainstream candidates will get them elected.
Another addition to this thread of things that will never happen.
I don’t believe Flock cameras are used anywhere in the UK?
Pretty much all public cctv cameras that are installed on the side of public roads, like Flock are in the US, are publically owned, either by Police forces, Local Councils or National highways.
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."
It seems odd though. Don't you have the right to bear arms, with some idea that it is needed to prevent the government from exercising excessive powers over you, yet actually doing anything with those guns to protect yourself from tyranny is a crime?
I remember hearing once that the constitution, having been written by a bunch of insurrectionists, intended people to have the power to keep the government out of their business. It seems they have lost that?
> Don't you have the right to bear arms, with some idea that it is needed to prevent the government from exercising excessive powers over you, yet actually doing anything with those guns to protect yourself from tyranny is a crime?
Because when it comes to that, the government is a failed state and no one will be worried about what’s legal.
It’s not meant to be a means of legal recourse, it’s a last resort.
If you're describing the US as a failed state then we have nothing to talk about. Notwithstanding the fact the essence of the state at question even being relevant.
> In Chicago, where speed cameras are abundant, the camera program improperly gave out over $2.4 million in fines from 2013 to 2015. Using a random sample analysis, the Chicago Tribune estimated the number of bad tickets to be somewhere around 110,000. The erroneous fines were issued in areas without proper speed limit signs or during times when the cameras should have been turned off. (Cameras near parks and schools operate within a specific timeframe.) The Chicago Tribune found that over half the cameras in use were giving out faulty speeding tickets.
> Unsurprisingly, the misuse of speed cameras has also become a massive source of revenue for local government. In Chicago, 300 of the city's speed cameras would bring in about $15 million each year.
> In March, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot lowered the speed limit threshold for speed cameras to trigger a citation. Cameras now trigger when a driver goes over the limit by 6 miles per hour, rather than 10 miles per hour, the previous threshold.
I think we need to make it easier for people to fight back against automatic tickets like this. The onus should be on the state not the individual. And individuals should still be entitled to their data
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.
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
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.
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.
Since when are warrants required for footage of people in public? Does a red light camera need a judge's warrant before it snaps a photos of a car running the light?
When it violates reasonable expectations of privacy. Being in public isn't a get out of jail free card. I mean, I could put up a camera right outside your house. It is 'public streets' monitoring your coming to your house is the sort of thing that does require a warrant.
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.
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.
Sure, but por que no los dos.
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.
If it's about sending a message, I think using a drone to defeat mass surveillance is quite evocative.
Yes. It will invoke the state to pass even more draconian laws surrounding useful technology.
You want to evoke the people and not the state.
That poor printer in Office Space…
It had it coming.
I dream of the day they ALL get their due.
There has been a pattern in the UK of destroying speed cameras for the same reasons - including in some cases throwing an old car tire around the pole and setting it on fire.
Seems to be getting more popular [https://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/antiulez-campaigners-v...].
Those are not "speed" cameras, they're to enforce daily payment (or fines) for driving in "Ultra Low Emissions Zone" areas in non-compliant vehicles. The area covers all 32 London Boroughs, around 1,500 km² (580 square miles), - affecting approximately 9 Million people.
Destroying speed cameras, especially the tire method, in the UK far predates ULEZ.
Goring them is about sending a message.
Somewhat related, I'm pretty sure there was a guy in China who did exactly this as protest against their surveillance. Seems effective.
>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
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?
So you can do it without your image being captured by the camera?
The camera doesn't have a 360 field of vision, besides COVID masks aren't uncommon now.
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.
Oof, I really hate this automated enforcement. Might be time to get a paintball gun.
What else could make life safer at a realistic cost for people outside of vehicles?
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.
This happened in my hometown. Arterial roads that were 40mph when I was a kid are posted at 25 today and they just passed legislation to make the automated speed cameras near school zones active 24/7.
Urban planning that separates pedestrians and vehicles.
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.
We have most of that in <pick some European city/country>, and the statistics show it makes a big difference compared to the USA, but drivers still exceed the speed limit, run through red lights etc and cause injuries and death to pedestrians and cyclists.
Removing automatic enforcement of speed limits would not improve the situation.
And this is the reason I can’t wait for self driving cars that just follow the speed limit.
They are said to drive like your Grandma, if she was a very good driver....
> Might be time to get a paintball gun
Just wait until you find out that paintball guns are considered firearms are require licensing in the aforementioned region.
I played paintball in Australia and I just had to sign a normal waiver about them not being responsible for injuries
Ownership of paintball guns is regulated under the state-level firearms act in most (all?) states and territories.
You can use them under the direct supervision of the licensed owner, but it's still quite restrictive. If you were to take one and shoot at cameras on the street it would vandalism plus firearms offences, most of which start at inversion of innocence, massive fines and move pretty quickly into prison time.
That's crazy
If you actually purchased one yourself in Queensland, you would need a Cat A firearms license, genuine reason, permit to acquire, safe storage etc as for a firearm.
NSW used to be similar, but a few years ago the state government had a rare moment of common sense and did away with most of that pointless bullshit.
Tbh an overpowered laser off alibaba probably works a lot better at longer range
A paintball gun might not invoke the federal government to hunt you down; an over-powered laser absolutely will. The FAA has a very low tolerance for that sort of thing. Do not ever, ever, ever use lasers in open air that are capable of damaging the human retina without the appropriate licenses. The last thing cities need right now is another federal agency going on a witchhunt. Firing eye-damaging lasers into the air would just serve them that excuse on a silvered platter.
The CCDs in cameras can be damaged with low-power lasers, or so I thought. No need for anything crazy. And the FAA won't become involved unless you're pointing them skyward. Pointing them across the street, or anywhere not visible from the air isn't going to sic federal agencies on you.
> And the FAA won't become involved unless you're pointing them skyward.
The point here is that 'skyward' is where the laser's beam goes when you're trying to aim it at a camera up on a pole. It's practically impossible to point a non-fixed position laser at something a non-trivial distance higher than you without spilling a large amount of laser beam into whatever happens to be behind your intended target; which is very often the sky.
Also here:
"In NSW, paintball is classified as a "prohibited firearm" under the Firearms Act 1996. However, it can still be legally played under strict licensing conditions. Unlike in some states where it is more loosely regulated, players and operators in NSW must comply with a range of legal requirements to ensure safety and legality."
These rules have changed, I think back before COVID they reclassified them as sporting equipment instead of firearms, but still brought in a whole bunch of licensing rules and requirements similar to gun ownership.
You can't just walk into KMart and walk out with a paintball gun here. |Or paintball markers.
I remember reading about that back in the 90s as a kid here in the USA, in Action Pursuit Games magazine. They said semi-automatic paintball guns were illegal in Australia. I was like what kind of hellhole dystopia is that? Meanwhile at the local paintball field I remember this hillbilly had a fully automatic Angel when they came out. (The first electronic paintball gun.) He walked over to the treeline and emptied a hopper full of Brass Eagle paintballs into a tree in like 5 seconds. They all hit the tree at the exact same spot and vaporized into pink mist. Freedom, baby.
> I was like what kind of hellhole dystopia is that?
Cynical answer: Not the kind of hellhole dystopia that has schoolkids shooting up schools twice a week.
So your thesis is that this hillbilly was likely to take his fully automatic paintball gun and shoot up a school with it?
Or that his possession and use of this gun might somehow serve as a sort of "gateway drug" to Harder Weapons that he would then use to the same end?
Neither one appears to have actually happened. In fact, I've never known a single person who has been involved in a school shooting, or heard of one happening here at all, ever. It just doesn't happen, regardless of whatever is supposedly happening on the glowing box in the corner of everyone's living room that's always portraying doom and danger everywhere.
Indeed, I don't recall a single one of my paintball playing friends (who all nonchalantly used illegal in Australia and super dangerous semi-automatic paintball guns against each other) who later went on to be involved in any kind of gun related incident.
I'm sure you've got some kind of excellent response prepared however, so we will now hear the details of how wrong I am and how Paintball Guns Are In Fact Really Dangerous Because Reasons And the Australian Government Nannies Are Right.
How’s the surf at Bondi?
This will never be a thing in America. Good luck putting the camera on a pole higher than a redneck can shoot a rifle.
Sounds like a new remit for the NRO. Park a billion dollar satellite over an area to keep an eye out for petty vandalism. Then the sheriffs office can team up with Space Force: papers will be served immediately by LEO MIRV deployment, which may also count as execution depending on visibility and aim on the day.
/s - but it wouldn't surprise me at the rate things are going.
https://www.wsfa.com/2026/02/07/police-use-drone-technology-...
will you stop giving these folks ideas on how to spend more tax payers money?
/s (but not really)
We've already got this and it's maybe more capable than you'd think.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARGUS-IS
I just have to say: this whole thread is great absurd comedy - I don't think I have laughed at something on HN that much before :).
We already have speed cameras Al over NYC. Often the posted speeds there are 25 leading to some absurd tickets.
That's what you get for not having rednecks with rifles
1. Shooting rifles in an urban area sounds like a great way to go to prison.
2. As of 2026, most rednecks seem to be all for the police state. Don't expect them to come save you.
In the mid-2000s the company I worked for in Glasgow fitting microwave links to buildings (broadband wasn't readily available outside cable TV aerials) had a pile of ODUs that had been shot off roofs.
Mostly from one particularly benighted area, Easterhouse. If you extensively gentrified Easterhouse back then, it would look like Detroit in the 90s. It's improved a little since then.
Reminds me of the story about Aeroflot (Soviet National airline) and hijackings
- Aeroflot flights get hijacked and flown to West Berlin
- Soviets decided to put Spetsnaz (Soviet special forces) on the planes much like we have Air Marshals today
- Spetsnaz figures "we have guns and are on the plane already" so they start hijacking flights
- So Soviets put TWO Spetsnaz teams on the flight
- Team 1 decides to hijack flight, realize there is a Team 2 who ALSO agrees to hijack the flight
Which Aeroflot flights were hijacked and flown to West Berlin? I've never heard of this. Funny though that Windows Copilot believes this happened and says that:
"On December 12, 1978, two Soviet citizens hijacked an Aeroflot Yak‑40 on a domestic route and forced it to fly to West Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport, which was under U.S. control."
But then, when asked about any reference to this event, gives this:
"1. LOT Polish Airlines Flight 165 (30 August 1978) A LOT Tupolev Tu‑134 was hijacked by East German citizens seeking asylum and forced to land at Tempelhof Airport in West Berlin."
Are you an AI?
I once called my Dad out about Chinese nationalists setting bombs on ships in the 60s. He reckoned his ship had come to the rescue of one where they'd found a bomb and the command crew had posed with it for a photo and it had gone off, killing or wounding all the crew capable of actually navigating the ship.
No mention on Wikipedia of these terrorist activities, nothing in the history I could find online. He was a bit of a tall tale teller so I called him out on it.
He was quite upset and ended up showing me his ship log book. With the ship name and the rough date, I actually found two news articles that had been scanned by Google scholar conforming that it had really happened.
I bet there's a lot we don't know that happened behind the iron curtain, I wouldn't doubt this just because you can't easily find any references with a quick Google.
If you want the rest of how they saved the ship, they tried to get a junior officer over in a sort of swing. If they'd have succeeded they'd have actually all been entitled to a salvage payment. But it was too rough so in the end they just got the other ship to follow them back to port.
When the pilot came out to dock the ship, he found another bomb.
http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1734&dat=19661114&id=F...
West Berlin was a part of Germany under US/UK/French occupation, I have not heard anybody referring to it as being "behind the iron curtain" before. What would be the reason for the above countries to completely erase multiple hijackings of Aeroflot planes from history? While still popularizing other hijackings, to the point of making a Hollywood movie about the LOT flight I've mentioned [1]. And why the Soviet Union would have joined the West in this conspiracy, while being open about other hijackings (mostly attempted)?
The story is ridiculous on its face: why fly to West Berlin where you'd need to get another flight to get anywhere? The popular targets of hijackers in the USSR were Turkey, Israel and Sweden. "Spetsnaz" is not some organization, it's just an abbreviation of "special designation" similar to English "spec-op", multiple military and law enforcement organizations have their own specnaz as they had in the USSR. Aeroflot was not one of them though, its flights were protected by the "air militia" - a department of the Ministry of the Interior, which was also in charge of the airports security. And, judging by multiple hijacking attempts, there were rarely armed agents on the plane or they rarely decided to engage, which makes sense, since fights on a flying plane would put lives of all passengers into mortal danger. Putting TWO teams of armed soldiers on each plane is something only an LLM could hallucinate in my humble opinion.
1. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095415
So pandaman is good and mattmanser is part of the same AI slop disinformation campaign as alexpotato. Got it.
That sounds like a typical kind of Soviet genre of joke; Like the guy leaving the breadline in disgust to go kill Gorbachev, but he comes back when he finds that line is even longer...
If you want to hit the lens with the paintball gun, wouldn't you need to be in its field of vision?
It depends if its field of vision is 180° or 10°.
The wind could curve the ball around slightly.
When Flock helps you lay out camera placements they make sure camera pairs are facing each other.
Drones with a paintball gun attached?
Realistically that’s going to attract a lot of negative attention.
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.
Yeah like we gotta be serious here, US cops and courts are out to screw people over because that is how they increase their budget, pay, and bonuses. If they think they can twist some law into giving you a felony, they will, regardless of the spirit of the law.
Attaching any kind of potential weapon on a drone has no real precedent so they can dig through 19th century law and combine it with some 21st century law and punishment and screw your life over with bull crap unless you got $100K+ sitting around to throw on a good lawyer. The risk of being caught may be a bit lower, but the potential punishment if caught could be absolutely enormous.
Plus now you're technically arming an aircraft with something, and that might piss off the feds a little bit.
Also, you are dropping something from the aircraft which is a different violation (even if it is moving at 100m/s horizontally while falling at 9.8m/s²).
Just use the drone to spray something on the camera that will etch the glass or destroy the plastic beyond repair.
About ten years ago a company started fitting CCTV cameras to the illuminated advertising hoardings in bus stops, initially to discourage vandalism and then using frankly fucking creepy targetted advertising that used fairly crude machine vision stuff to guess the demographic of people at the stop.
The advertiser's operators could actually look through the camera and shout through hidden speakers at people vandalising their adverts, usually by writing on the specially-coated toughened vandal-resistant glass that ink or paint didn't stick to.
The local wee wannabe gangsters took to filling bingo markers with the stuff they use to etch frosted glass, and tagging the displays with that.
I don’t think they make commercial paintballs with hard to remove enamel or tempura paints.
True but maybe you can fill them yourself?
Filling paintballs is very hard and specialized and would probably be limiting to 99 out of 100 people if not more.
Gluing two fragile gelatin halves (designed to dissolve and break easily) once you’ve filled them perfectly full of paint and then making sure they’re almost perfectly round takes specialized equipment.
Syringe out the old paint, syringe in the new paint.
Sounds like a business opportunity... Permanent marking paintballs...
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?
Must less recoil too.
I don't think there's a drone in this proposal.
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 use a powerful enough laser pointer. Bonus points if you use infrared since other humans can't see the beam and won't know what you're up to.
Though you either need a laser powerful enough to harm human eyes or lots of patience. Hong Kong protesters innovated a lot of these sort of resistance using lasers
> Bonus points if you use infrared since other humans can't see the beam
But how would you see it? IR goggles?
IR camera but if the beam is powerful enough it could in theory use a few bursts in rapid succession from a roof mount on a generic looking vehicle with the plates covered. Not suggesting anyone try such things but the camera is not guaranteed to catch the location of the busts.
Any cheap camera with the IR filter removed from the lens. Some better than others.
Why get an expensive paintball gun when you can get a mask and a can of paint and a mask for much less?
You also need a high ladder.
Humans are just evolved monkeys. Climb the thing. Go ape.
Sorry to let you down but my arms have forgotten their ape lineage.
Mitch Altman should make a "Flock-B-Gone".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV-B-Gone
Palantir makes a nice Vandal-B-Gone product too. Works a treat for linking vandals to Flock camera crime incidents.
Why wouldn’t you advocate it? A much easier way of doing this is using paintballs with the appropriate paint.
> Why wouldn’t you advocate it?
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.
You think we should give people being moderated on a forum due process? How would we ever run forums if every contentious and necessary moderation action could lead to a 5k-50k legal bill.
...How can we run a government when every contentious and necessary moderation leads to a 5k-50k legal bill?
Oh wait... Maybe that's the problem.
You can put a garbage bag over them if you don’t want to sawzall the pole and dispose of the hardware.
What you want is for this to become a Tiktok craze.
> 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.
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?
Just throw a rock at the stupid thing.
Do all drones do this now? Is this required by law for manufacturers to implement?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_ID in the US (FAA) at least.
Drones over 250 grams or for any drone operated commercially under part 107 registration is required. But, its easy to just build your own or desolder the id chip if you dont want it.
It’s easy to build your own, but it’s impossible to build one to be as stable as a DJI one, or as cheaply. E.g. with an FPV drone hitting the lens would be much harder (but you could use spray instead of a stick to make it easier). Removing remote id ‘chip’ is plain impossible since it’s implemented by the same radio that does video link.
Had a friend who worked on designing systems to pick these signals up around airports
In 1950s UK every country kid had a catapult in their pocket. Maybe that is what we should do. Give the kids catapults and tell them not to use them on Flock cameras. That is usually effective at making kids so stuff
You mean a slingshot?
(Or a trebuchet?)
in the UK a catapult [catty] is a slingshot.
Omg is that where the name comes from. In my language it's a "kettie".
I was thinking the same thing, much cheaper than a paintball gun, and less conspicuous.
A well made catapult in the right hands with a good aim is deadly.
In Minecraft it’s well known that lasers of even moderate power can ruin camera sensors. Only in Minecraft though.
Reflections are a concern regarding bystanders' eye safety, be safe.
What is the threshold for eye vs sensor damage and am I correct in assuming that duration is a factor. Basically less juice for a longer duration ruins a sensor but humans blink? For science.
I picked up an Axis security camera rated for ALPR use (the Q1700 series) and it has a safety warning telling me I shouldn't look at the built in IR LEDs for more than a minute...
LIDAR has been screwing up traffic cameras.
> 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.)
> I haste Flock Safety cameras.
Was this a typo? If not, what does "haste" mean in this context? (I'm not messing with you; I'm genuinely wondering.)
It was a typo. Fixed.
Oh please. Its tempera paint. It'll probably wash off in the next rain.
> Its tempera paint. It'll probably wash off in the next rain
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.
You're assuming that that "message" would persuade anybody.
It'd be more likely to make more people do it.
Oh no! Not property damage! We can't possibly go that far!
> Not property damage! We can't possibly go that far!
Anyone can go that far. The question is if it’s smart. The answer is it’s not. Acting out one’s need for machismo on a good cause is just selfish.
If I were a Flock PR person, I’d be waiting for someone to pull a stunt like this. (Better: they shoot it.)
The point of civil disobedience is to get arrested. That's what calls attention to the injustice of the thing being protested against.
The point of resistance is commonly to harm the counterparty in a fashion that the perpetrator finds morally acceptable such as to disincentivize them not convince them.
Vietnamese vs US Grunts not cute useless protestors holding signs that threaten to hold different signs longer.
You're both partially right, and that highlights the difference between nonviolent and violent resistance. You are incorrect in saying that a resistance is always trying to disincentivize the counterparty. Even in your example, the NVA didn't overrun their counterparty (the US military); they convinced enough of the US voting public (which is very much a separate entity from the US military) that "Peace with honor" was a viable, preferable option.
That would be detectable by the FAA and they would send the FBI after you, unless you used a junk toy drone but that would not cover much distance between charges.
Because destroying them sends a different message. People want them gone, not merely disabled. They're not joking or messing around with drones and tempera about it. Using a firearm to wreck the camera lens before tearing the whole thing down would be nice though.
The should disable them all in an area and pile them on a platter in a public space. Like a CiCi's takeover.
>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.
This must be the most hi-tech solution to a low tech problem I've seen this week ;)
> soaked with tempera paint Or even etching liquid, then you need to replace the lens.
I wouldn’t suggest doing that, it will result in more regulation restricting drones. I joined before few workshops that included the government too, and there were discussions about requiring a whole license every time you modify the drone, not limited to the airframe, but the flight purpose and payload. So you can imagine in the future, modding or repurposing your drone could be a “federal crime” if you don’t go and re-license the drone every time you change the payload.
Shooting them with a paintball gun might be a lot simpler and has the same effect. Just needs paint that's a bit harder to remove
Silly string is fast, cheap, easy, and fun when it freezes onto the camera in colder environments.
Maybe some spray foam?
Seems like it would produce a lot of litter on the ground before covering up the lens adequately.
“All it takes is a tiny drone”
Alright you buy one for me and I’ll consider it
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
> The real issue is prosecutors who refuse to incarcerate repeat offenders.
Sometimes judges contribute as well.
The real problem with prosecutors is that they don't want to prosecute. When I was on the grand jury in my city a couple of years ago, there was a slow morning and the assistant DA said that there were about 4000 cases per year and that they brought 30 of those to trial. He didn't think anything of it, for him it was a story about how they loved trials because "they were so much fun". But if they were so much fun, why are less than 1% of cases going to trial?
Plea deals.
Plea deals subvert justice for both those innocent who are bullied into pleading out, and for those who are wickedly guilty and get a big discount on the penalty exacted. Plea deals give the system extra capacity for prosecution, encouraging the justice system to fill the excess capacity, while simultaneously giving an underfunded system that doesn't have enough capacity the appearance of being able to handle the load. Bad all around.
Any evidence of what you're saying about prosecutors and video surveillance?
there exists evidence proving that a fraction of individuals commit the majority of violent crime. thus, incarcerating those particular individuals would inherently reduce the majority of violent crime. is something missing from this equation?
> is something missing from this equation?
Decades of historical evidence to the contrary.
If you’d like to have an informed opinion, at least engage with the academic material. Otherwise you come off sounding naïve, insisting that complex problems have simple solutions.
Edit: maybe my ears are a bit sensitive, but I can’t help but hear a faint whistle in the wind, maybe only at a frequency a dog could hear. But no, surely not here in gentlemanly company.
What evidence to the contrary? 1% of the US population does commit over 60% of violent crime: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3969807/
That’s not what I’m disputing, of course. I’m disputing that the grandparent’s assertion that if we (by your stats) simply lock up 1% of the population that violent crime would drop by 60%.
I mean, trivially, using our brains for a nanosecond, what if that 1% of the population is almost always 16-18 year olds when they commit those violent crimes. The 16-18 demographic is roughly 4% of the US population (Google). That would mean locking up 1 in 4 high school students for 6-20 of their most formative years, and thrusting them back into society with a “Mission Accomplished” banner hanging behind you.
Play with the numbers a bit (maybe it’s 1 in 20), but the point stands. Using imprisonment to try to quarantine a demographic that is perceived as irreparably violent is a barbaric, sophomoric idea that has very little evidence of success in the modern era.
Don't jail criminals because maybe they're young, that's your argument? Sounds like a something that's already part of the sentencing policy, leniency of first time offenders.
I was tipsy when I typed that out, tbh. But yeah, there’s a strong case to be made that jailing youth while simultaneously divesting in their communities causes a pretty significant hollowing out and sense of hopelessness.
The reason I brought up youth is because, unsurprisingly, most violent crime is performed by people who don’t have a fully-formed prefrontal cortex. Feelings of invincibility and a sense of not having much to lose.
oh so you did have a point , why didn't you just say so ! do you have any hard evidence to back you assertion that the majority of recidivism occurs in minors ? coz that would definitely make for a better discussion than calling each other names
There are two ideas here - locking up actual criminals and locking up people who happen to fit the pattern of a criminal even without committing any crime. You're arguing against the latter, but I don't think anybody was proposing that.
you are accusing me of virtue signalling without discussing the evidence. this in itself is a virtue signal. I'm not trying to insult you by saying this ... you are behaving hypocritically. lots of people don't treat that gently, I genuinely suggest you be careful towards whom you act that way. if you have an actual point I'm happy to chat about it, however my tolerance of snippy snappy rhetoric is running low
Nah man I’m going to continue to proudly call out people who skirt the line of racism by advocating for the same policies that racists have championed since the fall of the Confederacy. Say it with your chest next time, there’s a reason that it’s not tolerated in polite company. I guess maybe some of YCombinator would enjoy it though, judging by their investments and the rhetoric of those they are associated with.
it sounds to me like you would prefer moral grandstanding about north american politics instead of sharing discussion. not interested, thanks for the opportunity to practice my patience
I read that as questioning whether better evidence would actually help. Which I assume is a reference to some prosecutors ignoring certain crimes as a matter of policy, for example there was news a bit ago about CA choosing to ignore shoplifting under some amount.
>"The real issue is prosecutors who refuse to incarcerate repeat offenders"
Sure. US prosecutors are so lenient that the US is the capital of incarceration
This is literally true and you think you are being snarky but just look ignorant.
Ignorant of what may I ask? Also I do not "think".
I can't tell which element(s) of the previous post you are criticizing.
Depends a lot on the city/state. Check super blue cities like Seattle or San Francisco, and the people there complain that the justice system doesn't work as repeat offenders are let go, for one reason or another.
The big incarceration states are most likely deep red states.
I live in Canada, to me the US is a whole. I am pretty sure one can find close to crimeless areas there along with something totally opposite. does not matter from the outside.
The incarceration rate of every single US state is higher than that of every country in the European continent except Belarus, Russia and Turkey. Each state's incarceration rate is also higher than that of every country in the OECD (a club of mostly rich countries) except Chile, Costa Rica and Turkey.
Of the exceptions I have listed, Turkey has the highest incarceration rate of 366 per 100k. Even so, it is still lower than that of 41 states, falling between Hawaii (367) and Connecticut (326).
Source: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/global/2024.html
We spend $80 billion a year on incarceration in the US, and have the highest incarceration rate in the world. Your plan increases both. Do you honestly think that if we spend $160 billion or $240 billion a year and double or triple our incarcerated population that we'd solve crime?
Look at places and countries with low crime. They don't have the most Flock cameras, the most prisoners, or the most powerful surveillance evidence because while those may solve a crime, they don't solve crime as a whole.
I was at work the other day and we were talking about my mouse problem in my basement. My coworker asked how many mouse traps I had.
I said 74.
74?! That's way to many mouse traps. No one would ever need that many mouse traps.
But sir, I haven't told you how many mice I have.
The number of incarcerated individuals is not a relevant statistic if you're also not including the number of criminals there are.
But why is criminality higher in the US?
Are they working?
If your 74 traps solve your problem and in a month you have no more mice, then congratulations.
But it sounds like rather than buying more and more mouse traps, you should find and fix the underlying cause.
It's wild that you think the problem with the US is too low of an incarceration rate. 25% of all prisoners in the world are in the US
It can be true (and likely is) that both:
a) much more time and effort should be focused on catching and stopping the most persistent repeat offenders (sometimes by locking them up); and
b) orders of magnitude too many Americans are currently in prison.
From the outside, it looks like the US's society and culture fosters an unusually large criminal class compared to other western countries? If people had access to education, healthcare, jobs that aren't shipped overseas, minimum wage that wasn't laughable, etc, there wouldn't be so much problems? Arguing over severity of punishment while ignoring systemic issues is silly.
Non-developed countries do not have functional law enforcement and they are highly corrupt, so any statistics outside of developed countries should be ignored.
For developed countries, none but America have such high levels of immigration nor the racial diversity America has. It is much easier to convince society to promote high-trust empathetic solutions when society is racially homogenous and shares cultural background. It’s impossible to compare America to any European country, although soon it may be possible if immigration continues
How are you measuring that? There are plenty of developed countries with a higher immigrant share like Switzerland and Australia. If you're taking about visible minorities then Canada has a higher proportion of the population.
I don't think you can make a facile pronouncement that European countries and ethnically and culturally homogenous any longer. We can't have a High-trust society in the USA when politicians scapegoat immigrants, in spite of their being more law-abiding on the whole. We can't avoid having a demoralized populace when corporate funded politicians of both parties drag their feet instead of giving citizens of the most productive and wealthy country in the history of the world parity with less wealthy countries, in terms of healthcare, education, housing, retirement and lack of life precariousness, like going into bankruptcy over medical debt...
If the only crime--at all--in America was rape and murder, America would still have a higher incarceration rate than Germany.
America has a lot of criminals and therefore America needs a lot of incarceration.
Who do you think those people are that are incarcerated in the USA?
I come across this rather frequently among people from sheltered backgrounds like those who graduated from mom and dad taking care of them, all the way through to Mega Corp/university taking care of them, and absolutely cannot fathom why everyone doesn’t just eat cake.
I have a working theory that this effect, whatever one wants to call it, of people being too abstracted from reality, is ultimately the source of collapse of all kinds of organizations of humans… including civilizations.
It is, for example also why America can have so many vile warmongering people, because not only do they not have to lead troops into battle, have their children drafted into the front lines, or pay for the invariable disaster and murder they perpetrated and orchestrated; but in the most grotesque way, they profit from it and immensely; usually also combining it with other types of fraud like “money printing”, i.e., counterfeiting, which they use to plunder the wealth they accumulated through murder, mayhem, and fraud.
This isn't a new complaint. People have been identifying this group as the source of a lot of bad stuff at least as far back as Marx. The petty or petite bourgeoisie, the professional managerial class, Karens, the name changes with the times. But the constant derision for these groups is rooted in people observing that these groups are disposed to the sort of "driving society off a cliff" behavior you are listing examples of.
The real problem is people who don't want to be victims of crime, not the people doing the crime?
Now you're getting it. You have exactly identified the problem.
Instead of identifying and addressing the real problems--mass unemployment, homelessness, hopelessness--your dystopic "solution" is simply more and bigger jails, more and better armed cops with surveillance cameras attached, more laws, more weapons, more bondage and discipline, more "you will do what I say or else."
Doesn't work. Never works.
Read the essay "Fate of Empires" by Sir John Glubb to see how things this time are not in fact any different than what came before.
> Who do you think those people are that are incarcerated in the USA?
Say it then cowardly racist. Stop hiding behind rhetorical devices to justify an institution that has its historical origins in slave patrols
Or maybe repeat offenders can be put in jail, and other people could be let out. Just a random thought that occurred to me.
I agree. There needs to be a non racist president that just sweeps in and does a El Salvador type cleanup of the streets. I bet the 80%+ of normal black people in crime ridden cities like Baltimore, St. Louis, Memphis, Detroit, New Orleans would be in full support. Let’s be honest, young black gangsters are the main criminal element in these places. Trump can’t do this because he is a piece of shit with no integrity.
> There needs to be a non racist president that just sweeps in and does a El Salvador type cleanup of the streets.
Sounds like a certain, controversial federal law enforcement agency in the US
Except ICE has hired poorly trained far right good for nothings.
El Salvador doesn't have the type of Constitutional rights that America has. That type of sweep would not be legal.
And that doesn't even get into jurisdictional issues. The federal government doesn't have jurisdiction over local crimes that do not cross interstate boundaries.
You can get video evidence without sending it to a massive, opaque national database of non-suspects.
What is crime anymore when a felon is the president?
What is a felony anymore when the felony is "submitted bad paperwork"?
I love how we in Africa can finally see open corruption in US. You guys can't be high and mighty anymore. You are one of us now.
Fuck me, that is a deeply depressing sick burn.
As a Southern American I love it too.
Every single one of my ancestors who were in the war--except one--fought for the Confederacy in the War Between the States. (Or the War of Lincoln's Aggression, according to some. Yankees call it the "Civil War.")
Going further back, my Cherokee forefathers (the Chickamauga) were equally unimpressed by what they saw and experienced of this entity (they viewed it as a malignant tumor) that calls itself the "United" States of America.
I believe my ancestors are envious that I get to see the day when the truth of the Empire of Lies is finally exposed in front of all the world.
And what was the paperwork about you disingenuous asshole?
What was it about? By the time the Democrats were crowing that he was a felon, no one eve remembered. Did Trump see or sign this paperwork? Didn't much matter to anyone. If he saw it or signed it, would he have known what it was? Did he read it first? Probably not.
With a tiny little wall of text, you might even manage to tell me why you think the paperwork was so horrible that he should be in prison for it, I suppose. But no one would read your wall of text, because if it takes you a wall of text to explain it, they figure it's all bullshit anyway. And this is why he won in 2024, and why his successor will win in 2028, and likely in 2032. It's why this November is going to shock you even though there's virtually no room left for surprises. Just remember, it's like 96% certain Hillary's going to beat him if you need to fantasize about a better time...
To answer the question you avoided. The "paperwork" was classified materials that make the Hillary's emails outrage of magats look like nothing at all in comparison.
No. The so-called 34 felonies were about "falsifying business records". So you don't even know, that figures. You should've left room for being able to claim I'm wrong with a snarky non-answer.
You lie thru your teeth. Trump is far more guilty of mishandling classified material than let's say Hillary Clinton .... And in his own words. She belongs in prison. What does trump deserve then?
In June 2023, a federal grand jury indicted Trump on 37 counts, including violating the Espionage Act, false statements, and obstruction, regarding documents kept at Mar-a-Lago.
You are hitting on the fundamental difference in political views.
Half of this country believes problems are systemic and can be fixed. The other half believes they are a natural consequence of culture, race, and invisible flying creatures that tempt you to do bad things.
> Half of this country believes problems are systemic and can be fixed.
So then why don't they vote for the party that offers systemic solutions? Oh, right, because neither corporate party offers such.
We can't elect systemic solutions when the election and education processes are systemically hijacked by capital interests.
100% agree. Interestingly, the only politicians who talk about removing Citizens United or even just strengthening consumer protections are considered "far-left" in this country.
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!!
Do you have a link to the agenda? The only Monday meeting I see on the mountain view site is a Board of Library Trustees meeting
It’s listed on the agenda here as “Automated License Plate Reader Contract.” https://mountainview.legistar.com/MeetingDetail.aspx?ID=1352...
Always trust anonymous accounts to tell you how to organize!
Here's a list of Flock's investors:
- Andreessen Horowitz
- Greenoaks Capital
- Bedrock Capital
- Meritech Capital
- Matrix Partners
- Sands Capital
- Founders Fund
- Kleiner Perkins
- Tiger Global
- Y Combinator
I am absolutely shocked
flock safety were in one of y combinators incubator programs but to be fair, saying you want to make a camera company to improve public safety but then being used in a dystopian way... well it should have been foreseeable shouldn't it? Im conflicted in this, I love camera tech and its probably not going away any time soon, but wonder how it could be used responsibly for public safety only.
They actively WANT the dystopian surveillance state.
Lot of money to be made for anyone who gets to pull the strings in such a state.
Yeah I suspect defence-oriented startups massively out-perform most categories
Source? That’s a substantial claim on a platform run by Y Combinator.
Y Combinator's CEO promotes and praises them almost every day.
Pretty clear already that Ycombinator runs this very site as a community fueled decoy for their actual values (or complete lack thereof).
Id argue they run this site as a forum for tech discussions, because that alone gives them a huge boost to their image and name recognition, without any need for meddling.
Well, that’s what I meant for community-fueled decoy. We’re all, me included, our own unique bredd of useful idiots.
More like a crowd-sources think-tank and SEO magnet.
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.
Why is the market growing for stolen surveillance cameras in Brazil?
Because they're easy to steal.
That's honestly kinda beautiful. If they want more useful/advanced cameras, it just makes them more worth stealing
Who is buying?
Soon, nobody, because they're stolen too often! Or rather, it'll reach some natural equilibrium.
This will start happening to Ring cameras as well soon if it's not already.
Hello! You are being recor--hey what are you doing stop that, I'm afraid, Dave, I'm afraid...
Yeah right. Destroying cameras owned by a HOA in a wealthy area is one thing, destroying people's private cameras is another. A good way to get in a fight, though, if you're into that.
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.
Is funny reading this from the UK because this ship sailed here years ago, you just have to assume if you drive a car anywhere except small roads in the countryside you are potentially being tracked by ANPR.
Of course, actual serious criminals who are actively committing serious crimes just use fake plates so they aren't affected, it only really helps catch people who commit crimes on the spur of the moment (while also obviously eroding every "normal" person's privacy)
It also encourages councils to regularly change their road signs for side roads, to catch suddenly new trespassers in real time.
> except small roads in the countryside you are potentially being tracked by ANPR.
They do put them specifically whereever those roads join major roads though. Meanwhile the crime stats in the UK make chilling reading, as the focus on replacing Police officers with cameras, replacing courts with... nothing has lead to many crimes skyrocketing, especially those that are not associated with driving a car.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeand...
Yep, I mean "proper" countryside - I grew up out in the villages (all little B roads and unclassified roads) and it's still like the Wild West out there really.
A lot of people still habitually drink drive (not getting completely smashed, but a few pints at a country pub then drive home) and realistically as long as you don't crash you could do that for decades and probably get away with it.
There's almost no cameras and also almost no actual police
There's almost no cameras and also almost no actual police
That is starting to change. Porch pirates incentivized a lot of people to invest in cameras and placing them in discrete locations. Some are getting clever making them look like owl nest boxes on poles, bird feeders and other benign boring objects.
Big difference though is that in the UK these cameras are publically owned, and the data feeds into a publically owned ANPR database. Whereas Flock cameras are owned by flock and all the ANPR records are stored on their own infrastructure
In the UK these cameras are everywhere.
We have (a relatively recent phenomenon) elected Police and Crime Commissioners. They are elected with a tiny turnout. Next election in your area see if a candidate is anti-surveillance and run a campaign to support them. 10,000 extra votes to any of the mainstream candidates will get them elected.
Another addition to this thread of things that will never happen.
PCCs are being scrapped and their role reverted to national government
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c93d4dd3l3lo
Party because people haven’t got a clue what they do, partly as they have very little power, and party as it’s just a popularity vote on the rosette.
Personally I’m more worried about ring door bells, but I’ve spent years being told I’m paranoid.
> In the UK these cameras are everywhere.
We don’t have as many (per capita) as the US.
I don’t believe Flock cameras are used anywhere in the UK?
Pretty much all public cctv cameras that are installed on the side of public roads, like Flock are in the US, are publically owned, either by Police forces, Local Councils or National highways.
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."
False dichotomy. Both are bad.
Pales in comparison to the disgruntlement around the ultra low emission zone around London https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cz7y2xyxg7vo
> The explosion damaged a van opposite and blew out the tyre of a car as well as damaging a wall, front porch, shed and a Wendy house.
> Shrapnel also shot through a passing car into a passenger seat, while another piece of metal damaged the window frame of a child's bedroom.
Wtf. That was a “homemade” bomb to bring down one camera.
In US law, if the camera is doing something unconstitutional, is damaging it a crime? Genuine question.
Almost certainly. Random people are not the legal arbiters of what’s unconstitutional.
I can’t say I disagree with what they’re doing, but it’s absolutely vigilante justice, not legal.
It seems odd though. Don't you have the right to bear arms, with some idea that it is needed to prevent the government from exercising excessive powers over you, yet actually doing anything with those guns to protect yourself from tyranny is a crime?
I remember hearing once that the constitution, having been written by a bunch of insurrectionists, intended people to have the power to keep the government out of their business. It seems they have lost that?
> Don't you have the right to bear arms, with some idea that it is needed to prevent the government from exercising excessive powers over you, yet actually doing anything with those guns to protect yourself from tyranny is a crime?
Because when it comes to that, the government is a failed state and no one will be worried about what’s legal.
It’s not meant to be a means of legal recourse, it’s a last resort.
> It’s not meant to be a means of legal recourse, it’s a last resort.
Guns are a first line defense for millions of people. A lawyer with a briefcase and a judge wearing a gaudy robe+wig is not a defense at all.
Though the imagery of it would be funny of blasting each of those out of a cannon.
Even the government agrees, issuing a firearm to their officers who go out into the field (read: where everyone else is).
> Guns are a first line defense for millions of people
In failed states, sure.
In many countries police officers may not even carry guns all the time.
The gun and violence situation we have here in the US is not normal for first world countries.
> In failed states, sure.
If you're describing the US as a failed state then we have nothing to talk about. Notwithstanding the fact the essence of the state at question even being relevant.
Enjoy your day.
Next they can work on the Adhan speakers
Wait til they hear about Obvio https://www.obvio.ai/
Ultra-based. Fuck these creepy things and anyone who installs them.
Speed cameras next. Just another privacy violating device that is also a revenue source for irresponsible local leaders.
Hmm your comment made me curious so I looked into it. I guess the error rates are so incredibly high it seems likely they aren't "errors" at all.
https://reason.com/2022/02/03/unreliable-speed-cameras-line-...
> In Chicago, where speed cameras are abundant, the camera program improperly gave out over $2.4 million in fines from 2013 to 2015. Using a random sample analysis, the Chicago Tribune estimated the number of bad tickets to be somewhere around 110,000. The erroneous fines were issued in areas without proper speed limit signs or during times when the cameras should have been turned off. (Cameras near parks and schools operate within a specific timeframe.) The Chicago Tribune found that over half the cameras in use were giving out faulty speeding tickets.
> Unsurprisingly, the misuse of speed cameras has also become a massive source of revenue for local government. In Chicago, 300 of the city's speed cameras would bring in about $15 million each year.
> In March, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot lowered the speed limit threshold for speed cameras to trigger a citation. Cameras now trigger when a driver goes over the limit by 6 miles per hour, rather than 10 miles per hour, the previous threshold.
I think we need to make it easier for people to fight back against automatic tickets like this. The onus should be on the state not the individual. And individuals should still be entitled to their data
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.
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
> 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.
A significant number of people do not seem to want copper thieves, porch pirates, and organized retail thieves in jail.
If it requires constant public surveillance to catch them then yeah they can stay out of jail.
Was porch piracy, copper theft and shoplifting impossible to catch pre-flock?
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.
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.
Since when are warrants required for footage of people in public? Does a red light camera need a judge's warrant before it snaps a photos of a car running the light?
When it violates reasonable expectations of privacy. Being in public isn't a get out of jail free card. I mean, I could put up a camera right outside your house. It is 'public streets' monitoring your coming to your house is the sort of thing that does require a warrant.
> I don't want to let fugitives go without punishment.
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."
Follow the money.
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.