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Flock Credibility Lost as It Repeatedly Lies to City Councils, Police, & Public
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- spiderfarmer 2mo agoWere they ever credible?
- Tostino 2mo agoThey were by enough officials that collectively we have voted into power. Maybe we should think about who we're handing power to. They don't seem to have a solid grasp on things.
- allthetime 2mo agoThat wasn’t credibility, it was cash money.
- cute_boi 2mo ago[flagged]
- Freedom2 2mo agoI don't see why not. They're one of YCombinators most successful companies.
- t1234s 2mo agoI doubt the surveillance state is going away any time soon.
- elictronic 2mo agoCompany directly lies to governing body of city. Is found out the next day. Loses contract. Attacks city online afterwards. This isn’t about surveillance states, it’s about companies run by idiots.
- stackghost 2mo agoWhat if the surveillance state is also run by idiots?
- dhosek 2mo agoWhy not both?
- wmf 2mo agoIronically, Flock might create enough backlash to trigger regulations against surveillance. They're certainly an example of what not to do.
- zombot 2mo agoWhile police just use fleets of drones. Hardly any backlash there.
- preg_match 2mo agoPolice in America is so beyond cooked that the entire system needs to be rethought. It's just not working from any angle. It's expensive as all living fuck, with the majority of city budgets going to the police. It doesn't prevent crime. Traffic violations are still rampant, including speeding and reckless driving. And, worst of all, nobody likes it. People complain constantly and police basically just whine about how hard their job is. Who is this for, really? Is this just a complex money-siphoning scheme to extract funds out of local governments?
- wrs 2mo agoThis just sounds like the standard playbook for this crowd (by which wide brush I mean authoritarians and their enablers). They really hate being called on their lies, and their immediate response is to attack with whatever comes to hand (press release, xeet, the DoJ…depends on the person).
- int0x29 2mo agoRepeatedly lying about working with ACLU is an interesting choice. I'm kind of tired of the culture of words don't mean anything.
- graywh 2mo agothey (and others like them) also make zero effort to install poles complying with highway safety standards
- sarchertech 2mo agoThis guy on instagram does a good job of highlighting this (and other unsafe roadside hazards). https://www.instagram.com/theguardrailguy?igsh=ZXAxM2h2ZXFubmVw https://www.instagram.com/theguardrailguy?igsh=ZXAxM2h2ZXFub... From his bio, he lost his daughter to a guardrail crash and started exposing improperly installed guardrails.
- walrus01 2mo agoNot just that but I would also be very skeptical that whatever free standing poles they're erecting are fully compliant with TIA/EIA 222H (or engineer stamp approved drawing for each unique installation location, which will vary with local climate of snow/ice and wind loading), which is the engineering standard for self supporting tubular steel monopoles that have antenna, camera, solar panel appurtenances attached to them. https://tiaonline.org/press-release/tia-announces-publication-of-tia-222-h-standard-for-antennas-and-the-supporting-structures-for-antennas-and-small-wind-turbines/ https://tiaonline.org/press-release/tia-announces-publicatio... https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=TIA+EIA+222H https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=TIA+EIA+2... In general, 222H and its predecessors govern engineering standards for: a. Self supporting lattice/grid/angle steel type towers. b. Guyed towers c. Self supporting monopoles of all types (could even theoretically be antenna/solar/camera attachments as additional wind loading on a wood utility pole sunk into the ground, but more commonly, for steel monopoles) If you're going to put steel monopoles in the public highway ROW they need to be compliant with both AASHTO standards and also the above.
- cute_boi 2mo agoHow come we allowed all these cronies to put camera and do surveillance. Any politician advocating this should have cameras in their home for safety reason.
- iioiio 2mo ago[flagged]
- mplewis 2mo agoimagine a world where cops did their jobs
- moate 2mo agoI can, we're living in it. Now imagine a world in which cops served the masses.
- delecti 2mo agoThe UK is also notoriously surveilled and their crime rate is right on-par with the US.
- venzaspa 2mo agoWhat type of crime though, the US has substantially higher rates of violent crimes and those are the ones personally I would rather not be the victim of.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- Sharlin 2mo agoHoly cum hoc ergo propter hoc, Batman!
- pclowes 2mo agoSafer for who? Definitely not anyone critical of the Chinese dictator or regime. Definitely not the Uygher population. Free society is more important than marginally safer streets.
- 0xbadcafebee 2mo agoThe worst thing about this isn't that a company or CEO lied. It's that a private corporation that runs the largest mass surveillance system in the country habitually lies about what it does so local governments will adopt it and it can then secretly give that access to the government. What happens when the cameras get so good they can read lips? Or they add directional long-range mics to the cameras?
- cm2012 2mo ago[flagged]
- Terr_ 2mo ago> ACLU credibility lost with such a sensationalist headline. HN Comment credibility lost with such a sensationalist one-liner? I see your claim, but I don't see how you got there. TFA has enough examples that I don't think you can just casually pooh-pooh everything away without an argument.
- kaladin-jasnah 2mo agoI read the entire article, and it seemed that the article supported the headline well. Am I missing something?
- wilbo 2mo agoThis seems to me to be the inevitable outcome of a society that celebrates winners who claim their lies are merely "alternative facts" This relevant post is flagged, but yes, I do think this is a symptom of America crossing the asshole threshold where it pays to outright lie and call your fact checkers insincere: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48837460 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48837460
- dfxm12 2mo agoThere's too much in this article to distill as "this". The city of Oshkosh cancelling their contact with Flock after one day is actually quite heartening.
- wilbo 2mo agoYou're right. By "this" I'm referring to a company selling to the government feeling like they will not face consequences for publicly lying to their buyers. I agree it's heartening to see the contract cancelled. I find the doubling down on the lies as both unsurprising and disheartening.
- joering2 2mo agowhen I was a kid, my mom used to say "think about something nice and pleasant if you cannot fall asleep". So sometimes I think about scenario in which some disgruntled IT manager in one of AWS data centers, knowing which CDN server belongs to Flock, unplugs one of their RAID drives and plug it to their own laptop and copies the whole database of all plates, coordinates, etc, and Flock didn't even find out because most soft raids won't report an issue, and if they do, then what is there to troubleshoot if everything got back to normal 2 hours later? And then post it all in form of a torrent, so everyone can download it and see who went where. Imagine politicians caught visiting strip clubs or their mistresses, patterns of cops going to places where bad guys hang out (to collect bribes), highway patrol going over speed limits without genuine emergency. Thinking about all this I fell asleep much easier...
- cosmicgadget 2mo agoBetween Epstein, Panama Papers, and Madison Cawthorne Story Time, I don't think any of these things will end careers as long as voters can be convinced their team is the winning one. This is the post-fact era.
- TurdF3rguson 2mo agoAm I the only one picturing the Oshkosh mayor and Oshkosh city council as a group of toddlers in overalls?
- pclowes 2mo agoPeople always want high trust societies. They are incredibly hard to create and incredibly easy to destroy. However, once the cameras go up, you will never ever create one there. High trust requires, well, actual trust. You can’t build real trust in a panopticon just a sickly police state facsimile of it. Society and progress moves at the speed of trust. Without it many uniquely human and beautiful things disappear.
- moate 2mo agoSadly, many people just want to be highly trusted in society (whilst themselves fearing most of the rest of it). It's why we flirt with/fall face first into authoritarianism every few decades.
- mmooss 2mo ago> It's why we flirt with/fall face first into authoritarianism every few decades. Did the US or any advanced democracy "flirt with/fall face first into authoritarianism" a few decades ago?
- rootsudo 2mo agoyes, better dead then red scare and Mccartyism that faded during nixon-regan into more capitalistic freedom when the USSR failed and there was opportunity around the world.
- pjc50 2mo ago9/11 was an incredible shift in attitude.
- moate 2mo agoWe created an extrajudicial prison outside of our borders to house "prisoners too dangerous for the normal court system", created an entirely new surveillance police force, and expanded FISA in response to 9/11. So if that's not asking authoritarianism if they'd like to go out for drinks, we have very VERY different views on freedom. Also, I really don't care about other "advanced democracies", we're talking about America and it's not really relevant to my points.
- nikkwong 2mo agoEven with all this said, surveillance like this is certainly going to be one of the best ways to catch criminals and reduce crime over the long term. I hope the misgivings that we have around Flock won't close the door to us ever using this type of technology, in some way, in the future.
- nohell 2mo agoCatching a few criminals is not worth taking everyone's privacy by force.
- JumpCrisscross 2mo ago> Catching a few criminals is not worth taking everyone's privacy by force This drifts into truism with "few," "criminals," "everyone" and "by force" left so vaguely defined.
- OsrsNeedsf2P 2mo agoI spent 3 years in Korea, and that's probably where I will go back to retire after I exit. Crime there is extremely low - partially because of the cameras, but mainly because they're on top of it. They're able to spend time on every criminal, which deters anyone from breaking the law. Contrary to SF, where I've called the police and provided evidence for an open and shut case, and the cops shrugged their shoulders. Flock cameras won't fix that.
- nikkwong 2mo agoI used to live in china, which is by all means the dystopian surveillance state that we're all afraid that this could lead to. Don't misinterpret this as an advocation for that type of living; but it's simply interesting to note that when you ask any chinese if they would like to go back to the world of 30 years ago in terms of surveillance, essentially 100% of them will say no; they like it the way things are and not having to be afraid of being victim to any crime. Yes yes, a bird born in a cage thinks flying is an illness. I realize the irony in bringing this up. Yet it's just hard to ignore when you see delivery drivers leaving packages outside of buildings on the street in the most insecure manner and not having a single soul daring to touch it if they are not the intended recipient. At the same time, on HN we are not even having a conversation about what a sort of tradeoff between surveillance and safety. I live in Seattle, actually just had ~$400 in buckets of paint stolen off my porch just yesterday. Yes, buckets of paint. I had a break in 2 months ago, and that was one of many over the years. This is in U-District, a high crime, but also oddly affluent neighborhood. I absolutely detest the fact that criminals run around the city with impunity committing crime after crime. It makes everyone's life here just a bit more miserable—there are so many people that don't want to move to the city because of the crime; there are all these invisible costs we are paying because of it. So to think that cameras are such a no-go just doesn't make sense to me. Certainly there are ways to do it ethically. I think south korea is a great example, as well as many european countries. Honestly, I think it's just bizarre that every time Flock gets brought up on HN we all flip the bird to the supposed surveillance state without even discussing the tradeoffs.
- elAhmo 2mo agoLosing credibility means someone had it. I don't think anyone thinks Flock had any credibility. This was known from the beginning.
- SXX 2mo agoWhat we really need is to journalists and cybersecurity community to use these systems to track few hundred of politicians and publish the results. Just like some crooked cops already used it to stalk their exes. We know how much some billionares hate their jets tracked even though they have small army of bodyguards and three letter agencies spending budget of small country protecting them. Lets see how comfortable much less protected US politicians gonna be with a fact that everyone knows what time they leave their house by minute, what routes they take and where their cars gonna be.
- abhinai 2mo agoI respect ACLU but this article seems a fair bit biased. They're stretching the imagination quite a bit in some of their examples. Seems to me that someone has already made up their mind and are now looking for any example to support their narrative. I'd love for them to build a case more impartially and drop the activist nature of the language they use.
- EraYaN 2mo agoI mean being activist is sort of the whole point of the ACLU? And besides it's not like this would be the first time stuff like this happens. You don't have to imagine it, just learn history.
- awllau 2mo ago[dead]
- alfiedotwtf 2mo agoEveryone in the comments so hopeful, but here’s the reality - nothing will happen, they’ll get more money from more local governments signing up, and industry groups that have problems with protesters like forestry, and everyone will go about their day without anything changing moving onto the next rage bait.
- trolleski 2mo agoLies are the norm for BigTech. BigLies. So why should it play any different?
- thebiglebrewski 2mo agoIt always makes me so sad to see companies like this where the founders don't think twice about what they're building and just go straight for the cash grab! Can't we use technology for good and not to build a dystopian surveillance state?
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- johnea 2mo agoFlock had credibility?
- user00005 2mo agoFlock Safety building. <https://www.openstreetmap.org/?#map=18/33.816682/-84.497494 https://www.openstreetmap.org/?#map=18/33.816682/-84.497494>