I don't like that the government is tracking everyone's movements so openly. I knew they were doing this with cell phone data, but that wasn't so brazen.
Adversarial computer vision and DIY OSS $250 RPi Hailo ALPR (2M views), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp9MwZkHiMQ
"Tire Pressure Sensor IDs: Why, Where and When (2015)" (30 comments), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45490202
https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/flock-massachus...
https://www.404media.co/ice-taps-into-nationwide-ai-enabled-...
https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/surveillance-com...
I wonder what they estimate the "replace with newer" cost to be versus the "figure out how to deploy $modernAndroid fleet wide" costs. Bonus points if you express it as a percentage of CEO's compensation / company wide revenue.
¹ I'm being generous here. Police can still obtain Ring footage via warrants or "emergency" requests that don’t involve the user choosing to share anything.
https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/2123068verkadac...
This is part of the problem with Flock, IMO. Lack of adherence to or support of norms. Psychopathy actualized as a corporation.
The societal impact of disruption of trust, of personal privacy, is under-appreciated by the corporation. It's concerned with winning profit.
(Meta) It's an inspecific argument I'm lazily laying out, yes, however the problem is ridiculously obvious.
We should not have to ask to be respected, and here we are.
Democratic decline (both the systems and participation in), truth, self respect/understanding of one's own rights ... those qualities are dying at the relentless toxic, ethically under-explored capitalization of our laws and resources. (Especially USA, compare to corporate social responsibility countries, I suspect)
Tech disruption is amazing to watch, and participate in, like a fire consuming the forest. "But what about the children?"
What steps is Flock taking to address the privacy overreach? Do you have data sharing agreements with Palantir? If so, do they respect the same geofencing properties that your clients supposedly have full control over?
(We’ve recently had some high-profile political fundraisers in my town. Our state’s FOIA is halfway powerful, and a few of us were considering publishing maps of the routes they and they security details took, to illustrate how these products compromise our safety. But that strikes me as more of a fun publicity stunt than anything that would force the county.)
Does Flock control where the cameras are positioned?
https://ij.org/press-release/judge-rules-lawsuit-challenging...
Not exactly trying to get new legislation passed but working within the courts to set some boundaries.
You are selling tools that have zero upside and a lot of downsides and that are used for structural violation of the privacy of citizens. Don't hide behind that you're trying to help people stay safe, that is not what you are doing and if you believe that you can take credit for the upsides then you really should take responsibility for the downsides.
I hope you lose sleep like those women do.
Would love to hear from one of the founders on what they are doing to address that.
Nuture not control.
Living wage.
Access to day care.
I'm looking for convincing decoy ALPR cameras because I don't think my HOA will go for a real setup, and I've got concerns over the product's security. I want the appearance of surveillance if I can't get the real thing. Being on a Flock/ALPR tracking app/site would be a huge win.
There is no benefit to signaling one's virtue in this scenario. It's like having a sign in your yard that says "Proudly Gun-Free Household".
The problem is that the downside is unbounded.
We clearly don't have the control over our governments, in either direction or degree, that would be needed to ensure that the unbounded downside of ubiquitous networked cameras won't manifest itself.
Flock has been a "side project" that's been eating about as many hours as a part-time job since late June. I have spoken at city council meetings in two cities, met individually with city councilors, met with a chief of police, presented to city councilors in Portland, am in almost daily conversations with ACLU Oregon, have received legal advice from EFF, done numerous media interviews, and I have an upcoming presentation to the state Senate Judiciary Committee. I may also be one of the reasons that Ron Wyden's office investigated Flock more carefully over the Summer and recently released a letter suggesting that cities terminate their relationship with the company.
All of which is to say I've been in it for a while now and have had some wins.
Good and bad news: it's a lot easier to fight it now than it was in June, but it's still going to take more effort than you probably imagine.
You'll need a team. I'm one member of a community working group. We have a core group of about a half-dozen active organizers. We have filed (and paid thousands in fees for) tons of public records requests, done a lot of community organizing and outreach, built partnerships with adjacent activist organizations, and done original technical research.
There are a couple of different strategies to pursue that can kick these things out of a community. My recommendation is to find the one that you like best, and find other people that like other ones, and pursue them in parallel.
Depending on your local police department, you may find them to be surprisingly cooperative, or you may find that they dig in and start putting in an equal amount of effort to block yours. I've had both. Odds are that your city councilors are not aware at all of what Flock is or how it works, so your first step is to raise awareness. I strongly recommend starting with an approach that makes you seem like a reasonable, honest, and reliable member of your community.
I realize this comment isn't super helpful by itself. I'm a bit distracted at the moment and I don't think I could figure out how to write a helpful, comprehensive, and yet concise comment here on this. I need to put together an info packet for people that want to get efforts like this one started in their own community. In the meanwhile, you should be able to email contact@eyesoffeugene.org and I'm happy to provide advice and assistance to anyone that wants to take this up in their city.
The open-source project Every Door has been a really convenient on-the-go tool for contributing these annotations[1]
Every community in the nation that is home to Flock cameras should look at the user agreement between their police department (or other Flock customers) and the company, to see whether it contains a clause stating that the customer “hereby grants Flock” a “worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free free right and license” to “disclose the Agency Data… for investigative purposes.” This is the language that will govern in a community unless a department demands changes to the standard user agreement that Flock offers. That is something we absolutely urge any agencies doing business with Flock to do — and, the ACLU of Massachusetts found, is exactly what the Boston police department did.
---
What assurance does any member of the public have that your company does not and will not ever share data to which you claim a "worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free free right and license" to? Are you saying that the "customer" has the ability to choose a "do not share" flag or something? What happens when they flip that flag at some point in the future? What redress does a victim have if you share data you did not, at that point in time, have permission to share?
> There are a couple of different strategies to pursue that can kick these things out of a community
Would love to hear more about these, even if it's just a wall of links or brief thoughts.
"Alexro, there are clear and large signs about the cameras at the entrance to our neighborhoods.
"Our neighborhoods are not large public roads, they are typically 100-400 home communities. You would never have to enter the community."
Now, it's clear that the cameras are not always obviously marked, they are not always in small communities, and they are often now on public thoroughfares. i go past at least one every day and it is not within a subdivision, rather it's on a main thoroughfare. It is marked, but a sign that is readable at 5 MPH is not necessarily readable at 35 MPH. It doesn't help to mark it "Flock" because I don't know who it is for.
Presumably, someone who has permission to the data can use it for legitimate investigations. Or they can use it for illicit investigations. Or share it with others for their own investigations. Or exchange it for other data they care about. And since we're not the "customer", what can we do about it? We're the target.
The Cameras Tracking You Are a Security Nightmare
The model is not entirely unhelpful: selling better drugs might be one of the few practical solutions here. If cameras have undeniably visible benefits for private companies and public safety (I think they ultimately will), then the question is how to build them in a way that avoids accrual of centralized power while providing the benefits. You can attack that problem from a lot of angles, but at the moment it is undeniably hard to build video sensing in a way that doesn't rely on centralized (computing) power.
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40227280
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41927777
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45506690
Cards on the table that I was not a full-throated supporter of cancelling our Flock contract, for complicated reasons, but past that I'll take a fair bit of credit for the harm-reduction work we did, which ultimately created the procedural tracks we used to kill the contract.
Short answer for how we did it: message board nerding.
You're interested in getting the cameras taken down in a Wyoming muni. One advantage we had in Oak Park that you might not in WY is that our cost function priced bogus stops of Black drivers very high. So, if I was strategizing killing cameras in a major metro suburb, my strategy would be:
(1) Create procedural rails to collect your own transparency data on stops.
(2) Do the analysis to trace "real" stops to crimes meaningful to your muni (for us: enforcing failure-to-appear warrants for neighboring suburbs was not high-value work for OPPD, so many of the "legit" stops had negative value).
(3) You'll be left with some subset of real crimes cameras were involved with, and in only a subset of those will the cameras have been meaningful.
One thing that complicates Flock deployments in Illinois is that they depend on the ISP LEADS database as their hotlist of stolen vehicles, and LEADS is not maintained well enough to use as a real-time information source (or even a week-by-week granular source), so we had a bunch of bogus stops.
A super important thing I think everybody should know about Flock cameras:
You do not in fact need to be enrolled in Flock's sharing system to get data from neighboring muni cameras. In fact, I think Flock even has a product you can buy that just gives you access to sharing data without even owning cameras.
Since "we need to share our data to get access to other muni's data" is the only reason to have sharing enabled on these things, it should be pretty easy, as a political lift, to turn sharing off.
Competing with companies that don’t share these values is a “slow path.”
For instance, one of the most common requests is integrating our VMS with Chinese cameras, because of cost. While we’ve done it in the past, using a hardware device to prevent unexpected protocol communication, our CEO concluded that it was ethically questionable given our principles.
TLDR: The feature was dropped, and you can imagine that this decision had a significant impact on sales.
Pretty bold move, honestly.
Because of things like that, that's why I stay.
It seems weird to me to hyperfocus on Flock's role here rather than the role your own local municipalities play in deciding how to configure these things. Not sharing with ICE is apparently quite doable? At least to the point of requiring a court order to get access to the data, which is a vulnerability all online cameras share.
Later
s/company/country, thanks for the correction!
Absolutely!
Re: Strategies
- Public records requests (aka FOIAs, though FOIA is technically for federal stuff): this has been a big one for us. File a request for the contract, a request for the locations, a request for communications, requests for the network audit, and more. PRRs take practice, but I can put you in touch with someone that's become an expert at them. Some requests may come with price tags attached and in some cases they can be expensive. Usually that means either the agency is fighting you or something in the request needs to be reworded.
- Comms: set up a site (go with something quick and easy for multiple people to use), we've had good luck setting up a community chat on Signal (now with almost 100 participants). I've spent a pile of hours just assembling different slide decks that digest lots of Flock info into smaller bits for people learning about it for the first time.
- Show up: things got rolling here when a couple of people used the public comment period at local city council meetings. Local media often monitor city council meetings, and if you're a new face and you're saying something interesting, there may be a brief interview afterward.
- Gather intelligence: we've gotten to know our local politicians pretty well. You'll want to keep some notes on where everyone stands on it, who can be moved, who prefers individual meetings, talking points they may be responsive to.
- Engage with other local activist groups. Flock s a problem that affects people with lots of different political opinions.
- Try meeting with your local police department chief and just initiate a conversation about it. They may not be as pro-Flock as you'd expect. You at least want to figure out where they stand on it and let them see you as not a direct opponent from the get-go.
- Make contact with your local chapter of the ACLU. In our case, they've filed a lawsuit on our behalf over a public records request that the city refused to fulfill and the county DA denied on appeal.
- Write lots of emails to local officials, offer to meet them for coffee. They can be hard to reach initially, but once you get that initial meeting, if it goes well, they know who you are and they'll answer your texts. We are now having frequent text chats with city councilors and police commissioners and even state legislators.
This is all just off the top of my head real quick, I am probably forgetting at least one important strategy. But each of these can take a lot of time and each benefits from different skill sets, so that's where having a small group of people is really helpful.
Rather than trying to set up a hierarchical, official organization, we decided early on to just run as an ad-hoc informal "working group", and each of us would just pick up whatever tasks we were most interested in. That has worked out really well.
Analogy: criminals know Target stores have a policy to prosecute all shoplifters, so when there was still a shoplifting subreddit that fact would be regularly trotted out and criminals were warned by their peers (the best kind of testimonial) to stay away. I would love it if my neighborhood had that reputation.
Our police have real work to do. If we had a special magic beepy device in all the police cruisers that lit up when someone with an outstanding warrant drove past, we would not prioritize that enforcement work to the exclusion of the real work. But since OPPD doesn't know that they're going to end up burning 5 hours on a failure-to-appear warrant when they curb a car on a Flock alert, that's what Flock essentially had us doing.
I honestly think this argument is probably pretty portable to a lot of different municipalities. It's not a function of anything Flock itself deliberately does, but rather a simple function of pretextual or preemptive stops on cars: you are probably going to end up making a whole bunch of failure-to-appear arrests. And I think in pretty much every community where killing camera contracts is on the table, failure-to-appear enforcement will be perceived as net-negative, a distraction from preventing serious crime.
The thing I like about this argument is that it's insensitive to people's priors about law enforcement. Whether or not you like your PD (I very much like OPPD), this argument should have weight!
The key observation here, again, is that any arrest has a very high fixed cost.
I don't think anyone with a network like that can not "give" the contents to the feds for very long without drawing ire.
Flock does not sell data, they willingly give it away for free. And, technically, they don't do it - their customers do, and Flock knows and lets them.
Personally, in my view, this is worse. But they don't specifically sell data.
Mr. Flock Person, how about a feature request to alert only on 'interesting' warrants? I wonder if that's even possible — it might be a binary flag on the plate data. Hm. If so, that would be a serious bummer and something perhaps the legislature should look into remedying (such a change would require funding after all). A will-extradite flag seems like it would be useful.
I was wondering why Atlanta was so dystopian and creepy, then I Googled the guy posting here, Garrett Langley. It makes sense now.
"Flock was founded in 2017. It was co-founded by three Georgia Tech alumni:
Garrett Langley (chief executive officer), Paige Todd (chief people officer), and Matt Feury (chief technology officer)."
I agree that in the abstract maybe there are better things some cops could be doing, but it seems like a vaguely reasonable use of some traffic enforcement resources. It's not like this taking away from murder investigations.
There's a prisoner's dilemma defecting thing going on here, right? You'd want neighboring municipalities to enforce warrants out of Oak Park.
The key thing to understand is that an arrest eats half an OPPD officer's work day, so if OPPD is arresting someone, you want the juice to be worth the squeeze.
You want to make the world safer? Shut down your company.
No real objection to "the data source is bad," but I think the solution there is improve the data source rather than willful blindness.
We don't control this data! It's good to want things, but whether or not you think it's good that LEADS isn't good enough for real-time enforcement, it is not.
I think law enforcement everywhere in the US would like a way to make ALPR more useful for targeting higher risk offenders and leave the revenue generation warrants to times when the subject is being arrested for a different offense. Such an extension would maximize the utility of the investment that's already been made in ALPR hardware, software, and services.
I think putting them in high traffic retail areas is a great idea. I've noticed my local Walmart has stopped locking up razors. Home Depot is getting bolder with what they'll chain up in front of the store. I believe these cameras are having some positive effect on our public places. Putting them in private driveways or in residential areas is where it starts to get really obnoxious.
If you are not happy with the idea of things like felony retail/automobile theft, there aren't unlimited solutions available. Some kind of dystopian surveillance grid is perhaps the least crappy option today, all things considered. If you want to see an alternative, look to Singapore for the ~other option. I would be very open to a conversation about trading the Eye of Sauron for caning.
Thanks for pointing this out. I'll go ahead and give myself 10 minutes in the corner of shame.
Your wealth and power will not save you. Your rich friends will not save you. Turning off the monstrosity you are helping to create and reckoning with what you have already done in the world is the only thing that will. If there is still any shard of humanity left in you, I hope this finds it. It is not too late to turn away from the path you chose. But it soon will be. And there will be a reckoning either way.
Good for you.
> why do you think cameras are the only solution?
Straw man.
I want to deter criminals from even thinking about targeting my neighborhood. The appearance of surveillance might serve as a powerful deterrent. Inclusion on a site that warns criminals where ALPR cameras are located would be a boon to this effort. Convincing decoy camera housings, the subject of my post, might be enough to get the neighborhood listed without actually having go forward with a full Flock installation.
Let me be extremely clear: there's no member of the set of humans that actively avoid ALPR cameras that I want coming to my home uninvited. Not a single one.
[0] "Text us to see if you qaulify for (some non-existent) government program to get free (things)"
I hope that neighborhood enjoys the flock cameras more than the visual blight and their neighbors getting scammed.
> we all understand that "selling data" does not literally mean exchanging money for data.
You're completely wrong there. That is exactly what it means.
If what you mean is lax security practices, or collecting data in general, just say that. There's really no need to bend over backwards to defend this.
Of course the rest of the justice system has to be firing on all cylinders to make that happen... but still, when you're a crime victim, more information is better than less.
They do not sell data, they willingly give it away for free - which is a form of selling data, with a price tag of $0.
Most reasonable human beings will actually say this is slightly worse than "selling" (literal) data. Therefore, I think most people would agree with me, and not with you.
In my mind it's very similar to claiming you're not a thief because you give away the stuff you take. No, you're still a thief, you just love being a thief so much you don't even do it for monetary gain. Which is... worse!
Yes, I do. And I've even had one stolen. And even that isn't enough to persuade me that putting cameras everywhere is going to make us safer. People are scared of their own shadow, it makes zero sense. Theft and other crime is as old as humanity, it is a delusion to think that living in the panopticon is going to make you save from small crime. But what it will do is enable much bigger crimes.
As far as my car: we have this amazing thing called insurance. And they were most reasonable when my car was stolen and yes, I'm still pissed off about it. But cameras would not have stopped that.
Admittedly those are all big leaps of faith around here, where car thieves are handled on a catch-and-release basis and where we usually don't even bother with the 'catch' part. You could argue that law enforcement doesn't need any new toys if they don't use the ones they already have, and I certainly wouldn't disagree with that.
I think a lot depends on who owns and controls the cameras. I'd object to ALPRs being installed in my rural neighborhood, certainly. But I see little other than upside in private security cameras whose footage I can choose to share with the police, or with anyone else for that matter. Which is why that's what I have.
At the same time, cameras in urban settings are much less scary and offensive to me for some reason, partially because I disagree that anyone has any expectation of privacy in such settings, and partially because I believe that ship has sailed and anyone bothering to object is just wasting their breath.
The best we can hope for is aggressive public oversight of such cameras. The company itself can't be expected to show any leadership in that area; it has to come from us.
There is zero correlation between these cameras being installed or not and crime incidence rates or the number of cases solved.
Ironically, what did reduce crime - considerably so, even - was COVID. But I don't see anybody arguing for a curfew to reduce crime either.