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The Government Is Monitoring Anti-Flock TikTok and Instagram Accounts
- danielrmay 2mo ago"I hope our names are touching on the watchlist"
- bladeacidic 2mo agoEveryone posting here is now on a list somewhere. Hopefully you're deanonymized sufficiently. Better hope we don't get caught up in something!
- Cider9986 2mo ago>Hopefully you're deanonymized sufficiently What?
- bladeacidic 2mo ago*you are sufficiently anonymous here
- actionfromafar 2mo agoAnd here of course.
- Cider9986 2mo agoI don't see anything so wrong with cutting them down. I see it similar to maintaining a local trail. Removing obstacles like fallen trees or brambles. These are pests that are unconstitutional. It seems like a statement to the prosperity of the American ideals of freedom that they are being removed both by local activism and illegal means. Along with the general sentiment on social media. It's genuinely insane the power social media has on earth. It's attributed to the revolution in Nepal, major protests in India, and there were a bunch more in other countries[1]. We as humans have been brainwashed with the nothing to hide fallacy. It's good to see it dismantled once we see mass surveillance in practice. [1] Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Kenya, Morocco, Madagascar, Peru, and Bulgaria from a Brave overview (can't say I researched any of these). Prompt: other countries that had uprisings like the Nepal 2025 one
- linkjuice4all 2mo agoCutting them down isn’t the worst idea but it would be nice if we could just elect people that wouldn’t allow this in the first place. Knowing that won’t happen, the only chance reasonable people have to stop this is to turn these systems against the decision makers until they yield. Some kind of Flock@home volunteer surveillance network that tracks politicians, records LEO interactions (including those involving masked unaccountable agents), and provides the only accountability that the public has left.
- willis936 2mo agoWhat do you mean "allow"? Police chiefs are not elected positions and they often find funding outside of the town's budget for these automated bill of rights violation machines.
- Brian_K_White 2mo agoDoes the police deptartment own the land where the cameras are installed?
- borski 2mo agoSheriffs are elected (except in New York City, Rhode Island and Hawaii) and responsible for a county whereas a police chief manages law enforcement in a city or town and is appointed by its local government. There are a lot of sheriffs.
- conception 2mo agoSparrowmap.com is an attempt
- jMyles 2mo ago> Cutting them down isn’t the worst idea but it would be nice if we could just elect people that wouldn’t allow this in the first place. Is this really better though? First-party community maintenance is more direct, cheaper, and doesn't rely on fragile central authorities (granted, it _does_ rely on a difficult pattern of community discussion and collaboration to satisfy tribal consensus, etc). I'm broadly OK with cameras being in public, but I have much more trust in direct action than I do in elected "officials". On medium time-scales, it seems to me that a great solution will be to have community-maintained cameras kinda all over the commons, but such that the camera eye can be accessed publicly (ie, removing the information asymmetry which gives the undesirable actors (police, etc) greater view than the actual community participants).
- nullbio 2mo ago[flagged]
- vatsachak 2mo agoIt's just that flock is insecure and is also used in a negative manner by those who wield it. I mean functionally, given cell phones and ring doorbells we're already in a surveillance state.
- nullbio 2mo agoRight, and I think that part of Flock should be fixed. But I don't think in general it is a bad idea. Do these same people also think it is bad that the police can get a warrant to read your text messages?
- Calazon 2mo agoThey certainly think it would be bad for police to read your text messages without a warrant.
- nullbio 2mo agoI agree with that too. So if the argument is: "Flock is good in principle but right now it doesn't have the necessary safeguards", well, that's exactly what I said in my original post.
- harimau777 2mo agoThe problem is that the safeguards will inevitably be bent, ignored, parallel constructioned, or repealed. As long as the cameras are there, they are a threat.
- Calazon 2mo agoYou also said you "honestly don't understand the hate Flock gets". Which seems to suggests that the status quo is really no big deal, even with the current (lacking) safeguards. My real argument would probably be that this system is probably not unconstitutional but is very problematic and easily abused. Flock gets the hate that it does because it can be abused, and has been abused, and will in all likelihood continue to be abused. All kinds of ideas - especially involving having a very powerful government - would be great in theory if we could have "the necessary safeguards", but the necessary safeguards do not exist and I am not sure if they can be made to exist, at least in a practical realistic way.
- blakeashleyjr 2mo agoA plague on our land. Hopefully the recent Chatrie v. United States decision gives courts the ammo they need to shut these down. There is a big difference in a cop seeing you go by, checking a list, and coming after you than scanning every license plate, bumper sticker, etc. and putting in a database for every cop in the country.
- GauntletWizard 2mo agoI don't even have a problem with every cop being equipped with an automatic ALPR... So long as the data is not retained. I do believe that we need better auditing and oversight in response to the availability, but it's not a great evil that an APB can be virtually guaranteed to catch a car... So long as we're using them carefully and judiciously, in response to immediate and recent threats or a clearly understood long tail. There's supposed to be a balance of power; it's not evil to give the police new powers, but it is evil to give politicians unanswered and unlimited tracking of the movements of anyone they so desire.
- altairprime 2mo agoOne of the oddities in reporting about Flock is that no one’s considered who the silent customers are. Even Techdirt is focusing on municipal abuses and greed, calling out Flock for reactivating cameras for its own sake. But the real question should be: is Flock reactivating municipal cameras on behalf of non-municipal customers? So, when we find out here that the most likely non-municipal customer is also monitoring social media about Flock, it intensifies my suspicion that Flock exists as a liability shield for warrantless surveillance for the government — and that municipalities are just a front.
- thataccount 2mo agoShould be obvious to the government places that notice all this info coming out that people do not LIKE these as a solution, and they should maybe, I dunno, start listening to the people?
- tamimio 2mo agoGlowies are panicking, summarize the situation.
- whatever1 2mo agoGovernment is monitoring everyone.
- 4d4m 2mo agoFlock OS underpins many more cameras than are visible and added by Flock directly.
- spl757 2mo agoDollars to donuts it isn't just tiktok and instragram. If it's on the internet and not end-to-end encrypted with the proper ciphers it's being monitored. Shit, the police and feds keep things they can't decipher hoping they can in the future. My rule of thumb is that if it's technically possible, someone, somewhere is doing it.
- andrewflnr 2mo agoThis is good to know, and we might even mostly be on the side of the lawbreakers here but, like, monitoring public coordinated attempts to break the law is squarely in the job description of law enforcement. Maybe if someone had done a better job of social media monitoring, we could have had a real response to Jan 6, 2021. (I know, I know, maybe not under the cheeto's authority specifically, but the point is that LEOs reading public messages is still something that happens in a government actually working for the people.)
- andai 2mo agoWarm regards to GPT-6-NSA.
- driverdan 2mo agoWhat's going on with HN hiding this post? 84 votes in 4 hours and it's on page 3 while there are posts on page 1 that are older and have fewer votes.
- fastcall 2mo agoYou mean Flock Safety (YC ‘17)? :)