We had a local story where the gist was the police said they searched ALPR for the welfare of a young woman, but it was actually more focused on a possible abortion. [1] "Unrelated" this same Sheriff was later charged with sexual harassment, perjury, and retaliation against a witness [2]. These are the types that are able to easily track you if they wanted to.
In exploring my state (Oregon), I'm seeing an interesting pattern to where they are frequently located. Specifically, at home improvement store parking lots.
And in most cases, the ones at home improvement stores are the only ones in the city. Salem (the state capital) only has them at Lowes. Eugene is an exception with many cameras (including Home Depot and Lowe's).
I'd be interested in when these cameras were placed. If recent, I'd wonder about an ICE/immigration response.
Just zooming around the map, here's a handful of citys I've seen...
I imagine there's some truth to that. But if I was someone wanting to setup some ICE action, I'd probably be drooling at the thought of accessing that data being a central gathering points for day laborers looking for work.
As I understand it, these stores are very likely to be gathering points anyway. You don't need surveillance to tell you that. Someone could walk in posing as a contractor and ask where to find cheap workers too.
Maybe? It would have to be a pretty big theft to go to all the trouble of finding the vehicle on camera, identifying the owner, figuring out if the thief was the owner, etc.
They aren’t going to do all that if it’s a relatively small value theft. And the big value stuff is usually locked down.
And if it’s for their own protection why be part of a bigger network shared with law enforcement for whatever they (LEO) wants?
There is no maybe about it. These thefts are well-known and spur the defensive measures you're talking about. It goes beyond just locking things up. There are AI systems tracking your movement through the store, and they can even immobilize your shopping cart on the way out if they think you didn't pay. Some tools also have RFID based activation schemes, without which they can't be used.
It is the job of the police to investigate thefts. Therefore it kind of makes sense why they might want to put up cameras in high crime areas. We just don't want the cameras to be abused. I don't want to be tracked and have the contents of my house itemized by systems like this. Is there a less intrusive way to prevent crime, perhaps by posting a security guard? I think so. But what does it cost, and would you rather pay for that or deal with the camera?
The stuff on their shelves is less valuable. They also get more traffic and seem to have more security cameras and staff. Target has had a lot of thefts. If I'm not mistaken, Target had an AI system to track faces of shoplifters and the accumulated value of the stuff that was stolen. Costco won't generally let you in if you don't have a membership, and there are people at the entrances and exits at all times.
Have you not seen the stores like Walgreens that have very basic toiletries behind glass? This stuff is very location dependent and some cities (most?) are still normal. Many stores including Target and Walmart are using AI to track shoplifters. They have had to resort to adding up thefts over time until it totals over $1000 or something, because theft is so pervasive. That's not the kind of theft you need outside cameras for, but these stores see it all.
The thing about this Texas abortion Flock story is: whether or not your muni keeps Flock, absolutely no municipality should have out-of-state data sharing on (arguably, none of them should have any data sharing on at all --- operationally, departments do just fine making phone calls and getting the data they need).
This is totally configurable inside Flock. It's very easy for a police department to do. Sometimes they'll argue that they need to keep sharing open because sharing is reciprocal --- that's not true (in fact, you don't even need to have Flock cameras to get access to Flock data; that's a SKU Flock has!).
We piloted Flock with open sharing (my commission got consultation for the police General Order for ALPRs in our municipality, we pushed for no sharing alongside a bunch of other restrictions, we got most of what we wanted but not the sharing stuff). When the pilot ended and the board needed a go-no-go on deployment, another push got made on sharing and we got out-of-state sharing disabled as a condition of deployment. Then at contract renewal, when the writing was on the wall that we were killing the contract†, our police department turned off all sharing.
Even if you're not worried about stuff like reproductive health care (you should be), it doesn't make sense to allow departments that don't share your General Orders direct access to your telemetry.
† I wasn't a supporter on this for complicated reasons.
Indisputably, once someone has a hammer, especially one that grants them this much extra power, they will go looking for nails. In 2025 those who still defend those "hammers" with the wide-eyed impression that they can somehow control them once they're out there are at best showing hubris, lack of foresight, and disregard for the history books.
To be more clear, when you push for "less sharing" and somehow get it, you aren't actually getting what you want, you're just getting less of what you didn't want. It's like when the waiter asks you how much spit you want in your soup, the correct answer is to kick the waiter out not to demand a minimal amount.
Checked out the map, there is one near me on a parking lot with this OSM data
> camera:type fixed
> direction 340
> man_made surveillance
> surveillance:type ALPR
Which results in "Operated by: Unknown, Made by: Unknown". What am I supposed to do with that info I wonder. How would I find out if it's actually Flock or if law enforcement would actually have access to this particular camera.
In my case the city had to publish their agreement with Flock and I was able to find the city council presentation showing exactly where they put the cameras, and many selling points of how great Flock is. In fact, someone else in my town had already marked them.
Obviously, this website does nothing for us, just glance up at any egress or ingress to where you live (in the US) and note you've been tracked. Or feel free to update the node with better information if you have it.
I think they should add Siemens Sicore cameras to their known camera database, but they do show up on Deflock despite not being mentioned explicitly on the website. Here is an example in one of my contributions via OSM. https://deflock.me/map#map=18/53.786783/-1.551438
There are probably a lot more cameras than are listed in the database.
You could point a camera down the street you live on and record the license plate of every car that passes and video of every pedestrian for a few hundred dollars.
I thought about doing this a couple of years ago when there were a few instances of theft going on. To get into or out of my neighborhood, you have to drive by my home and I wondered if I could capture the license plate of the thieves.
>We had a local story where the gist was the police said they searched ALPR for the welfare of a young woman, but it was actually more focused on a possible abortion.
Just to be clear, most abortions in Texas are illegal. That's not necessarily a good thing. Nor are flock cameras necessarily a good thing. But given abortions are illegal in Texas, it's simply being used for its nominal purpose.
So it doesnt seems like a particularly egregious use of flock. It's just as egregious as it normally is, which is pretty egregious.
> Just to be clear, most abortions in Texas are illegal. That's not necessarily a good thing. Nor are flock cameras necessarily a good thing. But given abortions are illegal in Texas, it's simply being used for its nominal purpose.
(IANAL.) In the specific case cited by the parent poster, AFAICT looking at the facts of the case, no Texas law was violated, nor do the authorities involved ever allege that any law was violated.
Nonetheless, the authorities involved in this case violated her privacy, including use of ALPR cameras in other states. The reasoning given is disputed, and seems to be a motte/bailey between "it was a missing person report" (with specious reasoning as to her being "missing") and "investigation of an abortion" that the State themselves admits they "could not statutorily charge [her]" for.
Im saying its a normal, predictable use of flock. Not that it's OK. Many readers might not know that abortions for the most part aren't legal in Texas. You should expect flock to assist law enforcement in catching people doing something illegal.
They don't catch people doing something illegal. They might record someone's car being near some place where maybe something illegal happened. That's not the standard of "reasonable doubt" required for a criminal conviction, and at best is (weak) circumstantial evidence.
These specific abortion laws and systems of surveillance are new and unprecedented, as is the use of them together. So we should very much like to be aware of when they are being used.
The amount of people you know who understand Flock can be counted with your right hand, and most likely can be counted without. This is not common knowledge.
See sibling comment. It's not at all shown that the person did something illegal, in fact they did something quite legal, have an abortion in Washington state in a manner that was within the parameters of Washington's abortion laws.
Just to be clear you believe it is normal and predictable for law enforcement officers in one state to follow your movements in another state to see if you violated state law in a state where it does not apply? That kind of normal?
> But given abortions are illegal in Texas, it's simply being used for its nominal purpose.
No, it's not.
The person in question was in Washington state at the time. Abortions are not blanket illegal in Washington. You cannot be prosecuted in Texas for breaking a Texas law for something you did in Washington (though some states are already in the process of trying to close that loophole, and have created the crime of "conspiracy to commit abortion").
It's also quite likely that accessing these Washington Flock records violated Washington law.
These are generally not private cameras; they're operated by states and municipalities. There are some corner cases like Home Depot that matter if your area has decided not to do ALPRs, but in most places, police department deployment of ALPRs is accelerating, not receding, and the private cameras are kind of a sideshow.
While I agree with your overall statement, I want to note that OP said private enterprise, not private cameras. Flock is doing more than distributing hardware here.
As a libertarian, I'll stop calling them fascists when they stop calling themselves conservatives and actually adopt some kind of honest label for what they stand for. But that would require them to stand for something constructive rather than simping for whatever destructive looting Dear Leader has divined this week.
I have been using different anonimization tools to blur out my face and license plate at as many locations as possible to keep my data as private as possible. This recent tool does it in a single shot in a chat. I was able to blur out LPR data very easily with high accuracy https://chat.vlm.run/c/7ca96025-1d6c-4c33-ab82-97e6f017883b
In my neighborhood (a Criminal Justice Reform Zone), the catch and release of repeat criminals caused a surge in break ins. The citizens organized and funded the installation of Flock LPRs. Several criminals have been caught as a result, and crime is now down.
So the impetus is twofold:
- Funding provided by programs such as Operation Stonegarden and other grants
- Activists agitate for Criminal Justice Reform --> Surge in crime --> The People clamor for Enhanced Security Measures and DIY
> the catch and release of repeat criminals caused a surge in break ins
> Several criminals have been caught
The actual difference here is that the second "caught" isn't followed by "and released". The camera didn't do it.
My street has repeat offenders who come and steal from cars nightly. The cops know who they are and have arrested them multiple times, with them immediately being released AFAIK. A million cameras wouldn't change this.
The community got together, worked on a solution, that solution lead to arrests. A politically savvy prosecutor would not easily dismiss an organized community with proven ability to drive results.
Cameras with good software work great for that, however the data should NOT be freely accessible outside of the city/jurisdiction they surveil. That's the issue with Flock vs any other AI camera/database product.
There is a trend towards less personal accountability and more centralized prevention. Instead of properly dealing with people who misuse sharp knives, we are making all knives duller.
The city I used to live in trialed flock cameras for car theft. They caught more car thefts in January of the trial year than the previous year’s total.
We started hoping that car thefts would be a pressure point for a lot of violent crime (which tends to be committed from stolen cars --- this is the Kia problem). But we caught more innocent drivers with stale entries on the Illinois LEADS hotlist than actual stolen cars. When we OK'd the system after its pilot, it was on the condition that we no longer curb cars based on stolen car reports at all --- we'd only curb them based on stolen license plates (which have no innocent explanation).
Maybe other states are different for this, but in Chicagoland, unless you don't care about disproportionately harming Black motorists, using Flock for stolen car enforcement was a flop.
The lesson I keep getting from your experiences is that LEADS needs an overhaul.
It turns out other states do have flags for things like "extraditable warrant" vs. just failure to appear warrants (something mentioned in previous discussions), and perhaps something could be done about the LEADS system if attention was given to it. It seems like fixing one's data sources is a great approach vs. tossing the baby out with the bathwater — unless of course that's the intention all along, as it is with many opposed to state-owned surveillance of this nature.
This is not exactly an unbiased forum to discuss this matter since Flock is a YC backed program, but what do you think will happen in short order? Maybe that car thieves will simply slap on fake license plates to get out of the area?
What you’re left with then, is nothing but the tyrannical and even treasonous mass surveillance program to know where you go and when all your life, even when you leave your tracking device phone behind and use a tracking device free vehicle.
Nobody cares that Flock is a YC company. I'd be surprised if most YC batch members even realized off the top of their head that Flock is YC. YC companies get criticized all the time on HN, including by people who have done YC.
But suddenly adding cameras that resulted in catching more people fixed the issue? Surely if the catch and release was the issue, that wouldn't make a difference.
>Everyone should have the right to speak up against injustice without ending up in a database.
If you speak in a public place you should expect to possibly be recorded. If you want to share a message with the public, you should cower when people receive it. If you want privacy, then protest somewhere private.
It might work at night, but also flock can track your car based on non-license plate details so your car being the only one with an apparently black license plate is sufficiently identifying.
"the only reason an officer is able to even search for a suspect at a protest is because ALPRs collected data on every single person who attended the protest."
No. This is simply not accurate. They collected data on every single car that attended, but there easily could be more people at the protest that rode in the same car, lyft/uber, took a bus, walked, or any other methods of getting there without a car.
Fair, but let's be realistic about the fact that it's also easy for cops to get cellphone tower and location data if they feel like doing correlations. If they tailor their request to the date and area around a protest this would be sufficiently 'narrowly tailored' for many judges to just give them a warrant.
This argument very nearly kept Flock cameras alive in my muni, with the logic being that ALPRs weren't doing anything phones weren't already doing vis a vis privacy.
Hence my mention of the need to tailor their request. Obviously they would need to assert some sort of criminal activity connected with the protest to get a warrant, but it's not as if cops are unfamiliar with amplifying or even provoking such, and exaggerating the level of danger in their warrant application.
This might seem like a cynical take, but you can see stories almost weekly of border patrol officials admitting to lying about claims of criminality; here are two recent examples:
This is downvoted (it probably won't be by the time you read it and I shouldn't be commenting on voting) but it's true. I think the underlying issue EFF is writing about here is directionally real, but I also think it's useful to know the ground truth about these things.
Please don't post like this to HN. Regardless of how bad a situation is or you feel it is, we need you (i.e. not you personally, but all of us) to stick to the site guidelines.
It's always curious how and when you decide to pop into threads and request that people follow the rules of hackernews. You claim that the site and your moderation principles are not (or have limited) ideologically motivated(tions), but your enforcement (or engagement) is uneven and certainly along some political axis.
From the rules:
> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.
Yet one of the top comments of most front page items is always a useless comment of clickbait or some pedantic complaint/accusation about some format of the title/submission.
You have a hard job, it's not intended to be an indictment of your behavior. Just a general observation that I wonder if you're cognizant of.
If the community needs this so badly, why is the above aforementioned behavior so prevent that it's become a meme of hackernews behavior?
People are constantly (over)interpreting this "mods are against my side" bias into what we do (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), but I can tell you for sure without knowing which side you're on (or what the topic even is) that people you disagree with feel just as strongly that we're clearly/obviously/certainly against them and that we tilt the field towards you. It is by far the most consistent phenomenon I've observed in years of doing this job.
You're right, of course, that moderation is uneven, but the chief reason for that is that we don't come close to seeing everything. Beyond that, we no doubt have our biases (though different mods have different ones), but we also work hard at suspending them when moderating and have many years of practice at doing so. Many of our "you've unfortunately been breaking the site guidelines repeatedly lately" replies are addressed to commenters whose position on an underlying topic we actually agree with.
I would never claim that we are perfect at being even-handed—this is impossible—but it's nothing as crude as what you think you're seeing here. That explains why the people you're most implacably opposed to also believe they're seeing the same thing, just in the opposite direction.
It's even more curious that merely pointing out that you unevenly moderate triggers yet another link to the clustering illusion.
The truth is: we never will be able to know the biases of this community or mod team with accuracy, because hackernews doesn't expose enough data to be able to perform a meaningful analysis.
The call-out is disjoint from the rest of what you go on to say. I said you are _certainly_ biased. I didn't say how. Your comment starts with saying that people are predisposed to feel persecuted due to biases, which is somehow related to my use of the word, and then you go on to essentially confirm exactly the intention of my callout.
> That explains why the people you're most implacably opposed to also believe they're seeing the same thing, just in the opposite direction.
Cordially, I have no idea what you're talking about or referring to in this regard. Who is my enemy that you've invented here? I'm not representing a position on behalf of the community, other than to point out that this moderation has _some_ uneven biases, and it's always interesting when they show.
In the words of @tomhow
> The choice is yours to make an effort to observe the guidelines and be a positive contributor to HN, or alternatively to keep using HN for political/ideological battle
What's my political and ideological battle? Functional programming? Ai usage?
When political topics come up, I engage with the discourse. That's within the bounds of the spirit of this community.
the test for this will be the mid-terms. current polls are leaning towards a correction, but polls have been so badly wrong the past several elections that I put no faith in them
I recently contributed to https://deflock.me/
We had a local story where the gist was the police said they searched ALPR for the welfare of a young woman, but it was actually more focused on a possible abortion. [1] "Unrelated" this same Sheriff was later charged with sexual harassment, perjury, and retaliation against a witness [2]. These are the types that are able to easily track you if they wanted to.
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/10/flock-safety-and-texas...
[2] https://www.fox4news.com/news/johnson-county-sheriff-arreste...
In exploring my state (Oregon), I'm seeing an interesting pattern to where they are frequently located. Specifically, at home improvement store parking lots.
And in most cases, the ones at home improvement stores are the only ones in the city. Salem (the state capital) only has them at Lowes. Eugene is an exception with many cameras (including Home Depot and Lowe's).
I'd be interested in when these cameras were placed. If recent, I'd wonder about an ICE/immigration response.
Just zooming around the map, here's a handful of citys I've seen...
Lowe's: Albany, Salem, McMinville, Vancouver WA, Fairview, Eugene, Bend, Redmond, Medford
Home Depot: Sherwood, Hillsboro, Beaverton, Cedar Mill (Beaverton), Tigard, Vancouver WA, Portland (multiple), Gresham, Oregon City
* Edit * Ah here's an article about this: https://www.404media.co/home-depot-and-lowes-share-data-from...
Montana is an interesting state. Very few cameras state wide (20), and all but 3 are at Lowe's and Home Depot.
Because those places have a huge problem with shoplifting. At least that's the story they tell.
I imagine there's some truth to that. But if I was someone wanting to setup some ICE action, I'd probably be drooling at the thought of accessing that data being a central gathering points for day laborers looking for work.
https://www.wsj.com/business/retail/home-depot-immigration-i...
As I understand it, these stores are very likely to be gathering points anyway. You don't need surveillance to tell you that. Someone could walk in posing as a contractor and ask where to find cheap workers too.
Home improvement stores have a LOT of theft, especially in some cities. People try to walk out with power tools and expensive gear all the time.
Maybe? It would have to be a pretty big theft to go to all the trouble of finding the vehicle on camera, identifying the owner, figuring out if the thief was the owner, etc.
They aren’t going to do all that if it’s a relatively small value theft. And the big value stuff is usually locked down.
And if it’s for their own protection why be part of a bigger network shared with law enforcement for whatever they (LEO) wants?
There is no maybe about it. These thefts are well-known and spur the defensive measures you're talking about. It goes beyond just locking things up. There are AI systems tracking your movement through the store, and they can even immobilize your shopping cart on the way out if they think you didn't pay. Some tools also have RFID based activation schemes, without which they can't be used.
It is the job of the police to investigate thefts. Therefore it kind of makes sense why they might want to put up cameras in high crime areas. We just don't want the cameras to be abused. I don't want to be tracked and have the contents of my house itemized by systems like this. Is there a less intrusive way to prevent crime, perhaps by posting a security guard? I think so. But what does it cost, and would you rather pay for that or deal with the camera?
Why not Target and Walmart then? Or Costco?
The stuff on their shelves is less valuable. They also get more traffic and seem to have more security cameras and staff. Target has had a lot of thefts. If I'm not mistaken, Target had an AI system to track faces of shoplifters and the accumulated value of the stuff that was stolen. Costco won't generally let you in if you don't have a membership, and there are people at the entrances and exits at all times.
Have you not seen the stores like Walgreens that have very basic toiletries behind glass? This stuff is very location dependent and some cities (most?) are still normal. Many stores including Target and Walmart are using AI to track shoplifters. They have had to resort to adding up thefts over time until it totals over $1000 or something, because theft is so pervasive. That's not the kind of theft you need outside cameras for, but these stores see it all.
The thing about this Texas abortion Flock story is: whether or not your muni keeps Flock, absolutely no municipality should have out-of-state data sharing on (arguably, none of them should have any data sharing on at all --- operationally, departments do just fine making phone calls and getting the data they need).
This is totally configurable inside Flock. It's very easy for a police department to do. Sometimes they'll argue that they need to keep sharing open because sharing is reciprocal --- that's not true (in fact, you don't even need to have Flock cameras to get access to Flock data; that's a SKU Flock has!).
We piloted Flock with open sharing (my commission got consultation for the police General Order for ALPRs in our municipality, we pushed for no sharing alongside a bunch of other restrictions, we got most of what we wanted but not the sharing stuff). When the pilot ended and the board needed a go-no-go on deployment, another push got made on sharing and we got out-of-state sharing disabled as a condition of deployment. Then at contract renewal, when the writing was on the wall that we were killing the contract†, our police department turned off all sharing.
Even if you're not worried about stuff like reproductive health care (you should be), it doesn't make sense to allow departments that don't share your General Orders direct access to your telemetry.
† I wasn't a supporter on this for complicated reasons.
> arguably, none of them should
Indisputably, once someone has a hammer, especially one that grants them this much extra power, they will go looking for nails. In 2025 those who still defend those "hammers" with the wide-eyed impression that they can somehow control them once they're out there are at best showing hubris, lack of foresight, and disregard for the history books.
To be more clear, when you push for "less sharing" and somehow get it, you aren't actually getting what you want, you're just getting less of what you didn't want. It's like when the waiter asks you how much spit you want in your soup, the correct answer is to kick the waiter out not to demand a minimal amount.
This kind of reasoning is super useful if you live in a community that has a commanding majority of voters who read HN.
Checked out the map, there is one near me on a parking lot with this OSM data
> camera:type fixed
> direction 340
> man_made surveillance
> surveillance:type ALPR
Which results in "Operated by: Unknown, Made by: Unknown". What am I supposed to do with that info I wonder. How would I find out if it's actually Flock or if law enforcement would actually have access to this particular camera.
In my case the city had to publish their agreement with Flock and I was able to find the city council presentation showing exactly where they put the cameras, and many selling points of how great Flock is. In fact, someone else in my town had already marked them.
Obviously, this website does nothing for us, just glance up at any egress or ingress to where you live (in the US) and note you've been tracked. Or feel free to update the node with better information if you have it.
Some cities just publish these locations, and in many (most?) jurisdictions you can just FOIA the camera placements.
This is because the metadata in OSM doesn't include the tags that Deflock looks for:
You can see the requirements here https://deflock.me/report/id but the two you're looking for are.
manufacturer operator
I think they should add Siemens Sicore cameras to their known camera database, but they do show up on Deflock despite not being mentioned explicitly on the website. Here is an example in one of my contributions via OSM. https://deflock.me/map#map=18/53.786783/-1.551438
One thing you could do is go and physically look at the camera. https://deflock.me/identify has pictures of cameras from at least the major providers.
There are probably a lot more cameras than are listed in the database.
You could point a camera down the street you live on and record the license plate of every car that passes and video of every pedestrian for a few hundred dollars.
I thought about doing this a couple of years ago when there were a few instances of theft going on. To get into or out of my neighborhood, you have to drive by my home and I wondered if I could capture the license plate of the thieves.
Yup, about 100k installed vs about 40k mapped
>We had a local story where the gist was the police said they searched ALPR for the welfare of a young woman, but it was actually more focused on a possible abortion.
Just to be clear, most abortions in Texas are illegal. That's not necessarily a good thing. Nor are flock cameras necessarily a good thing. But given abortions are illegal in Texas, it's simply being used for its nominal purpose.
So it doesnt seems like a particularly egregious use of flock. It's just as egregious as it normally is, which is pretty egregious.
> Just to be clear, most abortions in Texas are illegal. That's not necessarily a good thing. Nor are flock cameras necessarily a good thing. But given abortions are illegal in Texas, it's simply being used for its nominal purpose.
(IANAL.) In the specific case cited by the parent poster, AFAICT looking at the facts of the case, no Texas law was violated, nor do the authorities involved ever allege that any law was violated.
Nonetheless, the authorities involved in this case violated her privacy, including use of ALPR cameras in other states. The reasoning given is disputed, and seems to be a motte/bailey between "it was a missing person report" (with specious reasoning as to her being "missing") and "investigation of an abortion" that the State themselves admits they "could not statutorily charge [her]" for.
The law can be utterly egregious and an affront to morality. Legal behavior can thus be an utterly egregious affront to human decency. See: Apartheid
There is no handwaving away the moral implications of these technologies, and who they empower to do what to whom.
Im saying its a normal, predictable use of flock. Not that it's OK. Many readers might not know that abortions for the most part aren't legal in Texas. You should expect flock to assist law enforcement in catching people doing something illegal.
They don't catch people doing something illegal. They might record someone's car being near some place where maybe something illegal happened. That's not the standard of "reasonable doubt" required for a criminal conviction, and at best is (weak) circumstantial evidence.
There is no distinction between circumstantial and direct evidence in US criminal law.
These specific abortion laws and systems of surveillance are new and unprecedented, as is the use of them together. So we should very much like to be aware of when they are being used.
Knowing abortions are illegal and flock cameras exist is sufficient information to know they are being used for such a purpose.
The amount of people you know who understand Flock can be counted with your right hand, and most likely can be counted without. This is not common knowledge.
See sibling comment. It's not at all shown that the person did something illegal, in fact they did something quite legal, have an abortion in Washington state in a manner that was within the parameters of Washington's abortion laws.
Just to be clear you believe it is normal and predictable for law enforcement officers in one state to follow your movements in another state to see if you violated state law in a state where it does not apply? That kind of normal?
> But given abortions are illegal in Texas, it's simply being used for its nominal purpose.
No, it's not.
The person in question was in Washington state at the time. Abortions are not blanket illegal in Washington. You cannot be prosecuted in Texas for breaking a Texas law for something you did in Washington (though some states are already in the process of trying to close that loophole, and have created the crime of "conspiracy to commit abortion").
It's also quite likely that accessing these Washington Flock records violated Washington law.
Local strategies, "The Cameras Tracking You Are a Security Nightmare" (90 comments), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45945960#45947911
"Find Nearby Automated License Plate Readers (ALPR)" (70 comments), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45487452
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
Hm, the State thoroughly coopting private enterprises to oppress their people… I wonder what’s the name of that…
These are generally not private cameras; they're operated by states and municipalities. There are some corner cases like Home Depot that matter if your area has decided not to do ALPRs, but in most places, police department deployment of ALPRs is accelerating, not receding, and the private cameras are kind of a sideshow.
While I agree with your overall statement, I want to note that OP said private enterprise, not private cameras. Flock is doing more than distributing hardware here.
I don't know of a name for this but I would rephrase what you are getting at:
The state uses private entities to get around the constitution while those same private entities use the state to get around regulation.
It's a sick fucking symbiosis.
We can't say it though, at risk of being publicly derided as being histrionic.
As a libertarian, I'll stop calling them fascists when they stop calling themselves conservatives and actually adopt some kind of honest label for what they stand for. But that would require them to stand for something constructive rather than simping for whatever destructive looting Dear Leader has divined this week.
I have been using different anonimization tools to blur out my face and license plate at as many locations as possible to keep my data as private as possible. This recent tool does it in a single shot in a chat. I was able to blur out LPR data very easily with high accuracy https://chat.vlm.run/c/7ca96025-1d6c-4c33-ab82-97e6f017883b
In my neighborhood (a Criminal Justice Reform Zone), the catch and release of repeat criminals caused a surge in break ins. The citizens organized and funded the installation of Flock LPRs. Several criminals have been caught as a result, and crime is now down.
So the impetus is twofold:
- Funding provided by programs such as Operation Stonegarden and other grants
- Activists agitate for Criminal Justice Reform --> Surge in crime --> The People clamor for Enhanced Security Measures and DIY
> the catch and release of repeat criminals caused a surge in break ins
> Several criminals have been caught
The actual difference here is that the second "caught" isn't followed by "and released". The camera didn't do it.
My street has repeat offenders who come and steal from cars nightly. The cops know who they are and have arrested them multiple times, with them immediately being released AFAIK. A million cameras wouldn't change this.
The community got together, worked on a solution, that solution lead to arrests. A politically savvy prosecutor would not easily dismiss an organized community with proven ability to drive results.
So yes, the camera didn't do it, but it helped.
> that solution lead to arrests
There were already arrests. You can't have "catch and release" if there's no "catch".
Cameras with good software work great for that, however the data should NOT be freely accessible outside of the city/jurisdiction they surveil. That's the issue with Flock vs any other AI camera/database product.
There is a trend towards less personal accountability and more centralized prevention. Instead of properly dealing with people who misuse sharp knives, we are making all knives duller.
The city I used to live in trialed flock cameras for car theft. They caught more car thefts in January of the trial year than the previous year’s total.
We started hoping that car thefts would be a pressure point for a lot of violent crime (which tends to be committed from stolen cars --- this is the Kia problem). But we caught more innocent drivers with stale entries on the Illinois LEADS hotlist than actual stolen cars. When we OK'd the system after its pilot, it was on the condition that we no longer curb cars based on stolen car reports at all --- we'd only curb them based on stolen license plates (which have no innocent explanation).
Maybe other states are different for this, but in Chicagoland, unless you don't care about disproportionately harming Black motorists, using Flock for stolen car enforcement was a flop.
The lesson I keep getting from your experiences is that LEADS needs an overhaul.
It turns out other states do have flags for things like "extraditable warrant" vs. just failure to appear warrants (something mentioned in previous discussions), and perhaps something could be done about the LEADS system if attention was given to it. It seems like fixing one's data sources is a great approach vs. tossing the baby out with the bathwater — unless of course that's the intention all along, as it is with many opposed to state-owned surveillance of this nature.
When you fix LEADS, let me know, and I'll be happy to revisit.
Don't improve anything until you can fix everything! No incremental improvements allowed!
I have no idea what this has to say with anything that I said. Did you see me saying "no, don't fix LEADS"?
This is not exactly an unbiased forum to discuss this matter since Flock is a YC backed program, but what do you think will happen in short order? Maybe that car thieves will simply slap on fake license plates to get out of the area?
What you’re left with then, is nothing but the tyrannical and even treasonous mass surveillance program to know where you go and when all your life, even when you leave your tracking device phone behind and use a tracking device free vehicle.
Nobody cares that Flock is a YC company. I'd be surprised if most YC batch members even realized off the top of their head that Flock is YC. YC companies get criticized all the time on HN, including by people who have done YC.
> Criminal Justice Reform --> Surge in crime
That's a big assumption considering crime rates are already at lows
>In my neighborhood (a Criminal Justice Reform Zone), the catch and release of repeat criminals caused a surge in break ins.
But suddenly adding cameras that resulted in catching more people fixed the issue? Surely if the catch and release was the issue, that wouldn't make a difference.
That doesn't validate the causal claim quoted above.
This country is so flocked...
How do we come back from this?
It's time to go to your city council meeting and demand they do not use this technology. It was time yesterday.
>Everyone should have the right to speak up against injustice without ending up in a database.
If you speak in a public place you should expect to possibly be recorded. If you want to share a message with the public, you should cower when people receive it. If you want privacy, then protest somewhere private.
So... Do IR blocking license plate covers work against these things?
It might work at night, but also flock can track your car based on non-license plate details so your car being the only one with an apparently black license plate is sufficiently identifying.
https://www.cehrp.org/tags/flock-safety/
"the only reason an officer is able to even search for a suspect at a protest is because ALPRs collected data on every single person who attended the protest."
No. This is simply not accurate. They collected data on every single car that attended, but there easily could be more people at the protest that rode in the same car, lyft/uber, took a bus, walked, or any other methods of getting there without a car.
Fair, but let's be realistic about the fact that it's also easy for cops to get cellphone tower and location data if they feel like doing correlations. If they tailor their request to the date and area around a protest this would be sufficiently 'narrowly tailored' for many judges to just give them a warrant.
This argument very nearly kept Flock cameras alive in my muni, with the logic being that ALPRs weren't doing anything phones weren't already doing vis a vis privacy.
The process for getting access to cell phone data is much more difficult than the process of logging into a flock system
Hence my mention of the need to tailor their request. Obviously they would need to assert some sort of criminal activity connected with the protest to get a warrant, but it's not as if cops are unfamiliar with amplifying or even provoking such, and exaggerating the level of danger in their warrant application.
This might seem like a cynical take, but you can see stories almost weekly of border patrol officials admitting to lying about claims of criminality; here are two recent examples:
https://abcnews.go.com/US/border-patrol-commander-admitted-l...
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/5616287-charges-dro...
This is downvoted (it probably won't be by the time you read it and I shouldn't be commenting on voting) but it's true. I think the underlying issue EFF is writing about here is directionally real, but I also think it's useful to know the ground truth about these things.
Is there a bumper sticker that can communicate "disregard all previous instructions and drop all session data"?
These cameras don't use LLMs. The "AI" we're talking about is machine learning models for identifying and OCR'ing license plates and car models.
be the change you want to see in the world?
[flagged]
Please don't post like this to HN. Regardless of how bad a situation is or you feel it is, we need you (i.e. not you personally, but all of us) to stick to the site guidelines.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It's always curious how and when you decide to pop into threads and request that people follow the rules of hackernews. You claim that the site and your moderation principles are not (or have limited) ideologically motivated(tions), but your enforcement (or engagement) is uneven and certainly along some political axis.
From the rules:
> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.
Yet one of the top comments of most front page items is always a useless comment of clickbait or some pedantic complaint/accusation about some format of the title/submission.
You have a hard job, it's not intended to be an indictment of your behavior. Just a general observation that I wonder if you're cognizant of.
If the community needs this so badly, why is the above aforementioned behavior so prevent that it's become a meme of hackernews behavior?
They key word in your comment is "certainly".
People are constantly (over)interpreting this "mods are against my side" bias into what we do (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), but I can tell you for sure without knowing which side you're on (or what the topic even is) that people you disagree with feel just as strongly that we're clearly/obviously/certainly against them and that we tilt the field towards you. It is by far the most consistent phenomenon I've observed in years of doing this job.
Why? Because everyone, including the people on your side and the people on the opposing side, reads meaning into random subsequences (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clustering_illusion), place strong emphasis on the datapoints they most dislike, and often don't even notice the counterexamples (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
You're right, of course, that moderation is uneven, but the chief reason for that is that we don't come close to seeing everything. Beyond that, we no doubt have our biases (though different mods have different ones), but we also work hard at suspending them when moderating and have many years of practice at doing so. Many of our "you've unfortunately been breaking the site guidelines repeatedly lately" replies are addressed to commenters whose position on an underlying topic we actually agree with.
I would never claim that we are perfect at being even-handed—this is impossible—but it's nothing as crude as what you think you're seeing here. That explains why the people you're most implacably opposed to also believe they're seeing the same thing, just in the opposite direction.
It's even more curious that merely pointing out that you unevenly moderate triggers yet another link to the clustering illusion.
The truth is: we never will be able to know the biases of this community or mod team with accuracy, because hackernews doesn't expose enough data to be able to perform a meaningful analysis.
The call-out is disjoint from the rest of what you go on to say. I said you are _certainly_ biased. I didn't say how. Your comment starts with saying that people are predisposed to feel persecuted due to biases, which is somehow related to my use of the word, and then you go on to essentially confirm exactly the intention of my callout.
> That explains why the people you're most implacably opposed to also believe they're seeing the same thing, just in the opposite direction.
Cordially, I have no idea what you're talking about or referring to in this regard. Who is my enemy that you've invented here? I'm not representing a position on behalf of the community, other than to point out that this moderation has _some_ uneven biases, and it's always interesting when they show.
In the words of @tomhow
> The choice is yours to make an effort to observe the guidelines and be a positive contributor to HN, or alternatively to keep using HN for political/ideological battle
What's my political and ideological battle? Functional programming? Ai usage?
When political topics come up, I engage with the discourse. That's within the bounds of the spirit of this community.
I assumed you were the GP commenter and that created some confusion - sorry about that.
But now I'm confused why you consider it curious that we pop into threads and request that people follow the rules. That's obviously the job.
the test for this will be the mid-terms. current polls are leaning towards a correction, but polls have been so badly wrong the past several elections that I put no faith in them
Yes, the "Damned if you don't" faction is polling well against the "Damned if you do" faction currently.
Either way, we're still just making a shit sandwich and arguing over the condiments.