US cities are axing Flock Safety surveillance technology

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

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

Those were great to watch, thanks!

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

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

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

Super worth a watch. Lots of technical tidbits also.

Love the Flashbulb!

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

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

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

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

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

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

>People are not willing to sacrifice their freedom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hunter-Killers not far behind.

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

Code 8-style cop drone drops incoming

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

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

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

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

> They just make life harder for regular people.

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

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

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

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

I live just outside Seattle. I worked for Flock.

Flock is a company based in Atlanta GA.

> But that's the whole appeal for bureaucrats.

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

> These companies build this tech in SF and Seattle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

> no choice but to accept its installation

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

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

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

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

Monte Sereno or Saratoga?

Where is this?

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

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

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

Would be a shame if it became common knowledge.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By any means necessary, as long as crime goes down? So we can execute anyone that breaks any kind of law and as long as crime goes down, that's all that should matter? Rights have no value to you, only protecting people from crime? There's no balance to be had, the only relevant question is if crime goes up or down?

Wow.

Crime would go down if everyone was executed. Your question is not the only one that matters.

> Would crime go up, down or stay the same if all surveillance cameras were removed?

I would think the same, crime rates would be unaffected in the short and medium term, since I don't think it prevents much crime given the short or non-custodial sentences given many criminals. Clearance rates and justice (conviction rates) would likely go down though IMO.

probably up