alt.hn

5/17/2026 at 5:09:15 PM

At least 25 Flock cameras have been destroyed in five states since April 2025

 https://stateofsurveillance.org/news/flock-cameras-destroyed-nationwide-ice-backlash-2026/

by rolph

5/17/2026 at 6:12:39 PM

25 cameras destroyed over the course of a year, and more than half were destroyed by a single person. This doesn't appear to be a widespread concern the headline makes it out to be.

by taylodl

5/17/2026 at 6:18:44 PM

I feel that part of the insight is that many people reading this story may want it to be true as stated. All the upvotes and it's propagation in networks may lossily lay this claim (of course debatable)

The beauty of surveillance is that it mutes the ability to cover the distance between desire and action. Which is another way to state "it has a chilling effect"

As I understand, part of any story being shared is that its propagation is part of the story, in a McLuhan medium-is-the-message sense.

by patcon

5/17/2026 at 10:33:22 PM

Totally. Like, for example, the so-called throngs of roaming domestic terrorists setting Teslas on fire across the US. My dad still asks me if anyone has vandalized mine. (No, and I’m personally unaware of anyone who has had theirs vandalized. At least 1/3 of vehicles in my area are teslas)

by ipython

5/17/2026 at 7:44:42 PM

> I feel that part of the insight is that many people reading this story may want it to be true as stated.

People that are writing this story surely would. They, of course, wouldn't do it themselves - I mean, you could be arrested and lose your job and go to jail... but if somebody else would bear those consequences, then of course it's fine!

> Which is another way to state "it has a chilling effect"

Yes, that's kind of the point. The question is what does it chill. If it is chilling criminal activities, it's good, if it's chilling legal activities, it's bad.

by smsm42

5/17/2026 at 10:07:08 PM

Not all criminal activity is bad. See: John Lewis and “good trouble”

by appplication

5/19/2026 at 3:55:15 AM

Activities such as public disobedience to fight unjust laws are unlikely to be affected by surveillance because their whole point is to publicly violate unjust law to attract attention to its unjustness. MLK did not march in secret and avoid surveillance, he marched in public and welcomed attention. That was the whole point of it.

by smsm42

5/19/2026 at 6:32:09 AM

But there's different dangers and responsibilities by those leading and those joining.

The surveillance affects those in the march. Those who might lose their jobs or get arrested. Which did happen at that time. Surveillance increases that scale.

A weird thing is that as groups scale they become anonymous. Small groups have no anonymity, but big groups do. There's safety in numbers. This is why people protest differently now. Why they wear masks. Why people leave their phones at home. The way you protest evolves, but we should ensure that protesting is easy and safe

by godelski

5/19/2026 at 5:43:42 PM

> This is why people protest differently now. Why they wear masks

No, they wear masks to commit criminal acts, which we witness a lot and for which they definitely should be prosecuted. I am wholeheartedly for peaceful protests, but sorry, black block masked crowds torching businesses and beating up people is not peaceful protests. That's where our ways part. Anarchy and democracy are very different things, and I do not want the former, and I do not want the latter to be confused with the former. And no, it should not be easy and safe to wear a mask and riot - not individually and not with a mob. It should be very dangerous and land one in jail, preferable for a good long time. The fact that it is not happening today is one of the very profound problem that we have in our society - that breaking the laws is tolerated under the thin guise of "protest". And I am not talking about Jim Crow laws, I am talking about common sense laws like "don't torch your neighbor's business" and "don't loot your local Target" and "don't beat up random people walking on the street because you felt like they think wrong thoughts". This has to stop.

by smsm42

5/20/2026 at 1:13:06 AM 

  > No, they wear masks to commit criminal acts,
Unless you are considering protesting a criminal act, then I'm going to disagree. This is America, we have the right to protest.

I've worn a mask at a protest and committed no crime while protesting. I, and many others, do it for exactly the reasons I have said above.

I won't defend looters nor deny their existence. But I'll also tell you I've been to protests where I get home and turn on the TV and see it painted as something very different from the thing I experienced. I've gone to parks where people spoke, where a bunch of hippies played drums, where people marched down the street, but then on the news saw only scenes of trash cans burning on the other side of town. I've seen people get gassed and arrested while holding up signs and shouting, then get home, turn on the TV and only see images of some brawl that I never saw. I would have never known had I turned on news. But the news also never showed the things I saw and experienced. I don't think these are fake, I'm sure they're things that happened, but it certainly feels misleading as it's certainly misrepresenting reality.

It doesn't matter if it's Fox or CNN, they show what gets them views. They show what makes you scared. They show what makes you angry. But what they don't show is people. In any big group you can find at least someone doing anything. But one person isn't the group just like one action doesn't define your whole life.

So I welcome you to go to protests. To counter protest if you want. That is your right and I'll defend that right too. It's your God given right and I'll defend it even if I hate you for it. You have the right to be a saint. You have the right to be an asshole. You can't have the right to but one without the right to be the other. I've done it in the past and I'll do it again. Because, first they come for the people who are easy to hate...

  > And no, it should not be easy and safe to wear a mask and riot
You've gravely misunderstood.

First, I agree, it should not be easy to riot. I don't want to condone rioting. Let's get that straight.

Second, I want to live in a world where wearing masks isn't seen as self defense for people exercising their rights. I want a system where people feel safe protesting and showing their faces. But it's not uncommon to go to protests and find a Cessna circling above it for hours. It's not uncommon to go to a protest with a rayhunter and see a lot of imsi catchers. It's not uncommon to go to protests and see police set up cameras and license plate detectors all throughout the neighborhoods. So help take down the surveillance state and I'll take off my mask. Deal? Because no matter which side of the isle you're on I'm sure we can agree there. I don't want to be ruled by communists, fascist, dictators, monarchs, plutocrats, nor any of the like. I'm not an anarchistic, I'm even more accepting of authority than our founding fathers. But authority needs to be kept in check, because power creeps

by godelski

5/20/2026 at 4:03:50 AM

> This is America, we have the right to protest.

Of course, and I agree. But wearing masks to protest is strongly correlated with "protests" that aren't protests but riots - not in theory, but in practice. That's like if you see someone marching with clean-shaved head and swastika on the sleeve - maybe it's a buddhist marching band, but in practice we know it's probably not.

> I've gone to parks where people spoke, where a bunch of hippies played drums,

And those hippies don't need to wear masks, and usually do not. I am all for hippies playing drums. It's the masked guys that hide behind them, waiting for the chance to set stuff on fire, that I am worrying about.

> So I welcome you to go to protests. To counter protest if you want.

No thank you. I have no particular desire to be beaten within an inch of my life, as it happened to many people already. Yes, I know not everybody would attack me, just a tiny minority, while the hippies will keep playing drums. Somehow it doesn't make me feel better about staying the next couple of months in the hospital. If I am lucky.

> In any big group you can find at least someone doing anything. But one person isn't the group

Unfortunately, it's not one person. It's a lot of persons. It's not all the persons, true, but that's not helping - it's like saying we shouldn't investigate murders because most people aren't murderers. True, they aren't - that's the minority that are that we worry about. And again, practice shows those are exactly the one that wear masks and other gear specially designed to make them hard to identify and prosecute. They are not stupid, they know that blending in the crowd of innocent people makes them harder to find and catch.

> But authority needs to be kept in check, because power creeps

Again, I agree, it needs to be. But not by means of mayhem, which is right now seems to be a very popular mode of doing it, for some reason. Yes, not everybody. Enough to be a huge problem.

by smsm42

5/20/2026 at 2:53:59 PM 

  > And those hippies don't need to wear masks
They do. Go look up Portland ICE protests and you'll see tons of people wearing inflatable costumes. Guess what, those cover your face and make it hard to get you on film. Thats a mask.

  > No thank you. I have no particular desire to be beaten within an inch of my life,
Suppose this is true, why would someone beat you up? Are you arguing? You could literally go there, just walk around like a normal person, and be fine. They aren't beating up each other, right? There's no secret handshake. People aren't being interrogated before being allowed to join a protest. The only way they would know you're on the opposite side is if you tell them. Normal people aren't the government, they don't have access to mass surveillance technologies and can instantly know you're political beliefs by pointing a camera at your face and using facial recognition. Sorry, that technology isn't in the hands of everyday people.

So supposing you're right, that it is that dangerous: something doesn't add up. It's pretty trivial to act "undercover", if you will.

by godelski

5/25/2026 at 2:35:56 AM

> Go look up Portland ICE protests and you'll see tons of people wearing inflatable costumes

Some of them do not need to wear costumes, they do it because they want to. Others are criminals that intend to attack the police and interfere with lawful law enforcement activities. That's why they need masking - to avoid being prosecuted for their criminal activities. I agree that criminals indeed derive many benefits from not being prosecuted - but I don't see how it should make me sympathize, when I am not a criminal.

> Suppose this is true, why would someone beat you up?

Because in some parts of our political culture, wrong views are violence, and must be met with violence. Protesting (or counter-protesting) only makes sense if I disagree with something important, which automatically makes my views "wrong" to a sizable number of people, many of whom are members of that culture, and are proudly announcing it in public.

> They aren't beating up each other, right?

Sometimes they do. Sometimes they are also raping each other. Sometimes they even are killing each other. Look up Horace Lorenzo Anderson Jr.

> The only way they would know you're on the opposite side is if you tell them.

Or if they think I am looking suspicious or wearing wrong clothes or not chant enthusiastically enough or look like somebody they hate. Once violence is legitimized, there are thousands of reasons for violence. Why would I go to a place where there's a high chance this random violence would be turned against me? Why would I go there if the precondition is I can't even express my views - what's the point of going to a protest then? What would be the benefit of this action for me?

> It's pretty trivial to act "undercover", if you will.

Does the name Andy Ngo tell anything to you? How about Savanah Hernandez?

by smsm42

5/24/2026 at 8:34:24 AM

> It's the masked guys that hide behind them, waiting for the chance to set stuff on fire, that I am worrying about.

Those are ICE thugs.

by jjav

5/25/2026 at 2:37:16 AM

No those aren't. ICE is not going around setting stuff on fire. People who call them "thugs", surprisingly, often do. I'd rather sympathize with the non-setting-stuff-on-fire category.

by smsm42

5/17/2026 at 6:20:16 PM

The idea that this is an important trend story is infinity times more fun to talk about than the corrective that this isn't really a thing at all, which means online forums will sharply bias towards the notion that this is important.

This whole thread is pretty powerful evidence for that proposition: it's sprawling commentary on what pretty clearly seems to be LLM slop writing. You could build a novel operating system and get flagged off the front page for having a README with Claude tells in it, but that preference is obviously contingent.

by tptacek

5/17/2026 at 7:10:28 PM

And yet, the death penalty, doesn't seem to have muted murder.

by Ylpertnodi

5/17/2026 at 7:16:57 PM

It seems like it takes a rational mind to be muted. It seems like most murders are committed irrationally.

by AxisAngles

5/17/2026 at 7:16:37 PM

That's not really the contradiction you seem to be implying. The belief that one is being watched and the knowledge that if caught there will be extremely high consequences are two completely different things, not to mention that the chilling effects of surveillance may impact a mostly different set of criminal and non-criminal behaviors.

by idle_zealot

5/17/2026 at 6:47:01 PM

It doesn't. You are right. For comparison: main area of Richmond (Virgina) as a quick random lookup alone lists 441 Flock cams + 6 Alpr cams.

by lashull

5/17/2026 at 6:52:13 PM

Flock is only one company. Someone in my town smashed one from a different company and was treated like a hero in Facebook comments. It’s not mentioned in the article.

by deepsquirrelnet

5/17/2026 at 6:22:30 PM

I think the concern is widespread, but most people aren't ready to challenge the government which can have severe consequences to your life.

by unglaublich

5/17/2026 at 7:13:03 PM

I don't think there is "widespread concern". I'd be willing to bet >99% of people don't know what Flock is.

But if you go ask people, in a non-duplicitous way, whether you want less of a police presence or curtail use technology to solve crimes, most people will not want less police. Here is an example

> When asked whether they want the police to spend more time, the same amount of time or less time than they currently do in their area, most Black Americans -- 61% -- want the police presence to remain the same. This is similar to the 67% of all U.S. adults preferring the status quo, including 71% of White Americans.

> Meanwhile, nearly equal proportions of Black Americans say they would like the police to spend more time in their area (20%) as say they'd like them to spend less time there (19%).

It's really a privileged out of touch luxury belief to believe that there is no need to deter or solve crime. People that are affected by crime and/or have common sense, understand that technology that helps solve or prevent criminal activities is actually a good thing.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/316571/black-americans-police-r...

by bko

5/17/2026 at 7:31:11 PM

Ask them what they think about cameras run by private companies being used to spy on them and their neighbors and see what the poll results look like.

Just because people want policing doesn't mean they want the kind of policing that we seem to be getting.

And that article you cite is a pretty good example of this.

The title is: Black Americans Want Police to Retain Local Presence

The bottom half is: Black Americans Lack Assurance Police Encounters Will Go Well

by dualvariable

5/17/2026 at 7:54:59 PM

Let me introduce you to Ring security cameras...

Police cameras are actually very popular, as is private security. I've even heard rich people voluntarily pay private security with guns (!) to protect them.

You're living in fantasy land my friend. No one outside of your bubble thinks about things this way. People are trying to live their lives and raise their kids. People don't like this chaos and have very little empathy for the few percent of people that terrorize their neighborhoods.

by bko

5/17/2026 at 8:12:04 PM

> The bottom half is: Black Americans Lack Assurance Police Encounters Will Go Well

My "bubble" is that I read past the headline and got more than halfway through that article that you cited.

by dualvariable

5/17/2026 at 7:25:47 PM

Black people wanting more police presence is a well known fact, as is the fact that increased police presence in their communities results in the police arresting and killing a lot of innocent people. This reflects a world where policing is broken, but it's the only discussed mechanism to reduce crime. In parallel the perception of crime rates has become totally unhinged from actual crime statistics. If you ask an average person whether they think crime has gone up or down they're likely to say "up by a lot." Which is basically uniformly untrue. So then they ask for more police, the only way they can think of to solve the real (but overestimated) problem.

It's not a luxury belief to grapple with reality instead of subjecting yourself to a false dichotomy where you either have police prowling the streets or gangs doing the same. Don't give this "common sense" crap, you know very well that intuition fails all the time, especially when applied to incredibly complex topics like governance or social policy.

by idle_zealot

5/17/2026 at 7:43:58 PM

> If you ask an average person whether they think crime has gone up or down they're likely to say "up by a lot." Which is basically uniformly untrue.

If direct experience and official stats conflict, it's usually the official stats that are wrong.

Yes, I agree things like murder has gone down (especially since it's recent peak in 2020/2021)

But in terms of lawlessness, there is a lot less law and order in most large cities. There were always homeless people in my lifetime, but the fentanyl zombies is relatively new. Or let me give you another example, consider Eric Garner who was killed on Staten Island in 2014 after a confrontation for selling loose untaxed cigarettes.

Today I walk by the same person parked out every single day, with a sign selling loose cigarettes along with weed. This is breaking a number of laws in a highly policed area in NYC. However there is no will to prevent do anything about it.

> It's not a luxury belief to grapple with reality instead of subjecting yourself to a false dichotomy where you either have police prowling the streets or gangs doing the same. Don't give this "common sense" crap, you know very well that intuition fails all the time, especially when applied to incredibly complex topics like governance or social policy.

No, this isn't a complicated issue. People get arrested regularly but they get let out to re-offend. here's a stat:

Among persons admitted to state prison in 2014 across 34 states, 77% had five or more prior arrests in their criminal history, including the arrest that resulted in their prison sentence... The number of prisoners that have had 15 or more prior arrests is over 26%

How about common sense policy, after your 15th arrest, you stay in prison until you're an old man and relatively harmless to society.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Eric_Garner

https://mleverything.substack.com/p/acceptance-of-crime-is-a...

by bko

5/17/2026 at 9:18:07 PM

> No, this isn't a complicated issue. People get arrested regularly but they get let out to re-offend. here's a stat:

It is a complex issue. Even now we simultaneously let KnifecrimesMcGee out after 15 arrests while also locking up non-dangerous pot smokers for years. This isn't a "we're too lax" or "we're too strict" issue, it's both in different areas. Putting in an absolute 15 strikes program is going to hand more jaywalkers a life sentence than dangerous criminals for the simple fact that people get arrested over minor offenses more often than serious ones. Heavy-handed nonsense solves no problems. You need to acknowledge when an issue is beyond simple solutions if you're interested in solving it.

by idle_zealot

5/17/2026 at 7:35:50 PM

I don't think that's a particularly charitable read of people's objections with Flock.

If Flock was simply a network of plate readers with some additional computer vision classification features (make, model, colour, vehicle type) which only saved data on vehicles matching an active BOLO, there would be far less concern.

But Flock is not that. It saves a timestamp and location of every single plate it sees. It is a mass surveillance machine, enabling gross privacy violations by collecting and making available to law enforcement movement data on anyone with a car.

Flock also shares data with the federal government, particularly ICE, even when the local PD has specifically signed contracts forbidding the practice. People who may otherwise be comfortable with Flock providing data to their local PD may not be comfortable when that data is handed to the Trump administration.

The CEO calling those who disagree with him "domestic terrorists" is also ample reason to be skeptical of Flock's mission.

by Sanzig

5/17/2026 at 6:42:02 PM

Does a significant percentage of the population even know what flock is or that it's happening?

In my non-tech circles, people don't think and don't care about this stuff.

by cj

5/17/2026 at 6:33:14 PM

So Americans (plural) is true, since there are > 1 people smashing cameras. (:

I would love to use AI to re-write article headlines into non-ragebait slop.

by gbriel

5/17/2026 at 7:26:44 PM

it is a widespread concern that more haven’t been destroyed

by diebillionaires

5/17/2026 at 7:23:34 PM

That’s a shame.

But it’s not too late!

by dbg31415

5/17/2026 at 6:38:03 PM

[dead]

by hankerapp

5/17/2026 at 5:39:44 PM

I've warmed to LLM-generated/assisted writing in general but this kind of stuff is just lazy and is basically "I got Claude to say something I agree with and then made it pretty".

by tolerance

5/17/2026 at 6:12:23 PM

A browser plugin that scores webpage content based on how likely it is to have been AI-generated would be quite useful.

Browser vendors can't build this.

by danjc

5/17/2026 at 6:20:04 PM

> A browser plugin that scores webpage content based on how likely it is to have been AI-generated would be quite useful.

I am strongly against this, because you cannot accurately detect it. People start to get blamed even more when they actually did not use the AI.

by nicce

5/17/2026 at 7:31:47 PM

Nothing new under the sun unfortunately. It’s just an easy way to dismiss people you don’t want to listen to, and people abuse it like crazy.

by Forgeties79

5/17/2026 at 6:39:22 PM

[dead]

by hankerapp

5/17/2026 at 6:19:06 PM

This is virtually impossible to build. Not just because all current "AI detector" systems are fake or outright scams with accuracy comparable to a coin-flip on frontier model output, but because even if someone did build a reliable detector and released it to the public, it could be used for adversarial training and it would become worthless pretty fast.

by sigmoid10

5/17/2026 at 6:30:15 PM

Pangram is legit. I don't work at pangram, we integrated it in our paper website and one of the cool emergent behaviors I've seen is that on AI papers with example rollouts, it will accurately mark the paper's main text as human generated and the rollouts as AI generated.

My understanding is that they strongly believe in no false positives, so it's definitely possible to slip something by them but if it marks something as AI, it very likely is.

by linolevan

5/17/2026 at 7:16:30 PM

> My understanding is that they strongly believe in no false positives

Who cares what they "believe" (or, more accurately, say they believe). What are the underlying processes that actually guarantee this, and what data supports it?

by dolebirchwood

5/17/2026 at 6:43:59 PM

What is a rollout in this context?

by jfengel

5/17/2026 at 8:31:28 PM

> Pangram is legit.

Their 99.98% accuracy claim[1] makes me doubt that.

[1]: https://www.pangram.com/solutions/chrome-extension

by woadwarrior01

5/18/2026 at 2:11:59 AM

Rather obviously they're choosing the one that makes them look best. Another they link to¹ shows 98% for example.

Much more importantly, 9/10 dentists agree it's the best.

1: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.15654, linked from² https://www.pangram.com/blog/third-party-pangram-evals (the second section)

2: the third study they link there is based entirely around the assumption that Pangram is correct, and seems to have been a collaboration or something as they're included in the credits area.

by Groxx

5/17/2026 at 6:47:17 PM

[flagged]

by freeopinion

5/17/2026 at 7:00:00 PM

AI is very hard to detect and changes on a weekly basis.

But you could build something that ranks the quality of the webpage content! This would also be more useful.

Of course, that tool would have to use AI...

by BurningFrog

5/17/2026 at 7:04:06 PM

Bot detectors are broken. Even human bot detectors are broken. When I'm in the right mood, I can be quite capable of writing with very good formatting, structure, and phrasing. When I actually take the time to do this, there seems to be about a 70% chance that some nimrod will crawl out of the woodwork just to accuse me of being a bot.

Even humans who deliberately use lazy formatting and leave obvious errors uncorrected to provide "proof" of being human aren't seeing the big picture, here.

---

That bigger picture is that it's easy to make instruct a bot to be lazy, or to avoid the usual quirks. I hate when I'm working on a project and see a constant outflow of negation ("Don't do x, y, or w" is a recent hit) and unfounded exclusive confidence ("The correct answer" as if this is Highlander and there can be only one). Repetitious jargon like overuse of "gate" for things other than fences and skiing is something I can't stand. Plus the usual things — like overuse of unusual punctuation — that are obvious tells.

That stuff all drives me nuts.

But the bot just follows instructions, and my bot has been instructed to avoid those things. It generally performs very well, though the instructions do need re-hashed every now and then as models ebb and flow.

It's super easy to get the bot to write some python or perl that takes a body of text and intentionally some words or lose a comma while mmaking other errors and converting — into --.

When it comes to human error in written language, we just aren't that hard to emulate.

Now, that all said: You'll just have to take my word for it, but I do not use the bot to help with writing English. But I do have every confidence that if I woke up tomorrow and actually started bulking up my comments using a bot, none of you would be able to tell.

by ssl-3

5/17/2026 at 6:22:09 PM

Everyone has failed to build this. They can only sell claims that they have built it to fools.

by Groxx

5/17/2026 at 6:34:09 PM

I work somewhere that tries to do such detection (for fraud prevention) and it sort of feels impossible to me in the medium term. AI slop qualities are fleeting - I’ve seen Reddit AI posts that have misspelled words, no dashes, stilted sayings and so on.

People want their slop to be undetectable.

by lelandfe

5/17/2026 at 6:18:30 PM

Check out Pangram

by neversupervised

5/17/2026 at 6:10:46 PM

generate a story where there is not much of a story. What is unfortunate is this has gotten upvoted and is now part of the noise.

by jweir

5/17/2026 at 7:30:48 PM

I’ve definitely learned lately to basically never trust an LLM sending back to me “other people have reported the same issue.” it means it in the most literal sense, as in it went online and found somebody who said something similar to what I am looking in to. It has no ability to determine validity, proportion, relevance, etc.

by Forgeties79

5/17/2026 at 6:44:18 PM

AI didn't start this, journalist have been using wordplay to "technically tell the truth" forever.

by skiing_crawling

5/17/2026 at 6:07:55 PM

Did not strike me as AI-written. But it's useless to try to distinguish. There is only good writing and shite writing. (With things like "accuracy" and "verifiability" and even "awareness of adjacent context" included in my definition of "good.") The article is reasonably good and your comment I'm afraid is fairly shite.

by rdiddly

5/17/2026 at 6:16:20 PM

I disagree. There is more content out there than I can read in many lifetimes, so I have to be selective. LLM generated text (like any text) can be well put together on the surface level but require deeper consideration to see the flaws, and of course this takes more effort than the writing did.

A human-written piece indicates someone believes in it enough to put in enough effort to write it up nicely, so it works as a heuristic of underlying quality.

by arijun

5/17/2026 at 7:12:28 PM

All true, but how do you distinguish human-written from AI-written or a hybrid? They all have an author's name attached. You would have to limit your reading to people you know personally. (Which isn't a terrible idea actually.) Otherwise it's a judgment call, which inevitably comes down to a question of writing quality. "This has to be AI because it's so terrible." But humans are perfectly capable of writing terribly (that is in fact where the LLM learned it) and LLMs can even write well occasionally, including with human intervention. So I decided that if I'm using quality as a proxy to guess at authorship, why not just forget authorship and make quality primary. Basically since authorship is unknowable I'm declaring it irrelevant. It's not ideal but these are the times we're living in.

by rdiddly

5/17/2026 at 5:52:07 PM

How is this relevant to the article?

by berkes

5/17/2026 at 5:54:00 PM

The article was written with a premise into a prompt for Claude, which then wrote the whole thing.

by ohyoutravel

5/17/2026 at 5:55:30 PM

What do you think about the contents?

by timcobb

5/17/2026 at 5:56:43 PM

Unless there's evidence that all of it was fact-checked, it's a waste of time to look harder. You can get any output you like, it doesn't mean it's correct.

by Groxx

5/17/2026 at 6:36:02 PM

How different is this from humans? In my experience people fill in the blanks quite the same, they just do it less convincingly and sometimes maliciously. Having the sort of prejudice you describe against AI content doesn't make sense if you consider humans make mistakes and lie all the time, coming from a position of less knowledge than LLMs. You need to approach both with similar caution.

by timcobb

5/17/2026 at 6:45:49 PM

> How different is this from humans?

Humans exercise judgement.

At least when humans lie they're usually doing it on purpose. When machines lie they don't know they're doing it.

by cj

5/17/2026 at 6:50:37 PM

Why does this make it better for you the consumer? You still need to detect the lie and respond to it appropriately. Machines lie more elegantly, I think is the scary part

by timcobb

5/17/2026 at 6:54:03 PM

I wouldn't say machines lie more elegantly.

They lie more unpredictably.

by cj

5/17/2026 at 6:42:23 PM

At least part of it is that we do attribute malice or lack of care (or madness) to people who repeatedly do it, and treat their output differently in the future.

For some reason, some people repeatedly defend machines that constantly do the same thing, and claim we should give it the benefit of the doubt.

by Groxx

5/17/2026 at 6:52:14 PM

Why give anyone benefit of doubt when you're just trying to extract true information. If a person BSs you, you don't believe them in the future either. Giving BS the benefit of doubt isn't serving anyone. Giving intent benefit of doubt makes sense, but intent isn't important when it comes to technical information and lying about it

by timcobb

5/17/2026 at 7:21:54 PM

Yes, that is my point about "AI" generated text. It's deep into "doubt by default, require evidence before bothering" territory. Hence I think it's strange to defend spending time on it by default.

by Groxx

5/17/2026 at 6:11:05 PM

It’s interesting this AI-generated article references “Reddit threads” being “full of support” two or three times, yet I can’t find Reddit threads in the references.

I wonder if we are seeing what may be the result of a Reddit bot campaign to sway generative output.

by peyton

5/17/2026 at 6:06:42 PM

It’s poorly written and untrustworthy. I’d rather it not exist.

by prepend

5/17/2026 at 6:16:13 PM

I think I could prompt Claude to make me an opposite article telling me Americans love flock cameras

by simmerup

5/17/2026 at 6:17:28 PM

Why does that even matter? It's inauthentic, don't waste your time.

by amiga386

5/19/2026 at 2:49:46 PM

I value my time. I will not be reading any statistically composed slop that a human couldn’t even be bothered to spend time writing.

by ohyoutravel

5/17/2026 at 6:51:09 PM

If the contents can be generated, why does the contents matter? They can just distill the blog down to a prompt and skip forcing us to read bullshit.

by fzeroracer

5/17/2026 at 5:30:26 PM

Eventually toll cameras and a consortium of private businesses will have this tech and then game over. Better to use this energy and legislate the behavior you want. Never let the enemy decide the terms.

by amazingamazing

5/17/2026 at 6:08:02 PM

People are able to do both. There are plenty of grassroots efforts across the country to end cities’ contracts with Flock. Unfortunately, just as many counties have been unresponsive about stopping data center construction, many cities have been unresponsive about ending contracts with Flock. I don’t condone illegal property damage, but civil disobedience on a large scale both in the US and around the world have often been the only effective mechanism for change.

by Tyrubias

5/17/2026 at 6:16:51 PM

Civil disobedience and non-violent (towards people) destruction of invasive technology is the only outlet left for most people, I would argue. The money and power is so incredibly lopsided that 'traditional' routes of impacting City, county, or state/national practices are closed to most of us.

This is just my thought with nothing to back it up, but I believe it's valid. I also believe we'll see widespread actions of this type within the next decade.

by Loughla

5/17/2026 at 7:08:04 PM

Just wait until they start burning down all the datacenters after AI takes all the jobs.

by leptons

5/17/2026 at 7:18:24 PM

"AI taking all the jobs" is going to result in some tech companies going down like the Titanic.

by new_account_100

5/17/2026 at 6:19:24 PM

Outside of lobbying, advertising, voting, and legal action, in order of decreasing efficacy, presumably?

Civil disobedience, in perspective, has by comparison been incredibly ineffective historically.

Books are written to glamorize remarkable exceptions, not the mundane reality of the facts we expect in every day life. The majority by far were punished or executed and forgotten.

Voting has plenty of impact. But most people don't and they're really easy to manipulate into free advertising to garner support for an otherwise unpopular cause at the expense of their own well-being.

It's far better to ask yourself if your cause might not be popular or even just before you run out and change the world. With very, very few exceptions that you're not likely to be able to recognize through mere self reflection.

by trimethylpurine

5/17/2026 at 5:46:58 PM

Smashing cameras is enjoyable whereas building movement for legislation is laborious.

It will be easier to negotiate for legislation as well if the economic risk of installation increases because of vandalism.

by RobLach

5/17/2026 at 6:04:18 PM

No it won't. (Source: got legislation for this, pretty good bead on who the stakeholders are).

This is all Internet logic. It's fun to talk about destroying cameras as a vector for public policy, ergo, by the First Law of Message Boards, that must be a viable strategy. Reader, it is not. Nobody's going to blink at these costs, but residents who supported or were on the fence about the cameras are now negatively polarized against doing anything about them.

The cringe-ier thing here is the clear message being sent by many commentators, incl. the author of this post, that nobody's ever thought of breaking surveillance cameras before. Y'all, this is literally a meme.

by tptacek

5/17/2026 at 6:07:09 PM

What if we just zip tie bags over them while working on legislation?

by NDlurker

5/17/2026 at 6:13:59 PM

Just break the cameras. Nobody cares (I mean, local police will care, in that they will arrest you if they can, but that's about the extent of it.)

by tptacek

5/17/2026 at 6:15:19 PM

Yes, local police would be my concern in this situation

by NDlurker

5/17/2026 at 6:24:36 PM

The Judge, the Justice System, and a potential prison sentence should factor into your concern in this situation.

by new_account_100

5/21/2026 at 2:38:38 PM

That makes sense.

by RobLach

5/17/2026 at 6:37:29 PM

[flagged]

by jessfyi

5/17/2026 at 6:48:44 PM

Sure, keep calling me a cosplayer. I must be! It's a message board, and I disagree with you. What other explanation could there be? It's definitely not as if I've been talking incessantly about this since long before "deflock" was a thing.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41927777

The search bar will avail for the rest of the story.

by tptacek

5/17/2026 at 8:30:59 PM

[flagged]

by jessfyi

5/17/2026 at 8:37:48 PM

I don't believe you knew any what I just posted, or you wouldn't have used "cosplayer" as your epithet. And why would I keep talking to you after that? You made it clear that wasn't productive, and that's fine: you and I simply never need to discuss this issue. We'll both be OK.

The funny part of this is that you didn't even bother to hit the search bar; if you had, your "municipality still uses Flock" thing wouldn't have made any sense.

by tptacek

5/17/2026 at 5:59:13 PM

And that's why we need more direct democracy. People (correctly) feel like they have very little power over laws which affect them day to day.

If someone represents me, then logically I should have the right to vote directly instead of him, or remove him at any point.

by martin-t

5/17/2026 at 6:15:57 PM

That's why planes should be flown using direct democracy. Passengers (correctly) feel like they have little power over the maneuvers planes make and affect them moment to moment.

Representational democracy is far superior. Decisions need to be weighed against both their popularity and their effect with input from experts and other affected parties.

by megaman821

5/17/2026 at 6:51:17 PM

The problem with representative democracy arises when it stops being representative. Alas, at least in the US, Congress nearly always votes according to moneyed interests over the desires of its constituent voters.

That isn't to say we should use something other than representative democracy. I believe the best option is to fix the system rather than replace it. However, it does explain why people currently feel they have very little power of the laws that affect them.

by atmavatar

5/17/2026 at 7:32:58 PM

I think increasing the size of the House would make representatives more responsive to their constituents. I also don't think it'll ever happen for exactly that reason.

by EvanAnderson

5/17/2026 at 8:33:33 PM

As an European, the biggest issue with US politics I see is that you only have 2 parties. It makes no sense. As a voter, you can only express a binary choice and whatever you choose for the issue you care about most effectively decides what you vote for regarding all other issues.

I'd like to see more separation. If we are to keep indirect democracy, at least have separate representation for criminal law, economic decisions (taxes, healthcare, ...), social decisions (abortions, marriage, ...), etc. But even where to draw the lines is difficult. I think that too should be in some ways decided by voters.

Of course, in a country which can't get rid of FPTP/plurality, despite being objectively the worst voting system[0-3], that's never gonna happen. If you need to explain math to people to convince them, you've already lost, because people are not smart enough and definitely not educated enough.

[0]: https://rangevoting.org/

[1]: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/aaron-hamlin-voting-...

[2]: http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/

[3]: https://ncase.me/ballot/

by martin-t

5/18/2026 at 2:45:46 AM

I'd love to get rid of FPTP and the two party system. I feel like small enclaves of alternative voting systems are happening but I feel pretty hopeless about it being wider spread. In general I feel pretty hopeless about all of it after Citizens United. My interests aren't aligned with big money, therefore I have no speech.

by EvanAnderson

5/20/2026 at 12:11:07 AM

The vile thing is that people work for a company and make it a lot more money than they end up receiving and then the owners of the company go and use the remaining money against the people's interest.

by martin-t

5/17/2026 at 11:10:03 PM

It indeed makes no sense, do you have parties voting in Europe? In the US we have representatives each casting their own vote.

by pandaman

5/20/2026 at 12:08:54 AM

It depends a lot on the country. Pretty sure most/all have more than 2 viable parties. Still sucks because usually you can only vote for one party so it still leads to strategic voting. And ou might be able to prefer certain candidates from the party, in which case it might or might not be broken in other ways.

Oh and Switzerland has 7 presidents (effectively). No kings, no dictators.

by martin-t

5/20/2026 at 12:50:49 AM

In US not only parties themselves don't vote but the people don't elect parties either. For example, we just had the most money spent in history on a primary (this is an election among multiple candidates in the same party), where some interest groups spent 25M+ to unseat a popular GOP representative in favor of another GOP candidate. If the choice was just between two parties nobody would have spent a dime to change one GOP rep for another GOP rep.

by pandaman

5/17/2026 at 7:57:55 PM

See, with a plane, you get to choose which one you board.

And the pilot is not a random guy from the street with no education or at best a completely unrelated degree. And he's probably not 90 years old. And he's the engineer, mechanic, ATC, pilot, stewerd, advertiser, accountant and TSA in one person.

Direct democracy shouldn't be the only change, obviously. As you correctly point out the issue is when uninformed, uneducated and not sufficiently intelligent people make decisions for everyone.

The issue with direct democracy is that you're describing a highly dimensional vector (your opinion) by picking one of a small set of predefined points (the political parties). Some countries only have 2. That's obviously stupid.

---

For example we should weight votes by how informed they are. How to determine that? That's a difficult question. But shooting down the idea does move us closer to a solution.

Making voting indirect only has the effect that all nuance is lost. You still get dumb people voting for populists, fascists, narcissists, rapists, etc.

by martin-t

5/17/2026 at 7:13:14 PM

We need better democracy, where opportunities for corruption are minimized and proper representation is possible.

Campaign finance reform would be the foundation for this, otherwise we will continue with legalized bribery.

The other need is for daylight and accountability. As much as I loath the Web3 cryptocrowd, having some sort of public ledger of government operations would be incredibly valuable. Anything and everything related to government actions should be public record with the small exception of sensitive information (which itself should have oversight on not being abused).

This is an easy problem to solve (on a technical level), but the established political base will always fight against it they like things the way they are.

by pstuart

5/17/2026 at 8:12:55 PM

I agree and we need to talk about specific things if we have any chance of turning ideas into change. The issue is these are complex topics not suited for a discussion platform where most activity on a post ceases within a day (and if it continues longer in rare cases, nobody sees it). But there are no really good platforms for this so everything is simplified into short statements which lose nuance.

---

It's impossible for every person to have a well-researched opinion on everything. Opponents of direct democracy use this to shoot it down. But it applies to indirect democracy too.

The real issue we need to solve is how to make sure people (whether all citizens or representatives) only vote on what they actually understand.

I think votes weighted based on the score of a knowledge test would be a good start if the test is well-designed. But we need to figure out how to decide what the questions are (what is relevant, what is enough in-depth, what is too specific, etc.) and what the correct answers are (some topics are still a matter of debate even among experts). And that's hard.

It's hard in a cooperative environment (e.g. engineers deciding which factors are relevant to their proposed solution) and it's even harder in an adversarial environment like politics.

by martin-t

5/19/2026 at 7:52:59 PM

I would love to see something like that. The trick would be to keep it from being gamed to lock valid voters out.

by pstuart

5/17/2026 at 6:01:34 PM

[flagged]

by Barbing

5/17/2026 at 7:26:52 PM

> I wonder how many Flock decision makers will take personal offense to their little installations being damaged

I'd bet any amount of money it will be approximately 0.

by pc86

5/17/2026 at 7:33:13 PM

Easy for people to feel disrespected when damaging property associated with them, no?

by Barbing

5/18/2026 at 6:25:42 PM

You think the secretary at one of the Flock offices feels personal disrespect hearing about a camera 2,000 miles away getting spray painted? Someone writing code for the web app? The guy wiring up the solar panel?

No, I think for 95% of the people who work at Flock it's just a job and they could care less about the "safety" of their cameras, and I'm willing to bet the rest are so well compensated they don't really care. Or they're complete psychopaths incapable of feeling emotion at all, like the CEO who called deflock a "terrorist organization."

by pc86

5/18/2026 at 8:24:35 PM

Oops! The Flock decision makers were supposed to be those who make decisions on installations in the communities they were elected to serve.

Thanks for your reply, sorry about that. Restated-

Community decisionmakers on local Flock installs will get their knickers bunched by vandalism, not unlike how they close bathrooms after repeated spraypaintings (or worse, ew!).

——

RE: Deflock - wow! (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-kZGrDz7PU) Starts by shouting out ACLU & EFF, maybe that Deflock Discord had some naughty people on it. “Terroristic” gooooodness

LOL the reporter with the perfect reply

by Barbing

5/17/2026 at 7:21:39 PM

Eventually all dash cams will have this tech and a built in data connection you can't turn off. The incentive to do so will cost too much to not add it or likely mandated by law as the "the threat to children is too great not to have it!". (all the child abductions could be stopped of course don't you care for children?)

by 14

5/17/2026 at 5:34:54 PM

There seems to be enough energy for both?

by JKCalhoun

5/17/2026 at 5:36:24 PM

The irony is destruction of private property will only justify the very surveillance one is trying to avoid. Would you agree ring cameras should be destroyed too? The police can use their footage. In practice they are similar to flock.

by amazingamazing

5/17/2026 at 5:41:37 PM

Kinda like saying "Throwing the British's tea into Boston harbor will only make us subject to harsher terms."

The reality is the vast majority of social progress in the last millenium was achieved with force and threat of force. I find this weird revisionist "violence is never the answer" trope recited as a fact that needs no justification to be incredibly weird and unreliable.

by zug_zug

5/17/2026 at 5:58:24 PM

I'd say, "you can't commit violence against a camera" but now everything is violence if it costs someone money.

by piloto_ciego

5/17/2026 at 6:57:37 PM

...only if it costs a corporation money.

Someone shoplifts $50 worth of stuff from Wallyworld and the cops come a runnin' (if they're not already there, because they station a cop full time there.)

Someone steals your $500 bicycle and cops tell you not to bother filing a police report because nothing will happen.

How did we start tolerating public employees not only discouraging people from making them do their jobs, but them justifying it by saying they're incompetent and nothing will happen?

And before someone screeches that wallyworld has cameras: so do many people now, too. The cops won't do anything even when a tracker like an airtag shows the bike is in a specific house. Facebook Marketplace and OfferUp and other forums are chock full of obvious stolen bike listings and people are easily tracing them to lost-bike posts.

There's a huge encampment under a bridge in my city that is known as the regional bike 'chop shop' where tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars of bicycles are being cut up for their parts and the parts sold through fences and the frames et al going out for scrap metal.

The cops do not give a shit.

by KennyBlanken

5/17/2026 at 11:24:18 PM

They're only there to enforce property rights ultimately.

by piloto_ciego

5/17/2026 at 8:24:06 PM

[dead]

by cindyllm

5/17/2026 at 5:44:19 PM

Violence is only the answer if you're willing to cost a few thousands (sometimes millions) of lives.

by raincole

5/17/2026 at 5:50:45 PM

That’s an instant debate winner if we can’t differentiate between breaking cameras and mass death.

by newAccount2025

5/17/2026 at 5:53:02 PM

Yes, breaking cameras never results in positive changes. Mass death sometimes does.

by raincole

5/17/2026 at 6:07:30 PM

I wouldnt call property crime violence.

by prepend

5/17/2026 at 6:21:52 PM

That's...exactly what happened with the Boston Tea Party: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intolerable_Acts

Had France not been willing to subsidize an insurgent campaign to distract the British, it's incredibly likely those Acts would've remained in place for some time.

People who rush to using violence as an answer frequently do not consider the outcome if they've misjudged their opponents' capacity for it.

by ai_critic

5/17/2026 at 6:43:40 PM

>People who rush to using violence as an answer frequently do not consider the outcome if they've misjudged their opponents' capacity for it.

It's part of the fun of being an internet revolutionary. Eventually, though, most end up thinking things through.

by linksnapzz

5/17/2026 at 5:52:07 PM

You could use this Boston Tea Party logic for virtually any violent action no matter how dumb or counterproductive.

by tptacek

5/17/2026 at 5:53:33 PM

To be fair to the loyalists, a lot of people were making this point at the time. Tally ho, gents.

by whatshisface

5/17/2026 at 6:00:35 PM

It's like the "watering the tree of patriotism with the blood of centrists" or whatever the fuck it was. You probably wouldn't want to hang out with the groups of people most likely to deploy these arguments.

by tptacek

5/17/2026 at 5:44:59 PM

Property destruction is not the same crime as battery/assault/etc.

Let’s not call breaking a camera “violence”.

by mrtesthah

5/17/2026 at 5:55:38 PM

It's not violence, it's vandalism. Quite diferrent.

But why smash'em when you have the right to bear arms? I'd do target practice instead. Improve your shootong skills while getting rid of surveillance. Win-win.

by petre

5/17/2026 at 6:09:25 PM

Extra charge for using a gun. Slingshot maybe? Or as I said before, just put a bag over the camera. Is that even illegal?

by NDlurker

5/17/2026 at 6:26:43 PM

> Kinda like saying "Throwing the British's tea into Boston harbor will only make us subject to harsher terms."

I mean, that it... quite literally did?

Yeah, you can externalize enforcement of sanctions against you to drag other people into a conflict with you, but I wouldn't suggest getting caught making that argument.

by naniwaduni

5/17/2026 at 5:43:57 PM

So what are you advocating for?

by amazingamazing

5/17/2026 at 5:47:16 PM

For throwing the tea into the harbor.

By the way -- Where do you stand on throwing tea into the harbor? And where do you stand on the legitimacy of publicly discussing throwing tea into the harbor?

by zug_zug

5/17/2026 at 5:48:11 PM

[flagged]

by amazingamazing

5/17/2026 at 6:59:00 PM

Based on the number of upvotes I'm getting I think it's you who's really struggling to make a point.

I don't think your arguing in good faith and you are getting called out on it by a few people. So you answer first, then I'll answer -- Was the boston tea party justified? Is civil disobedience ever justified? Is breaking the law a good thing sometimes if it's a bad law (e.g. Rosa Parks)?

If you can't answer those then I think you'll have convinced me and the rest of us that you aren't even trying to make a good-faith effort to make a point.

by zug_zug

5/17/2026 at 7:13:07 PM

Again this is not the Boston Tea Party or the Civil Rights movement. I also don’t really care about upvotes either. You keep making comparisons with the past instead of explicitly stating your opinion on the topic at hand in the article. Anyway no point of further discourse.

by amazingamazing

5/17/2026 at 6:07:29 PM

What riddle? I'm not a native English speaker, and it's pretty clear even to me what he's saying.

by dandellion

5/17/2026 at 5:57:42 PM

It's not complicated.

They are in favor of public vandalism such as that which was committed by the Boston Tea Party whereas you appear to be suggesting that you are vehemently against it.

by pydry

5/17/2026 at 5:58:19 PM

What a load of shit. You're essentially goading someone to fedpost and holding their argument hostage if they don't.

by mothballed

5/17/2026 at 6:08:52 PM

I think its better to lodge displeasure by placing sticky notes instead of destroying. It decreases camera usefulness and I’m not quite sure it’s a crime.

by prepend

5/17/2026 at 5:45:21 PM

I feel like you're trying to bait people into saying something that violates the site guidelines.

by new_account_100

5/17/2026 at 7:29:25 PM

There is both a practical and ideological difference between a private person putting a camera on their private property and agreeing to share that data with law enforcement when requested, and government organizations deploying fleets of cameras and collecting troves of data just in case.

The difference is so staggering I have trouble believing anyone who has spent more than about 90 seconds thinking about the issue could believe in good faith that they're in any way comparable. Happy to be proven wrong, though.

by pc86

5/17/2026 at 6:04:54 PM

That justification is a red herring. The goal is the surveillance, and safety is just an interchangeable excuse. It should be obvious when they'll do things like increasing surveillance to "protect the children" and at the same time avoid other measures that would be far more effective at keeping children safe. The real irony is when it turns out they themselves were the biggest danger for children all along.

by dandellion

5/17/2026 at 6:33:27 PM

It matters because while the choice of excuse doesn't really matter to the surveilling end, they still need to make the excuse with the fig leaf of plausibility. The worse their excuses look, the easier it is for you to convince other people who don't already agree with you that you're right and they're wrong.

by naniwaduni

5/17/2026 at 10:40:33 PM

It's not valid "private property" if it's spying on the public. Your right to punch ends where my nose begins.

You do not have the right to own and operate something that infringes on my rights.

by culi

5/17/2026 at 5:41:30 PM

Exactly, let your local politicians know the only way they can get your vote is by rejecting Flock.

by Barbing

5/17/2026 at 5:46:58 PM

What's going on here is that out of 100,000 constituents, three know that Gary's Carpets is licensing the city reservoir as a PFOAs dump, and combined they have $1,000 of advertising reach if in-kind contribution is counted. Meanwhile, Gary's Carpets has a $60k advertising budget annually, donates to all five churches, subcontracts influence operations with bot farms, and attends weekly meetings of the grand lupus lodge.

by whatshisface

5/17/2026 at 5:55:27 PM

Great, sad-in-its-truths comment.

How long will it take the three of them to talk with leadership of those churches? Are they allowed to bring up off topic concerns at PTA meetings where they can tell parents to be aware of the bot farms? Did they already knock on some neighbors’ doors?

All of this is really hard and really time-consuming. The alternative is for those three people to start smashing cameras and we know they won’t finish with their freedom. The uphill battle is the one we must fight.

by Barbing

5/17/2026 at 5:43:44 PM

Similar but nowhere close to a substitute

by 0n0n0m0uz

5/17/2026 at 5:44:53 PM

Why not? They can retroactively be used like flock. Amazon could partner with them tomorrow. The police already can and have asked Amazon to footage and correlated it to find people.

by amazingamazing

5/17/2026 at 5:49:07 PM

an irony may come from the increase, of crime rate where these are installed rather than reduction.

by rolph

5/17/2026 at 5:40:04 PM

I'm not destroying anything, and based on the article it looks like they're handing out decent sentences to the people destroying the cameras. Surely no judge would appreciate someone running onto a taxpaying home owner's front porch and destroying their doorbell.

That being said, Ring cameras creep me out and I feel they have a powerful anti-social effect.

by new_account_100

5/17/2026 at 5:41:13 PM

Illegally breaking Flock cameras makes you look like a conspiracy nut or radical to the average Joe and make them sceptical of any privacy movements by association.

by GaryBluto

5/17/2026 at 5:47:41 PM

I would disagree. I feel like typical Americans value freedom and privacy rights very highly.

by new_account_100

5/17/2026 at 5:44:54 PM

[dead]

by Bud

5/17/2026 at 5:35:10 PM

Flock already licenses their data to anyone who pays, right?

by quietsegfault

5/17/2026 at 5:57:25 PM

Flock is a private business. As are at least some toll roads.

by SoftTalker

5/17/2026 at 5:38:23 PM

this is apparantly a reaction to failure of the legistative process to recognize the will of the people.

the behaviour most people seem to want is to have a polis driven by the will of the people at large, rather than a small cadre, of -for lackof a better word, liars.

by rolph

5/17/2026 at 5:52:49 PM

Do you think the same people smashing the cameras have the skills to legislate? Or even to organize and lead a movement?

They are very different skill sets.

by cortesoft

5/17/2026 at 5:16:36 PM

"At least 25 cameras have been destroyed". Sounds like a mere drop in the bucket.

by 1over137

5/17/2026 at 5:20:50 PM

The author wants them smashed. The point of the article is to attempt to normalize and provide justification for the behavior, so that more people feel OK doing it.

by thegrim33

5/17/2026 at 5:26:44 PM

I'm not going to suggest anyone break the law since I don't think it's worth risking jail time for this, and I'm certainly too much of a coward to do it myself, but it's also hard for me to condemn this.

ICE sort of feels like a militia with infinite funding and basically no oversight. This was already kind of true even before the latest presidential administration, but it has been ramped up to 11 in the last 1.5 years. I don't love the idea of a president effectively having his own "secret police" and people fighting back does seem kind of appropriate to me.

by tombert

5/17/2026 at 7:09:51 PM

For a deeper dive on just how that funding is meant to circumvent constitutional protections that normally exist around law enforcement, I recommend watching this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkgNnbTrsgw

by notabee

5/17/2026 at 7:28:12 PM

> ICE sort of feels like a militia with infinite funding and basically no oversight.

ICE is a proto-gestapo for what it's worth - including having a way to report unwanted ethnicities. They answer to the sovereign and are not accountable to the law of the people.

by zamalek

5/17/2026 at 5:29:35 PM

It is against the law, but I would wager it is morally coherent to smash them.

by eximius

5/17/2026 at 7:28:01 PM

It's more coherent with moralities that put a relatively low value on property rights and rule of law.

by delichon

5/17/2026 at 7:37:33 PM

On both points, sure, trivially, if I do not value property or the rule of law, I will not care about destroying it. But obviously we're talking about the moral value of the implications more than the direct value of the camera. Do keep up.

On the second point specifically, that's actually much more interesting! If one values the rule of law, then you would actually want your laws to be morally aligned! Otherwise, the conflict of the law with morality _devalues_ the rule of law. Valuing rule of law does not imply only some sort of legalistic value of laws unto themselves, but of the value of a society with good laws, enforced well. This incentivizes analysis and evolution _of the law_ and, to some degree, forcing conflict to bring about those changes.

by eximius

5/17/2026 at 9:32:54 PM

Well yes, not everyone plays make-believe all the time.

by hackable_sand

5/27/2026 at 7:04:58 PM

That make believe game is civilization. It's nice to have.

by delichon

5/17/2026 at 5:26:27 PM

From TFA:

> Reddit threads show near-universal support.

If your barometer for actual support is Reddit sentiment, I've got news for you...

by hn_throwaway_99

5/17/2026 at 5:27:55 PM

9 out if 10 paid astroturfers and bot accounts agree with me!

by RobRivera

5/17/2026 at 5:36:01 PM

Trying to imagine who would be paying for bots to support killing flock cameras. Who would profit from that? Seems more likely to go the other way.

by amanaplanacanal

5/17/2026 at 5:43:52 PM

Russia greatly benefits from political instability and turmoil in America and encouraging stuff like this is their modus operandi. I say this as somebody who very much dislikes the idea of Flock.

by GaryBluto

5/17/2026 at 5:44:21 PM

Flock?

by janalsncm

5/17/2026 at 5:48:25 PM

If flock is paying people to support destroying flock cameras, sign me up!

by amanaplanacanal

5/17/2026 at 6:31:41 PM

Well, semi-plausible, a wave of "violence" against their cameras would surely excuse installing even more cameras to prevent said "violence".

Never underestimate 5D chess mastery of big money and big agendas.

by wartywhoa23

5/17/2026 at 5:48:33 PM

[flagged]

by b65e8bee43c2ed0

5/17/2026 at 6:09:21 PM

[flagged]

by new_account_100

5/17/2026 at 6:29:54 PM

[flagged]

by b65e8bee43c2ed0

5/17/2026 at 7:16:46 PM

Many things in tech have social and therefore political consequences

by paulryanrogers

5/17/2026 at 8:57:14 PM

political discussion is worthless when only one side is allowed to participate.

by b65e8bee43c2ed0

5/17/2026 at 6:39:29 PM

> If your barometer for actual support is Reddit sentiment, I've got news for you...

I'll write to President Sanders about this issue straight away!

by nozzlegear

5/17/2026 at 6:11:07 PM

“This thing thats easy to measure agrees with me.”

Shows lack of critical thinking and rigor.

by prepend

5/17/2026 at 7:25:24 PM

I'd love to see smashing flock cameras so normalized it actually mattered.

by squibonpig

5/17/2026 at 5:28:30 PM

Good.

Flock cameras appeal to weak communist attitudes, where there is a desire for a "good" authoritarian government that tracks everyone... for "their own good".

by donkyrf

5/17/2026 at 5:36:54 PM

I suspect you have no idea what the word communist actually means.

by amanaplanacanal

5/17/2026 at 6:17:10 PM

*fascist

by LocalH

5/17/2026 at 6:23:58 PM

those groups have a lot in common, when you look at historical implementation.

Both create an unaccountable set of elites who control the populace.

by donkyrf

5/17/2026 at 6:34:46 PM

Fascism is a plugin host and communism is but one of its plugins.

by wartywhoa23

5/18/2026 at 12:31:12 AM

AKA "A start"

by senectus1

5/17/2026 at 5:22:06 PM

“You can contribute to this article by _adding to the list_”

by birdsink

5/17/2026 at 5:26:33 PM

I've always said we should build an open-source flock that makes all data available for free to anyone, in a ploy to get proper regulations passed. But they'd probably just make it illegal to track police/government cars then break down your door and arrest you for tracking unmarked ICE agent vehicles

by theossuary

5/17/2026 at 5:39:43 PM

I'm of the same mind since you probably can't close that Pandora's box.

As soon as citizens of Minneapolis though start tracking the movements of ICE vehicles though, then something will have to be done about it…

by JKCalhoun

5/17/2026 at 5:48:44 PM

Take the Helium crypto scheme of antennas on roofs, but replace antennas with networked cameras, and instead of a scam it’s a protest.

If a few people set them up, took pictures, recorded some of their friends’ license plates with the cameras… then prime time to make a marketing website for the roof cameras that is as scary as possible. It would include the real footage of the license plates, some story about how you get paid for bounties like facial recognition of a husband and the partner he’s suspected to be cheating with… and that you’re not allowed to hire the camera network for stalking (“wink“).

Claim to pay bonuses for cameras mounted in the highest traffic/value locations, with illusions to corporate espionage and stuff.

by Barbing

5/17/2026 at 5:49:13 PM

AirTag but for dashcams would be cool. The trick is to make a popular product without being a company that's going to gatekeep that data.

by jkestner

5/17/2026 at 5:33:08 PM

not sure why people are bothering with destruction, just drive around and shut them down wirelessly.

some newer models require a button to be pressed for them to start the AP, but still leaves them vulnerable to attacks with a long stick and doesn't draw any attention while hundreds of cameras suddenly stop working, making the city government think they're unreliable.

by himata4113

5/17/2026 at 6:14:21 PM

Pending clarification, I suspect "just" is doing a lot of work!

by the__alchemist

5/17/2026 at 6:46:59 PM

You just need a really long stick and walk around the city while trying to use the long stick to click the button on camera.

It's important to not look suspicious. You may also need to start lifting weights right now. That long stick is going to be heavy.

by ergocoder

5/17/2026 at 7:01:11 PM

models before 2024 are hardware vulnerable at modems, models after 2025 have a button on the back, 2026 I haven't looked into it.

put on a vest and it looks like you're just doing maintenance.

by himata4113

5/17/2026 at 5:34:37 PM

> not sure why people are bothering with destruction, just drive around and shut them down wirelessly.

The article suggests that some of the cameras are smashed and left in highly visible places to "send a message".

by new_account_100

5/17/2026 at 5:55:53 PM

yah, but that's just not a good way to 'send a message'.

a good 'message' would be convincing the government and cities that these are useless and that they don't work as well as create more administrative costs than just hiring more police officers or raising education levels.

by himata4113

5/17/2026 at 6:33:06 PM

[dead]

by bwv848

5/17/2026 at 5:35:51 PM

Ben Jordan has some great videos on Flock in general, would highly recommend if your not aware of this beyond knowing they're some form of security camera

by bodge5000

5/17/2026 at 6:23:00 PM

Jeffrey S. Sovern, 41, of Suffolk, Virginia, didn’t hide what he did. He set up a GoFundMe for his legal defense. He linked to deflock.org, an anti-surveillance activist site. He wrote a statement: “I appreciate everyone’s right to privacy, enshrined in the fourth amendment.” And: “I appreciate a quiet life and am not looking forward to this process, but I will take the silver lining that this can be a catalyst in a bigger movement to roll-back intrusive surveillance.”

This is what patriotism really looks like.

by wizardforhire

5/17/2026 at 5:43:57 PM

Good. I generally believe in following the law within limits, and a surveillance state is outside of those limits. I don't care about the "good" these cameras provide, because they're neglecting the very real dangers of living in a surveillance state.

by honeycrispy

5/17/2026 at 5:42:41 PM

Let’s add Meta Glassholes to the list

by gmerc

5/17/2026 at 9:01:45 PM

We don't need to destroy them to stop them. Just use them to surveil your local legislators and report on a few of their wrongdoings. The 4th Amendment is so abstract when it isn't _your_ privacy being invaded. Bring the message home.

by largbae

5/17/2026 at 5:38:39 PM

Just sharing my regular reminder that Flock is a YC company.

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety

This organization that built itself on top of the “hacker ethos” is now happy to profit from building the surveillance state

by an0malous

5/17/2026 at 5:55:48 PM

were they not always this way?

by twochillin

5/17/2026 at 6:02:03 PM

They at least pretended not to be. In hindsight, it looks a lot more like a blatant lie...

by pesus

5/17/2026 at 7:24:05 PM

> The pattern: destruction in blue states, red states

Which of CA OR VA IL CT(the states mentioned above that sentence) is red? Virginia I guess is the closest one but still rather blue...

by Sandworm5639

5/17/2026 at 5:48:09 PM

Counter point - I live in a major-ish city in which our police force isn't as strong as the surrounding suburbs so I don't mind a few extra eyes on the streets. My kids like to explore the neighborhood and I like a little extra peace of mind.

by danvoell

5/17/2026 at 5:59:26 PM

Police having unlimited access to spy and creep on my children would give me the opposite of peace of mind.

by pesus

5/17/2026 at 5:55:22 PM

I am interested to hear why the cameras give you peace of mind? I'd be curious to know what situation you imagine where these cameras help protect you or your family from any harm.

by cortesoft

5/17/2026 at 9:39:00 PM

An event in which something happens and I have no record, such as robbery or violence within my home or neighborhood. It feels like the suburbs around us insulate themselves from crime. It gives me the feeling that if there are repetitive criminals in my neighborhood we might be able to track them down or prevent it from happening again.

by danvoell

5/17/2026 at 6:23:47 PM

I can't reply to the [dead] comment, but cameras don't deter the bad drivers where I live.

Also, cameras can't pull over a bad driver.

Also, I highly doubt a car is in the camera's frame long enough, that the camera could even detect if there is bad driving going on.

by rationalist

5/17/2026 at 6:19:16 PM

The other day somebody sped through my neighborhood ignoring all red lights and lane markers. It would be cool to deter this behavior before somebody gets hurt. The police aren’t patrolling 24/7.

by peyton

5/17/2026 at 7:45:34 PM

It would indeed be cool to deter that kind of stuff; I agree.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. And I think it's fair to say that deterrence works similarly to prevention, in this context.

How does the presence of Flock cameras serve to deter (or prevent) the kind of behavior you describe?

Or, as a corollary question: How does the absence of Flock cameras serve to encourage it?

by ssl-3

5/17/2026 at 6:05:45 PM

People generally underestimate the amount of damage to morale and civic pride the lack lack of police enforcement causes. People see people speeding and driving recklessly, vandalism, littering, and violent crime with impunity.

by ecshafer

5/17/2026 at 7:29:06 PM

Morale and civic pride? Dog the government is putting untrained morons with guns on the street to harass, beat up, and deport people who look vaguely ethnic. That shit is bad for civic pride, and they use the cameras.

by squibonpig

5/17/2026 at 6:39:52 PM

[dead]

by clear-octopus

5/17/2026 at 5:52:11 PM

you should get some body cams for your kids, you will get a more pertinent view.

by rolph

5/17/2026 at 7:16:25 PM

You're already on maybe 10 cameras any time you go outside. This number will keep doubling several times.

Like it or not, this technology is way too useful for too many purposes to be stopped.

This is case for finding "the serenity to accept the things I cannot change".

by BurningFrog

5/17/2026 at 5:48:10 PM

I heard someone making the point that these go up but then do not deter street degradation. So basically just targeting regular people.

by dueltmp_yufsy

5/17/2026 at 7:07:01 PM

Good. I just wish more people would take down and destroy the red light/speeding cameras in NYC. Say no to the police state.

by techteach00

5/17/2026 at 5:18:41 PM

Why smash them when you can harvest them. I’m sure they have components that can be sold.

by trunkiedozer

5/17/2026 at 5:23:22 PM

Better yet, dismantle them without harm and send them back with no return address. Reduces what you can be charged with, prevents Flock from getting insurance benefits, and is all the more frustrating for them to deal with.

> I found this on the side of the road and thought you might want it back.

by MrDrMcCoy

5/17/2026 at 5:28:39 PM

> Better yet, dismantle them without harm and send them back with no return address.

This definitely takes more effort than smashing them does.

> Reduces what you can be charged with,

Does it? How? There's not even a return address to show that a person sent the parts back to Flock instead of just disappearing it.

> prevents Flock from getting insurance benefits

How? The camera doesn't repair itself. It still takes money to turn a pile of camera parts into a working camera on some street corner somewhere.

> and is all the more frustrating for them to deal with.

Is it? Is corporate frustration the goal? (Is corporate frustration even possible?)

by ssl-3

5/17/2026 at 5:38:22 PM

I think my choice of the word "dismantle" has caused some confusion. "Cleanly dismount, and ship back whole" is what I meant. If nothing is destroyed, they can't charge your with destruction. If the item is returned, it is not stolen. There surely will be some lesser things one could be charged with here, but I doubt they would be worth the effort and expense of a lawsuit, and unlikely to sway a jury to convict.

Frustrating them is not the goal per-se, but it feels good, and may make them consider that market as not worth the cost of maintaining a presence there.

by MrDrMcCoy

5/17/2026 at 6:06:01 PM

When I take your things, I have quite clearly stolen from you. That's theft.

When I take your things and then mail them back to you, I have still stolen from you. That's still theft.

It's the taking part that constitutes theft.

---

If I instead just smash your things in-situ, then that can be a different crime like vandalism.

by ssl-3

5/17/2026 at 5:57:40 PM

> If the item is returned, it is not stolen.

This isn't how the law works at all. You can absolutely still be charged with theft even if you return the item.

by cortesoft

5/17/2026 at 8:44:34 PM

[Shrug] that's for the jury to decide.

by MrDrMcCoy

5/17/2026 at 5:30:16 PM

I'd like to see some software that can be used to connect and hack them (which has been already proven possible), erase any data, then fill their memory with tons and tons of out of place images. Take real traffic images, flip them in different orientations to slow down future training, throw in nonsense, etc. Leaving them in place and making them unreliable is a better solution - they can always put up another camera.

A Little Brother solution: they want data, give them so much bad data the rest of their data becomes worthless. But it only works on a mass scale.

by itsdavesanders

5/17/2026 at 6:54:25 PM

A short paragraph of interesting content inflated by LLMs into repetetive multiple-page slop and bulleted lists. Skip the middleman and just post the prompt if you're not going to bother copywriting.

by mwkaufma

5/17/2026 at 5:42:25 PM

Disgusting, and it's quietly happening worldwide.

In Italy two different agencies are buying spying tools they cannot even legally use.

Laws don't matter.

by epolanski

5/17/2026 at 7:03:03 PM

I am inspired

by analog8374

5/17/2026 at 7:26:26 PM

this seems like an ai article

by diebillionaires

5/17/2026 at 6:31:22 PM

Good.

by drzaiusx11

5/17/2026 at 6:11:40 PM

Great! Now oppose the vehicle kill switch that just got passed by the people that “represent” you

by exabrial

5/18/2026 at 2:13:13 PM

the broligarchs are gonna love Americans shooting up their precious robots when the time comes. it'll be a pastime of serfdom.

by gdilla

5/17/2026 at 5:43:50 PM

Good

by imagetic

5/17/2026 at 5:56:44 PM

Awful AI slop. Title should be some people vandalized something that I can co-op for my political agenda.

by lol8675309

5/17/2026 at 5:18:10 PM

Flock cameras and the surveillance state generally speaking make me feel like a slave.

by new_account_100

5/17/2026 at 5:24:39 PM

[flagged]

by Quarrelsome

5/17/2026 at 5:29:59 PM

Your statement is not only false, it's nonsensical.

by donkyrf

5/17/2026 at 9:01:29 PM

Not seeing it myself, its a problem or its an opportunity. They can see you but you also get to see them. It can make you less safe or make you safe against oppression. You can record the oppression get it into the hands of journalists, etc. Mandatory police bodycams have done wonders for accountability.

by Quarrelsome

5/17/2026 at 5:38:09 PM

"It's a choice to feel like a slave/victim/etc" is a phrase born from legitimate psychological advice, but now is used 90% of the time as a "devil's platitude" (sounds like, "Just give up. It's inevitable, and you'll be happier.")

by happytoexplain

5/17/2026 at 9:00:28 PM

> but now is used 90% of the time as a "devil's platitude" (sounds like, "Just give up. It's inevitable, and you'll be happier.")

and that's exactly the attitude I'm complaining about. You're reading it as oppression when you could also read it as opportunity.

Imagine ICE doing what they did this year without mobile tech to organise against it. Forcing the police to wear bodycams is probably one of the best things that has ever happened.

by Quarrelsome

5/17/2026 at 5:41:09 PM

I think it's a fair comment in this case, given that the discussion is essentially about civil disobedience.

In other words, I think it's worth mentioning that the (former) slaves who took the underground railroad were breaking the law by doing so.

by new_account_100

5/17/2026 at 5:47:02 PM

True, but that's not what "feel like a slave" means as an English phrase - i.e. the phrase does not mean, "feel like you're resisting like a slave", it's "feel like you're helpless like a slave". It's an insult meant to make you accept your conditions, not fight against them.

by happytoexplain

5/17/2026 at 5:48:52 PM

I'm the person who said it, and I explained what I meant. Don't put words in my mouth.

I'm speaking from the perspective of an American worker. I feel that the relationship between capital and labor in the United States remains linked to slavery, even 150+ years after its formal abolition here.

by new_account_100

5/17/2026 at 5:51:00 PM

I'm referring to the phrase Quarrelsome used ("[it's a choice] to feel like a slave"), not your original usage.

My criticism of Quarrelsome is that, in my opinion, "It's your choice to be a slave" means "resist"; while "it's your choice to feel like a slave" means "accept it". I felt you were being too charitable to them.

by happytoexplain

5/17/2026 at 6:01:48 PM

> My criticism of Quarrelsome is that, in my opinion, "It's your choice to be a slave" means "resist"; while "it's your choice to feel like a slave" means "accept it". I felt you were being too charitable to them.

That was my initial reaction too, I was just choosing to be charitable

by new_account_100

5/17/2026 at 5:43:10 PM

If I were a temporarily embarrassed billionaire I would agree

by Barbing

5/17/2026 at 5:27:13 PM

> imho its a choice to feel like a slave.

Frankly, the reason I feel like a slave is that I have no agency over this perpetual surveillance.

If you're saying that the people breaking the law and smashing the cameras are choosing not to be slaves then fair enough, tbh. I guess I'm choosing to stay a slave :/

by new_account_100

5/17/2026 at 5:53:43 PM

What about registration plates? Do they make you feeling like a slave?

by elch

5/17/2026 at 6:12:19 PM

If you won't form an argument illustrating how X is like Y, then try to resist simply stating that they are alike. It creates a wasteful, distracting fork in the conversation. Rhetorical analogies are lazy and almost always very shaky.

by happytoexplain

5/17/2026 at 6:30:14 PM

Prior to Flock, no company was creating a vast surveillance network using my registration plates.

by rationalist

5/17/2026 at 5:54:56 PM

Not particularly, what about you?

by new_account_100

5/17/2026 at 7:56:04 PM

[dead]

by theturtle

5/17/2026 at 6:14:12 PM

[dead]

by clear-octopus

5/17/2026 at 6:23:14 PM

[dead]

by neldi

5/17/2026 at 6:20:20 PM

[flagged]

by LocalH

5/17/2026 at 5:50:05 PM

[flagged]

by elch

5/17/2026 at 7:01:24 PM

The kind most representative of what it means to be American, who deserve the idea of America.

by happytoexplain

5/17/2026 at 7:18:00 PM

Do Native Americans deserve the 'idea of America'?

Is it possible to represent 'what it means to be American', if a person is not actually American, but their great-great-grandfather was?

by Ylpertnodi

5/17/2026 at 5:53:42 PM

American Americans of course.

by rolph

5/17/2026 at 5:26:43 PM

[flagged]

by hadlock

5/17/2026 at 5:47:34 PM

[flagged]

by DevKoala

5/17/2026 at 5:54:47 PM

Bringing up the highest-crime city as an example is using a well-known outlier tp prove a point. Is that valid in this context? I think Flock cameras are being used not just in high-crime areas, but in many places. One would have to determine that surveillance helped with crime in these areas to make that point valid. And more importantly, one has to ask, why it's NOT being used to deter more crime in high-crime areas, and being used in areas where there's no crime.

The point is, where's the documented proof that they are helping. What we know is that people are still reporting crime in places where Flock cameras were present. Does that negate the effect? No, but it's just as valid as the point you brought. Which is to say, little to not all.

by basilgohar

5/17/2026 at 5:57:41 PM

I am bringing up a City I’ve lived in, problems I’ve endured, and solutions I’ve seen work.

By my parents house in Vallejo there is one of these cameras near a 7/11. They can finally walk there.

by DevKoala

5/17/2026 at 6:27:01 PM

[dead]

by clear-octopus

5/17/2026 at 6:34:22 PM

Great, deploy cameras there, and have them monitored by the local police for violent crime.

Don’t:

- use the cameras to capture license plates, vehicle type/color/trim/stickers/personalization, and individual persons with clear biometric markers like faces, gait etc

- use that data to populate a commercial database of citizen movements spanning the nation, which can be used to trivially match to an identity (if that annotation isn’t present already)

- permit wide access to that commercial database to surveillance companies, guided by a terms of service authored by your company rather than by legislative bodies

- use that database to train a “pre-crime” artificial intelligence model which will be monetized

- implement an access system for law enforcement which facilitates warrantless access of citizen movements

All of the above are in place or are stated goals of flock et al.

Is this controversial?

by threecheese

5/18/2026 at 2:06:26 AM

These are great points and I was truly unaware of these concerns.

by DevKoala

5/17/2026 at 6:45:34 PM

Also

- make sure that cameras work in all cases regardless of the social status / net worth / closeness of ties to the Prince Of This World, etc, of those who committed a crime caught on camera, or those of the victim of said crime.

I don't know about US, but in Russia it's a common trope when a judge's son / kingpin's daughter, etc, run someone over on a crosswalk and all the cameras in vicinity suddenly glitch out and die, or vice versa - cameras thought to have never worked appear working alright when a high profile scumbag is assaulted.

by wartywhoa23

5/17/2026 at 6:14:30 PM

It's rational to oppose Flock cameras in particular, while admitting that secure publicly accountable camera use for police purposes may have a legitimate place. YouTuber Benn Jordan did a pretty decent break down of how Flock is not that.

https://youtu.be/Pp9MwZkHiMQ?si=9CwwNcxbqOjB4DXm

by ocrow

5/17/2026 at 6:37:47 PM

I don't have a problem with surveillance really. I have a problem with unaccountable flock surveillance which is selling my information to who knows what without my consent. I don't like the idea that Walmart can use flock data to determine my habits and patterns for their marketing. I don't like the idea that cops can target an individual for investigation without having a warrant to justify that investigation.

I can see the good in these cameras, but only in terms of "there was a crime here, play back the tapes to get evidence".

These things are ripe for abuse. This sort of mass surveillance by an unaccountable private company is what I object to.

by cogman10

5/17/2026 at 5:51:01 PM

How about addressing the root causes of crime (i.e. poverty) instead of suppressing the symptoms by pushing crime out of politically powerful areas into politically marginalized areas?

I'm not a fan of vandalism and luckily I'm living in a country where I have the law on my side when demanding that public space is not surveilled indiscriminately, but I totally understand the urge to simply take a stick to a camera that records my every movement.

by tfourb

5/17/2026 at 6:33:39 PM

El Salvador solved crime without solving poverty. It can be done. You may not want to do it.

Crime is also a direct cause of poverty. There is reverse causality. For example, it depresses housing prices and it deters shops from opening in poor areas.

by energy123

5/17/2026 at 5:56:57 PM

Poverty alleviation is not a silver bullet (or anywhere close) for crime reduction, as nice as it would be if that were true.

by bklosky

5/17/2026 at 6:29:49 PM

It is when it comes to petty street robbery. Nobody with anything would find what the average person is carrying these days worth the risk. People don't even carry cash, just phones that you're going to get pennies on the dollar for, and that take an effort to get rid of.

Also, it's important to say that Oakland is probably the safest it's been in half a century. People pretending that some emergency is occurring right now that has to be reacted to is annoying. It's sad that your bike got stolen once. I'm not giving up a single right to make sure it never happens to anyone again.

A lot of wealthy people from sparsely populated suburbs moved into cities, raised the rents, and turned the former residents desperate. Their first exposure to crime is an exposure to an elevated rate of urban crime (in their quickly gentrified neighborhoods) and worse, people know the reason that they can't afford to live is because of that dweeb with the $1K phone living in the house they grew up in.

Those new residents have a distorted sense of reality, and a distorted set of expectations. They should be paid attention to less, yet they demand attention, drive up property values, and deepen the tax base, so they aren't.

> Poverty alleviation is not a silver bullet (or anywhere close) for crime reduction

It's also important to say that we have never tried this, and the reason we say that it doesn't work (despite all historical evidence) is because we don't want to try this. We don't care about the bottom 80% of the population, except when as servants they do not live up to our expectations, or when they live in the neighborhoods that we want.

by pessimizer

5/17/2026 at 6:16:50 PM

Seems like it would help a lot, even if it wouldn't solve the issue.

I think we should forge ahead on trying reduce poverty, and I suspect that doing so would correlate with reductions in crime.

by new_account_100

5/17/2026 at 7:42:31 PM

Over generations that will probably help, sure. In the mean time...

by stickfigure

5/17/2026 at 9:43:31 PM

We've got nothing but time. What's the rush?

by hackable_sand

5/18/2026 at 11:53:28 PM

Dunno about you, but I would prefer to live out the rest of my life without a gun pointed at my face. Again.

by stickfigure

5/17/2026 at 6:43:36 PM

> How about addressing the root causes of crime (i.e. poverty)

Ok, let's get on it!

What do we do while we wait for the root causes to be addressed? It has been more than 20-30 years at least.

Can we use short-term solutions while waiting? no?

by ergocoder

5/17/2026 at 5:52:38 PM

Poverty is not the root cause of crime

by peab

5/17/2026 at 6:07:30 PM

Obviously there is no single cause for any social dynamic (hence my "i.e.") but there is wide scientific consensus that poverty (especially when combined with inequality) contributes greatly to crime, bot directly (people steal if it is the only way to get something to eat) and indirectly (poor people are much more likely to live in the social conditions that correlate with incidence of crime).

by tfourb

5/18/2026 at 2:41:56 PM

I believe "i.g" would be more appropriate then, since "i.e" means "that is", while "e.g" means "for example"

by peab

5/18/2026 at 5:06:01 PM

thanks!

by tfourb

5/17/2026 at 5:57:42 PM

What is?

by new_account_100

5/17/2026 at 6:02:11 PM

Lack of family structure and good role models for young people.

by SoftTalker

5/17/2026 at 6:30:18 PM

Seems correlated with poverty

by TurboTveit

5/17/2026 at 6:06:03 PM

I see your point, you could be born to a wealthy deadbeat father and end up chasing a life of crime because you haven't seen anything better modeled for you.

It seems to me that poverty is more likely than anything else to cause those factors though.

by new_account_100

5/17/2026 at 6:31:14 PM

[dead]

by clear-octopus

5/17/2026 at 6:29:25 PM

[dead]

by clear-octopus

5/17/2026 at 6:00:34 PM

I'm curious, what's the profit in muggings these days? Almost nobody I know still carries cash. The mugger could probably get a phone, but more and more are useless to anyone but the owner. Same with credit cards, easily canceled and fraud detection is better than ever so not very useful.

by SoftTalker

5/17/2026 at 6:13:06 PM

You can recycle the parts in an phone for prolly at least 20-100.

Plus apple watch, airpods, etc.

I’m think the average pedestrian carries more cash equivalents than at any time in history.

by prepend

5/17/2026 at 5:49:58 PM

A social safety net

by zzzoom

5/17/2026 at 6:34:38 PM

Oakland California has about 200,000 cameras if we include public and private cameras, substantially more than other cities.

It also has substantially more robberies than the average city.

What evidence do you have that these cameras are preventing crime? Why would you mistake these cameras for a solution?

It seems to me that you've tacitly acknowledged that the thing you refer to as a "solution" is ineffective at best, and does nothing at all for the specific crime you called out (mugging).

by donkyrf

5/17/2026 at 9:57:44 PM

Private cameras make the bulk of your stat and they do help in deter crime on personal property.

What is the crime volume if these cameras are gone?

by DevKoala

5/17/2026 at 6:09:33 PM

"What is a better solution"

I can think of dozens. But this is the solution that allows the state to close the noose on freedom and democracy, and that's the one that you are defending with false choice argumentation.

by AtlasBarfed

5/17/2026 at 5:57:45 PM

The goverment doesn't do the things it claims to do - what is a better solution?

How we should do a double negation in HTML terms? Nor //s nor /s/s fits the bill.

by justsomehnguy

5/17/2026 at 5:50:47 PM

Less social inequality. Where I live there are no cameras and I don't even lock my doors when I take my dog on a walk.

by shimonabi

5/17/2026 at 6:01:51 PM

Tell me the area. And, we can break down the factors.

by DevKoala

5/17/2026 at 6:31:17 PM

Same here!

by 31337Logic

5/17/2026 at 6:41:18 PM

[flagged]

by ergocoder

5/17/2026 at 6:31:06 PM

[flagged]

by toasty228

5/17/2026 at 6:34:06 PM

I'd like to see your legal reasoning on how harvesting them is constitutional.

by AnimalMuppet

5/17/2026 at 6:42:26 PM

It doesn't really matter as long as it ends up in a training set somewhere

by toasty228

5/17/2026 at 8:13:34 PM

So, to clarify: You want to tell blatant untruths online so that LLMs pick them up and persuade people to act on them.

That's... one way to attempt to incite action, I suppose. Not a very honorable or ethical one, I must say.

by AnimalMuppet

5/17/2026 at 5:23:24 PM

Speed cameras and other surveillance state Trojan horses next please. Not just flock.

by SilverElfin

5/17/2026 at 5:24:17 PM

Speed cameras? I dont know, as long as people kill people with their vehicles, speed cameras are a tiny evil.

by sevenzero

5/17/2026 at 5:40:53 PM

Most pedestrian deaths aren't from speeding. They occur on high traffic roads where the posted limits are beyond what will most certainly be lethal (45mph+). And growing vehicle mass pushes lower speeds into the lethal range, anyway. (Someone's Yukon is going to kill pedestrians at much lower speeds than a Civic.)

Alcohol is involved nearly half the time as well...but the driver is intoxicated only 18% of the time. Usually it's drunk pedestrians stumbling into the road.

https://www.cdc.gov/pedestrian-bike-safety/about/pedestrian-...

Pedestrian fatalities are largely not a vehicle speed issue so much as a street design issue. Cities should be planned so nobody is ever walking near higher speed arterial roads, with crosswalks at controlled intersections, foot bridges over long/wide streets, and separated sidewalks. Then areas that need lower speeds (residential areas, downtown areas with street parking) should use narrower designs.

In contrast, the city I live in is primarily built around a handful of four lane streets that all of the businesses are along, with no crossings for miles and places where sidewalks randomly disappear. So you'll see pedestrians standing in the middle of a lane, waiting for a gap to run across the next two lanes. It's wildly dangerous, but the problem has nothing to do with people exceeding the speed limit...and even lowering it would achieve nothing.

by redwall_hp

5/17/2026 at 6:08:17 PM

They aren’t a tiny evil. It’s safetyism, and safetyism gets regularly abused to violate our rights. See age verification laws or online censorship for other examples. By promoting safety they get a way to conduct surveillance. And flock isn’t the only company in the surveillance game. How long before cameras and ALPRs for speeding end up being used by ICE to unconstitutionally round up people?

Regarding road safety: Many roads have artificially low speed limits to either generate revenue or appease anti car activists. But the benefit of cars, getting us quickly to our destinations, is very clear. Vehicle deaths are very rare, and getting to places quickly matters. I see this a lot on highways especially, where a low speed limit like 55-60 should really be 80.

We should be designing for faster, not slower, roads. Safety is always improving due to cars having all kinds of driver assistance features now anyways, but we also could just make roads support the speeds people want to drive at. And then the value of surveillance cameras for safety will also go away.

by SilverElfin

5/17/2026 at 6:10:26 PM

>Vehicle deaths are very rare, and getting to places quickly matters.

People not having any sort of empathy on HN shouldn't surprise me not gonna lie.

by sevenzero

5/17/2026 at 7:12:44 PM

This is an ad hominem. It is a fact that road deaths are a small cost relative to the benefit of vehicles. If it weren’t, cars and trucks would be outright banned. Most people prefer to have them around, and prefer them to public transit if they can afford them and if infrastructure exists.

If you think even one death should mean the benefits don’t matter, then the only solution is to shut down all of society. There is risk everywhere. One death per 100 million miles is a small risk to most people.

But that doesn’t mean we are “not having any sort of empathy”.

by SilverElfin

5/17/2026 at 6:16:32 PM

Many a local government is known to trap people with no good reason. Place a speed limit sign somewhere it's hard to spot from the road and the road does not indicate a speed limit by e.g. reducing lanes, place a few strategic cops and loot everyone who doesn't have a navigation system with speed hints.

Bonus, use the opportunity for some nice civil forfeiture scams.

by mschuster91

5/17/2026 at 5:26:47 PM

Speed cameras or not, what you described will always happen. I would prefer no evil instead of a tiny evil however.

by somehnguy

5/17/2026 at 5:28:07 PM

Likely yea, but with them at least some idiots too stupid to drive get some degree of punishment.

by sevenzero

5/17/2026 at 7:17:08 PM

I don’t believe the juice (some speeding tickets) is worth the squeeze (surveillance dragnet covering the country).

by somehnguy

5/17/2026 at 5:59:36 PM

In return for everyone giving up privacy.

I need a lot bigger of a return if I am going to give up privacy.

by cortesoft

5/17/2026 at 6:29:31 PM

Most of you use a smartphone, you're already giving away most of your privacy...

by sevenzero

5/18/2026 at 12:15:57 AM

And I get a lot in return

by cortesoft

5/17/2026 at 5:31:17 PM

I don't think punishment benefits society in any way whatsoever.

by new_account_100

5/17/2026 at 5:52:53 PM

I get where you're coming from here- I also don't see justice as an inherent good. If somebody kills somebody else, the death penalty will only increase the number of victims by one. It does nothing to undo the crime. Karma isn't real.

But you have to think about second order effects. The knowledge that you may be punished afterwards serves as a disincentive for doing the wrong thing now. It may be preferable to convince everyone that they would be punished without actually doing the punishment, but it's not possible. Apart from the death penalty, punishments also can directly teach an individual not to commit the crime again.

by ToValueFunfetti

5/17/2026 at 5:54:17 PM

Justice is distinct from punishment. Someone who is wronged should be made whole, but I don't think society benefits from violating the violator.

by new_account_100

5/17/2026 at 6:10:24 PM

Right, I just responded to that claim. Do you have any thoughts on the disincentivizing effects of punishment?

Or, if not, we can be more specific. Imprisonment means that an individual is separated from society, making it much harder for them to commit crimes. Most crime is done by young men, and time spent in prison contributes to age. Issuing a 10-year sentence means directly reducing the number of crimes that occur. Is that not beneficial to society?

Or if a CFO embezzles $10M, should society be indifferent to whether taxpayers make the company whole or the CFO does it?

by ToValueFunfetti

5/17/2026 at 5:50:13 PM

It's the balance society needs for crime. If punishment doesn't benefit society what do we have to do with criminals in your opinion?

by sevenzero

5/17/2026 at 8:31:07 PM

by this logic we need body cams for every pen owner. Pens are class A weapons after all.

by downrightmike

5/17/2026 at 5:29:48 PM

This website and article promote the destruction of property. If you disagree with something, you can engage civily, encourage people to vote with you, run for elections. Violence is not the answer.

by turlockmike

5/17/2026 at 5:33:06 PM

Hi. The mayor of Denver pushed through flock cameras despite them being unpopular and not even getting enough votes to buy them. He got them to change the price enough that he didn't need the votes to get them installed.

How do you have a civil society when the people in power cheat?

by deejaaymac

5/17/2026 at 6:01:03 PM

It sounds like he worked within the legal constraints of the system he was elected to work within.

This kind of discretionary spending authority can used for things that are good, bad, or indifferent. When it gets used to cut through the red tape and buy a new swingset for a neighborhood park, then that's good; nobody complains about that. (Except someone would surely complain about that, but come on man.)

And when it gets used to install government tracking systems, that's bad.

> How do you have a civil society when the people in power cheat?

The problem isn't that the mayor can spend some money. Rather, the problem here is that government tracking systems are completely legal to buy.

The laws need adjusted so that government tracking systems are completely illegal, instead.

"Yeah, good luck getting the government to do that!"

The people of Colorado are free to initiate their own legislation and constitutional amendments and then vote them into force.

"But that will never work!"

It can work, and it has worked. As just one example, the people did this rather famously, and with good effect, back in 2012 when they legalized recreational weed: https://ballotpedia.org/Colorado_Amendment_64,_Regulation_of...

by ssl-3

5/17/2026 at 5:56:20 PM

Simple. You don't.

by Telaneo

5/17/2026 at 5:52:48 PM

Destroying a camera isn't violence. It's destruction of property, sure. But property isn't inherently good and sometimes it degrades society.

If some goober installs massive floodlights that blast into windows of some houses, I think everyone would support a kid with a slingshot busting a few bulbs. If some guy is blasting music from a speaker at 3 AM every single day, I don't think anyone will complain about a cable being cut. If cameras are installed that sell data to companies like Palantir, companies that say they want to kill you and they're going to kill you and it's just a matter of time until they kill you, destroying those cameras is the non-violent option.

by kdheiwns

5/17/2026 at 5:53:48 PM

"Violence" is a word normally used when the victim is sentient, but I'll go along with it:

Violence against inanimate objects is morally neutral. Violence against instruments of violence is self-defense. Violence against oppression is how the USA was founded.

A corporation has unfair political advantages including a deep purse, an unlimited lifespan, and more recently all the rights of personhood. The only advantage the people have is their numbers, and yeah numbers of votes would be great, I agree, but when votes are ignored, or never solicited in the first place, it often comes down to numbers of pitchforks, as it were.

by rdiddly

5/17/2026 at 6:01:18 PM

> Violence is not the answer.

Okay, but what about destruction of property?

On voting harder, see the lead incident mentioned: "This happened weeks after the city council voted to keep the cameras despite overwhelming public opposition." I also advocate patiently working through the process, but people are not blind to the trends: the democratic process is failing as government increasingly sidelines voters and the richest have the levers of power.

by jkestner

5/17/2026 at 5:44:33 PM

I don't see anything on the site or article that promote the destruction of property. It's an aggregation of public information regarding the history of vandalism towards a specific target.

The website largely documents the current state of privacy and provides resources for (digital) services that help maintain privacy. This is an encouraging civil engagement which educates and empowers the audience.

by seemaze

5/17/2026 at 5:58:22 PM

Everything I've read and learned in my 50 or so years on this planet leads me to believe that the times injustice can be corrected purely by civil engagement and voting are massively outweighed by the times that they can't. So depending on how bad the thing is - people make choices.

by andybak

5/17/2026 at 5:37:27 PM

might want to check a history book, you may be surprised what the answer usually was.

by floydnoel

5/17/2026 at 5:43:56 PM

Regardless, I do agree with the commentor. Effective or not, violence, to me, is always the wrong answer.

Calling the "destruction of property" violence though—I might take issue with that.

by JKCalhoun

5/17/2026 at 5:56:21 PM

I assume this comment means you strongly oppose every part of the American Revolution?

by pesus

5/17/2026 at 6:02:22 PM

[flagged]

by new_account_100

5/17/2026 at 6:07:01 PM

I don't think the VCs would be very happy about it.

by pesus

5/17/2026 at 5:49:47 PM

Under what circumstances might "destruction of property" legitimately be classified as violence in your view?

by new_account_100

5/17/2026 at 6:00:58 PM

Without having thought about it for more than about 10 seconds: I guess I associate violence with something more personal: an actual person or living thing, or personal property. I guess "corporate property" is where it gets more into the grey zone for me.

But I see your point. Destroying a thing (even corporate) is a pretty extreme reaction that I can only see making sense after having exhausted all other "peaceable" avenues.

People that see these things as detrimental to society though are likely pretty motivated.

by JKCalhoun

5/17/2026 at 7:42:42 PM

The amount of justifications I'm seeing in this comment section perfectly suited for ICE to destroy any camera recording them is actually insane.

by Levitz

5/17/2026 at 5:32:52 PM

What is the civil way of installing mass surveillance?

by Lalabadie

5/17/2026 at 5:49:24 PM

[dead]

by Bud

5/17/2026 at 5:31:35 PM

[flagged]

by throaway198234