"Thankfully, we live in a beautifully democratic and capitalistic society where we can fight in court."
Of course he's "thankful" for that, since in our "beautifully democratic and capitalistic" society, Flock can use their $658 million of VC funding [1] to wage lawfare against the have-nots with their armies of lobbyists and lawyers. [2]
It isn't even just about money. It's more apparent than ever that freedom, democracy, justice, human rights in this country are increasily reserved for those with the right political alignments.
Why not? They hold all the cards and have aligned one of the most powerful governments in the world with them, while wielding enough money to make almost any nation, let alone individual, more inclined toward doing what they need. They will only become more powerful.
Authoritarian regimes don’t run on facts. They run on the primacy of Authority. Cameras record factual information. Facts are inconvenient for Authority. You know, 1984 Department of Truth style.
Yes, that if, the most powerful government stays intact. But as it turns out, tech CEOs want to dissolve the nation state and its government to implement their vision of a utopia. The same nation state, the same government that protect their interests and assets, and make lawfare possible in the first place.
I know about these plans, but even if they end up happening to their fullest extent, I don't see why people are so unanimously predicting that they'll definitely fumble the bag. By the time this can happen, they will almost certainly have the most advanced weaponry available and enormous groups of people working on defending them. Again, they can buy anything. In their dream world, power descends directly from them, making their governments obsolete. The direct power of the governments isn't just erased, it'll transition into their hands.
Cards can always be taken with violence. Chaos is progression to a state of all versus all, where the most important thing is having the biggest wrench: https://xkcd.com/538/.
And they will almost certainly have the biggest wrench. Before you consider the sheer difficulty of making mass violence happen (especially in a world where tech can be used to regulate a sufficient portion of people's worldviews as required), at some point they'll probably just have the upper hand militarily. As military tech gets better, wealth will be able to shift directly into physical power, amplifying their abilities against a comparatively powerless populace.
Yes the rich have "all the cards" but the thing about societal reorganization is things get completely flip-flopped and the fact society recognizes you as owning a mansion and a screw factory today doesn't mean that they won't recognize Castro's lieutenant as controlling it tomorrow.
Possessions that are "yours" are only yours insofar as you can either defend it or others recognize it as yours. Thus you end up with situations like "Barbeque" in Haiti owning the streets and much of the rich's land/assets are now magically in the hands of barbeque or his crew and whatever money that one thought they could use to resist that turned out to not be their money anymore. The "rich" thus still hold all the cards but who is rich and who isn't isn't the same as when it started.
> Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov (Russian: Николай Иванович Ежов, IPA: [nʲɪkɐˈlaj ɪˈvanəvʲɪtɕ (j)ɪˈʐof]; 1 May 1895 – 4 February 1940), also spelt Ezhov, was a Soviet secret police official under Joseph Stalin who was head of the NKVD from 1936 to 1938, at the height of the Great Purge. Yezhov organized mass arrests, torture, and executions during the Great Purge, but he fell out of favour with Stalin and was arrested, subsequently admitting in a confession to a range of anti-Soviet activity including "unfounded arrests" during the Purge. He was executed in 1940 along with others who were blamed for the Purge.
This guy was head of the secret police, didn’t help him out when he was purged aka murdered.
Apple has more cash reserves on hand than most countries do and yet its CEO had to scramble to stand behind Trump during the inauguration and offer a million-dollar tribute to stay in his good graces. Power > money.
The rich are increasingly uninterested in keeping up appearances.
And really, why should they? We've learned now that there was actually a worldwide network of child rapists purchasing girls from other wealthy child traffickers in positions of power in seemingly every Western nation, and the consensus thus far is to do exactly nothing about it.
I still argue that our current capitalist system is nothing more than an extension of the Norman system. Only capitalist executives see even less of the humanity of their ‘customers’ and the damage from their policies/maximal extraction than medieval lords saw in the serfs of the village that their policies/maximal extraction impacted.
Moments later (~1:13) he also said "we aren't forcing Flock on anyone"
False, he is forcing Flock on EVERYONE
No one has permitted themselves to be surveilled. And no, under the radar agreements with local cops and govts do NOT constitute my permission to be surveilled. If they want to go in with fully informed referendums in each community, then I'd accept it. But that is not Flock's business model.
> If they want to go in with fully informed referendums in each community, then I'd accept it.
I might accept it for this specific case. But, in general, just because the majority wants to do something doesn't mean it's legitimate to force everyone to accept it.
> No one has permitted themselves to be surveilled
As much as I dislike Flock, this is bad logic. There's no such thing as opting out of surveillance in public spaces. Public spaces are defined by being public, in that everyone (even governments/corporations!) is free to observe everyone else in that same setting.
So in reality, everyone has permitted themselves to be surveilled, purely through the act of being in public.
This idea that there's some kind of difference between me watching you in public and Flock watching you in public is, quite frankly, bogus.
I can't imagine that the authors of the Constitution predicted always on, AI enabled facial and license plate recognition on every street corner in America.
If this is what they thought was possible, why write the 4th Amendment?
Unreasonable search and overbearing government was one of the key issues of the American Revolution.
There's a ton of difference between a random person noting my presence at a single point in space-time and a commercial entity tracking and storing my movements all the time.
Being okay with people watching me in public does not imply being okay with someone aggregating the information about my whereabouts 24/7 even though it's "the same" information.
Btw it's a fallacy similar to the one debunked in "what colour are your bits". The context matters, not just the abstract information.
This is an unfortunate thing about a whole lot of legal precedent in the US.
Courts made a pretty reasonable set of tradeoffs around the 4th amendment for search warrant vs. subpoena, police officers observing you, etc.
During the 19th century.
Unfortunately, modern data processing completely undermines a lot of the rationale about how reasonable and intrusive various things are. Before, cops couldn't follow and surveil everyone; blanket subpoenas to get millions of peoples' information weren't possible because the information wasn't concentrated in one entity's hands and compliance would have been impossible; etc.
>This idea that there's some kind of difference between me watching you in public and Flock watching you in public is, quite frankly, bogus.
The idea that me an individual observing you, and a large, well funded company allied with the US government observing you has no difference, quite frankly, leads me to conclude* you are arguing in bad faith.
You can make an ideological argument that is the case, but not one based on fact and reality.
> This idea that there's some kind of difference between me watching you in public and Flock watching you in public is, quite frankly, bogus.
If you followed me around all day taking photographs of my every move for no other reason than you felt like it, I would very likely have recourse via stalking and harassment laws.
There is no difference to me that some company does it via technology.
If I'm interesting enough to get a warrant for surveillance of my activities - fair game. Private investigators operate under a set of reasonable limits and must be licensed in most (all?) states for this reason as well.
It's quite obvious laws have simply not caught up with the state of modern technology that allows for the type of data collection and thus mass-surveillance that is now possible today. If you went back 50 years ago and asked anyone on the street if it was okay that every time they left the house their travel history would be recorded indefinitely they would talk to you about communist dystopias that could never happen here due to the 2nd amendment.
But Flock doesn't "follow you around"? It's fixed location cameras. If you avoid the locations, you avoid the cameras, and thus the tracking.
> There is no difference to me that some company does it via technology.
I feel like it's telling that no one has yet taken this logic to court. I think that means that while there may be no difference to you there is a difference according to the law. This gets at your later point.
Speaking of:
> If you went back 50 years ago and asked anyone on the street if it was okay that every time they left the house their travel history would be recorded indefinitely they would talk to you about communist dystopias that could never happen here due to the 2nd amendment.
I think you're doing a subtle motte-and-bailey here. As far as I'm aware, Flock has strict retention policies, numbering in the low single-digit months (Google says 30 days "by default"). There is no "recorded indefinitely" here, which significantly changes the characteristics of the argument here. This is roughly on par with CCTV systems, to the best of my knowledge.
I don't disagree that laws haven't caught up yet, but I also think a lot of the arguments against Flock are rife with hyperbolic arguments like this that do meaningfully misrepresent their model. I think this leads to bad solutioning, as a consequence.
I'd much rather have good solutions here than bad ones, because ALPRs and other "surveillance technologies" do drive improvements in crime clearance rates/outcomes, so they shouldn't be banned--just better controlled/audited/overseen
they could instead be limiting flock to private places.
> This idea that there's some kind of difference between me watching you in public and Flock watching you in public is, quite frankly, bogus.
if you followed me everywhere and took pictures of me everywhwre i went outside from my door in the morning to my door in the evening, id want to get a restraining order on you as a stalker. this is stalking
> This idea that there's some kind of difference between me watching you from a park bench in public and hundreds of thousands of clones of me watching you from every street corner in public is, quite frankly, bogus
To paraphrase the quote, quantity has a quality of its own.
Mountain View recently turned off their Flock installs after they discovered Flock had enabled data sharing without notice and other agencies were searching through MV data.
https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/privacy/2026/02/flock-came...
> A separate “statewide lookup” feature had also been active on 29 of the city’s 30 cameras since the initial installation, running for 17 straight months until Mountain View found and disabled it on January 5. Through that tool, more than 250 agencies that had never signed any data agreement with Mountain View ran an estimated 600,000 searches over a single year, according to local paper the Mountain View Voice, which first uncovered the issue after filing a public records request.
A different town (Staunton, VA) also turned of their Flock installs after their CEO sent out an email claming:
https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/flock-ceo-goes-...
> The attacks aren't new. You've been dealing with this for forever, and we've been dealing with this since our founding, from the same activist groups who want to defund the police, weaken public safety, and normalize lawlessness. Now, they're producing YouTube videos with misleading headlines.
I'd like to see a database of municipalities that have passed an ordinance banning these systems (including 12 hour drone flyovers like they've been doing in Camden, NJ; drones are fine for specific or exigent circumstances, but flying them systematically is concerning!).
In fact, if anyone knows of municipalities that have done so let me know. I'd like to spend tourist money in those places that I haven't been able to spend in authoritarian-leaning locales as a reward for valuing freedom over suffocation of the constitution for little to no benefit.
"...and then unfortunately there is terroristic organizations like DeFlock, whose primary motivation is chaos. They are closer to Antifa than they are anything else."
"We're not forcing Flock on anyone..."
It is a short 1:32 video, I encourage people to watch it for themselves.
I thought DeFlock was just publishing locations of cameras and lawfully convincing local governments to not use Flock, primarily through FOIA requests.
Twenty-some years back, I attended a talk by a classicist who was talking about how the Romans, Caesar specifically I think, basically used "pirate" the same way.
Oh so Antifa is a single formal political party with card carrying members, a clear leadership structure and participation in mainstream public political life? I had no idea. Your analogy makes perfect sense. Where is the Antifa national headquarters?
"Despite the name, The Party of Peace and Love is actually authoritarian and horribly repressive, as you can see from the millions of people they've killed."
"Despite the name, Antifa is not just 'anti-fascist' but is actually _________"
__an identity claimed by people who are taking direct action against what they perceive as fascism, but currently more often the term is applied as an unthinking boogeyman by right wing authoritarians__
It's wild what the perception is in the right echo chamber right now. I was talking with my brother, who I love, but who, through his practicing Christian faith is essentially pulled into this right-wing cultural environment and propaganda machine. So he was making the point that the politics in the US have drifted so much more to the left that the right is actually the center. My jaw dropped off the floor. How do these thing even get propagated? It's borderline ridiculous and I don't know how this firehouse of bullshit can ever be countered.
Theres no organisation but they are well organised in a distributed sense. Horizontally, theres lots of tradecraft and opsec details that get spread around to help people fight. Thing is, theres no central pillar you can break to stop that spread.
What gets me is how right wing protesters specifically eschew good opsec. "mask off rallys", visible tattoos etc. They love the police state and then look like idiots when that big police state they demanded rounds them up with absolute ease because they took selfies with their swastikas out during a protest.
I live in Portland. I've met many people that label themselves antifa. They're just protestors that are willing to be a little more aggro. That's literally it.
So when people talk about antifa as if it was the left wing equivalent of Osama Bin Laden's terror network, it's a self report they're forming their views based on strawman style propaganda, not engaging with the reality of it.
Right, but that makes it pretty much impossible to stop anyone from claiming to be antifa or anyone accusing someone of being antifa... a lot of people will accuse anyone who is doing anything they don't like as being antifa
I Googles that exact string and I can't say that I see even enough cases to count on one hand. Do you have any concrete examples that you think are representative for the behavior that you are referencing?
Googling “earth is flat” nets you thousands of results from very passionate people willing to share their experience and expertise. (I just did to verify)
Which SPECIFIC persons are being silenced and which SPECIFIC topics were they attempting to speak on?
It’s a huge diff between someone being ”silenced” for speaking their minds on bike paths versus being ”silenced” for indirectly or even directly promoting a new holocaust. And from your vague responses it is not clear.
A movement is better terminology than an organization, fair.
But okay - I'm confused what sources you would accept? There are "Antifa" groups on social media that literally advocate for doing this, I've seen it first-hand.
Ah yes, when the first result on Google is from a group known as a right wing think tank...
>American Enterprise Institute, a prominent center-right think tank in Washington, D.C., that promotes free enterprise, limited government, and individual liberty through research and policy advocacy in areas like economics, foreign policy, and social studies
I too can get paid think tanks to publish hundreds of reports on how communists are taking over America... Doesn't mean communists are actually taking over America.
If you don't trust a center-right think tank with video evidence, but you're advocating for a far-left movement... you need to see more center.
I've literally seen, with my own eyes, people of this movement shut down speech on my own college campus so many times. Probably everybody I've ever known at any college (Harvard, BU, BC, Northeastern, Middlebury, UC Berkeley, NYU, Columbia, etc) has seen this first-hand. How are you denying such an obvious reality?
> Antifa is commonly known as an ironically fascist organization that uses violence and intimidation to silence speakers — it's like how the "Democratic People's Republic of Korea" is not really democratic.
That's not "commonly known", that's the spin you'll get from the right-wing in the US who just happen to have heavy fascist tendencies.
"Antifa" is understood as violent communist street thugs by most huge swaths of people. You may not think that's accurate, but that's the definition he is calling to mind.
That's the intent but most people know it's not true. It's right up there with "woke" and "progressive" as generic, shapeless, boogeyman words. No real meaning besides "something bad".
Pretty sure most who claim the mantle of “Antifa” would welcome that Communist label, and plenty would endorse violence if it’s against the “right” people, so if the shoe fits…
They're kinda famous for punching people (physically) unprovoked at this point. There was a whole discourse around it that comes back up pretty regularly, I don't know how you could miss it.
The air quotes around 'right' are interesting there. Yes, violence against Nazis and Fascists is acceptable. Do you disagree? I thought it was pretty much settled, we did a whole world war about it.
"A majority of individuals involved are anarchists, communists, and socialists, although some social democrats also participate in the antifa movement. The name antifa and the logo with two flags representing anarchism and communism are derived from the German antifa movement." [0]
Ah yes, I too conflate bills written by organized lobbyists with a loosely affiliated group that says American shouldn't be ran by Nazi's. The Nazi's running America get very mad about that and ensure to flood the airwaves with how cities in the US are mile wide smoking craters due to people who don't like authoritarians.
The point GP was making, which holds as a general rule, is that simply adopting a moniker does not necessarily mean that it accurately describes you. Your argument pre-supposed that just because Antifa self-describes as antifascist, it inherently is, and that the CEO was expressing an opposition to the concept of antifascism, rather than simply expressing opposition to the specific group.
If Antifa’s record speaks for itself, then you don’t need to play these kinds of word games. If some CEO spoke unflatteringly of The Red Cross or Habitat For Humanity, that would say more about them than anything, not because they have virtuous sounding names (though they admittedly do) but because they’ve established a specific track record of public service.
I don't even know what antifa _is_ anymore, honestly. I only see it used as a boogie man by the right in discourse online.
But I _do_ know that when someone tags someone as "antifa" they are making a political statement and aligning themselves with a certain group that perceives "antifa" a certain way. "See, I hate those damn' antifa terrorists, I'm in the same camp as you! Please help my company make money!"
> The point GP was making, which holds as a general rule, is that simply adopting a moniker does not necessarily mean that it accurately describes you.
I'm deeply curious why you think someone would identify as an anti-fascist if they were not, in fact, anti-fascist. Do you think they just really like the flag logo or...?
>Ah yes, I too conflate bills written by organized lobbyists with a loosely affiliated group that says American shouldn't be ran by Nazi's.
Somebody doesn't understand analogies, so let me spell it out explicitly for you:
Approximately nobody is against "antifa" because they're fighting "fascists". Here's an excerpt from wikipedia:
>Antifa activists' actions have since received support and criticism from various organizations and pundits. Some on the political left and some civil rights organizations criticize antifa's willingness to adopt violent tactics, which they describe as counterproductive and dangerous, arguing that these tactics embolden the political right and their allies.[13] Both Democratic and Republican politicians have condemned violence from antifa.[14][15][16][17] Many right-wing politicians and groups have characterized antifa as a domestic terrorist organization, or use antifa as a catch-all term,[18] which they adopt for any left-leaning or liberal protest actions.[19] According to some scholars, antifa is a legitimate response to the rise of the far right.[20][21] Scholars tend to reject an equivalence between antifa and right-wing extremism.[2][22][23] Some research suggests that most antifa action is nonviolent.[24][25][26]
Those allegations might not have merit, and it's okay to have a productive discussion over the merits of that, but it's wholly unjustified to round everyone who oppose antifa off to "they're against antifa because they're fascists, because why else would you be against a group that's anti-fascist?". Doing so is making the same mistake as the PATRIOT act above. It's fine to be against the patriot act, or even support it. But it's totally poor reasoning to skip all that logic and go with "you oppose the PATRIOT act so you must be not a patriot".
I know we're not supposed to talk about it, but what in the world is happening to this site? Mistaking 'Antifa' for 'the concept of opposing fascism' is not the kind of failure mode I expect here. And this kind of thing has become endemic lately- emotive noise and sarcastic dunks drowning out substance in every thread, especially since the beginning of December. Or am I just imagining this?
> Approximately nobody is against "antifa" because they're fighting "fascists".
So, I will say that far right, comservatives and fascists are against anti-fascism of any kind. Whether it is the boogeyman antifa or anything else. And there are a lot of people like that. Including in goverment.
They do take issue with anyone who openly opposes fascism.
Funny thing is that in my German neighborhood we have Antifa stickers pretty much on any other street lamp. Given the fascist tendencies all around it actually makes me feel safer...
> in my German neighborhood we have Antifa stickers pretty much on any other street lamp. Given the fascist tendencies all around it actually makes me feel safer
My Polish-German godmother asked me, as a kid, "who would you hide."
I didn't get the question. And 6-year old me wasn't ready for Holocaust with grandma. But it comes back to me from time to time.
Who would you hide. Who would you stake your wealth and life on to keep from undeserved suffering. The stickers are good. But they only mean something if you're willing to fight for them. At least in America, I'm unconvinced most sticker-toters are willing to sacrifice anything. (It's what makes Minnesota and Texas different.)
Is there a general term for metastatic semantic overinclusivity?
Terrorist. Racist. Colonist. Fascist. Historically-rooted and precise terms that are collectively decohering in a self-amplifying and propagating way as everyone feels increasingly free to detach more and more words from their original meanings.
you have seriously got to read and understand Eco's 14 tenets of Ur-Fascism [0] if you think that contemporary applications of the term "fascist" are inaccurate in describing what's happening right now in the US.
> if you think that contemporary applications of the term "fascist" are inaccurate in describing what's happening right now in the US
Didn't say that. I'm saying I've seen the term thrown around wildly to apply to all manner of things. Like the other terms.
The term is probably fundamentally fucked. If you asked Hitler if he's a Nazi, he'd say yes. If you asked Mussolini if he's a Fascist, he'd say yes. These were the words they used to describe themselves. The reason I'm describing the phenomenon versus blaming the folks using the terms broadly is because I don't think this is a personal failing by anyone as much as something that's linguistically happening.
The thing is the billionaires are terrified of US. The point of these surveillance systems isn't to make us safer. Because we're actually pretty safe already. We're not going to be assassinated, kidnapped, or beaten because we pissed someone off.
It's to make people like Garrett Langley feel protected from us.
> The thing is the billionaires are terrified of US.
Are they though? The odds of any kind of coordinated response that could seriously threaten the billionaires seem next-to-none. Flock seems to be a lot more offensive than defensive - it enables the targeting and mass surveillance in order to find and punish the 'right people', as well as mass tracking to create yet another datapoint to understand the way people move, think and coordinate. The defensive side is already covered through internet services, like social media. They don't have much to fear. I reckon that a powerful/rich enough person could kill a stranger on the street in plain view of a huge crowd and have absolutely nothing happen to them.
Friend of mine used to work for a single digit billionaire. No one you know. His name barely comes up in a search. He said he found out after a few years that the guy had been kidnapped and held for ransom.
INTERVIEWER: Surveillance is becoming more prevalent everywhere. There's an organization called Deflock that's become fairly well-known in activist circles. They take an aggressive approach—counting cameras and maintaining a Discord channel where they discuss potential activities to move against surveillance expansion and stop organizations like Flock. What's your perspective on this organization and their methods?
FLOCK CEO: I see two distinct groups of activists here. There are organizations like the ACLU and the EFF that take an above-board approach to fighting for their viewpoint. We're fortunate to live in a democratic, capitalistic country where we can fight through the courts. I have a lot of respect for those groups because they engage in reasonable debate while following the law.
FLOCK CEO: Unfortunately, there are also what I'd call terroristic organizations like Deflock, whose primary motivation appears to be chaos. They're closer to Antifa than anything else. That's disappointing because I don't want chaos - I value law and order and a society built on safety.
FLOCK CEO: For those groups, I think it's regrettable they haven't chosen a more constructive approach to achieve their goals. They do have the right to their views, but that's why we have a democratically elected process. We're not forcing Flock on anyone. Elected officials understand that communities and families want safety, and Flock is the best way to create safe communities.
INTERVIEWER: Deflock probably wouldn't agree with the "terroristic" label you've applied to them, but...
----
Yeah. "They have a right to their views" buuut also, they are terrorists, and implicitly therefore deserve to have their freedom taken away because of said views. So giving the public a map of flock cameras and organizing to advocate against these being used in our communities is terroristic, I suppose. There's one party here that should be in jail here. Seems like that ought to be the creeps that are filming everyone against their consent, but I guess that makes me a terrorist...
the more prosaic (the bear case) POV is that physically mounted outdoor street cameras have the same enforcement limitations as most other enforcement support technologies. flock isn't really bringing "number of unseen crimes" down from 1 to zero, he's bringing it from like 1000 to 999. a flock being easy to disable by a lay person, and a street corner not having witnesses - they're the same thing, it just isn't as good of a technology as he says (or people imagine) it to be.
so at the very beginning, the thing that threatens him the most is: simple ideas that sound objective and that make Gary Tan wary of putting $50m instead of $25m.
that said, very few things do that, bring "unseen crime" from N to 0. for example, legalization of something does that! he has found a very successful business nonetheless. it's more interesting to explore why. if he wanted to level constructive criticism at Deflock, i suppose we should wonder: how do they disrupt enterprise sales? flock is just, yet another failed IT project. it shouldn't be too hard. obviously, the best thing you can do is getting elected, and simply putting it in the law to not adopt the technology.
This is an excellent video documenting some Flock camera vulnerabilities by Benn Jordan, a security hobbyist/researcher: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB0gr7Fh6lY. It's a bit long, but worth it.
His work on this and similar topics is very good, he has deep technical insight and is a good communicator, but it's a bit funny seeing him referred to as a security hobbyist as in my mind he's a musical genius and one of the greatest living US musicians/programmers.
It's amazing at how terrorism has been re-defined. When I was a kid you had to blow up skyscrapers or planes (or both at the same time), set off bombs in a crowded area, or a specifically targeted mass shooter to be labelled a terrorist.
Yeah really does show you how it's now (actually for some time) just a label, conveniently morphing over time for people/groups you don't like, losing any actual meaning because it's applied so liberally.
And it's ironic because there are clearly "real terrorists" (i.e. 9/11 guys).
This statement essentially boils down to "The only right way to fight me is in an environment where I expect to win"
That's how you know the DeFlock strategy is effective. They aren't playing the game that the CEO wants to play, they are playing the actual game.
The actual game is minimizing the impact of cameras that are now everywhere.
Some individuals may take it upon themselves to vandalize the cameras, which can't be planned via conspiracy (that would be illegal), but those radical individuals can be "set up for success" through information.
This strategy of creating an environment where effective vandalism is easy, is also part of the actual game.
Everything about his body language screams, "I'm doing something slimy and I know it, but here, listen to these words spoken authoritatively whilst I wave my hands around and forget about it."
Their are documented cases of Flock cameras that can see into private residences. What if one of those cameras recorded an underage person? Would Flock be responsible for collecting and distributing CSAM?
I'm honestly tired of all these knuckleheads. They've got a few bucks in their bank accounts and pretend that makes them smarter than everyone else. They're just gaming the system, nothing more, and they have every incentive to keep it alive.
He can shove his cameras deep in his ** as far as I'm concerned.
The "system" is not hapless or ignorant here. In fact, this company would not exist, if the "system" didn't have specific desires to effectively enslave the entire population.
Who wouldn't want to become a new age digital pharaoh? Wouldn't this be precisely the type of panopticon they would try to create?
Does anyone have a template for a network audit that one could request of a local police department that would disclose access logs for Flock Safety data?
A lot of jurisdictions actually require the data to be public! For example, ctrl-f "download csv" on this page for central LA PD: https://transparency.flocksafety.com/central-la-pd- . Not all jurisdictions require this, but if you can guess the URLs (https://transparency.flocksafety.com/<DEPARTMENT ID>) you can find quite a few, or just Google "YOUR PD flock safety portal". (EDIT: You'll want to regularly download these if you're trying to build a comprehensive record. The PDs I've been monitoring are only required to keep data for 30 days, so the CSVs are just a rolling window cut off at EXACTLY today minus 30 days.)
This guy gives all villain vibes you see in futuristic movies, funny how he resembles a young version of “Fletcher” in minority report movie, a movie about mass surveillance to provide a “safer community” to all.
Flock btw isn’t just an ALPR, it is a car finger printing technology, I have seen some videos of police IDing cars with no plates and they knew the owner by using flock cams.
I “like” how Overton window (??? I hope I use it right) shifted dramatically in USA.
- “law and order” is “good”, when _de facto_ most of constitution is not being applied for a year and laws or court orders are applied selectively. Not to say that “law and order” is vastly different depending on the size of your bank account;
- “terrorist” now is anything you don’t like, especially if it’s anti establishment. True freedom of speech is now apparently “violence” (and of course this dictatorial (adjacent) government would think that, as it’s biggest danger);
- “antifa” is apparently now a boogeyman, though I’d say he used it correctly as he is (apparently) fascist;
Also it is forced against people, how population can choose otherwise?
"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition...There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."
The TV series Person of Interest [1] becomes more on point as years go by, even though by now it has been 15 years since its S1. One of the scenes [2] from that series where "terrorist" are shown as being in control over ghoulish CEOs like the one from this posted video.
These clean-shaven wide-eyed SV types give me the uncanny valley heebie-jeebies. Everything, from their tone of voice, to their appearance, to (most importantly) the way they phrase things... there's an almost AI-generated quality.
Anyone aware of people doing something like over here in Europe? And how legal/illegal it might be? I'm talking about putting government-operated security cameras on a map, for the general public to be aware of their locations.
These wretched wastes of skin that contribute to the surveillance system need to have the full brunt of that same surveillance apparatus turned toward them full time, published for all to see. This should include elected officials that voted for and paid for these systems as well. You don't want a system that allows more anonymous movement? You want that data collected and stored and collated and analyzed without end? Ok, pull down your pants and have yourselves offered up as the first and most prominent ones to be tracked and then see if you change your tune.
Good luck trying to subject them to the same level of scrutiny. They live in places with high walls and armed guards, a lot of them don't even drive themselves if they drive at all. Even when using helicopters or planes their private ownership means a lower level of scrutiny. "The plane" was a big part of how Epstein was able to do what he did. Obviously, these types never step foot on public transit.
Even if hypothetically speaking you could support volunteers to follow them around and film them, I would think the asymmetry of resources would practically make it impossible. It's not about privacy, it's about wealth. Take their wealth away and then they'll actually have to live the way they tell you to. They don't care because they don't live in the world they are creating, you do.
Seems like “terrorists” = citizens standing up for their rights. We aren’t past the point of no return but we are rapidly approaching it. What will it be Americans? Liberty or death?
It was originally shortened in German from ”Antifaschistische Aktion” and ”Außerparlamentarische Opposition”. Then that carried over to other languages as a common name. Feel free to go back to the roots! ;)
disregarding the history of the term, you see that even posters on Hacker News Dot Com dispute the accuracy of the term "fascism" as applied to contemporary american politics, so what difference would it make? people who are okay with fascistic politics will not distinguish opposition with a name change.
Our city council voted 5-0 to install more. A unanimous vote which includes democrats who ran on disrupting a council that had the same members for decades.
I swear, every fascist has the same playbook. They use the same phrases, same accusations, same lies, sometimes even same wordings. It is like they have a single hive mind - for which everyone else is the enemy and is subject to destruction or enslaving.
That figure is straight from Flok's own press release. There were deep deep methological flaws in the calculation of that figure.
https://archive.is/7iNyQ - this is an excellent piece breaking down the many many flaws in that figure and quotes the 2 academics involved who later said highlighted the issues.
->"“This 'study' rings a cacophony of alarm bells: the closer you look at it, the more it looks like a marketing scheme than data science,” Dave Maass, director of investigations at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told me. “Nobody should be repeating the claims until the data can be verified and the conclusions replicated by independent data scientists without a direct tie to the company that stands to benefit."
That's a claim Flock makes. They poison their own well a bit when they then also claim that Deflock are terrorists. One might point out that one claim was made off the cuff while the other is has a white paper detailing why they're making this claim but said white paper has a number of it's own issues. See, unless perhaps you think they're a terrorist news organization: https://www.404media.co/researcher-who-oversaw-flock-surveil... which quotes one of the consulting academic researchers as saying:
>The researcher, Johnny Nhan of Texas Christian University, said that he has pivoted future research on Flock because he found “the information that is collected by the police departments are too varied and incomplete for us to do any type of meaningful statistical analysis on them.”
Well then... let's eliminate any due process and fourth amendment protections, maybe requiring something sensible like "officer suspicion", or maybe just a program of "random" searches.. you know keep everybody on their toes. I also bet that real crimes (whatever that means) goes down...
Just because something works doesn't make it right. Personally, giving up what the law is suppose to protect (individual rights) in the name of the law is something I can only see as a fool's bargain.
has anything ever good come out of silicon valley or the wall street? one greedy capitalist after another and you wonder why the world has turn to a shithole! the inequality between the rich and the poor is reaching the level of ambani vs. mumbai slums.