8 ms·
Deflock Casa Grande
- josefritzishere 3mo agoThis sort of hyper-local protest is the way to go. Nobody wants to be surveilled.
- Barbing 3mo agoStill hyper-local but much more efficient than one retiree holding a sign in front of one camera! Kudos to all doing it nondestructively.
- UmYeahNo 3mo agoI wonder if this is as efficient or as effective. The guy holding the skimmer was viral and garnered a lot of attention to the situation. This site, while something I support, probably won't. Maybe it'll be the place people find after learning about the guy holding the sign. Now, if the guy holding the skimmer had a sign with the URL on it, then we're on to something.
- TeMPOraL 3mo ago> Now, if the guy holding the skimmer had a sign with the URL on it, then we're on to something. Or a QR code. (Extra points for a hand-drawn QR code. Yes, it takes patience (or grid paper), but it's easier than it sounds.)
- IncreasePosts 3mo agoSpeak for yourself. I don't mind this type of surveillance personally.
- VTimofeenko 3mo agoThat's your right, but the problem is that cameras are in public and some people do mind this.
- phoghed 3mo agoI believe they mean they don’t mind if others are surveilled against their will
- happytoexplain 3mo agoIf you force surveillance on 10 people and even one of them doesn't consent, that's still a net bad. And this situation is probably closer to the inverse of those numbers, or at the very least 50/50. And this isn't even to mention the criminal negligence of Flock, and the evils they have already enabled, as committed both by Flock employees and by government.
- IncreasePosts 3mo agoIs surveillance special in that it needs total buy in from society, or else it's bad? Is any other aspect of governance held to that standard?
- bigyabai 3mo agoSurveillance isn't populist. The Patriot Act, for instance, is not representative of what taxpayers want to spend money on.
- infinite_spin 3mo agoIt's hard to gauge the sincerity of these beliefs, and even harder to tell if you've actually tested these beliefs against the reality of mass surveillance, especially when it's been used to arrest and stalk innocent people. https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/georgia-cops-keep-getting-arrested-152500231.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/georgia-cops-keep-get... https://cambridgeanalytica.org/surveillance-privacy/police-flock-cameras-stalking-arrests-51112/ https://cambridgeanalytica.org/surveillance-privacy/police-f... https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/the-cop-investigating-a-flock-stalking-was-charged-with-flock-stalking/ar-AA28D3dI https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/the-cop-investigating-a...
- IncreasePosts 3mo agoWell, we need laws and oversight to stop these actions. Do you realize that people use phones to stalk innocent people? And yet you probably have a phone. Why is that?
- ceejayoz 3mo ago> Well, we need laws and oversight to stop these actions. Do you think this hasn't been tried? We have laws on stalking. We've tried to rein in cops.
- bigyabai 3mo agoWe have laws and oversight surrounding phone surveillance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawful_interception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawful_interception Just like you say, it still gets abused both within and outside the government (eg. Salt Typhoon) because surveillance inherently threatens society.
- IncreasePosts 3mo agoShouldn't we get rid of phones then?
- bigyabai 3mo ago
- xyzsparetimexyz 3mo agoWhile such a surveillance system appears to (kinda) work in China, do you really trust American companies and the American police system to implement it at anywhere close to that level of competency?
- SoftTalker 3mo agoIt's not the cameras I mind per-se. They have legitmately been used to solve some crimes that might have gone unsolved otherwise. But the problem is the cameras are pervasive. It's not like a red light camera, or a speed zone camera, or a toll road camera, that has a specific purpose in a specific location. And it's the building of a database, and correlation of data from point to point, and the potential abuse. We have documented cases of cops abusing Flock data to stalk exes, And history proves that any time you collect data about a group of people, it will eventually if not immediately be abused. You can propose all the warrants and anonymizing and other restrictions that you might like to control who looks at the data and when, but at the end of the day it's all about trusting those in power who have control of the data, and that's not a good thing to do. The government does not (or should not) have the right to track the public to this degree as they go about their daily personal business.
- ARandomerDude 3mo agoThat's because you haven't thought it through. "We only want info on the bad people" might not alarm you personally until any government entity changes the definition of bad and now you're a "bad guy".
- veec_cas_tant 3mo agoThere are all sorts of powers we afford law enforcement that could be abused; I hardly think cameras would be at the top of the list of concerns, honestly. NYC has had thousands upon thousands of cameras for quite a while without much fanfare, along with other major top cities worldwide.
- Cider9986 3mo agoThey are abused. They can be abused in the future even more. Mass surveillance is abuse within itself. There has been controversy in NYC. No controversy doesn't make things right.
- IncreasePosts 3mo agoYes, I have thought it through. Is this how you view the world? "Smart people agree with me and thoughtless people disagree with me"
- happytoexplain 3mo agoThere is no implication of that in the parent post. This is uncharitable to the point of trolling. Edit: Actually, it's such an extreme misconstrual that I'm wondering if you thought you were replying to a different post?
- IncreasePosts 3mo agoOP knows only a very basic opinion of mine, and they tell me I'm wrong because I haven't thought about it, what else should I think? Do you think they know how much I thought about this? Isn't the implication "if only you thought more and better about this topic, your opinion would match mine"?
- applfanboysbgon 3mo agoWould you care to elaborate on why you don't mind individuals being stalked by employees with zero oversight or accountability, and why you don't mind protestors being monitored by the government? Since those are both part of "this type of surveillance", and are a pretty fucking crazy thing to state you're okay with with no argument for them. Do you perhaps lack the imagination to consider how this would affect your life if a government that did not agree with your political views came into power sometime in the future and were to use "this type of surveillance" against you?
- righthand 3mo agoNeither do the pedophiles in positions of power that want to watch you and your children.
- smegma2 3mo agoI do actually
- righthand 3mo agoGreat hand over the links to your 24hour live stream of your home and neighborhood. I promise I will only watch you.
- happytoexplain 3mo agoI agree with the implication that the parent's use of the word "nobody" is incorrect. It might be hard to believe if you read some of the things I write, but I have enormous sympathy for people who want surveillance. Personal crime is a hideous affront to the comfortable society that we all deserve. Related: I even sympathize with people who want to be allowed to lethally attack any home invader, despite my being largely liberal. Such invasions are an indescribable violation of our sense of civilization and dignity, that I think many people don't appreciate. However... the opinion of people who do not want to be surveilled is heavier than those who do, naturally. The effect of being surveilled, especially by a system that has already been demonstrated to be abused, is more dramatic than the effect of not being surveilled despite wanting it. Surveillance is simply too double-edged in the long term (or, in this case, the short term, considering Flock's incompetence). We must resist the temptation to allow it just because it currently benefits us.
- veec_cas_tant 3mo agoWhen you say "especially by a system that has already been demonstrated to be abused," what does that mean exactly? We have some of the largest and globally important cities with tens of thousands of cameras. Look at London, NYC, Singapore, Sydney, Seoul, Chicago, or Tokyo. Tens of millions of people live in those cities, and they have relied on massive camera networks for years without turning into dystopias.
- joshcsimmons 3mo agoI am right up the road from Casa Grande. I run a youtube channel with 30k subs and have recently gotten VERY INTERESTED in investigating Flock/Deflock. I had no idea the cameras were everywhere. I'll reach out anywhere on the site but feel free to get in touch here as well. I want to interview the creator and broadcast the situation in Casa Grande. edit: emailed the address on the site. Anyone else on the east valley working on similar efforts should give me a nudge in the comments.
- joshcsimmons 3mo agoHappy to report we're in touch :)
- extr 3mo agoWell made website IMO. Gets to the point with plenty of easy-to-understand evidence and calls to action.
- user102030 3mo agoFeels like every other site that AI generates. Hard to tell what the creators believe and what is just probabilistically generated.
- semiquaver 3mo agoNothing about this site screams AI to me. The site does its job well. Not sure what you are complaining about.
- tkel 3mo agoSorry it's painfully obvious it's AI generated. The copy - "it's not left, it's not right," short punchy sentences. The spacing in the header - font sizes The copy in the header - Too much text for a title "Who We Are" section - has 4 symmetrical boxes, filling out the space with unnecessary detail. The "cards" in the middle content section - Tons of detail . AI loves to generate these as the meat of a website. The sections after, it begins to devolve into tangents/rambling , but still with excruciating detail. More small cards each with too much detail. Lots of meaningless numbers highlighted. "20!" "13!" "Timeline of documented abuse" - this section has text that is too small and a bullet list way too long. AI loves to use this very small text size. Spacing is weird and not made for/by a human. It keeps going... I'm sorry but you all need to level up your game wrt detecting AI.
- extr 3mo agoI don't really care if it was made by AI or smeared onto the keyboard by a monkey. It was effective in it's job and communicated clearly.
- danielmeskin 3mo ago
- whalesalad 3mo agoCoincidentally I was just watching this video and felt it was a pretty decent way to communicate this to old boomer city councils. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6oKX1w7k5w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6oKX1w7k5w
- mooreds 3mo agoThis video is what led to the 404 media article I shared above.
- Cider9986 3mo agoGreat video thanks. That guy is well spoken. Always find occasional really great speakers at these meetings. Alan McLintock comes to mind: https://youtu.be/KgEe22H3phg?t=2012 https://youtu.be/KgEe22H3phg?t=2012
- subarctic 3mo agoI watched his speech until he got cut off by the guy saying he's out of order and I have to admit I really didn't follow what he was saying
- Cider9986 3mo agoThe background is that the city council was going to have a meeting to get feedback on AI surveillance cameras in a park. Tons of people signed up because Louis Rossmann promoted it. It was already like Thursday at 9 am so already not designed to let regular people speak. So the city council or mayor decided to re-schedule the agenda item or public comment so people couldn't speak. They still let the sales rep from Live View technology speak because they had known to put some special form to become an official speaker or whatnot. One more thing was that they wrote the email saying it was rescheduled like a day or two before they sent it so it was last minute. So all these people show up anyway and some protest outside and others decide to speak on other agenda items and just tie it back into the expensive park AI cameras at which point they are declared out of order by somebody. So I guess he was speaking on some VPN item. Rewatching it's not as good but it was creative for the situation.
- diego_moita 3mo agoI wonder how many of the people that defend Flock, Google, Facebook " etc, also are the ones that "denounce" Huaweii for spying for the Chinese government.
- bronlund 3mo agoThis is like sending a letter to Satan asking him to please stop being a nuisance.
- ryandrake 3mo agoYea, I am thoroughly unconvinced that protesting and asking nicely is really a way to implement political change. The people implementing these things and making these deals are sitting on their yachts and mansion balconies, sipping their martinis, and looking down at us little people with raised eyebrows, not caring in the slightest what we say. They are going to keep doing what they are doing, they're going to keep getting elected, they're going to keep getting appointed to their corporate boards, and they look at the protesters as just loud annoyances--if they even look at them at all.
- Cider9986 3mo agoIt's local government. Austin Texas has 1 million+ residents and they stopped their contract with Flock.
- goda90 3mo agoMy suburb got rid of Flock after enough people complained at a city council meeting. I think more places in our county are following or attempting to follow in our footsteps.
- tamimio 3mo ago> Their own patent describes something bigger: video analysis that can identify people, assign traits, and make real-world activity searchable. That’s not news, and I did mention that months ago in here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46226795 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46226795 I watched few videos where the police by mistake mentioned how they tracked the cars even with no plate numbers on them.
- collabs 3mo agoI know this is preaching to the choir but from the article on the person holding the skimmer > Police can also use the cameras to surveil protestors and stalk ex-lovers—or strangers they find attractive. I didn't believe police actually did this until a roommate's new classmate told me her story. She has recently moved in to the neighborhood (an HOA at that). She was walking her dog one evening when a police officer who also lives in the HOA greeted her by her full legal name which she swears she never uses anywhere so the only way someone would know it was if they looked her up. She was just a roommate at this new place so her name wouldn't be in any HOA papers. The police (or any law enforcement) really should not have access to any kind of dragnet surveillance. They won't use technology to find our lost/stolen phones but they want even more surveillance for what?
- know-how 3mo ago[dead]
- jodacola 3mo agoA little searching will find you all sorts of such hits, like an officer tracking her domestic partner [0], an officer stalking someone after meeting on a TV set* [1], another officer tracking his ex partner [2], another officer tracking his mistress [3]. This is just a random sample. * Note this scenario was not with Flock, which is important: there's more than one player in this space. Kill Flock and others might roll in; something broader is needed like, oh, I don't know, constitutional protections or something. [0] https://www.cbsnews.com/atlanta/news/police-supervisor-accused-of-using-flock-license-plate-reader-system-to-track-domestic-partner-in-georgia/ https://www.cbsnews.com/atlanta/news/police-supervisor-accus... [1] https://www.404media.co/footage-shows-cop-stalking-woman-he-met-on-a-tv-set-after-surveilling-her-with-a-license-plate-reader/ https://www.404media.co/footage-shows-cop-stalking-woman-he-... [2] https://www.404media.co/cops-keep-getting-arrested-for-using-flock-to-stalk-people/ https://www.404media.co/cops-keep-getting-arrested-for-using... [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byhWSvwz1Vw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byhWSvwz1Vw
- Freedom2 3mo agoThis is quite distressing to hear. It's not the United States I know or even grew up in. What went wrong and how can we try to fix it?
- tokioyoyo 3mo agoI do find it very funny how over the past couple of decades US has been talking about how awful Chinese government is wrt surveillance, but now doing exactly the same but through private industry contracts instead. I hold a semi-middle ground view to CCTVs/plate readers, and understand how it can deliver improved QoL to most citizens. But a bit weird how a core American "surveillance = big no no" belief was thrown out in a few years. Another proof of people just say things, but when it comes to action, you can just do stuff. Sorry for a negative comment, but it's just an interesting observation from an outsider.
- know-how 3mo ago[dead]
- jameslk 3mo ago> But a bit weird how a core American "surveillance = big no no" belief was thrown out in a few years. I can't speak for China since I'm not as familiar with that culture, but as for the US, the culture has not changed, as you can see by protest campaigns like this and many similar types of protests (e.g. public destruction of Flock cameras). The culture in the US was founded on minimal government interference based on those trying to escape persecution elsewhere at that time, and that thread is still baked into many facets of US politics. What has changed is the state. Surveillance has been growing constantly, to much of the disapproval of those who live in the US (e.g. Edward Snowden's revelations were very damning and the revealed surveillance was very much protested against, and likewise after the Cambridge Analytica leaks). But it's a bit of boiling frog syndrome for those experiencing it: the state can grow more controlling of our lives slow enough not to be perceptible, or to spin surveillance under manipulative politics, which is for example what led to bipartisan support of the Patriot Act. This makes it difficult to stop. Technology is especially a double edged sword for making this worse.
- cucumber3732842 3mo agoThe useful idiots were happy to bury their heads in the sad and ignore the broader trajectory so long as the state threw them a bone from time to time. A few speed cameras here or there, environmental violation lead generation via location data there, maybe even a shotspotter deployment or two. It didn't take much to not just keep HN quiet, but to get their active support, as every brick in the road to hell was laid down.
- mooreds 3mo agoI learned about this site from the 404 media article: https://www.404media.co/casa-grande-arizona-flock-city-council/ https://www.404media.co/casa-grande-arizona-flock-city-counc... An excerpt: > “I've spent the last several months talking to people all over Casa Grande, and one thing keeps coming up: Safety. So, today I'm excited to announce a new company called Shepherd Safety,” he said. “Our mission is simple. Keep government officials and their families safe.” It would be no different than how the city monitors its citizens using Flock cameras, he said; he planned to launch satellites that would use AI to monitor “where government officials go, where they stop, who they meet with, and when they return home.” It was satire, but drove the point home well.
- computably 3mo agoWhy, what a fantastic idea! Maybe a certain trillionaire would be interested...
- Cider9986 3mo ago"Politicians will be exempted from chat control"
- amazingamazing 3mo agoGet your reps to pass a law.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- alwa 3mo agoI’m familiar with cities that conduct time-bounded surges of policing in reaction to specific outbreaks of criminality. When inter-faction violence in a neighborhood escalates to the level of a murder, for example, they surge for a couple weeks. Massively increased visible patrol presence—cops on every corner—portable light towers attached to generators, to provide near-daylight-level illumination on the sidewalks and streets... a conspicuous level of “eyes on the street” that discourages retaliation and responds to residents’ heightened fear in the immediate aftermath. While at the same time being obviously temporary—not permanent measures that signal the neighborhood as structurally crime-ridden. It’s a “fly the flag at half mast for a bit” kind of signal, not “this neighborhood is full of criminals and deserves the corresponding built environment.” I wonder if something in that spirit might be a reasonable long-term equilibrium for things like Flock. Garbage bags over the camera poles for ordinary times, almost as a point of civic pride that the place we’ve built and maintained is safe enough not to need to use them. Pull the garbage bags off if there’s a problem—spate of auto thefts, high-profile crime, fugitive on the loose—but we demand an explanation when that happens and a concrete end point where they go back on.
- Cider9986 3mo agoIt's okay to enable mass surveillance to fight crime that's already decreasing? The optimal amount of crime is not zero.
- fragmede 3mo agoNot all crimes are equal. I'd like very much for my stuff to not be stolen. I'd like it even better if I didn't get murdered. Optimally, no murders would happen.
- tclancy 3mo agoOur city doesn’t have them. Except there’s one in the main hospital parking lot. This reminds me to finish up that letter I meant to send to them asking how they square that with the fact any cop in Texas can peek at people coming in and out of the maternity ward in New Hampshire, given Ken Paxton a call and try to jam up someone for looking like they terminated a pregnancy.