alt.hn

4/8/2026 at 12:26:14 PM

US cities are axing Flock Safety surveillance technology

 https://www.cnet.com/home/security/when-flock-comes-to-town-why-cities-are-axing-the-controversial-surveillance-technology/

by giuliomagnifico

4/8/2026 at 1:52:18 PM

Musician-turning-tech anarchist (?) Benn Jordan is making a very interesting series of videos about Flock cameras, their poor safety, and their gray-area interfacing with local governments:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMIwNiwQewQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB0gr7Fh6lY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vU1-uiUlHTo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp9MwZkHiMQ

I recommend them.

by gorgonical

4/8/2026 at 5:47:12 PM

I think his comment about "why dogs might provide actual neighborhood safety" is a good reminder that the thing that makes communities safe is "knowing your neighbors." You don't get safety by building a castle with a moat and a million cameras. You get safety by building a community with context that can respond without having to just "react" to the 6s version of "what happened".

by xracy

4/8/2026 at 6:10:36 PM

I'm reminded of prepper forum discussions. Where some do little more than hoard supplies, weapons and gadgets yet don't network and build communities. In an actual societal breakdown scenario these isolated individuals will become loot drops for others who actually band together.

by snerbles

4/8/2026 at 6:50:39 PM

It's not that they'll be able to call on one another - you can't guarantee who else will be around after The Bad Event (whatever it is).

It's that they don't have the basic strength of building alliances in the first place - something every kid is supposed to learn through the joys and pains of playing together. Bullies are not generally the popular ones, but neither are the loners.

To put it another way: castles can't survive siege forever. They are a delaying tactic until outside help can arrive.

"The Dauphin, whom of succors we entreated, Returns us that his powers are yet not ready To raise so great a siege. Therefore, great king, We yield our town and lives to thy soft mercy." -- Henry V, Act 3, scene 3

by IAmBroom

4/8/2026 at 6:48:46 PM

Many may find it unintuitive, but one of the best things you can do for the actual security of a neighborhood is to design it for pedestrian and "loitering" friendliness.

by Sharlin

4/8/2026 at 8:38:03 PM

This is extremely salient. Check out Phoenix, AZ sometime in street view. It's a brutalist grid of wide roads (even in "residential zones") where every property is lined in a six-foot block wall. As a result, sight lines are excellent for drivers (encouraging high speeds) but terrible for homeowners. Kids can't reasonably roam free, neighbors rarely meet, and everyone is viewed with suspicion. Most of my neighbors are really decent people, but I see them so rarely we might as live in different cities.

by ultrarunner

4/8/2026 at 3:20:51 PM

Benn's videos along with this one from a very chill middle-aged engineer/state rep made the difference in swaying our town to discontinue its Flock contract: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwbE5ks7dFg

by jkestner

4/8/2026 at 2:50:41 PM

Those were great to watch, thanks!

Also, I can't help but feel like I'm watching a young Dr. Emmett Brown.. Great Scott!!

by seemaze

4/8/2026 at 3:02:57 PM

Benn is the best. His most recent video is about Ring cameras.

by devin

4/8/2026 at 4:35:23 PM

And Data center noise pollution before that. It's the only channel I subscribe to knowing full well every video is going to infuriate me.

by kgwxd

4/8/2026 at 5:40:16 PM

I'd also recommend Louis Rossman's videos on the topic, including how to get involved.

by stronglikedan

4/8/2026 at 1:57:30 PM

Super worth a watch. Lots of technical tidbits also.

by boriskourt

4/8/2026 at 5:41:59 PM

Love the Flashbulb!

by boc

4/8/2026 at 2:15:42 PM

Wow thank you for sharing this I had no idea this guy existed!

There’s more of us techno anarchists out there apparently!

by AndrewKemendo

4/8/2026 at 1:58:36 PM

[flagged]

by waNpyt-menrew

4/8/2026 at 2:01:38 PM

???

It is very clearly because YouTube has a higher reach than any other platform in that space.

by puppykito

4/8/2026 at 2:23:34 PM

During the KMT military dictatorship in Taiwan, the KMT used the radio to spread its anti-democratic propaganda and disparage pro-democracy activists. Activists meanwhile spread their messages via pirate radio.

by komali2

4/8/2026 at 4:07:34 PM

Cool, what does that have to do with anything?

by pc86

4/8/2026 at 6:11:19 PM

>[1] Would crime go up, down or stay the same if all surveillance cameras were removed? The answer to that is the only one that matters.

At least 40,990 [2] innocent people died in the US in 2023, without significant outcry - that is, on the road, in car accidents. People in the US clearly value the freedom of driving over the deaths of innocent people. In 2023, there were an estimated 19,800 [3] homicides in the US. But even if you assume surveillance like Flock could prevent a meaningful fraction of those homicides - and there's little evidence it does [4] - that's still asking people to give up their most sensitive freedom, the right to move without being tracked, for speculative gains. People are not willing to sacrifice their freedom to save 40,990 people from cars, why should our constant locations be monitored?

The abuse isn't speculative. Police have been caught stalking exes, tracking abortions, and innocent people [5] have been held at gunpoint due to a flock misread. The "safety" these cameras provide comes with a surveillance that's already being turned against ordinary people.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47690237

[2] https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/2022-traffic-deaths-202...

[3] https://bjs.ojp.gov/document/hvus23.pdf

[4] Flock can't even demonstrably reduce car break-ins. The drop in San Francisco started months before cameras were installed (https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/sf-car-breakins/). If it can't prevent car beak-ins, how can we expect it to make a dent in homicides.

[5] https://www.businessinsider.com/flock-safety-alpr-cameras-mi...

>misreads by Flock's automated license plate readers... resulted in people who hadn't committed crimes being stopped at gunpoint, sent to jail, or mauled by a police dog, among other outcomes.

by Cider9986

4/8/2026 at 7:33:14 PM

>People are not willing to sacrifice their freedom

Given that we (societally, rather than like, you, I or I imagine most of the people reading this here) seem perfectly willing to sacrifice personal freedoms elsewhere (that flock was ever deployed, the past few years rollout of age gates on websites, etc), how can you conclude that with cars its unwillingness to sacrifice personal freedom rather than entrenched economic interests driving (lol) the lack of change with cars?

by ribosometronome

4/8/2026 at 7:28:09 PM

> If it can't prevent car beak-ins, how can we expect it to make a dent in homicides.

Im not advocating for these cameras at all, but I dont think this is a very good line of thinking. The drop started before Flock, but that doesnt mean that they arent beneficial and currently helping lower the rate even further.

by thebigman433

4/8/2026 at 7:25:06 PM

To rich people, the privacy attack isn't an issue. We already track their private jets, how is this any different?

by ramraj07

4/8/2026 at 7:51:22 PM

There are rich people who charter private jets instead of own them. Their personal whereabouts aren't being tracked in the air. (They get to skip the entirety of TSA screening for these charters, too.)

But Flock tracks them on the ground when they get in their big S Mercedes after arriving at their third vacation home in Aspen.

Flock also tracks the wealthy who can't afford charter a jet, but who can afford to buy seats on the fanciest side of the curtain.

Flock tracks the doing-alright folks in business class.

Flock tracks those aspires to reach these levels: It even tracks the temporarily-disadvantaged billionaires who work soulless factory jobs and stuggle to keep up on the lease for their Black Express RAM 1500 Quad Cab, who rail against taxing the people who actually do have money as if that would ruin their own lives.

Flock tracks Joey who manages the sandwich shop down the way.

Flock tracks everyone.

By the time we get down to the point of mentioning that "everyone" includes the subset of people who are criminals, that part almost seems like a bug instead of a feature.

by ssl-3

4/8/2026 at 7:39:14 PM

FYI when cops arrive at a homicide scene, they don't go looking for the FLOCK camera's, they go looking for people who have RING cameras and businesses that have security cameras. Anything that is within sight of the crime scene is where they start.

If you think FLOCK is an issue, you're barking up the wrong tree. You can remove all the FLOCK camera's you want and it won't change the already overwhelming passive surveillance that's already in place.

We crossed the Rubicon decades ago when people gave up their ability to move without being tracked for speculative gains when they started using smartphones religiously.

Also, the passive surveillance has resulted in several high profile killers like LISK and Bryan Kohberger being caught. So as much bad as you think it does, there are clear cases where its helped crack decades old serial killings and put horrifically violent people in jail. I think we can both agree we don't want those people out walking freely in our society.

by burningChrome

4/8/2026 at 8:04:19 PM

I’m for looking for the existing cameras. I’m against a panopticon where any “trusted” LEO with an account can query and have ring + flock + OnStar + Tesla etc all aggregated to follow anyone. Ring has this now. I would guess some cities have it for traffic cameras. What I’m really against is having it privately owned as an end run around laws restricting government surveillance.

by bnjms

4/8/2026 at 7:56:03 PM

> So as much bad as you think it does, there are clear cases where its helped

You can "justify" so much with that sentence, that it becomes meaningless.

Also, it won't hide the fact that this surveillance infrastructure can cause much much more harm then it prevents. We've seen what it might do in repressive states and we see today that even those states which represented the idea of individual freedom on this planet, you are only one election away from madness.

by Krasnol

4/8/2026 at 8:35:58 PM

>> "it won't hide the fact that this surveillance infrastructure can cause much much more harm then it prevents."

"can cause much much more harm."

Cars kill way more people than guns per year. Where do you draw the line on something as subjective as this? It has the capability to cause harm but has it to the degree you're talking about? Its debatable.

Also, taking a serial killer who murdered 8 women and dismembered several of them off the streets to me outweighs quite a bit of harm. But that's just me.

by burningChrome

4/8/2026 at 8:34:05 PM

> Also, the passive surveillance has resulted in several high profile killers like LISK and Bryan Kohberger being caught. So as much bad as you think it does, there are clear cases where its helped crack decades old serial killings and put horrifically violent people in jail.

Isn't that true of almost every restraint on the state's power?

A lot of less intelligent people get very emotional about the state quartering soldiers in homes against the wishes of the homeowner. But if you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear. We may not know who the Zodiac Killer is but I can tell you one thing for sure - he didn't have four to ten infantrymen in his house, keeping track of his comings and goings. Given the obvious security benefits of having soldiers in your home, no rational person would object - unless they've got a meth lab in their basement. /s

by michaelt

4/8/2026 at 3:04:42 PM

It seems like this article buried the best lede of the story on paragraph ten, which explains Flock's new business of surveillance drones launched in response to 911 calls (and also presumably triggered by other alerts configured by police and private businesses).

> Flock has recently expanded into other technologies... Most concerning are the latest Flock drones equipped with high-powered cameras. Flock's "Drone as First Responder" platform automates drone operations, including launching them in response to 911 calls or gunfire. Flock's drones, which reach speeds up to 60 mph, can follow vehicles or people and provide information to law enforcement.

by diogenes_atx

4/8/2026 at 3:55:32 PM

This is much less concerning to me than mass surveillance. If someone calls 911 and you need to send a first responder, why not send a drone to get there faster while a person is on their way?

by jonas21

4/8/2026 at 5:11:07 PM

Because today it will be used as a first responder.

Tomorrow a police officer will suggest that these drones (that we are already using successfully) could be very useful for checking up on that "dangerous" neighborhood.

by rudhdb773b

4/8/2026 at 6:53:38 PM

Hi, I'm in Denver. They're already doing this over on Colfax. It's a significant change vs the existing halo cameras, because they use the drones to follow people.

by citruscomputing

4/8/2026 at 5:15:04 PM

[flagged]

by anskksdkdkdk

4/8/2026 at 5:30:49 PM

...and now you have actual domestic surveillance bots, instead of the silent CIA Blackhawks we used to joke about.

by tadfisher

4/8/2026 at 4:06:52 PM

As a concept, first responder drones are a good idea. But I wouldn't want public services having anything to do with that company.

by sheiyei

4/8/2026 at 4:21:55 PM

If the drones are "providing information" to the police, it's only a matter of time before their AI hallucinates something that gets someone killed. We've already seen AI gun detection services that report things like Doritos bags as guns.

by pesus

4/8/2026 at 4:47:08 PM

OTOH it will provide more surveillance of the police themselves. Humans are also bad at gun detection (sometimes willfully so) and this provides another check.

by grimcompanion

4/8/2026 at 4:57:31 PM

Watch for Flock footage to be "unavailable"/"deleted"/"corrupt" just as often as bodycam footage is.

by FireBeyond

4/8/2026 at 6:55:26 PM

Not as often; it creates friction and requires cooperation from others (or an officer with unusual skill and access, presumably).

It will absolutely happen in corrupt departments, or those involving an officer with those skills and access. But data that is uploaded is infinitely harder to erase than simply turning off the camera in the first place.

by IAmBroom

4/8/2026 at 5:13:09 PM

That's right. And also just like the missing epstein footage.

Because it's a social problem, not a technology problem.

At the same time, just because these instances of "missing" tape happen, does not mean that body cams and jailhouse CCTV are useless. We would not take those away. Likewise for the future drone footage

by gretch

4/8/2026 at 4:39:47 PM

It's a very bleak (and awfully sus) outlook if you think providing more information to people who need to make decisions that could save or end lives is a bad thing.

by scottyah

4/8/2026 at 6:04:50 PM

It's more "sus" that you blindly trust the police, politicians, and billionaires that have a history of discrimination, violence, and oppression and attempt to slander those who don't. Not to mention blindly trusting AI systems with someone's life - the only reason one would do that is because they either stand to profit from it or don't understand how they work. Are you really willing and eager to put your life in the hands of a piece of software that can't distinguish a gun and a Doritos bag?

Remember, oppression and invasion of privacy is still bad even if it isn't currently happening to you. If you think you can't be a target, you're sorely mistaken.

by pesus

4/8/2026 at 5:14:23 PM

Those people have proven very untrustworthy and are structurally unaccountable.

by Quinner

4/8/2026 at 7:25:05 PM

If you give me long enough, I can find something to charge anyone with.

by _DeadFred_

4/8/2026 at 5:15:18 PM

You are giving those people the benefit of the doubt. It's been proven many many times that police will use "more information" to excuse their own decision to use violence. A decision that they already made well before the incident.

by thomastjeffery

4/8/2026 at 4:08:40 PM

At least their current cameras are fixed to a single point.

With their drones they now have cameras roaming freely everywhere.

by wiether

4/8/2026 at 4:27:19 PM

I'm sorry but, in what way is a swarm of surveillance drones NOT a mass surveillance system?

by chaps

4/8/2026 at 4:58:39 PM

What's the drone gonna do?

by dmbche

4/8/2026 at 5:41:08 PM

Likely: Scan everyone's home while en-route to the 911 call with an infrared camera. Or scan all of the license plates and faces of people along the way.

Possible: Perhaps crash into someone? Or worse.

by ThaDood

4/8/2026 at 6:15:29 PM

> Scan everyone's home while en-route to the 911 call with an infrared camera.

That's unconstitutional. Use a regular camera and it's fine for some reason.

by HWR_14

4/8/2026 at 4:08:04 PM

And then what? Hover over me as I'm dying?

by zoklet-enjoyer

4/8/2026 at 4:23:27 PM

Yes. If you called from your cell phone while on foot or in your car, the drone can find your exact location and hover over you until help arrives, quicker than if EMS has to search you out themselves.

by tux1968

4/8/2026 at 4:55:29 PM

How so? I ask as a paramedic of 14 years, now retired.

If EMS has to "search you out" so does the drone.

At least in my County, we actually get very good triangulation info from 911. It was very rare that Dispatch told us they only had Level 2(IIRC) location info (which might be to several hundred feet).

FAR more common was people who actually told us the -wrong- location. Car accidents that were several miles up the road from their location. Saying Blah St SE when they meant Blah Rd NE, etc.

Drones don't solve for that problem. They're going to the wrong location, too.

by FireBeyond

4/8/2026 at 6:13:25 PM

> If EMS has to "search you out" so does the drone.

The point is that the drone is fast enough to arrive first, and do the searching so that you don't have to. It's just one of many possible scenarios.

I totally understand the argument that this might not be the most effective use of money, but I honestly don't understand the lack of appreciation for the number of places this could be used effectively.

by tux1968

4/8/2026 at 7:17:01 PM

I want to see who is in a location. I get a plant to call 911, which triggers Flock drones in the general area and scans the faces of everyone it can find. I get that info from Flock.

by markdown

4/8/2026 at 7:30:20 PM

There are always security concerns and exploits. Some crazy gamers call 911 swat attacks on people; that doesn't mean that the police shouldn't have guns, or that 911 should be turned off.

Yes, the drones should be secure. Yes there should be measures to make sure that they're not abused. But none of that takes away from anything i've said, which is ONLY to point out the situations where they could be useful. And people seem to be having a very negative visceral reaction to even considering the possibility.

Also, i'm not recommending or supporting Flock, just the concept of drone use in general.

by tux1968

4/8/2026 at 4:31:25 PM

Ok. I live in a small, flat city with few trees. So why did my police department buy these?

by zoklet-enjoyer

4/8/2026 at 4:39:14 PM

Obviously I don't know the specifics of your city, but in general there are a lot of scenarios where it's valuable to get to a scene very quickly (no traffic, etc.) and obtain reconnaissance. Especially violent scenes, or it could even be a drunk driver who is still on the move, or a stolen car where the perpetrators are likely to flee on foot if stopped.

I'm sure you can come up with a lot more ideas using your imagination.

by tux1968

4/8/2026 at 5:32:59 PM

Thanks for the explanation. I will ask my local city council to spend the money elsewhere.

by tadfisher

4/8/2026 at 4:47:00 PM

Sounds like a scam

by zoklet-enjoyer

4/8/2026 at 7:31:56 PM

One of the best reasons is that a very large % of calls can be cleared without anyone actually going to the scene. Many cities using drones as first responders now report that they clear ~30% of calls with just a drone. This is great for small cities/towns that struggle to recruit officers and have had ballooning labor costs for police in order to get people to work there. Its also great philosophically if you want police to be involved less, because it dramatically lowers the amount of time they are going to scenes

by thebigman433

4/8/2026 at 4:40:38 PM

Can they drive straight to you at 60mph without stopping?

by scottyah

4/8/2026 at 4:49:29 PM

Got it, a surveillance missile.

by chaps

4/8/2026 at 8:16:19 PM

Common missiles go about 900 mph faster...

by scottyah

4/8/2026 at 8:33:47 PM

There's more than one definition of missile. Florida criminal code's just one place where a drone could be considered a "missile".

Florida criminal code:

  "790.19 Shooting into or throwing deadly missiles into dwellings, public or private buildings, occupied or not occupied; vessels, aircraft, buses, railroad cars, streetcars, or other vehicles.—Whoever, wantonly or maliciously, shoots at, within, or into, or throws any missile or hurls or projects a stone or other hard substance which would produce death or great bodily harm, at, within, or in any public or private building, occupied or unoccupied, or public or private bus or any train, locomotive, railway car, caboose, cable railway car, street railway car, monorail car, or vehicle of any kind which is being used or occupied by any person, or any boat, vessel, ship, or barge lying in or plying the waters of this state, or aircraft flying through the airspace of this state shall be guilty of a felony of the second degree, punishable as provided in s. 775.082, s. 775.083, or s. 775.084."

by chaps

4/8/2026 at 4:07:53 PM

Yeah this doesn't bother me in any way, shape, or form. We already have manned aircraft that respond to such things, unmanned aircraft are a strictly better solution. It makes sense for police and it makes even more sense for fire. An aircraft can arrive at the site of a reported fire while firemen are still buckling their pants.

by jeffbee

4/8/2026 at 4:59:51 PM

You get manned aircraft to come and check in before the police when you call 911?

by dmbche

4/8/2026 at 7:21:52 PM

In high school in the mid 2000s in Denver, they had a chopper in the air on weekend nights from 8 until 2:30 am or so.

When our parties got called in, the spotlight would be the warning that the cops were a few minutes away and it was time to run.

Lots of cities have manned aircraft loitering during busy times that will respond to a call before ground units

by dghlsakjg

4/8/2026 at 5:02:36 PM

Yes, often the first response to some calls is a CHP aircraft that continuously loiters in the area.

by jeffbee

4/8/2026 at 4:19:40 PM

That’s actually really cool and I don’t feel like it’s invasive. It’s surveillance in a specific location for a specific purpose and in response to certain emergencies. Active shooter is probably the first thing that comes to mind, but accidents, fires, unexpected disasters, etc. could all be situations where this technology helps assess the situation and inform response.

by jm4

4/8/2026 at 7:35:29 PM

"CITIZEN there has been a report of a shooting in the area, please remain motionless as we scan your face for biometrics.

Scan complete. Please do not move or attempt to leave the area until you have been notified via the 'GovernmentForYou' app that you are cleared to leave the area.

Because you have been identified in the active area police have been granted legal probable cause to search your home. Please unlock your homes doors via any smart home app you have to prevent the authorities from forcibly removing your door onsite

Notification. Citizen because of your scan you have been identified as committing a bank fraud case in North Dakota and will be detained and transported (the move process takes 2-4 weeks). Once in North Dakota your right to a speedy trial will start if you are held more than the reasonable 60 day administration period.

Have a good day citizen and thank you for your cooperation."

by _DeadFred_

4/8/2026 at 4:13:48 PM

In Southern California we have eye-wateringly expensive (and loud) police aircraft flying 24x7.

I’m not a fan of Flock but I would welcome anything that knocks out some of the ghetto birds’ budget.

by mullingitover

4/8/2026 at 4:07:33 PM

They do more than that - our local PD gave a presentation on what Flock’s pitching - ALPRs, fixed pan/tilt cameras, “citizen cameras,” drones, and a whole “sensor fusion” software suite that lets you stitch in everything along with data from surrounding precincts which also have Flock (think Palantir for local cops). We were pretty shocked at the scale.

by roughly

4/8/2026 at 7:26:41 PM

I can anticipate this starting to happen: shoot into the sky, wait for flock drone to start coming in, then shoot it! Free target practice!

by ramraj07

4/8/2026 at 3:31:44 PM

Hunter-Killers not far behind.

by SoftTalker

4/8/2026 at 4:18:25 PM

Nor is the Butlerian Jihad.

by mystraline

4/8/2026 at 4:33:59 PM

Thank you for finding this nugget, I really only read HN comments and rarely the source material. You all have been my LLM summary for a decade at least.

by iwontberude

4/8/2026 at 3:38:55 PM

Code 8-style cop drone drops incoming

by Forgeties79

4/8/2026 at 4:35:12 PM

These companies build this tech in SF and Seattle, cities with some of the gnarliest public safety problems in the country, then turn around and sell it to smaller towns where it does more harm than good.

Most places in America don't have problems that surveillance solves. They have problems they already know about and won't act on. Cameras don't fix homelessness or addiction or underfunded services. They just make life harder for regular people.

But that's the whole appeal for bureaucrats. Buying a product looks like doing something without having to do any of the actual work.

by schlap

4/8/2026 at 5:19:02 PM

"Cameras don't fix homelessness or addiction or underfunded services. They just make life harder for regular people."

In what way do cameras make life harder for regular people? If anything rampant crime (and progressive legal systems' unwillingness to lock up repeat offenders for a long time or at all) makes life much harder for regular people than a camera just sitting there.

by jamiequint

4/8/2026 at 5:54:19 PM

A few months ago a woman was harassed over a crime she did not commit, by a police officer using her vehicle driving in a large general area as proof she committed the crime. Officer demanded she admit to a crime she did not commit.

Additionally, the surveillance apparatus enables parallel reconstruction. When law enforcement gathers evidence via illegal means, they can then use the drag net to find cause to detain/search unrelated to the original crime, in order to have cover to gather evidence they illegally gathered prior, aka a loophole for civil rights.

by MSFT_Edging

4/8/2026 at 5:33:14 PM

Surveillance tech can alter peoples behavior. I know I'm personally more stressed when I know I'm being filmed, even if I'm doing nothing wrong.

https://academic.oup.com/nc/article/2024/1/niae039/7920510?l...

by ggoo

4/8/2026 at 5:40:14 PM

Untrue at a population level, just compare anxiety disorders and self-reported anxiety between USA and China.

by jamiequint

4/8/2026 at 8:25:16 PM

I think it’s a cultural thing. On average, people seem to hate cops more in the USA.

Personally I like having little cop boxes in 5 minute walking distances in Tokyo. There are people who are very against it, bring up bad encounters, but net positive, I would say.

by tokioyoyo

4/8/2026 at 7:09:58 PM

There are certainly no other causal factors...

I'm not saying that it couldn't be true, but we have no way of concluding that from just comparing such rates. There are many differences in daily life and thresholds for reporting beyond surveillance levels.

by qbit42

4/8/2026 at 8:17:38 PM

anxiety in the sense you're talking about is a function of private surveillance and in that regard America is much worse. State led surveillance in Chinese public spaces is real and effective in producing compliance (20 years ago public theft, pulling people off motorcycles was a daily occurrence) but in private China is a significantly freer society.

Foucault used to distinguish between models of authority that operate on "make die and let live" vs "let die and make live". China's the former, the US with its moral busybodies both in progressive and religious flavors the latter.

The US now is a society of public disorder and personal policing, China is a society of public order and largely indifference in private life. Of course the former creates anxiety. American Beauty, a film about permanent surveillance without any state, would make no sense in China.

by Barrin92

4/8/2026 at 5:36:06 PM

"Police used AI facial recognition to arrest a Tennessee woman for crimes committed in a state she says she’s never visited": https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/29/us/angela-lipps-ai-facial-rec...

by tadfisher

4/8/2026 at 5:37:48 PM

The plural of anecdote is not data

by jamiequint

4/8/2026 at 5:58:11 PM

You didn't ask for data... You asked: "In what way do cameras make life harder for regular people?"

That requires a specific example, which you were provided with. This reads to me as a pithy response that doesn't want to wrestle with the ways this can be misused.

by xracy

4/8/2026 at 6:29:39 PM

By this same argument ANY police makes life hard for regular people because they sometimes fuck up, so let's just get rid of police too. What's the worst that could happen.

by jamiequint

4/8/2026 at 6:58:08 PM

The general sentiment in the thread is that this is too powerful a technology in the hands of unqualified law enforcement. In the same way that I don't trust federal law enforcement in the post-Snowden era, I don't trust local law enforcement with mass surveillance tools.

by text0404

4/8/2026 at 5:57:26 PM

Your question was:

> In what way do cameras make life harder for regular people?

I provided an example. Are you only accepting peer-reviewed studies?

by tadfisher

4/8/2026 at 6:33:00 PM

Single example is worthless. Is there a pattern of this happening far more often? Overall, do fewer people get incorrectly arrested or detained as a result of this technology, or more.

by jamiequint

4/8/2026 at 7:24:10 PM

Such great questions. Maybe we should answer them before building a massive, privately-owned, nationwide surveillance apparatus with taxpayer money.

by text0404

4/8/2026 at 7:44:30 PM

No, we should build the massive, privately-owned, nationwide surveillance apparatus with taxpayer money! It's for science, after all! We have no data on whether or not cameras covering every square inch of space, hooked up to a centralized surveillance database is actually good for society. We need to conduct this methodologically and scientifically. We'll be able to come to an objective conclusion with enough testing!

by sigbottle

4/8/2026 at 6:46:55 PM

so where are your data sources arguing these are helping?

by turtlesdown11

4/8/2026 at 5:40:32 PM

There's zero proof anywhere that these devices do anything about crimes. How could they? A camera can't lock someone up.

by array_key_first

4/8/2026 at 7:29:39 PM

They provide law enforcement timely information about the location of wanted (e.g., stolen) vehicles. Law enforcement can act on that information. If law enforcement does not have that information, it cannot act on it.

by loeg

4/8/2026 at 7:46:53 PM

These systems have provided incorrect data, and law enforcement often misuse that data to stalk, attack, and wrongfully arrest innocent people. Privacy matters to everyone - especially for ones who don't care about privacy.

by vjsrinivas

4/8/2026 at 6:45:57 PM

1) Surveillance needs to be reviewed. Even if reviewed by AI, eventually that reviewed work needs to be reviewed by a human if we're going to maintain the fiction / friction of "human in the loop". The "hits" will include false positives, unless the system is overtuned so that it rarely kicks an event.

1a) Review will take time / resources which could be spent on human policing, harming the community.

1b) Some jurisdictions may prefer "broken windows as policy", the notion that they can construct a "reasonable suspicion", given enough garbage (some of it outright garbage, the point being there is so much of it nobody cares; don't need to do an accurate drug test until trial, right?).

2) False surveillance hits will make it through human review and result in injury to innocent humans.

3) Police forces already lack the money / manpower to investigate potential crimes.

4) Police forces already "prioritize" other matters than the mentally ill setting their houses on fire or releasing plagues of rabbits into their neighborhoods (actual things that have happened to me!).

by m3047

4/8/2026 at 6:38:12 PM

feels somewhat dystopian, no? the big brother is watching everywhere you go. no way this can go tits up

by ikrenji

4/8/2026 at 4:39:33 PM

I think this echoes very true in a lot of places, not just in the US. Here in the UK I'm pretty sure the police/the state more broadly know perfectly well who is doing a lot of the low level quality-of-life crime in most areas, but for structural reasons either can't or won't bother acting in many instances. Investigative work has never been easier: oftentimes there's multiple cctv angles of offences being committed, endless digital records, etc., but unless something can be done with this information in the real world, it's useless and actually takes resources away from other areas of public services.

Increasing the quality of the panopticon has all the downsides we talk about regularly on HN, and if you can't do anything useful for society with the data, it only ends up hurting people.

by noodlesUK

4/8/2026 at 4:59:50 PM

> They just make life harder for regular people.

"Making life harder for people [in the other tribe]" has become a core platform for a great many politicians. There's growing movement advocating that one of the major purposes of government is to grief people you don't like. Looked at through that lens, blanketing small towns with these things, with a plan to use them against "Those People," makes complete sense.

by ryandrake

4/8/2026 at 6:00:11 PM

Agreed. I live in a city that's top 5% of safest cities in CA and these cameras have sprouted up everywhere. I reached out to my cities representative about it and he ignored my outreach (nice thing about instagram - that "read" indicator!). The most blatant is one that just points into the Home Depot parking lot. I don't see them at target.

It's gross but I think the cohort of America that watches Fox News all day probably loves these things because they've been brainwashed with crime reports that are disproportionate from reality.

by kylehotchkiss

4/8/2026 at 6:33:17 PM

I believe home depot themselves put up these cameras.

by clickclackk

4/8/2026 at 7:32:20 PM

Cringe. I'll try to shop at other hardware stores going forward, thanks.

by kylehotchkiss

4/8/2026 at 4:56:32 PM

> These companies build this tech in SF and Seattle, cities with some of the gnarliest public safety problems in the country

I live just outside Seattle. I worked for Flock.

Flock is a company based in Atlanta GA.

by FireBeyond

4/8/2026 at 7:34:50 PM

Also worth pointing out that Seattle and SF - despite their portrayal in the media - aren’t particularly violent places. Their violent crime rates are less than half the leading cities.

Both Seattle and SF have lower violent crime rates than Salt Lake City.

N.b. property crime is different and is a much less reliable metric. Both cities are ranked higher for property crime, but still below the famously dangerous Salt Lake City.

by dghlsakjg

4/8/2026 at 6:01:20 PM

Axon, on the other hand, does have a decent sized Seattle presence.

by superfrank

4/8/2026 at 4:59:06 PM

> But that's the whole appeal for bureaucrats.

I don't think it's the bureaucrats. You should hear the Flock CEO talk. They have made it very public that their direct intent is to influence government policy in sweeping and total fashion to enable their service to be the mass surveillance tool of the near future. They sincerely believe that people will look back on them as the saviours of mankind.

by 52-6F-62

4/8/2026 at 5:09:48 PM

> These companies build this tech in SF and Seattle

Flock's headquarters and largest offices are in Atlanta. They also have an office in Boston.

Ring's headquarters were in Santa Monica until post-acquisition they moved to Hawthorne, CA.

Arlo's offices are in Carlsbad and San Jose. Ok, finally an office in the Bay Area (one of two main offices), but still not San Francisco.

by vel0city

4/8/2026 at 1:34:58 PM

I'm surprised Garrett Langley still has a job, he seems wildly out of touch. For instance he really believes that his Panopticon as a service is the reason crime is down in cities, conveniently ignoring crime rates prior to COVID.

by jmuguy

4/8/2026 at 1:46:11 PM

"Garrett Langley" sounds like what they renamed the villain in Le Mis for an American audience.

by Zigurd

4/8/2026 at 3:46:10 PM

Another POV is, they didn't invent cameras or drones, they aren't philosophers / employ any great or influential thinkers, nobody at Flock has won an election, all they really have done is sell some stuff that is easily defeated by a guy with a hammer or spray paint. I'm not sure he has another chance at a big Pay Day in his life, so in such desperate circumstances it will take something really criminal (or souring with VCs) to end this appearance in public life.

by doctorpangloss

4/8/2026 at 1:37:00 PM

He won’t for long. The backlash is just getting started. Left or right, no one wants their whereabouts subject to constant surveillance.

His only advantage is that the cops are on his side and won’t let go of these cameras without a fight.

by therobots927

4/8/2026 at 2:27:34 PM

> no one wants their whereabouts subject to constant surveillance

But sadly lots of people want everyone else subject to it, and some are willing to submit to it themselves to get it. It's not a foregone conclusion.

by delecti

4/8/2026 at 3:05:46 PM

I was recently at a "town hall" meeting in my community and spoke with a older woman about Flock cameras. Initially she was not concerned about it and was generally in favor of the idea.

I agreed that there could be benefits but that the downside is that they know when and where you go to church, or the grocery, or where you get your hair done, or even when you go on vacation. Her eyes lit up and I she replied that she would have to think about that a bit.

I'm not saying that I changed her mind, but that bringing the consequences down to something she could understand was much better than yelling from the rooftops. Mentioning church is especially impactful with a lot of older folks.

by Corrado

4/8/2026 at 3:31:08 PM

In talking with many of the older people in my community about Flock, they initially defer to what our police department says it needs. A few things made them reconsider: - This is not about our police. This is about all the outside organizations that can watch us. - Focusing on Flock specifically. Once the cameras are given a name, people can start to form a better opinion fueled by the readily available bad press Flock is producing. - With the focus on Flock, the YouTube videos elsewhere in this topic do a great job of explaining how crappy their security is and how they're lying to their customers about it. Which brings it back to, this isn't about our local police — it's about the company that's an unworthy partner.

Good job talking to your community. The first step is that people are aware of the cameras - for my neighbors, most did not know about them, and immediately found it creepy.

by jkestner

4/8/2026 at 2:18:39 PM

I'm very in favor of speed & redlight cameras and don't have a particular problem with license plate trackers. I think we partisan-ize far too many things nowadays, unfortunately.

by whimsicalism

4/8/2026 at 2:36:47 PM

Both of these camera systems also usually come with a kangaroo civil court of sorts. Last time I looked at red light camera distribution in Texas it was also fairly obvious that they were only installing them in poorer areas.

These systems were largely disliked bipartisanly because of those factors.

by oooyay

4/8/2026 at 4:04:38 PM

Aren’t red light cameras unenforceable in Texas?

by piperswe

4/8/2026 at 4:31:39 PM

They are potentially now, but when I lived there (~a decade ago) they were not and this was the battle we were fighting as neighborhoods and communities. At the height of it they couldn't take your drivers license but the company could file an injunction preventing you from renewing your drivers license over civil penalties.

by oooyay

4/8/2026 at 3:38:36 PM

They install them where the data show that people are running red lights.

by SoftTalker

4/8/2026 at 3:50:00 PM

Where the data shows people are getting caught running red lights.

Which isn't necessarily where the most incidents are.

by ceejayoz

4/8/2026 at 7:31:12 PM

If they only installed them based on collision/injury data, and that data identified mostly poor areas, you would be ok with it? Because this is what the data finds over and over. The people most harmed by red light running are the poor people who live in these neighborhoods.

by loeg

4/8/2026 at 3:58:04 PM

Any dataset involving police actions will show high concentrations in poor areas because that's where police patrol the most and where they're most likely to crack down on behaviors that might be allowed to slide elsewhere (in part due to the racial demographics of those areas).

by banannaise

4/8/2026 at 4:11:13 PM

Usually allocation decisions are related to actual car/pedestrian fatality/injury counts + trial placements and measurements. Either way, wouldn't you be in favor of measures that remove police from overpoliced poor neighborhoods in favor of a technology focusing on traffic safety enforcement?

by whimsicalism

4/8/2026 at 7:15:32 PM

They shorten the yellow light interval to gain more revenue. It's an irresistible corruption when working on a revenue share.

by Zigurd

4/8/2026 at 7:33:27 PM

You're taking something that has happened at least once and extrapolating it to every situation; this isn't accurate.

by loeg

4/8/2026 at 7:41:39 PM

Show me one big city PD that isn't corrupt enough that this is just a minor corruption snack to them.

by Zigurd

4/8/2026 at 7:43:14 PM

This is a bizarre comment. What level of absence of evidence would you accept to prove "not corrupt enough?" The "corruption snack" language strongly suggests you aren't really interested in changing your mind even if such evidence could be provided.

by loeg

4/8/2026 at 8:07:02 PM

If you know of one I would gladly hold it up as a shining example and a template for others to follow. And yet...

by Zigurd

4/8/2026 at 7:47:25 PM

welcome to hn

by whimsicalism

4/8/2026 at 5:36:24 PM

The police aren't removed, they're still there, just with more technology, more information, and more power now.

by ImPostingOnHN

4/8/2026 at 4:51:50 PM

The value of red light cameras is debatable. I've copied the conclusion from a DoT study below (1):

This statistically defendable study found crash effects that were consistent in direction with those found in many previous studies, although the positive effects were somewhat lower that those reported in many sources. The conflicting direction effects for rear end and right-angle crashes justified the conduct of the economic effects analysis to assess the extent to which the increase in rear end crashes negates the benefits for right-angle crashes. This analysis, which was based on an aggregation of rear end and right-angle crash costs for various severity levels, showed that RLC systems do indeed provide a modest aggregate crash-cost benefit.

The opposing effects for the two crash types also implied that RLC systems would be most beneficial at intersections where there are relatively few rear end crashes and many right-angle ones. This was verified in a disaggregate analysis of the economic effect to try to isolate the factors that would favor (or discourage) the installation of RLC systems. That analysis revealed that RLC systems should be considered for intersections with a high ratio of right-angle crashes to rear end crashes, higher proportion of entering AADT on the major road, shorter cycle lengths and intergreen periods, one or more left turn protected phases, and higher entering AADTs. It also revealed the presence of warning signs at both RLC intersections and city limits and the application of high publicity levels will enhance the benefits of RLC systems.

The indications of a spillover effect point to a need for a more definitive study of this issue. That more confidence could not be placed in this aspect of the analysis reflects that this is an observational retrospective study in which RLC installations took place over many years and where other programs and treatments may have affected crash frequencies at the spillover study sites. A prospective study with an explicit purpose of addressing this issue seems to be required.

tl;dr - it's complicated. There are places RLCs make sense and places they don't. Expecting local government to know the difference... good luck with that.

1 - https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/safety/05049/

by alistairSH

4/8/2026 at 5:38:04 PM

People like you expressing sentiments like that are exactly how we got here. You want them to go hard on some particular issue. Save the children, get rid of the drugs, arrest the terrorists, save the planet, there's always some justification that's hard to argue against in abstract but think a few steps ahead "what would happen if everyone did it". At the limit tolerating this sort of thing for even a fraction of people's pet issues adds up to dystopian 1984 crap.

And the real root problem isn't you or what you believe. The problem is that you don't feel responsible for the side effects that would happen if you got your way any more than a lone piece of litter feels responsible for ruining the park. Nor does society hold you responsible, "it's nobody's fault". So you and everyone else are free to peddle bad solutions to small problems without consequence.

Edit: Perhaps this is just part of a longer arc of societal progress. We used to categorize bad people worthy of being ignored based on group membership they mostly couldn't control, religions, races, stuff like that. As society got better at measurement we realized this was wrong and somewhat stopped doing it. Now we struggle holding groups accountable. All sorts of evil can be done without consequence as long as the responsibility is diluted enough. Maybe something in the future will solve this.

by cucumber3732842

4/8/2026 at 2:23:57 PM

Maybe you're also in favor of some light reading https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-4/

by snsr

4/8/2026 at 2:27:09 PM

you think speed cameras violate the 4th amendment?

by whimsicalism

4/8/2026 at 2:29:45 PM

No but license plate requirements pretty clearly violate the 4th and/or 1st amendment, IMO. And without being required to have your license plate searched (registration 'papers' forced to be displayed) at all times without even an officer presenting RAS or PC of a crime, these cameras become a lot less useful.

I don't see how removing the cameras is compatible with the first amendment, but if you have the right of "speech" to record me in public chasing every place I go in a manner that is the envy of any stalker, I ought to have the right of "speech" not to "say anything" (compelled speech of showing my plate).

by mothballed

4/8/2026 at 2:34:53 PM

It really doesn't seem like the courts agree that you have a right to travel via car without a visible plate.

by nemomarx

4/8/2026 at 3:01:31 PM

Courts are currently wrestling with this.

https://www.oyez.org/cases/2017/16-402

> The government's warrantless acquisition of Carpenter's cell-site records violated his Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches and seizures. Chief Justice John Roberts authored the opinion for the 5-4 majority. The majority first acknowledged that the Fourth Amendment protects not only property interests, but also reasonable expectations of privacy. Expectations of privacy in this age of digital data do not fit neatly into existing precedents, but tracking person's movements and location through extensive cell-site records is far more intrusive than the precedents might have anticipated.

Or in United States v. Jones (cited in https://www.ca4.uscourts.gov/opinions/201495A.P.pdf):

> Although the case was ultimately decided on trespass principles, five Justices agreed that “longer term GPS monitoring . . . impinges on expectations of privacy.” See id. at 430 (Alito, J., concurring); id. at 415 (Sotomayor, J., concurring). Based on “[t]raditional surveillance” capacity “[i]n the precomputer age,” the Justices reasoned that “society’s expectation” was that police would not “secretly monitor and catalogue every single movement of an individual’s car for a very long period.”

It seems clear these cameras can hit some kind of threshold where they're common enough and interlinked enough to amount to unconstitutional surveilance. We don't know exactly where that threshold is yet.

by ceejayoz

4/8/2026 at 4:06:01 PM

The courts made polygraphs submittable legal evidence used to convict people, and still use them on people under supervision (because lesser standards apply).

Precedent is often crap and wrong until someone can find a good case paired with good lawyers to rectify.

Edit: Throttled so editing to reply

Precedent is randomly set by whoever gets there first often with a random case and a defendant with zero funds desperate to minimize their situation (for example without the funds to challenge the legality of polygraph/flock versus polygraph/flocks paid 'experts'). Although now political people are trying to game the system and shop very thought out cases to specific friendly courts to help put their finger on establishing precedent. After building enough such cases in lower courts, moneyed interests then shop it to the next level. Then with enough at the next level, to the Supremes.

It's a pretty awful, unintentional by design and fairly random 'legal system' with a huge bias towards those with more money and or the huge disparity in power of the Federal government, it's prosecutors, trial tax and the ridiculousness of 'if you exercise your constitutional rights you risk an additional 20-50 years in prison' versus someone broke, whose life has already been ruined by time in jail (and their fight beaten out of them), just wanting to go home as soon as possible.

And when those disempowered have the courage to risk the trial tax and do happen to stumble upon a win you get the strategic use of either pleas bargains or dropping the case by prosecutors to prevent precedent, or the abuse by judges of 'as applied' rulings in order to again prevent precedent from being set even when the case was won.

One side has all the power. One side has huge threats (in the form of trial tax). One side literally holds in you prison and has 100% control over every aspect of your life as you try to fight them and uses things like diesel therapy or the many other ways the have to apply to break you down for 'being difficult'. One side has the power to just drop cases it if risks precedent they don't like. And one side has the power to label a case 'as applied' to prevent precedent they don't like. It's a pretty crap system if you want fair unmanipulated precedents to come out of it. It's a great system if you want money/federal prosecutors/judges to be able to put their finger on the scale and set the outcome.

by _DeadFred_

4/8/2026 at 4:26:52 PM

I agree with you generally but taken to the extreme this argument very easily goes to "precedents I agree with should be venerated because they're precedents and precedents I disagree with are wrong" silliness.

"Precedent is often crap" isn't really the basis for any cohesive judicial philosophy or legal thought process.

I'm not aware of any precedent anywhere that approaches "ALPRs violate 4A" territory, it's when other stuff happens that's beyond simply "$lp_id was seen by $camera on $datetime" that I've seen courts start to talk about reasonableness and privacy.

by pc86

4/8/2026 at 2:37:33 PM

The courts have been wrong about many things, sometimes for centuries before they've fixed it. Some things they think they've interpreted correctly now that they'll turn around and interpret some other way later.

Trying to interpret viewing and recording the plate as speech but not displaying it as speech is trying to have your cake and eat it too. If the camera can stalk my car everywhere and record it under auspices of 'speech', it's only logical I can hide it as 'speech.'

by mothballed

4/8/2026 at 4:49:09 PM

Driving a motor vehicle on public roads is a privilege that many of the morons I share the road with seem to take for granted. If they are allowed to drive then I want their plate identifiable on video from my dash cam.

Automated mass surveillance of license plates should also be illegal.

by nkrisc

4/8/2026 at 5:10:28 PM

Ah yes, the muh public roads false representation.

Guess what, all the roads around me are private easements, all privately owned, and they are that way 90% to town. A good portion of my trips never touch a publicly owned road yet I'm still required to display my plate on them. We don't even have public, tax maintained roads where I live (I literally have to bring out a tractor and fix them myself when they wear down). Yet the compelled 'speech' of displaying the license plate is required even then while driving your car on your privately owned non-gated road.

by mothballed

4/8/2026 at 7:28:19 PM

You should check on that. AFAIK you don’t have to display a plate unless the property owner (or HOA) requires it or it’s a state chartered private road like some turnpikes. Police may still hassle you over it but they shouldn’t.

Many farmers have plateless farm trucks, people who live in the woods have plateless UTVs that they drive on private dirt and gravel roads, etc.

by iamnothere

4/8/2026 at 2:54:34 PM

Is the law obligated to be logical like that? As you note it already doesn't have to be consistent over time, there's no particular reason it must be consistent in who it applies to.

You shouldn't pin your ideals on anything as flawed as the Constitution of the US. It was barely a workable system to begin with, and who knows how long it can last now.

by nemomarx

4/8/2026 at 4:18:29 PM

Cameras like Flock which fingerprint the driver and non-registration vehicle information (e.g. light brightness, damage, driving style, etc.) to generate a best-guess as to the driver of the car absolutely does.

by pc86

4/8/2026 at 1:44:23 PM

Nah, he's just missing a good PR campaign, there's a 30% of the population that will eat whatever their supreme leaders say they should, I'm sure they can sanewash these cameras as well.

by mlinhares

4/8/2026 at 1:54:03 PM

America is pretty polarized around privacy as demonstrated by reactions to the Snowden leaks. So I think that’s a fair point.

by therobots927

4/8/2026 at 1:57:07 PM

That was over a decade ago. I wonder if it has gotten better or worse since.

by hrimfaxi

4/8/2026 at 2:16:56 PM

It's gotten worse: I'm so tired of rampant crime that I'm up for a little surveillance. And I used to donate to the ACLU before they went crazy.

by zulux

4/8/2026 at 2:26:34 PM

> And I used to donate to the ACLU before they went crazy.

When was that? Because in 1977 they defended Nazi's free speech to demonstrate in a town that had jewish people as half its population so it tried to block them, and I don't recall them doing anything nearly that controversial since.

https://www.aclu.org/news/free-speech/the-skokie-case-how-i-...

by estebank

4/8/2026 at 2:31:36 PM

Yeah that’s when they actually defended free speech. They now take sides on what speech should be allowed. That’s crazy.

by selectodude

4/8/2026 at 3:52:08 PM

> They now take sides on what speech should be allowed.

Alternative framing: Given limited resources and lots of things to care about, they pick the specific cases that best improve the freedoms they're interested in protecting.

In the case of the Second Amendment, they decided to let the NRA handle it, as that seems to be working just fine.

by ceejayoz

4/8/2026 at 5:26:16 PM

I mean defending horrible shitty people who are exercising their 1st amendment rights.

The ACLU should defend people who suck ass and another group should defend the heroes who beat their ass for saying awful shit.

by selectodude

4/8/2026 at 5:29:15 PM

Sure. But there's 100 shitty people and you have to pick one or two.

So maybe you pick the anti-ICE protester instead of the Nazi to help out. Both got shot with pepper balls, both had their rights infringed upon. Why not pick the one who isn't a complete ass to establish the same precedent with?

by ceejayoz

4/8/2026 at 5:40:20 PM

I agree 100%, I’d rather the ACLU picked their battles and if there’s a choice, not pick a Nazi. But I’m not a huge fan about how they’ve explicitly said they won’t defend hate speech. It’s a betrayal of their original cause.

by selectodude

4/8/2026 at 5:43:54 PM

> But I’m not a huge fan about how they’ve explicitly said they won’t defend hate speech.

They've explicitly said the opposite.

https://www.aclu.org/news/civil-liberties/defending-speech-w...

2023: "We joined Young Americans for Freedom, the Cato Institute, and other unlikely partners in filing an amicus brief on behalf of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression in its challenge to New York’s new law regulating 'hateful conduct' in social media."

by ceejayoz

4/8/2026 at 4:47:31 PM

A disingenuous take. The ACLU has actively published anti-2A literature in the past, arguing (as all such arguments must) that only the police, government, and military forces should have access to effective weapons.

by CamperBob2

4/8/2026 at 4:56:29 PM

I mean, the ACLU is allowed to say they don't interpret the Second the individualist way you do. That's their First Amendment right, yes?

The Second is probably the amendment least in need of defending by the ACLU. It's well covered, and pretty much a third rail of American politics.

by ceejayoz

4/8/2026 at 2:52:22 PM

[flagged]

by nxm

4/8/2026 at 5:34:11 PM

Gosh, the ACLU? Activists? Say it ain't so!

by ceejayoz

4/8/2026 at 3:59:21 PM

It's always been an activist organization. Even defending Nazis' free speech is activism. You just don't like their current activities.

by triceratops

4/8/2026 at 3:00:52 PM

the difference is that they would not do this today

by whimsicalism

4/8/2026 at 4:38:04 PM

2017: the ACLU defends Milo Yiannopoulos' right to advertise his new book. They file an amicus brief in the Supreme Court supporting a Tea Party supporter challenging a ban on wearing political insignia at polling places.

2018: the ACLU supports the NRA's First Amendment challenge to Governor Cuomo's attempt to convince NY financial institutions not to do business with the NRA.

2019: they defended a conservative student magazine which was denied funding by UCSD.

2020: they filed a brief supporting antisemitic protestors picketing a synagogue on the Sabbath. They also supported a Catholic school's religious right to make religious-based choices in hiring and firing teachers.

I'm just quoting the fruits of five minutes of research here, so I won't go on (but there's more). Is it possible that you're reacting to the radical conservative stereotyping of the ACLU rather than the actual actions of the organization?

by BryantD

4/8/2026 at 4:45:58 PM

It's very possible that I'm misinformed, but if so it was mostly from reading 'radical conservatives' like the NYT and other related reporting, along with ex-ACLU lawyers. [0]

0: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/06/us/aclu-free-speech.html

I think this is particularly noted as a post-2022 shift

by whimsicalism

4/8/2026 at 6:01:21 PM

I am also tired of rampant crime in this country, but unfortunately they aren't installing these cameras in boardrooms or the meeting rooms of politicians, so I don't think they are going to do much to deter the real crimes that are hurting our society.

by georgemcbay

4/8/2026 at 3:08:50 PM

Yup. Some "teens" can riding down my street with a pellet gun shooting at the cars. They ended up breaking 3 to 5 windows. It probably cost us collectively $3000++.

The only problem with the license plate readers is that the "teens" drive cars with fake tags. They deliberately copy the plate numbers from some granny with the same model. Makes it fun when the SWAT team knocks on Granny's door.

by xhkkffbf

4/8/2026 at 7:10:07 PM

So you're saying that a technology:

- is trivially defeated by teenagers

- is used by police departments as evidence to legally justify violent raids for property damage

- whose data is mishandled by law enforcement agencies who don't do due diligence

... should have more widespread adoption and support?

by text0404

4/8/2026 at 2:29:06 PM

Ha ha ha, you think it'll be used to help you? A hit and run drived totaled my car at an intersection with cameras, the cops would not even show up even though it was all on camera. When I called insurance they didn't bat an eye, the claims person pretty obviously was used to this happening all the time and didn't even question why I wasn't able to get a police report.

by mothballed

4/8/2026 at 5:10:31 PM

Happened with my step daughter. Traffic light at intersection. She said she had a green light, so did the other driver.

Cops -did- show up. "Did you have a green light" "I did." Less than 30 seconds of questions. Goes to the other driver, same, is back in under a minute. "Well, he said he's absolutely sure he had a green light, so I'm citing you for failing to obey a traffic signal".

There were no cameras in the area, no witnesses, just the two drivers. But the other driver was a 50 something male, and my step daughter was 17 and upset because it was our car. So the cop took his word and cited her.

Hmm, vehicle black box? If that showed that she had come to and been at a stop, and then accelerated, that would at least imply she had been at a red light, and gone when it turned green, as she said.

No, no interest there. Even the insurer (fine, whatever), said "unless we're facing a six digit payout, we're not pulling the black box".

Don't even start me on the fact that after our insurance denied liability, the other driver sued her in small claims court for $10,000 for a car that had a KBB of $1,450. And the small claims judge noted that he technically couldn't sue a minor in small claims, but required us to go to mandatory arbitration, where the arbitrator said, quote, "I don't understand why, as a decent human being, if insurance will pay out, you don't just accept the claim." (Yeahhhh, filed a complaint about that, too. And here I stop, because I feel my blood pressure rising lol).

by FireBeyond

4/8/2026 at 5:32:17 PM

So the system worked exactly as intended?

It's not just auto insurance. Every government, government adjacent and highly regulated process is just like that.

It's not about right and wrong or fairness or making the responsible party pay or saving the children or protecting the environment or preventing sub-prime loans or enforcing building code or or whatever the alleged pretext is. It's about having an efficient process turn the subjective into the quantifiable and/or assign financial responsibility and do so in a manner that's not flagrantly wrong so often that a "large enough to be a problem" amount of people seek recourse outside the system (like smoking the CEO on the sidewalk or armoring a bulldozer or whatever).

But of course, marketing the system as though it's about right and wrong or fairness or whatever is what they do as a means toward what the point actually is so it's easy to understand why you think it failed instead of worked perfectly.

by cucumber3732842

4/8/2026 at 2:40:24 PM

i think politicians have seriously underestimated how much people don't like crime, and most people would take constant surveillance if it could actually improve feelings of safety in urban environments.

by anthonypasq

4/8/2026 at 3:11:39 PM

I think it's also true that many people are wildly out of touch when they think about how "safe" their local municipality is.

The Bay Area is objectively safe, for example, yet I constantly run into neighbors in affluent neighborhoods who are afraid of venturing various places, letting their kids play outside or bike to school, or just generally exploring around.

I was at a BayFC match last weekend, for example, and ran into the family of an acquaintance from my elementary daughter's school. They have an 8th grader and are trying to get an intra-district transfer approved for high school so she doesn't have to go to the neighborhood school where a student brought a ghost gun on campus 3 years ago (he was arrested and successfully prosecuted, and no one was hurt)... and instead go to the local school where a handful of kids arranged their bodies in a swastika pattern on the football field (and photographed it!) several months ago. My point isn't that either of these crimes is acceptable, but that people tend to be irrational and ignorant of statistical analysis. Both of these are good schools with better than average student outcomes, but families consistently bring their own prejudices into analysis and it creates mild chaos & havoc across the system overall.

by eitally

4/8/2026 at 5:42:24 PM

The US media has completely fooled the public into thinking their town is a violent hellhole, and that a trip to the grocery store is endangering their lives. Fact is, violent crime has been plummeting for decades, and unless you live in one of a handful of very small hotspots, Americans live in one of the safest times in the country's history. Yet, people's perception of crime as a problem has been going up and up.

by ryandrake

4/8/2026 at 3:53:37 PM

[flagged]

by anthonypasq

4/8/2026 at 4:12:11 PM

San Francisco homicide rate is like what, 2x Berlin and 3x London, so Berlin is half a Mad Max?

by dmoy

4/8/2026 at 6:51:04 PM

you think people in those cities didn't wish they were as safe as Tokyo? maybe i was a little too focused on America specifically, we are just by far the worst.

but also imagine thinking the richest city on the entire planet should just be fine with 3x the homicide rate of other comparable cities and 20-30x worse than Beijing or Tokyo. I mean its just embarrassing that you think your comment is defensible.

We've completely resigned ourselves to living in the most dangerous developed country by a long shot for no good reason.

by anthonypasq

4/8/2026 at 2:43:36 PM

Enforcing public safety effectively is one of the most pro-democracy things you can do. Otherwise people use democracy to elect public safety authoritarians like the wildly popular Bukele and Duterte.

by energy123

4/8/2026 at 3:08:08 PM

So we should 1984 the crap out of ourselves because if we don't we'll elect an authoritarian who'll 1984 the crap out of us?

Reminds me of this classic: https://static.poder360.com.br/2020/11/2020-11-07-22.31.49.j...

Yeah, I'm all for public safety in theory but seems like these days that's just a dog whistle for "go hard on whatever sort of petty deviance I don't like" and so I'm unwilling to support things like that in the default case. It's all just so tiresome.

by cucumber3732842

4/8/2026 at 3:14:13 PM

I read OP differently. I thought they said "we should invest in non-dystopian public safety[1] to avoid dystopian populist creating a 1984 version of public safety".

[1]: I imagine this includes things like mental heath help, housing, and other related social safety nets.

by krastanov

4/8/2026 at 5:28:08 PM

It's been both normalized and suppressed. I'm old enough to remember not being to able to point out SF crime problems without being called a fascist. It's denial, it's perverse. Noah smith claims that our(USA) "solution" to it, besides just ignoring it, was basically giving up on cities and moving to suburbs.

by chermi

4/8/2026 at 3:25:21 PM

Often what we criminalize is stupid.

Giving away food to homeless is a crime in many places. Bad capitalism.

Feelings of insecurity are manufactured relative to the danger posed:

https://ourworldindata.org/does-the-news-reflect-what-we-die...

by yabutlivnWoods

4/8/2026 at 4:48:31 PM

> Giving away food to homeless is a crime in many places. Bad capitalism.

How is this due to capitalism?

I mean, I can maybe see how you can tie it to NIMBYism, and from there to capitalism through the desire to maintain or increase property values. But that's a stretch, and only one mechanism

There are many drivers for this type of regulation, some more well-meaning than others. Most of them would not go away simply because we ceased private ownership of the means of production

by StackRanker3000

4/8/2026 at 4:44:17 PM

It is antithetical to capitalism as well. The whole basis of capitalism is property rights, and it generally encourages the public doing things themselves instead as private individuals instead of relying upon a bureaucrat or public agency to do everything unless there is a major reason not to.

And here they are telling you that you cannot use your own property to help alleviate issues in your community. That sounds more like an exaggeration of Communist attempts at division of labor and to 'organize' a civilization.

by Nasrudith

4/8/2026 at 3:53:29 PM

[flagged]

by anthonypasq

4/8/2026 at 1:52:49 PM

No one wants their whereabouts subject to constant surveillance, except everyone who carries a “normal” cell phone, in other words not a burner.

by ses1984

4/8/2026 at 1:55:53 PM

Do people who carry normal cell phones do so with the active desire to have their whereabouts subject to constant surveillance?

by hrimfaxi

4/8/2026 at 1:54:50 PM

Yes but you can always leave your phone behind if you want to drop off the map. Flock makes that borderline impossible.

by therobots927

4/8/2026 at 2:46:16 PM

You can remove your license plate, you will get pretty far before it actually gets you pulled over.

by deadbabe

4/8/2026 at 2:51:11 PM

Actually, that won’t work. The flock cameras don’t only rely on license plate information. They use “AI” to determine the make model and color of your car as well as any outstanding features, such as bumper stickers or roof racks.

by Corrado

4/8/2026 at 5:42:51 PM

It works if you just add a magnet sticker somewhere when you remove your plate.

by deadbabe

4/8/2026 at 3:45:03 PM

Leaving a cellphone behind is legal still. Removing a license plate is breaking the law.

Drawing an equivalence is foolish.

by sophacles

4/8/2026 at 1:38:30 PM

Does he really believe it or is it his job to say he really believes it?

by thinkingtoilet

4/8/2026 at 1:42:04 PM

Could he tell the difference?

by everdrive

4/8/2026 at 5:41:59 PM

Anyone can tell whether they believe what they're saying. If you pay me enough to lie, I'll lie, but of course I won't believe it.

by stronglikedan

4/8/2026 at 4:59:48 PM

As an ex-employee of Flock, if he doesn't really believe it he is an amazing actor. He talks of a very Minority Report-esque future, where there is literally zero crime, and it's because of Flock.

Flock's stats are very misleading too. If there was a Flock query in the course of investigating a crime, even if it leads nowhere or isn't relevant to the arrest or conviction, still, Flock was queried, so "Flock solved a crime".

It was sad. I had significant ethical questions when I joined, but all through recruitment and week one, everything was all about controls and restraints and auditing and ethics. After that, nope, a free for all. Selling our products in states that don't allow the use of certain functionality? Not our problem. We're not disabling it. That's up to you to decide whether you're using it or not.

by FireBeyond

4/8/2026 at 1:37:12 PM

I realize how unpopular flock is, and I will first say that I have literally never personally looked into the privacy concerns. But one city you don’t see named here is SF, which has cited Flock as a primary driver of its 10x reduction in car break-ins, and 30% reduction in burglaries. Those were a quality of life plague while I lived there

by jdross

4/8/2026 at 2:56:38 PM

I could believe that perma-cameraing every inch of public space is more akin to chemo than to vitamin gummies, that SF had the city equivalent of bone cancer, and that this doesn’t mean healthy midwestern towns need Flock in any way.

by QuadmasterXLII

4/8/2026 at 3:28:17 PM

The byproduct of habitually coddling criminals with zero consequences.

by kevin_thibedeau

4/8/2026 at 7:02:11 PM

Do you have empirical evidence that we "habitually coddle criminals"? The united states locks up more of their people than pretty much any other nation...

by turtlesdown11

4/8/2026 at 7:37:13 PM

> Do you have empirical evidence that we "habitually coddle criminals"?

In this context, we're talking about SF, not the US at large. Yes, SF is well known for coddling criminals. This is, obviously, a qualitative characterization -- it cannot be proven empirically. But we can point at characteristic examples:

https://ktxs.com/news/nation-world/san-francisco-ends-5m-alc...

https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/s-f-start-allowing-ev...

https://www.denvergazette.com/2024/01/27/california-finally-...

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/yes-its-ok-to-be-mad-about-cri...

(There's some hope it's improving very recently or in the near future.)

> The united states locks up more of their people than pretty much any other nation...

We (the US) have more criminality than many peer nations. We either lock them up, or let them be free despite doing crimes.

by loeg

4/8/2026 at 8:00:20 PM

> We (the US) have more criminality than many peer nations

Do you have any empirical evidence to support this claim?

by turtlesdown11

4/8/2026 at 5:43:48 PM

It's a much tougher problem then "idk just throw them in jail lol" and anyone who claims otherwise is dishonest.

by array_key_first

4/8/2026 at 3:41:45 PM

[flagged]

by ceejayoz

4/8/2026 at 1:41:53 PM

Crime's been descending from the COVID blip for a while, everywhere, Flock or otherwise. My city saw zero murders in Q1; 2021 saw ~15 by now.

In other words: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSVqLHghLpw

by ceejayoz

4/8/2026 at 2:22:57 PM

it's clearly not a covid effect https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/sf-car-breakins/

by whimsicalism

4/8/2026 at 5:55:44 PM

The data is open, and so we don't have to do the visual reasoning off an imperfect graph. SF Chronicle has done a pretty rare (but I think good journalistic practice) of specifying the source of the data: https://data.sfgov.org/Public-Safety/Police-Department-Incid...

First to match the graph you make sure you pick 'Larceny - From Vehicle' only (there are some others one might argue matter) and ensure you're only counting incidents once (many rows reference the same incident). That lets us recreate the original graph.

When looking at many things I like to look at seasonal effects just to see, and it doesn't look like they are significant here (but you can see the Mar 2020 drop to the next year quite easily which I like): https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/images/2/2e/SFPD_Vehicle_Bre...

I also tried overlaying various line charts but that's useless for visually identifying the break.

One thing I thought would be fun is to run a changepoint algorithm blindly https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/File:SFPD_Vehicle_Break-Ins_...

I like PELT because it appeals to my sensibilities (you don't say ahead of time how many changepoints you want to find - you set an energy/cost param and let it roll) and it finds that one changepoint. You can have some fun with the other algos and changing the amount of breakpoints or changing the PELT cost function. And then you can have even more fun by excluding 2020 or excluding Mar 2020 onwards or replacing it by estimates from the previous years (quite suspect considering what we're trying to do but hey we're having fun - a bunch of algos all flag Nov 2023 as some moment of truth)

Anyway, anyone curious should download the data. It's pretty straightforward to use and if I goofed up with off-by-one or whatever, you can go see for yourself.

by arjie

4/8/2026 at 2:24:38 PM

The spike in your link's chart clearly starts in early 2020.

And "While our data extends only to 2018" is... important, yeah?

by ceejayoz

4/8/2026 at 2:26:08 PM

i encourage other people reading to look at the chart so they can assess the veracity of ^ comment

by whimsicalism

4/8/2026 at 2:28:58 PM

Here it is.

https://imgur.com/a/FK3sfna

There's an enormous drop in edit: late 2019, and the second drop starts in 2023.

https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/your-sfpd/policies/depart...

> Starting on March 19, 2024, Flock Safety began installing ALPR cameras in various strategic locations across San Francisco. This rollout is expected to take place over the next 90 days. Per 19B ALPR policy, the administration of the Flock ALPR system is the responsibility of the Investigations Bureau.

How did the Flock cameras cause two crime drops before their installation?

The article's note about 2018 is talking about extending backwards, not forwards. It's entirely accurate, and a direct quote from your link.

by ceejayoz

4/8/2026 at 2:30:59 PM

that drop is obviously in early 2020, not 2019 and there is no way you can look at that chart and describe car breaks ins as a "COVID blip"

by whimsicalism

4/8/2026 at 2:32:22 PM

Look at the X axis labels again.

The chart is trending down by January 2020, changes directions (upwards) right around the March 2020 spot, and again around (down) the July 2023 spot.

The fact that they only have data going back to 2018 means it's hard to say if the pre-COVID stuff was the norm or unusual.

To be super-clear, here's the chart annotated to show that 90 day window (black rectangle) in which the cameras were installed. https://imgur.com/a/i00Gna0

"that drop is obviously in early 2020", to reemphasize, is several years before the cameras got installed.

by ceejayoz

4/8/2026 at 2:47:25 PM

I read this as 2020 was Covid related drop, it then returned to normal for 2 years, then began dropping again in late 2023. The covid blip is explained by what was going on at the time, nothing since 2023 has any explanation and could be flock

by conductr

4/8/2026 at 2:49:03 PM

COVID makes it spike up (after a months long downward trend long before the cameras), not down. Nation-wide, incidentally.

The cameras were added where the black rectangle is here: https://imgur.com/a/i00Gna0

by ceejayoz

4/8/2026 at 1:58:00 PM

Any evidence that the reduction is actually due to the cameras?

by BoggleOhYeah

4/8/2026 at 3:38:48 PM

Don't people tend to behave if they know the are being watched?

by toephu2

4/8/2026 at 4:01:48 PM

yes, people tend to act differently. not the people they're trying to afect, just random people just minding their business. but it is not an effective deterrent to things like "violent crime".

• Meta-analyses (studies that average the results of multiple studies) in the UK show that video surveillance has no statistically significant impact on crime.

• Preliminary studies on video surveillance systems in the US show little to no positive impact on crime.

https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/images/asset_upload...

by chaps

4/8/2026 at 3:57:34 PM

I thought he asked for evidence?

by jmye

4/8/2026 at 2:36:14 PM

[flagged]

by esbranson

4/8/2026 at 2:48:14 PM

There is very solid evidence it wasn't the cameras.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/sf-car-breakins/ has a chart of the car breakins.

It shows the drop starting in September of 2023.

https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/your-sfpd/policies/depart...

> Starting on March 19, 2024, Flock Safety began installing ALPR cameras in various strategic locations across San Francisco. This rollout is expected to take place over the next 90 days.

In other words, the cameras were added where I've annotated the chart with a black rectangle here: https://imgur.com/a/i00Gna0

To my knowledge, Flock doesn't have a time machine offering.

by ceejayoz

4/8/2026 at 5:30:37 PM

A crime drop between over that 3 months is not, as evidenced by the subsequent rise for 3 months after, of the time period you claim as evidence.

by esbranson

4/8/2026 at 5:46:44 PM

The drop starting a year before the cameras is evidence that the drop is not explicable via the cameras.

by ceejayoz

4/8/2026 at 6:05:56 PM

Sorry, this is russell's teapot falacy. "the burden of proof lies with the person making an unfalsifiable claim, rather than on others to disprove it"

If there is evidence this is related to cameras, then the onus is on companies making these cameras and claims to provide the data. Not on others to prove that they don't stop crime.

There's a reason you always start with the null hypothesis.

by xracy

4/8/2026 at 2:01:25 PM

> which has cited Flock as a primary driver of its 10x reduction in car break-ins, and 30% reduction in burglaries

Are there reports or studies released which explains how the flock system influenced these reductions?

by MisterTea

4/8/2026 at 4:04:24 PM

ALPR does help with some things but stationary burglaries are largely not among them.

by mixmastamyk

4/8/2026 at 4:10:06 PM

Unfortunately, Flock really has been doing some shady stuff and the alliance of 1) people with legitimate concerns about Flock operations, and 2) the much larger population of people who are accustomed to getting away with petty crimes is, together, politically successful.

It would be easy to create a camera network that is locally owned and operated by public agencies, and if any place in America could so that it should be SF.

by jeffbee

4/8/2026 at 2:21:40 PM

The crime did not happen because of a lack of technological capability or resources availability at a given price point. It happened because of politics and priorities. The 1984 camera dragnet vendor is no more responsible for the change in politics and priorities and subsequent crime reduction than whatever vendor sold the tires for the cop cars.

by cucumber3732842

4/8/2026 at 5:43:55 PM

I'm glad Flock made it as far as they did before the ass-handing commences. Even some my normie friends and family are aware of the scourge because of their initial success, where they would otherwise think we're talking about a group of birds.

by stronglikedan

4/8/2026 at 2:30:37 PM

And switches to Axon - https://denverite.com/2026/02/24/denver-ends-flock-contract-...

I have not done any research if that's out of the frying pan and into the fire or an improvement

by maerF0x0

4/8/2026 at 7:11:44 PM

It's different. The primary harms of flock come from their horizontal integration into a nationwide surveillance network, working with ICE etc. Axon (formerly Taser) has strong vertical integration, which is new and we haven't thought through as much yet. (This is the position of city councilmember Sarah Parady, who's been part of a working group to research+draft ordinances about surveillance technology, and whose speech at the meeting voting on the contract I really respected. I think it's available online.)

The Axon contract is smaller than the Flock one, 50 cameras instead of >100, but that's because it's all they could get budget for, and they want to expand. DPD owns the data and is theoretically not supposed to share it with federal agencies, but there are lots of legal ways to make them comply. They're setting a 21-day retention period for data that's not part of an ongoing investigation, but I think that's missing the point, and it's not codified into law. The Axon cameras can be switched into a mode where DPD can view live feeds. Most of the contract provisions that the mayor's office added because of significant public outcry I would call "token." They're not addressing the real issues, and it's still contributing heavily to the development of the surveillance state.

Overall, it's an improvement, in the sense that breaking your leg is better than breaking both your legs. But don't get me wrong, they're coming for the other one as soon as they can.

by citruscomputing

4/8/2026 at 2:43:49 PM

I don't know if axon does it, but the future is going to be mobile ALPRs. Uber drivers going around scanning every plate, selling to police, and helping predatory auto lenders repo cars. The latter is already being done, so it's just a matter of time.

by gosub100

4/8/2026 at 3:25:48 PM

Interesting point. Autonomous cars themselves could sell all the data they collect (like license plates, but also street maps, live traffic data, pot hole counts and locations etc)

by maerF0x0

4/8/2026 at 7:32:02 PM

You don’t even need autonomous cars for this, many modern cars have cameras and always-on internet. It’s not like the manufacturers care about privacy.

by iamnothere

4/8/2026 at 2:38:12 PM

Practically, axon cameras aren't nearly as ubiquitous as flock's, thus reducing the leo's dragnet capability. I'm sure the feds will successfully try to get access to this footage as well.

by dfxm12

4/8/2026 at 7:15:30 PM

In Denver, they'll be expanding once they have budget. Also as soon as Axon finishes developing their integrations with civilian cameras into their Fusus product. They've also got natural-language queries in the pipeline ("find red trucks near here"), and they already have integration with the hundreds of existing non-ALPR LEO cameras. It's not better.

by citruscomputing

4/8/2026 at 4:03:35 PM

Kind of. Motorola (axon) effectively acts as an integration system for flock and about 20 other services. Motorola's stuff is IMO the bigger problem because it includes access to flock.

by chaps

4/8/2026 at 2:22:17 PM

Non-US citizens - what's the situation with cameras in public spaces where you live? In my town every 2nd hour or building entrance has a private camera pointed at the street. It's very depressing because the cops don't care - I've asked 2 in a patrol car when there was a mild case of vandalism I witnessed. Technically it's illegal, but nothing happens. The public cameras are on intersection and some bus stops. Too much, if you ask me, but the private cameras are everywhere.

by AlBugdy

4/8/2026 at 3:36:34 PM

In London cameras are everywhere, mostly private and they have been for years. Don't think I've seen anything like it in any European city I've visited.

by boelboel

4/8/2026 at 2:48:20 PM

Private cameras pointing to street can be lawful under GDPR, but in that case they are GDPR controller. That then requires them fulfill bunch of obligations which they probably aren't, e.g. giving proper Article 13 notice.

I don't know if it's criminal in any EU country, but it would be something that you could complain to DPA about. Or initiate civil lawsuit against the controller.

Worth noting is that in some cases the camera vendor might also be (joint) controller as they can determine means & purposes of the processing. If they are simply storing the video then it's unlikely, but if they for example use it for AI training that would likely bring them controller territory.

by buzer

4/8/2026 at 4:38:03 PM

Japan is exporting it's AI-enhanced crime prediction platform across LatAm after successfully deploying it in Tokyo [0]. Japan is doing similar work to analyze financial transactions [1]. South Korea has also deployed a similar surveillance platform called Dejaview [2]. Even Finland has been deploying surveillance camera fusion centers [3]

The brutal reality is everyone is doing this and there's nothing you can do about it. National Security trumps all other concerns (even the GDPR exempts governments who argue their data collection is done for National Security reasons), especially in a world as unstable as today.

[0] - https://www.japan.go.jp/kizuna/2024/06/japans_ai-based_crime...

[1] - https://www.tc.u-tokyo.ac.jp/en/ai1ec_event/10769/

[2] - https://m.blog.naver.com/mtnews_net/223775186368

[3] - https://poliisi.fi/en/camera-surveillance-system

by alephnerd

4/8/2026 at 8:09:37 PM

> The brutal reality is everyone is doing this and there's nothing you can do about it.

Maybe not me personally, but society can.

by AlBugdy

4/8/2026 at 7:05:28 PM

> world as unstable as today

The world is the most stable and peaceful it's been in decades if not longer. What is your evidence that the world is unstable?

by turtlesdown11

4/8/2026 at 5:25:07 PM

If you want to hear from the man himself, see link below. It was a fairly soft interview. I listened mainly because it was Noah and wasn't expecting him to be so pro-surveillance. So, even though I don't agree with them, it might be worth listening to their reasoning.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/2V5m4J0tjYg1shWXWrOG8k?si=k...

by chermi

4/8/2026 at 1:29:20 PM

It's quite ironic to get an amazon ring video ad while viewing this article.

by Dezvous

4/8/2026 at 1:57:25 PM

An obnoxious, autoplay-at-full-volume ad that took the page an extra 30 seconds to load and somehow bypassed firefox adblockers...

by elphinstone

4/8/2026 at 3:47:09 PM

Firefox 149 + ublock origin did not display ads for me

by radiorental

4/8/2026 at 7:02:35 PM

I'm also on firefox 149 with ublock origin. Probably just need to enable some more filters.

by Dezvous

4/8/2026 at 1:37:49 PM

Ring is just as bad. Arguably worse because it comes with a convenience / personal security factor.

by therobots927

4/8/2026 at 5:56:26 PM

flock says customers own their data and control access. but their national lookup tool means 5,000+ agencies can search your city's cameras without your city's permission. 'customer-owned data' that anyone in the network can query isn't customer-owned in any meaningful sense.

by kevincloudsec

4/8/2026 at 7:59:00 PM

Should we remove logs from service running?

by taobility

4/8/2026 at 5:51:48 PM

Y Combinator CEO Gary Tan evangelises this company every chance he gets and YC was an early stage seed funder (Summer 2017)

by Cipater

4/8/2026 at 5:52:28 PM

Y Combinator CEO Gary Tan evangelises this company and YC was an early stage seed funder (Summer 2017)

by Cipater

4/8/2026 at 2:29:25 PM

And moving to the next vendor that hopefully does a better job of staying out of the public eye...

by jcstryker

4/8/2026 at 2:33:08 PM

Funny they are just trying to get this started in Toronto

by gegtik

4/8/2026 at 2:04:16 PM

I drove into a very affluent subdivision this weekend, and like most others around here it had a flock camera recording every car on the way in. This camera, however, had the gall to advertise its presence as a neighborhood security measure. "Flock Safety watches this neighborhood" read the sign on the post, or some such. Of course the residents there had no choice but to accept its installation, as the local police support it. Nefarious framing and marketing in the name of "safety".

by baggachipz

4/8/2026 at 6:27:12 PM

It's probably the neighborhood HOA that pays for it. My HOA got Flock cameras after a string of thefts, and has similar signs up. The HOA encourages homeowners to submit their car license plate info so that if a crime is reported, it's easier to identify cars that don't belong to homeowners.

Soon after the cameras were installed, some thieves stole a gift my brother had sent me. Thanks to license plate data and images of their faces, Vancouver PD had little trouble catching the perpetrators. It turned out that in addition to stealing Amazon/UPS/Fedex packages, they were stealing USPS mail and using it to commit identity theft. IIRC they ended up getting a decade in federal prison.

It seems like only a few people are responsible for the majority of thefts, so catching them and locking them up drastically improves quality of life for everyone else. Obviously this technology could be abused, but that's also true for things like fingerprinting, DNA evidence, and ID requirements. Similarly to those technologies, we could have laws restricting certain uses, allowing us to reduce crime while preventing abuses. But if a private community wants to install cameras and allow law enforcement to access the data they record, I don't see any constitutional issues.

by ggreer

4/8/2026 at 7:31:35 PM

Fair point and I hadn't considered that. I just assumed that no place would voluntarily use Flock. Thanks for the info and perspective.

by baggachipz

4/8/2026 at 2:22:28 PM

> no choice but to accept its installation

You might be shocked to discover there are subdivisions so affluent they can afford physical armed security and access control structures with far more invasive identification and logging procedures.

by bob1029

4/8/2026 at 2:34:08 PM

I am not shocked to know that, but there are Flock cameras all over the town. None of the other ones have this advertisement on them. This neighborhood is not gated. However, Flock decided to do announce its presence only here.

by baggachipz

4/8/2026 at 3:44:50 PM

Why is this such a surprise? It’s just like those “ADT Monitoring” signs in someone’s yard, scaled to the community.

by alex43578

4/8/2026 at 3:51:35 PM

Because as far as I've seen until now, Flock cameras were stealthily installed and unannounced by the local government. When somebody contracts a company like ADT, they pay money and put that sign up voluntarily.

by baggachipz

4/8/2026 at 2:15:20 PM

I saw the same thing in a Home Depot parking lot yesterday. I guess I'm glad there's some sort of notice about it, even if its intent is more, I dunno, branding? It took me a while to figure out what all the solar panel + camera on a post installations were as they popped up around my town. I even pulled over to inspect the hardware for signs of ownership and didn't find anything.

by bradleyankrom

4/8/2026 at 3:44:01 PM

Most of the houses probably have little yard signs advertising some security service, and stickers on the doors advertising an alarm company too.

by SoftTalker

4/8/2026 at 3:50:06 PM

Ok? They paid for those.

by baggachipz

4/8/2026 at 5:13:45 PM

It's all just part of the scenery in neighborhoods like that. Like "Beware of dog" signs in poorer neighborhoods or "This property protected by Smith & Wesson" in rural areas.

by SoftTalker

4/8/2026 at 2:20:01 PM

we enforce laws presumably in the name of safety, is this really nefarious framing or marketing? seems pretty straightforward to me.

by whimsicalism

4/8/2026 at 2:32:24 PM

It is very clearly advertising on their part. They have been paid to put that thing there and added the sign to announce the presence. It's like when you get your roof replaced by a business and they ask if they can put a sign in your yard. They're not doing it to make everybody know that you're getting your roof replaced, they're advertising.

by baggachipz

4/8/2026 at 2:53:37 PM

Monte Sereno or Saratoga?

by HoldOnAMinute

4/8/2026 at 7:02:01 PM

> means the installation of ALPR cameras

That’s a big misconception, flock is a car identification system not a license plate one. I have seen many videos of some crime documentaries where flock was used to ID cars with no license plates, and weeks later they still have them in the system to track, coupled with phone tracking, they know exactly all the details needed.

by tamimio

4/8/2026 at 4:32:49 PM

Congratulations EFF I know for a fact you’ve been working hard to get these removed.

by iwontberude

4/8/2026 at 3:44:32 PM

this kind of headline might have some scholarly name, because, no... actually the number of cameras and feeds in the San Francisco Bay Area is multiplying rapidly, along with the entirety of California with few exceptions.. long ago, San Diego county, a military-led area, was the exception and to many pariah on the constant increase in tracking of vehicles, people and "events".. now, what used to be thought of as harsh and creepy, is not only matched in hardware, but exceeded in backend capacity, across almost every populated area

by gnerd00

4/8/2026 at 2:23:16 PM

Our city voted them out for awhile. So the feds just put them on every bit of federal property near roads, which ended up doing the exact same thing.

by mothballed

4/8/2026 at 3:02:46 PM

Where is this?

by loteck

4/8/2026 at 1:41:54 PM

It's funny, if the company had just sold cameras to cities, they probably could have avoided this whole mess. But they just had to hit some keywords for Wall Street (like "AI" "cloud" and "SaaS"), which had the side-effect of making it appear (true or not) that they were part of a Palantir-style surveillance panopticon that tracks you everywhere.

by phendrenad2

4/8/2026 at 2:15:16 PM

A big part of the value is the network: track a stolen a car or a suspect in the next town over or across the country.

by alex43578

4/8/2026 at 3:04:34 PM

A car, a suspect, an ex lover, a union organizer, a journalist going to meet a source, an activist headed to a rally. All kinds of things, really!

by kennywinker

4/8/2026 at 7:15:15 PM

If the only content of your post is sarcasm, please stick to Reddit. We like to stick to facts and reality here.

The sky is blue. See? I posted a fact. My comment is fully valid and you can't say anything about it. Oh? It's irrelevant to the topic?

It may be too subtle for you, but I was actually making the point that the surveillance panopticon theory was mostly triggered by the fact that Flock is cloud-based.

I'm basically making a distinction between a hypothetical non-cloud Flock vs cloud-Flock.

And it may be too complex a concept, but ex-lovers, union organizers, and journlists could use whatever camera-based ALPR existed, even if it wasn't cloud-based.

Making your comment irrelevant.

Thank you for it though.

by phendrenad2

4/8/2026 at 8:27:58 PM

Replying in a separate comment, since you seem to have responded to my reply by editing your comment.

If you can’t disagree without belittling, maybe stick to reddit?

Either way, a networked array of license plate readers is an issue because it’s low friction and easily abused, with little space for oversight. A non-networked setup? Yeah i’m ok with that. If the gov needs to physically go to each camera and load data off them? Sounds fine to me. But somehow i don’t think that’s what you are suggesting when you say “non-cloud”. Once it’s networked, it doesn’t really matter if the network is a “cloud” based one or not.

But also, most of my comment was actually directed at alex43578‘s remarks, not yours.

by kennywinker

4/8/2026 at 7:50:26 PM

My post contains only the thinnest crust of sarcasm, the rest is fact based content.

Ex lovers (using flock): https://www.kansas.com/news/politics-government/article29105...

Protestors (using flock): https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/11/how-cops-are-using-flo...

Union organizers (not using flock): https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/may/21/amaz...

https://fedscoop.com/social-media-ai-surveillance-unions-sta...

Journalists (not using flock): https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/source-leaked-documen...

Examples using flock are directly applicable, examples not using flock require a little bit of imagination to see that if they are not currently happening, they will be soon.

And a bonus i didn’t mention a woman leaving the state to obtain a legal abortion: https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/crime/te...

by kennywinker

4/8/2026 at 2:46:04 PM

Or a woman who got an abortion

by Larrikin

4/8/2026 at 2:19:21 PM

And they will either quietly rebrand and build it or someone else will.

Government loves the product. What it doesn't like about Flock is that the peasants are aware about it and complaining.

by cucumber3732842

4/8/2026 at 1:32:49 PM

Funny that. Not everyone wants to live in an open air prison.

by josefritzishere

4/8/2026 at 1:45:53 PM

Someone in my hometown was arrested for vandalizing them. The media chose to say "city owned security camera". It's amazing how they will rush to defend private enterprise.

by gosub100

4/8/2026 at 1:48:10 PM

Legacy local news is highly dependent on the police for content and access. No surprise.

by Zigurd

4/8/2026 at 3:53:27 PM

More likely: the local news reporter doesn't know the difference, or didn't think there was a difference.

by knowaveragejoe

4/8/2026 at 2:41:28 PM

the alternative is to not punish vandalism? what are you even saying?

by anthonypasq

4/8/2026 at 7:53:51 PM

It's unfortunate they got caught. It is nice to be reminded that every community has people willing to fight for freedom though.

by hackable_sand

4/8/2026 at 3:46:29 PM

[flagged]

by alex43578

4/8/2026 at 12:56:55 PM

It really is amazing how they managed to fit so much copper into those devices.

by lenerdenator

4/8/2026 at 1:19:20 PM

Would be a shame if it became common knowledge.

by therobots927

4/8/2026 at 4:46:15 PM

[dead]

by cboyardee

4/8/2026 at 1:51:50 PM

[flagged]

by waNpyt-menrew

4/8/2026 at 2:02:09 PM

There are ways of doing this that don't require you to abdicate all of your privacy to a third-party SaaS company who makes it easy to share information with the police everywhere.

My camera system is not connected to the cloud and it has a retention policy of 4 weeks. I took pains not to aim them anywhere where I'd be collecting data outside of my own property. There's full-disk encryption in use. The police could maintain their own surveillance network and place their own cameras in a legally compliant way and it would be fine.

Flock and Ring are awful because they enable easy surveillance and search after the fact, not a priori because they are surveillance systems. If they required proof of warrant before letting the police execute a search I think a lot of people would be more comfortable with them. A police officer stalking an ex is like the basic example you get if you ask an ALPR vendor why we need audit logging and proactive auditing of all searches. But that's not the only way these tools enable invasion of privacy.

If you want proof that that's the problem with them, you should know that people have been building wired camera systems and ALPR systems for decades before Flock and Ring came into existence. So it's solely the cloud Search-as-a-Service business model that's the problem there.

by throwway120385

4/8/2026 at 2:27:00 PM

> The answer to that is the only one that matters.

This statement rests on the belief that absolute crime rate is the only thing that matters, and is a cousin to the "I have nothing to hide!" response from people who care little for intrusions to their privacy. Are you in favor of giving law enforcement authorities a way to unlock all private electronic devices?

I'm willing to tolerate the presence of some crime in the name of personal liberty. I do not think my whereabouts should be known on demand by government actors just because I drive a car.

by HelloMcFly

4/8/2026 at 2:51:38 PM

You’re going to be so shocked to find out the tracking device the government tricked you to put in your pocket is even worse. Police can run geofenced dragnets whenever they want, and all you got was the ability to shitpost on the Internet.

You’ll be even more shocked when biometric login isn’t protected by the 5th amendment. Possibly, even more shocked when you find out about XKEYSCORE.

ALPR is bad, of course, but in terms of actual invasion of privacy there are far bigger kraken sized fish to fry that we have accepted as just… completely normal and even necessary to function in our society. It’s only natural that they continue to push the boundaries. Almost like giving up rights for security has consequences we were warned about 250 years ago.

by stuffn

4/8/2026 at 3:15:07 PM

I won't be shocked (I don't have biometric logins enabled, thankyouverymuch), but does that mean I just celebrate it, or give up in all circumstances? I'm not yet a kicked dog, in either behavior or attitude.

by HelloMcFly

4/8/2026 at 2:54:06 PM

Unless something has changed (or I'm simply clueless), it's not quite so trivial to ask where my phone was on January 30th. Camera surveillance is not time-limited.

by macintux

4/8/2026 at 5:54:45 PM

It’s quite common for cell phone carriers to provide law enforcement with historical records of which towers a phone was connected to at specific times. Also the phone itself stores detailed location history, including which wifi networks it connected to, allowing police to get someone’s movements if their phone is seized as evidence. Police can even use battery temperature history to get an idea of whether the phone was on someone’s body, outside in the heat/cold, etc.

by ggreer

4/8/2026 at 6:06:09 PM

None of that sounds as straightforward as a dragnet would be. Most require a target to be identified.

by macintux

4/8/2026 at 1:55:54 PM

> The answer to that is the only one that matters.

Is it, though? Crime would be super low if we were all confined to prison cells by default, too.

by RankingMember

4/8/2026 at 1:56:51 PM

[flagged]

by waNpyt-menrew

4/8/2026 at 2:06:55 PM

You made a broad-brush statement that essentially justified anything in the name of safety. You might want to re-word your statement if you meant otherwise.

by RankingMember

4/8/2026 at 2:17:11 PM

It's a stretch for sure.

I think the point is that it's a tradeoff of civil liberties in exchange for safety.

I think it's an interesting discussion and it's not clear to me what the right answer is.

Given the first amendment in the USA, i think once it's cheap enough everyone will be filming everyone all the time. Just look at how many people have ring doorbells.

by peab

4/8/2026 at 3:08:38 PM

The first amendment?? Is surveillance speech now? Lets add it to the list: money is speech, surveillance is speech, protesting is NOT speech. Anything I’m missing?

by kennywinker

4/8/2026 at 2:00:37 PM

> For a tech forum the rebuttals are terrible.

Physician, heal thyself!

by ceejayoz

4/8/2026 at 3:06:38 PM

HN has become much dumber as X became less censured.

by someguydave

4/8/2026 at 1:52:58 PM

No it's not. Would crime go up, down, or stay the same if we had to get strip searched before entering airplanes?

by hrimfaxi

4/8/2026 at 1:54:55 PM

The types of crime that would happen in an airplane would already be identifiable due to its constrained cabin, so I don’t understand the comparison.

Let’s use your example for say a concert. Is checking bags worth it? Would crime go up if there was no bag check? Why or why not?

by waNpyt-menrew

4/8/2026 at 2:08:49 PM

> Is checking bags worth it?

Probably not. It's mostly there to preserve the profits from alcohol sales.

> Would crime go up if there was no bag check?

Did it go down when they added them?

by ceejayoz

4/8/2026 at 6:02:46 PM

My point was if you are only looking at the reduction in crime as the sole success criterion we will all end up naked in glass cells because that would result in the lowest crime rates.

by hrimfaxi

4/8/2026 at 1:59:26 PM

I mean, that depends on whether you consider the warrantless, disproportionate search a crime.

It should be!

by ceejayoz

4/8/2026 at 4:09:50 PM

By any means necessary, as long as crime goes down? So we can execute anyone that breaks any kind of law and as long as crime goes down, that's all that should matter? Rights have no value to you, only protecting people from crime? There's no balance to be had, the only relevant question is if crime goes up or down?

Wow.

by asadotzler

4/8/2026 at 4:31:03 PM

You need the carrot and the stick. There's a reason the QoL in urban areas in countries with significantly draconian enforcement like Singapore, Japan, and South Korea is significantly higher peer cities in North America and Western Europe.

Cleanliness and order as a cultural norm only arose because police in Singapore, Japan, and South Korea are very fine and enforcement happy.

by alephnerd

4/8/2026 at 1:52:38 PM

Crime would go down if everyone was executed. Your question is not the only one that matters.

by macintux

4/8/2026 at 1:55:15 PM

[flagged]

by waNpyt-menrew

4/8/2026 at 3:04:45 PM

> Would crime go up, down or stay the same if all surveillance cameras were removed?

I would think the same, crime rates would be unaffected in the short and medium term, since I don't think it prevents much crime given the short or non-custodial sentences given many criminals. Clearance rates and justice (conviction rates) would likely go down though IMO.

by esbranson

4/8/2026 at 3:38:14 PM

probably up

by toephu2

4/8/2026 at 2:51:03 PM

Perhaps this venture would have been more successful as a Public Benefit Corporation.

In the USA in 2026, "capitalism", "politics", and "evil" have all become synonymous.

Maybe I am naive, and the corruption is too deep and pervasive.

by HoldOnAMinute