- Flock decision-makers and customers holding ethics as a priority, and not taking the actions they are due to sense of duty, community, morals etc
- Peer pressure resulting in ostracization of Flock execs and decision makers until they stop the unethical behavior
- Governments using legislation and law enforcement to prevent the cameras being used in the way they are
What has worried me for years is that Americans would not resort to this level. That things are just too comfortable at home to take that brave step into the firing lines of being on the right side of justice but the wrong side of the law.
I'm relieved to see more and more Americans causing necessary trouble. I still think that overall, Americans are deeply underreacting to the times. But that only goes as far as to be my opinion. I can't speak for them and I'm not their current king.
Starvation isn't avoidable and you can't ride it out. There isn't any chance that starving to death could be less severe than getting a bad flu. Nobody can avoid not eating for an extended period of time. If there is not enough food, it will affect everyone directly.
Herman Cain denied COVID's severity right up until it killed him, and them even after he died, his team was still tweeting that "looks like COVID isn't as bad as the mainstream media made it out to be." When I saw that people were literally willing to die to "own the libs", I knew shared reality was toast.
> My comment is simply calling out the liberticide episode we attended rather quietly.
Intellectually dishonest polemics. The mandates were not "ridiculous", nor were they "ordoned non democratically by a senile" ... that doesn't even get the timeline right--Trump was President. As for whether he was senile ...
Well one of those is already on the fast tracking to happening (economy stalling).
Unfortunately, I don't have much faith that people will turn against the administration during any kind of major depression/food scarcity. I foresee people turning against each other for survival instead.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proclamation_of_Rebellion
Interestingly y'all Americans pay much more tax now than you did to England back in the day. Turns out King George was right, and it was just about changing who the tax was paid to.
Where there’s an opportunity to be the 1%, folks will find a way to be the 1%
The degree to which legislation in the US is bought by big companies and rarely reflects democratic desires we may be in another "no taxation without representation" era.
These are no longer impossibles.
To quote a well-known study on the topic: “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”
(Gilens & Page, Perspectives in Politics)
Frankly, Obama _tried_ to close Guantanamo Bay. He significantly shrunk the population of inmates, but it was ultimately Congress, and the courts that prevented the closure
Obama spent a huge amount of time and political capital trying to clean up Bush's messes.
Obama and Biden both led to meaningful policy improvements and they were far more stable than the current admin.
On the broader topic, I'm not sure that just voting is the way that we'll get out of this mess, but I think a large part of the problem is how our focus on wider, national issues has eroded the interest in the local. So people seem to be most disenfranchised from the level of politics where they can actually have the most influence, both by voting and direct action (protests, calls, etc).
It also represents an opportunity for upstarts. If you want to get into local politics, this is a single issue that will unit voters and bring them in.
We had a city councilperson elected on the sole issue of replacing the purple street lights. She won decisively and her entire campaign was literally signs everywhere promising to fix the purple streetlights. (yes, they were fixed).
Then 2 years later a new city council gets elected and they install flock cameras in your city too. You can never get rid of them because it already passed and nobody wants to relitigate the same thing every couple of years.
Local politics does not work here.
Those who care about their privacy should relitigate at every opportunity. "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance". Those who give up in advance, are beyond fucked, because they'll have to take whatever is sent their way.
I remember being horrified the first time I heard this was legal in the USA.
How can the US citizens accept such a brutal denying of good governance is beyond me.
Though I wouldn't be surprised if the idea goes back to Roman times.
It’s all just identity politics. I will say that Trump has proven the exception to this rule, enacting a whole lot of policy that circumvents the law and has real effects. (And is likely mostly unconstitutional if actually put to the test)
So while locally, voting can be powerful, it’s mostly bread and circuses at the federal level since regulatory capture is bipartisan.
It really bothers me that so few people in the modern West understand just how lucky they are. If you didn't have the control you already have over your government, you'd be fighting for it.
Every time I hear this I cringe, whether this subject or any other. The people did vote and this is what they got - not necessarily what they specifically voted for. Different people hold things in different importance. Flock security cameras (or similar) generally don't even get noticed by the people voting on taxes, guns, abortions, etc.
My hope in the US is that folks at least take the time to evaluate their options and/or candidates; voting a straight ticket just because someone calls themselves something can lead to undesirable outcomes.
The single biggest improvement to American society would be to implement multi-member districts for legislature, OR to implement STAR voting - any kind of system that promotes the existence of more parties, more political candidates, to break the two party cycle.
Far too many people fail to vote or research candidates due to how shitty our democracy is. Far too few candidates exist as a blend of values, and we are stuck with "every liberal policy" vs. "every conservative policy".
---
To that end, it seems the cities that are banning Flock for proper privacy reasons are all in liberal states and cities. Conservative/moderate areas seem a lot less engaged on the topic. "That's just how it goes, of course government is going to tread on us, what can be done about it".
The majority of random people don't have combination of desire, corruption, sophistication, and political experience to pull off this kind of bribery.
Virtually every elected politician does.
~Everything about the election process selects for the worst kinds of people.
But what you could do is vote with a string attached and a penalty for being recalled that is going to make people think twice about running for office if their aim is to pull some kind of stunt. The 'you give me four years unconditionally' thing doesn't seem to work at all.
The twist on that body however is that voting is mandatory and ballots have a non of the above option on them. If a super majority (say 60-75%) vote none of the above the election is a do-over with all the people on the ballot being uneligable to run for that seat for say 5-10 years.
Then it boils down to morals, how flexible people are with them - this is weakness of character. Ability to ignore malevolent behavior if it suits me is more a ballpark of amoral sociopaths than good-hearted guy who simply doesn't have 2 hours a day to ponder philosophies of modern politics and regional historical details half around the globe. No amount of ads (which are so far trivial to avoid with reasonable lifestyle) change what a moral person considers moral.
And it couldn't have been easier this time, its not some left vs right view on things, just simple morality - lying, cheating, stealing, potential pedophilia, not hard to say of one is OK with that or not.
Sure I could eat a salad for 5$, but no I'll get a crappy burger for same amount because I like salty greasy stuff. Gee doctor why do I have bad heart, how could have I known? Must have been those evil mega corporations and their genius marketing.
They'll stop once the police (or ICE, more likely) start dishing out horrific punishments for it.
But also if a small portion of Americans disparately plan to do stuff like sabotage surveillance camera, it's still newsworthy.
Politics is like water boiling - it’s just going to be little bubbles at first but all of a sudden it will start to really rumble.
The trouble is at least in the high population areas (AFAICT) a huge swath of "average" people seem to be stuck living life on a paycheck-to-paycheck basis, renting, no prospect of property ownership, minimal to zero retirement savings, no realistic way to afford children, etc. Not abnormal by historic or global standards but very abnormal when compared to the past ~150 years of US history.
It first dawned on me when i visited NYC some 30 years ago. I stepped over some arbitrary yellow line I wasn't supposed to - the uniformed cop that noticed that went from 0 to 100 in 0.1 second and behaved as if I just pulled a gun. Zero time to reflect and assume I might have made a legitimate mistake. Since then I've visited U.S. >150 times, and in my experience it was always thus in the U.S. - the law enforcement is on hair trigger and the populace has seemingly grown used to it and considers this behaviour normal. Geez.
(Go live in any northern european country for comparison. Any interaction with law enforcement is almost certainly going to be pleasant, cordial, and uniformed police typically does not rely on threats of violance for authority).
The UK looks at the use of cameras and feels threatened for its Nanny State title. We Yanks have laughed at that name while the water around us slowly came to a boil.
Some cities and/or states have banned the use of cameras at stop lights to issue tickets. Not really sure what caused that to happen, except the cynic in me thinks some politician received a ticket in the mail from one of the cameras.
When it hurts the billionaires, they will tell their politicians to invoke the 25th.
It's the only way, we've lost our democracy, but we still have economic power.
The combination of ubiquitous scanners, poor data controls on commercially owned date, and law enforcement access without proper warrants compounds to a situation that for many rational people would fail the test of being fair play under the Fourth Amendment. For similar reasons, for example, it has been held by the Supreme Court that installing a GPS tracker on a vehicle and monitoring it long-term without a warrant is a 4A violation (US v Jones). Similar cases have held that warrants are needed for cellphone location tracking.
So far, however, courts have not held Flock to the same standard -- or have at least held that Flock's data does not rise to the same standard.
I personally think this is a mistake and is a first-order reason we have this problem, and would prefer the matter to stop there rather than rely on ethics. (Relying on ethics brought us pollution in rivers, PFAS and Perc in the ground, and so on.)
Given the state of politics and the recent behavior of the Supreme Court, however, I would not hold my breath for this to change soon.
Yearly reminder to read:
https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/kurz-the-discourse-of-vol...
Having lived or spent time in a lot of 3rd world shitholes, including a civil war, I've only really felt freedom in places with lawless lack of government, never places with 'rule of law' -- that always gets twisted for the elite.
Of course the same happens in lawless regions, but power is fractured enough, there is a limit on power they can wield against the populace, as the opposing factions ultimately are a check on any one side oppressing the population to leave. They can't man machine guns at all the 'borders' and ultimately corruption becomes cheap enough that it is accessible to the common person which arguably provides more power to the common man than representative democracy does.
I think this element of factions in competition was part of the original genius of the '50' states with the very minimal federal government. But the consolidation of federal power and loss of the teeth of the 10th amendment and expansion of various clauses in the constitution means there is now no escape and very few remaining checks.
Living under a tyrant at least tends to provide predictability and stability of a sort. The kind of violence that exists in a lawless society tends not to exist. State sanctioned violence, sure, but that's more often than not targeted.
Basically, given the choice of Somalia or North Korea, there will be a diversity of opinions as to which someone prefers. I'm not saying I prefer one to the other, just that "Somalia" is not an objectively correct choice.
It's actually not lawless, it just uses a decentralized (polycentric) legal system that is poorly understood by westerners. They've had better outcomes under this system than under democratic government of FGS, which led to all or nothing tribalism influences coming into office.
A government that can't do anything to police unions is also the government living in fear of the governed. A government that can't rein in (say) PG&E is also a government living in fear of the governed. When political representatives are shot by a right-wing anti-abortion terrorist that is also (and perhaps even more viscerally so) a government living in fear of the governed. And I'm certainly not 100% okay with this.
How can you look at the current state of affair and say this with a straight face... It's a mafia, they're all millionaires, they're all friends, thay all go to the same schools, they all work for the government and instantly bounce to lobby for the private sector, they all use their insider knowledge to profit, &c. Only someone who went through the American education system can believe the US is anywhere close to what you described, it's a farce
In fact the capital criminals in this matter are the people violating and betraying that supreme law; the politicians, sheriffs, city councils, and even the YC funders behind Flock, etc.
It is in fact not even just violating the supreme law, but though that betrayal, it is in fact also treason.
https://journals.law.unc.edu/ncjolt/blogs/under-surveillance...
Murder is implied in the Epstein files with an email about burying girls on the property.
Eating sounds like an unhelpful exaggeration, unless I missed a major news story.
Society is like a pressure cooker, with built-in safety release valves to prevent the pressure from getting too high. If your solution to the safety release is to block off the valves, with authoritarian surveillance, draconian laws, and lack of justice for the elites committing crimes, it just moves it somewhere else. Block off too many, and it explodes.
- JFK
More people need to understand that the system is working as designed, and the elimination of peaceful, incremental reform based on popular demand, along with mass manipulation of human emotions through media and advertising, means that this sort of resistance is the sole outcome left before devolving into naked sectarian violence.
Say what you will, but the anti-Flock camera smashers are at least doing something beyond wishcasting from a philosophical armchair in comment sections or social media threads.
You are simply imposing your own views on others. Just because you disagree with Flock doesn't give you the right to destroy license plate readers that my tax dollars paid for. Who appointed you king?
Sorry, try again!
Doesn't breakdown in rule of law happened when a corporation (surely) bribed local officials to install insecure surveillance devices with zero concern for the community living near them?
All this shit flows downhill from Citizens United.
That was the wellspring of all this shit.
It really comes down to whether you consider an individual’s right to privacy more important than your state’s security. Neither is really a perfect options in this case, but having the Flock camera means some part of your property is under the panopticon of local law enforcement that could arrest you (loss of privacy).
Going with chinese tech, you are probably more private in regards to your own government, but you’re probably having some negative effect on state security based on the marginal benefit of CCP surveillance/ potential malware in your network.
The dichotomy is false. People could have cameras which report to no one, but that’s less useful for all governments involved.
The human is doing what you would expect the human to do when faced with limited options in an operating environment that is not favorable to them. Crime has been trending down for some time [3], Flock cameras are a business driven on fear like Shotspotter, where the results are questionable at best and you're selling to the unsophisticated.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2026/02/17/nx-s1-5612825/flock-contracts...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_privacy
[3] https://time.com/7357500/crime-homicide-rate-violent-propert... | https://archive.today/vMACL
> there are alternatives
This does not consistently appear to be the case in the US unfortunately.
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/12/effs-investigations-ex...
[2] https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/flock-roundup
you wouldn't consider someone vandalizing your home or the infrastructure in your neighborhood to be violence? of course it is violence, an attack on the place i live (whether that's limited to just my home or to the larger community i live in) is an attack on me
is it not violence to, for example, burn down a business where people work in if you do it at a time where no one is around to get immediately hurt as a consequence? can i not call the financial damage caused both to the workers and the owners of that place violence?
Very obviously not. Words have meaning. You are misusing words to garner emotional support for your preferred political position.
Burning down anything (including a business) is arson. Not violence. It only becomes violence if people are present and at imminent risk of physical harm.
Financial damage is not violence. Speech is not violence. Please take your doublespeak back to reddit; it doesn't belong on HN.
a case where you can argue speech can be violence would be a verbal threat to hurt or kill someone, but that has nothing to do with what we're talking about, i don't know why you're bringing up speech, are you trying to say that destroying these cameras is a form of expressing freedom of speech? (not accusing you of this btw, just genuinely curious what you meant by that)
I included speech as an example, the same as your bringing up property damage, arson, and financial damage. It seemed relevant given the general shape of what you were expressing.
Someone being driven to suicide or unable to pay for medication is not an example of violence. It might be many things but violence is most certainly not one of them.
> you cannot pretend that disrupting someone's livelihood is not at all related to attacking their liberty and/or life
Indeed it is _related_ but that does not magically make it "violence". Violence is direct physical harm. Not indirect and not anything other than physical.
> a case where you can argue speech can be violence
Speech is _never_ violence. That's about as close to definitionally impossible as you can get.
Respectfully, you seem to be having extreme difficulty comprehending the fact that words have meaning. It's impossible to engage in meaningful discussion with someone who either can't or won't conduct themselves in accordance with that fact.
coming up to you on the street and telling you i'm going to stab you to death is not violence as long as i don't go through with the stabbing? someone needs to better secure the mental asylum wifi, you shouldn't have access to it
also, i consider a security camera in a place i live to be security infrastructure, you should not be able to come into a place and do act like a vigilante imposing your view on what should and should not be recorded through force, if you have a problem with the way things work you should try to work within the law
again, this is what separates civilization from chaos
No, I file an insurance claim and move on with my life. It is just property, and almost all property can be trivially replaced. Your property is not you. It is just property. We simply see the world differently, that's all. Good luck to you.
life is very simple when you live in fairy land
(All US specific)
If enough people can be convinced that those cameras are somehow helping Trump, you’ll find a lot of people in here and Reddit saying “yes”, I’ll imagine. Before this we had people vandalizing Teslas because of Elon.
I don't like all this surveillance stuff, but Flock is just the tip of the iceberg and "direct action" against Flock is just as likely to backfire as it is to lead to changes. More importantly, once you give folks moral license to do this stuff it's hard to contain the scope of their activity.
Everything you said is true, but I suspect, also irrelevant, because options short of vigilante justice aren't going to be seen by the public as viable for much longer (if they're even seen so now). America's social contract is breaking, and existing institutions make it clear, daily, that they will strengthen that trend rather than reverse it. And as JFK said, 'Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.' That doesn't make the violence laudable, or even desirable. It is simply inevitable without seemingly impossible positive change from an establishment that is hostile to such.
You don't want to give people "moral license" to do this broadly, but we've hit a point where there are no options available that don't have downsides. Stated another way: Taking no action can also be unethical.
the threat has to be credible, which is where things like this, and luigi are quite valuable
I believe in surveillance, but Flock is just the tip of the iceberg and rolling out mass public surveillance is just as likely to backfire as it is to lead to changes. More importantly, once you give folks moral license to do this stuff it’s hard to contain the scope of their activity.
[1] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/record-low-crime-rates-are-...
https://www.uscourts.gov/educational-resources/educational-a...
This is absolutely the right thing to do.
Remove and smash the cellular modem in your car while you are at it.
This was in regards to: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2025/01/...
I don't have facebook, X, or tiktok installed on my phone.
https://darkanswers.com/how-your-location-is-sold-to-adverti...
I don't have the same choice with cameras everywhere that feed into a company with a security team run by donkeys and that provides minimal to no oversight to the government bodies using the camera data to do an end run around the fourth amendment.
It seems incongruous to me that people are willing to recognize the benefits that these tools provide law enforcement at solving crimes but when it comes to Flock cameras somehow things are totally different. They're just cameras with really good software, and law enforcement likes them because it makes their jobs easier.
A ring doorbell camera provides the individual with tangible benefits. It is installed by the individual on personal property. It does however typically capture some amount of public space which I think is problematic.
Government run centralized surveillance does not provide the individual with tangible benefits. It almost exclusively captures public spaces (that's usually the entire point of the exercise after all). It generally is not realistic to opt out short of being denied access to any surveilled public spaces. If that happens to include the majority of roads near your home then I guess you'll want to look into moving.
You can scream up and down about how building such things is a horrible idea because it can one day be used for evil, and folks will either yawn or call you paranoid or worse.
Then the thing actually gets (very lightly) abused/used for something folks don't like and omg it's an emergency no one could have ever predicted! And oh look - it's often times far too late to do a damn thing about it other than surface level 'fixes' that are nothing of the sort.
It gets very frustrating living in such a society, but it might simply be the way humans are wired. If it's not in your face and actively a major problem to you in the moment, it's simply not a concern.
Until recently very few people could articulate the real risk this tech posed, now you can literally see it play out (depending where you live)
I wonder how resistant the cameras are to strong handheld lasers. I suppose they could harden them against some common wavelengths with filters, but that'd affect the image clarity in normal use.
Most of his work was dealing with and accounting for reflections that left the machine. If you have a prism that’s sending 95% of the light where you want it to go, when it’s a multi watt laser you can’t just let that 5% go wherever it wants. You will blind someone. So his job was getting black bodies in all the right spots to absorb the lost light.
His safety goggles looked like even more expensive Oakleys of that era and they were (much more expensive).
Please, don't play with lasers. At all. Even supposedly "safe" lasers can output far more light than expected.
How can one know what is dangerous for the eyes or not? Years ago I got an "IR illuminator" (from aliexpress, probably) that I wanted to use with my raspberrypi NoIR camera, for fun. Say filming myself during the night to see how much I move while sleeping, or making my own wildlife camera trap.
But I was scared that it could be dangerous and never used it (I tested it in an empty room, but that was it).
Is there a safe way for a hobbyist to get an IR illuminator and be sure that I won't make somebody blind with it?
I assume you're concerned about reflections from the camera lens or housing? In my mind, the archetypal camera is mounted on a nice tall pole, silhouetted against open sky, and painted matte black.
> watt class lasers
Surely those would be excessive for someone attacking the sensor, unless they want to remotely sear some graffiti by burning away paint.
This is a nerd fantasy thing, but it's a really bad idea. It's hard to hit a tiny lens from a distance and it only takes one slip of the hand to shine it straight into traffic or someone walking down the sidewalk.
https://www.cehrp.org/dissection-of-flock-safety-camera/
https://www.arducam.com/product/arducam-ov5647-noir-camera-b...
Additionally, that you draw the line at sharing that juicy data with law enforcement. I mean sure, yeah, but even before that, sharing essentially all your movement data with some company because...?
[0] https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=video+r...
There's more of us then there are of them - so their wealth can't protect them from everything. They can and do buy privacy so there must be something worth protecting that the masses can expose using their same methods.
what good is their platform if it is easily defeated by a guy with a ladder and a hammer?
It just depends on if you're on the up portion of the K or the down stick. The larger picture might show an increase but if you split the data apart one leg is actually declining while the other is growing.
They disagree on the authority, not the methods, and help the two institutional parties cooperate to destroy civil liberties by accusing their counterparts of abusing ("weaponizing") civil rights to commit crimes, spy for foreign governments, and/or abuse children.
If you don't believe me, just look at the CCP. It already happened there.
1. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/04/republican-part...
2. https://www.esiweb.org/newsletter/100-million-expulsions-pro...
3. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/06/europe-zohra...
I would suggest you go look at polls. Dems have been polling in the dirt among their own party since they decided to usurp Bernie in 2016 and embrace the rich, Repubs have been polling in the dirt since Trump took office last year.
Absolutely no one is happy about the state of America. You can argue semantics, but it's pointless navel gazing at the larger national issue. No one, of any political affiliation, believes the government can govern. It's probably the single uniting factor across all political stripes. No one is happy. No one believes America has gotten measurably better in the last 10-15 years, and everyone is suffering in one way or another. The flock/authoritarian bent is simply the last gasps of a neoliberal government that has realized there's no easy way out of the last 40 years of anti-citizen policies.
Well who could've seen that coming.
HN was special while it lasted o7
I would say that anarchist-style direct action against mass surveillance pretty much embodies the classic hacker ethos going back many decades at this point.
Police states are like autoimmune diseases under the hygiene hypothesis. They'll keep ramping up their sensitivity until they're attacking everything, even when it's benign.
There obviously isn't a future without crime. This is just a tool to make it easier for police to do their job and deter criminals somewhat, but that is probably marginal.
There will always be kidnappings, there will always be property damage. Having technology available to make it easier to solve those crimes seems obvious to me.
I do not want to live in a society where police are watching everything I do in the name of solving minor property damage. "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" is bullshit. I don't do anything illegal in my bathroom, but I do not wish to have a camera in there, even if it could solve a hypothetical crime.
There are other ways to sacrifice your privacy for a sense of safety that doesn't impose your 'understanding of right and wrong' on the entire public.
"Could I be making wrong assumptions? No I'm a hacker, it must be everyone else who is wrong."
The amount of damage these cameras have caused is totally disproportional to whatever meager benefit they may have wrought. These are antisocial machines.
edit: I live in Dallas so, although we sometimes hear gunshots when the Cowboys score a touchdown, i'm not in an active war zone.
Edit: And I don’t even know how to have good faith conversations about this topic in these spaces, because the hive mind has decided that anything but absolute outrage is untenable. I’m getting downvoted for sharing my opinion.