Once the police started to record every interaction with the public, along with their existing habit of placing traffic cameras left and right, they acquired enough data to track people.
Trying to restrict the analysis of existing data is never going to work. The police can always point to some death that wouldn't have happened, if they had ran Flock's software on their surveillance footage.
And even if by some miracle you manage to forbid plate recognition, cross referencing, etc, every ambitious (or lazy) detective would start doing it on the down low with OSS software.
I was sold during the recruiting process on high ethics and morals and an idealistic vision.
The reality was a surveillance state, questionable policies on data sharing between agencies and private installations (HOA, etc.), and a CEO with a very literal belief that Flock should "eliminate all crime" - not "visionary" but far more literal. It was way too Minority Report for my liking.
They have a public "disclosure" site that supposedly shows the agencies using Flock that is absolutely inaccurate (there are three agencies in my County alone using it that are not listed there).
Any conversations about ethics and the other "should we even do this?" questions got consistently shorter and superficial during my time there.
> The police can always point to some death that wouldn't have happened
Why must it be this way?
Because we're a bunch of bitch-ass pansies unwilling to tell our fellow countrymen (and women) to shove it when they permit the use of such logic.
I don't care "how many children need to die" or whatever, the sum total of the affronts upon our freedom a is not worth it. What even is the point of caring about the children if we're giving them a totalitarian dump to inherit?
> Once the police started to record every interaction with the public
I don't think this is true? As far as I can tell any time the recording is mentioned in a complaint at the police behaviour the camera was off due to [battery life|maintenance|other].
I get the feeling that judges & juries are less and less likely to give the benefit of the doubt if charges/lawsuits are ever actually filed against the officer, year by year.
You also get just rank intimidation. My friend got out of jail and the next day tried to file a complaint about an officer stealing his pocket money during an arrest. He was placed in a room with the arresting officer, who explained that any complaint which was filed would incur retribution from the DA with regards to the thing that got him arrested. This is happening in a large urbanized precinct, in a blue state.
To ever regain control of the police force, the various civilian & political oversight bodies would need to prosecute thousands of felony exortion, kidnapping, and assault cases a year.
Actually now that they have all pervasive surveillance, there is real evidence to be used against them in incompetence and allowing crimes to occur. This is not going to go the way they hoped
Courts have previously held that heuristics based determinations are not sufficient to serve as probable cause. E.g. "predictive policing" technologies can be used for e.g. scheduling officers to different areas, but aren't valid to conduct a search.
If this feature is used to make an arrest, there's a good chance the case would be thrown out.
The case can be thrown out, but it's still going to cause you massive disruptions. Everything from just being arrested in the first place and being held in custody for some amount of time, to having to hire a lawyer, to the social consequences of your name being tied to being arrested. It's going to cost you time, money, stress, family and social relationships. And there's a non-zero chance that if your life starts being investigated after such an arrest, something could be found to still affect you or your family and friends.
And once you're on their radar, you're probably going to also end up being marked for extra scrutiny. You might find yourself being pulled over more often, or getting the SSSS on your airplane boarding pass.
ICE are to a large extent above the law. Their entire purpose is to snatch people and move them to locations where they can be denied legal redress. A couple of high profile cases have only got redress due to very dedicated intervention by congresspeople, which does not scale.
I think people need to start reckoning with the underlying problem, which is that oppressive policing in America is popular provided it's happening to someone else.
> Curious how "Homeland Security" and "State Security" are equivalent names.
Yes, but the unfortunate thing with names is that people get to pick them to sound however they want.
This is why the official name of the Berlin Wall translates as "anti-fascist protection barrier", along with all the examples that probably inspired 1984 (written in 48, so before the wall).
I’m sure there are also ways to anonymously report illegal immigrants to ICE as well. People are still free to criticize Trump all they want. The First Amendment is pretty clear on this.
American nationals whose parents are both Americans are safe. People in the US who are not full citizens are at significant risk. People who are American citizens by birthright are currently safe, but there are explicit plans to attack birthright citizenship.
In theory, yes. In practice, he already has a long track record of leveraging his position, and the institutions it allows him to command, to enact personal vengeance upon his enemies. The examples are numerous, but one need look no further than Stephen Colbert.
Paramount paid $16 million to the Trump library fund to settle a meritless case, because of his ability to wield the FCC to squash their merger.
Colbert called this out on his show as rampant extortion by the Trump Administration, and they promptly cancelled his show.
Sure, you can argue that this wasn't a police/military act, and the government itself did not punish Colbert for his views and speech.
But in cronyism, especially under a regime actively trying to gut the federal government and allow private parties to assume it's functions, this becomes at best a nominal distinction. If you, in an official government capacity, can wield your power to enact vengeance on your opponents and dissidents, maybe even going as far as to diacriminate against entire states that vote against you (https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/trump-discriminati...), you have a mechanism with which you can quasi-legally (good luck fighting this one in court) punish Speech You Do Not Like.
For the average, or even exceptional person, this functionally amounts to a restriction on your speech. I am highly critical of Trump, but not under any avenue tied to my identity.
I am far from the only person who operates this way. The assertion that you can freely citizen the administration without fear of reprisal does not hold water.
How much of the damage done was specifically by ICE agents and how much of it was done by illegal immigrants resisting arrest? I suspect that some of them went to hide in many of the spaces that were “torn up” by ICE agents. In many of these raids , people are not turning themselves over peacefully. If you harbor criminals you should not be surprised when law enforcement combs every inch of the building to find them.
There is also the option of being paid to self deport if you know that you are in the country illegally.
People have every right to resist with maximum force to being taken without due process to a camp where they will disappear off the grid and paperwork system.
Also ignoring the large proportion of citizens getting swept up with no due process or legal rights. We even have cases of citizens ending up in foreign prisons and only getting returned after extensive legal battles lead by Congress members... The average poor us citizen with no PR or viral marketing .... is just disappeared
I'm not sure such cases would be thrown out. See "parallel construction" for examples of illegally obtained data the DEA was advised to build an evidence chain NOT based on the illegally obtained info, but based upon evidence gleaned after the fact but built to show discovery during the course of investigation.
Who says the feature will be used to make an arrest?
The heuristics are clearly about who to pull over, etc. Evidence for arrest/search will be determined afterwards. And, as far as search is concerned, it could be as simple as getting a dog to bark.
Why? Because the prosecutor doesn't want all their work to go to waste because they didn't disclose Brady evidence. Even if they successfully argue that Officer Flock's reporting isn't exculpatory, they still have to do extra work to respond to a Brady motion for a case that already got a conviction.
In cases of parallel construction of evidence, is the prosecution still obligated to disclose everything to the defense in discovery? Is the tree from which the Fruit is picked only obscured from the jury, or from the defense as well?
Any evidence the prosecutor uses that is potentially exculpatory must be disclosed to the defendant. So your questions raise why they wouldn't: they think the defense can't find out. And it's arguably likely that they won't. But if they do, it will not only invalidate that single case, it could potentially trigger retrials of hundreds of cases because now a bunch of people know that Officer Flock is on the Brady list.
And one final thing about this... the prosecutor (who has probably said some variation of "ignorance of the law is not an excuse" to try to get a conviction) can't claim ignorance as a defense to a Brady violation. Failing to disclose, whether they knew or not, is a Brady violation.
Hah, as an ex-Flock employee, their transparency report is utter garbage. "Agencies using Flock." In my immediate vicinity, three County Sheriffs use it, but they are not listed. Several city PDs in my county also use it, but they are not listed.
But flock now has an Api for to Cause, the parallel construction AI. /s
So if they flock to the cause, all arrests are go. And there are always fallback crimes everyone in a modern society commits, that can be dragged in after a search .
There are passive ways too on AliExpress like IR reflective sprays, coatings and films, but in my country, and I suspect in most of Europe, any intentional tampering with the legibility of your license plate is illegal and can land you hefty fines or even jail if caught.
They also don't help much any more. Not with cameras that do color, infrared, 4K or 8K video, high dynamic range, and vehicle make and model recognition.[1][2]
In the first video, note the checkbox in the analysis program for displaying vehicles with "strange plates" which were in range for reading but not read. Trying to obscure a plate draws automated attention.
Flock will use things like bumper stickers, tow hitches, roof racks, body panel color differences, wheels/rims, and window tints to add to vehicle identification metadata".
What would happen if you stenciled paintings of license-plate-like patterns all over the back of your car? Then you're not tampering with the plate itself, but I guess you end up with a goofy-lookin' car.
Why do you think tons of fleets have 6-char alphanumeric vehicle IDs?
Gotta have some number on the thing for your own ID purposes and if it saves tou a $50 semi truck toll bill 1/500th of the time that's icing on the cake.
I live in the neighborhood where Flock started. The three Georgia Tech grads moved into a house in the West End in Atlanta. It’s a great neighborhood but like any urban neighborhood, you often deal with car break-in’s, so the roommates built a prototype security cam.
All fine so far. Except that the direction it was pointed at was the neighborhood middle school. Which means these three notably white college students started flock by surveilled predominantly black young kids.
The neighborhood was pissed - but what are you going to do?
Eventually Flock took off and they moved out.
My point is that if your product started as surveillance on not just another age demographic but a racial and class demographic, is it any surprise that all of this is fundamentally in the DNA of the company?
We're getting to the point where the thing making Minority report look unreasonable is that they had three (extremely drugged, troubled) humans making decisions as a consensus instead of just using an algorithm or a police officer's vibes. Nobody really doing these things today would slow down enough for that or risk someone having empathy and derailing the whole operation.
The last ten years have stuck out as a continuous loop of "this is so messed up it wouldn't be a believable/good movie plot".
I feel the ship has sailed here.
Once the police started to record every interaction with the public, along with their existing habit of placing traffic cameras left and right, they acquired enough data to track people.
Trying to restrict the analysis of existing data is never going to work. The police can always point to some death that wouldn't have happened, if they had ran Flock's software on their surveillance footage.
And even if by some miracle you manage to forbid plate recognition, cross referencing, etc, every ambitious (or lazy) detective would start doing it on the down low with OSS software.
As an ex-Flock employee:
I was sold during the recruiting process on high ethics and morals and an idealistic vision.
The reality was a surveillance state, questionable policies on data sharing between agencies and private installations (HOA, etc.), and a CEO with a very literal belief that Flock should "eliminate all crime" - not "visionary" but far more literal. It was way too Minority Report for my liking.
They have a public "disclosure" site that supposedly shows the agencies using Flock that is absolutely inaccurate (there are three agencies in my County alone using it that are not listed there).
Any conversations about ethics and the other "should we even do this?" questions got consistently shorter and superficial during my time there.
> The police can always point to some death that wouldn't have happened
Why must it be this way?
Because we're a bunch of bitch-ass pansies unwilling to tell our fellow countrymen (and women) to shove it when they permit the use of such logic.
I don't care "how many children need to die" or whatever, the sum total of the affronts upon our freedom a is not worth it. What even is the point of caring about the children if we're giving them a totalitarian dump to inherit?
> Once the police started to record every interaction with the public
I don't think this is true? As far as I can tell any time the recording is mentioned in a complaint at the police behaviour the camera was off due to [battery life|maintenance|other].
I get the feeling that judges & juries are less and less likely to give the benefit of the doubt if charges/lawsuits are ever actually filed against the officer, year by year.
You also get just rank intimidation. My friend got out of jail and the next day tried to file a complaint about an officer stealing his pocket money during an arrest. He was placed in a room with the arresting officer, who explained that any complaint which was filed would incur retribution from the DA with regards to the thing that got him arrested. This is happening in a large urbanized precinct, in a blue state.
To ever regain control of the police force, the various civilian & political oversight bodies would need to prosecute thousands of felony exortion, kidnapping, and assault cases a year.
Actually now that they have all pervasive surveillance, there is real evidence to be used against them in incompetence and allowing crimes to occur. This is not going to go the way they hoped
What difference does it make if they allow crimes to occur? They have no duty to protect.
Courts have previously held that heuristics based determinations are not sufficient to serve as probable cause. E.g. "predictive policing" technologies can be used for e.g. scheduling officers to different areas, but aren't valid to conduct a search.
If this feature is used to make an arrest, there's a good chance the case would be thrown out.
The case can be thrown out, but it's still going to cause you massive disruptions. Everything from just being arrested in the first place and being held in custody for some amount of time, to having to hire a lawyer, to the social consequences of your name being tied to being arrested. It's going to cost you time, money, stress, family and social relationships. And there's a non-zero chance that if your life starts being investigated after such an arrest, something could be found to still affect you or your family and friends.
And once you're on their radar, you're probably going to also end up being marked for extra scrutiny. You might find yourself being pulled over more often, or getting the SSSS on your airplane boarding pass.
“You can beat the rap, but you can’t beat the ride.”
or you know, more false bullshit leads to way more people talking about it, and less stigma about it
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/emiliano-s-agents-left-beh...
ICE are to a large extent above the law. Their entire purpose is to snatch people and move them to locations where they can be denied legal redress. A couple of high profile cases have only got redress due to very dedicated intervention by congresspeople, which does not scale.
I think people need to start reckoning with the underlying problem, which is that oppressive policing in America is popular provided it's happening to someone else.
Geez, East Germany's State Security, but with supremely better surveillance tech, and AI.
Curious how "Homeland Security" and "State Security" are equivalent names.
Looking forward to a "Report suspicious neighbors"-program next. Your neighbor made fun of Trump? Report this unamerican activity to Kristi Noem!
> Curious how "Homeland Security" and "State Security" are equivalent names.
Yes, but the unfortunate thing with names is that people get to pick them to sound however they want.
This is why the official name of the Berlin Wall translates as "anti-fascist protection barrier", along with all the examples that probably inspired 1984 (written in 48, so before the wall).
Minnesota implemented this during COVID…
https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/coronavirus-in-minnes...
I’m sure there are also ways to anonymously report illegal immigrants to ICE as well. People are still free to criticize Trump all they want. The First Amendment is pretty clear on this.
American nationals whose parents are both Americans are safe. People in the US who are not full citizens are at significant risk. People who are American citizens by birthright are currently safe, but there are explicit plans to attack birthright citizenship.
> People are still free to criticize Trump all they want. The First Amendment is pretty clear on this.
I guess it depends on how you define "person."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activist_deportations_in_the_s...
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/19/trump-deportation-g...
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/09/nyregion/ice-arrests-pale...
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/rumeysa-ozturk-tufts...
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/oRiQz7mOY6A
> People are still free to criticize Trump all they want. The First Amendment is pretty clear on this.
In theory.
No, in actuality. People criticize Trump daily without fear of repercussions.
He's not a king or a dictator. Much of his agenda is being put in check by the other two branches of government.
In theory, yes. In practice, he already has a long track record of leveraging his position, and the institutions it allows him to command, to enact personal vengeance upon his enemies. The examples are numerous, but one need look no further than Stephen Colbert.
Paramount paid $16 million to the Trump library fund to settle a meritless case, because of his ability to wield the FCC to squash their merger.
Colbert called this out on his show as rampant extortion by the Trump Administration, and they promptly cancelled his show.
Sure, you can argue that this wasn't a police/military act, and the government itself did not punish Colbert for his views and speech.
But in cronyism, especially under a regime actively trying to gut the federal government and allow private parties to assume it's functions, this becomes at best a nominal distinction. If you, in an official government capacity, can wield your power to enact vengeance on your opponents and dissidents, maybe even going as far as to diacriminate against entire states that vote against you (https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/trump-discriminati...), you have a mechanism with which you can quasi-legally (good luck fighting this one in court) punish Speech You Do Not Like.
For the average, or even exceptional person, this functionally amounts to a restriction on your speech. I am highly critical of Trump, but not under any avenue tied to my identity.
I am far from the only person who operates this way. The assertion that you can freely citizen the administration without fear of reprisal does not hold water.
Are you high lol
How much of the damage done was specifically by ICE agents and how much of it was done by illegal immigrants resisting arrest? I suspect that some of them went to hide in many of the spaces that were “torn up” by ICE agents. In many of these raids , people are not turning themselves over peacefully. If you harbor criminals you should not be surprised when law enforcement combs every inch of the building to find them.
There is also the option of being paid to self deport if you know that you are in the country illegally.
https://www.ice.gov/self-deportation
People have every right to resist with maximum force to being taken without due process to a camp where they will disappear off the grid and paperwork system.
Nations have every right to defend their sovereignty and to detain and deport people that are in the country illegally.
Also ignoring the large proportion of citizens getting swept up with no due process or legal rights. We even have cases of citizens ending up in foreign prisons and only getting returned after extensive legal battles lead by Congress members... The average poor us citizen with no PR or viral marketing .... is just disappeared
> large proportion of citizens getting swept up with no due process or legal rights
Can you give me a few examples of this? I can’t find evidence to support what you’re saying here.
> We even have cases of citizens ending up in foreign prisons and only getting returned after extensive legal battles lead by Congress members
Are you referring to the “Maryland man” here? Kilmar Abrego Garcia is not a US citizen.
Constitution seems to disagree in plainly self evident English ...
Which section of the Constitution are you referring to?
I'm not sure such cases would be thrown out. See "parallel construction" for examples of illegally obtained data the DEA was advised to build an evidence chain NOT based on the illegally obtained info, but based upon evidence gleaned after the fact but built to show discovery during the course of investigation.
Who says the feature will be used to make an arrest?
The heuristics are clearly about who to pull over, etc. Evidence for arrest/search will be determined afterwards. And, as far as search is concerned, it could be as simple as getting a dog to bark.
Why would the police even inform you that flock was used?
Why? Because the prosecutor doesn't want all their work to go to waste because they didn't disclose Brady evidence. Even if they successfully argue that Officer Flock's reporting isn't exculpatory, they still have to do extra work to respond to a Brady motion for a case that already got a conviction.
In cases of parallel construction of evidence, is the prosecution still obligated to disclose everything to the defense in discovery? Is the tree from which the Fruit is picked only obscured from the jury, or from the defense as well?
Any evidence the prosecutor uses that is potentially exculpatory must be disclosed to the defendant. So your questions raise why they wouldn't: they think the defense can't find out. And it's arguably likely that they won't. But if they do, it will not only invalidate that single case, it could potentially trigger retrials of hundreds of cases because now a bunch of people know that Officer Flock is on the Brady list.
And one final thing about this... the prosecutor (who has probably said some variation of "ignorance of the law is not an excuse" to try to get a conviction) can't claim ignorance as a defense to a Brady violation. Failing to disclose, whether they knew or not, is a Brady violation.
Hah, as an ex-Flock employee, their transparency report is utter garbage. "Agencies using Flock." In my immediate vicinity, three County Sheriffs use it, but they are not listed. Several city PDs in my county also use it, but they are not listed.
Discovery applies even in cases where the state is prosecuting you.
If this feature is used to make an arrest, there's a good chance the case would be thrown out.
They'll just parallel construct the crap out of it and get their arrest anyway.
But flock now has an Api for to Cause, the parallel construction AI. /s
So if they flock to the cause, all arrests are go. And there are always fallback crimes everyone in a modern society commits, that can be dragged in after a search .
> With our new Multi-State Insights feature, law enforcement is alerted when suspect vehicles have been detected in multiple states
So, using our freedom of movement is now suspicious?
That's not what the sentence you cite is saying.
If they decide you are suspicious, they'll get an email alert about your location.
It's not someone "deciding," it's a black box algorithm.
Big Tech is building a dystopia and we all here are complicit. Become aware of the consequences of your actions and try to minimize the harm.
Certainly not all no, maybe not even most.
I do not feel guilty of the unethical actions of others.
May I ask what you do that you consider yourself not complicit?
But, if we don’t build the Torment Nexus then someone else will anyway!
Grab a pole saw, cut em down, take a shit ton of free nice Tenergy battery packs and a SIM card with free data.
It’s time to snip the flock.
Are there IR lights you can put on your license plate to block cameras from taking pictures of it?
There are passive ways too on AliExpress like IR reflective sprays, coatings and films, but in my country, and I suspect in most of Europe, any intentional tampering with the legibility of your license plate is illegal and can land you hefty fines or even jail if caught.
They also don't help much any more. Not with cameras that do color, infrared, 4K or 8K video, high dynamic range, and vehicle make and model recognition.[1][2]
In the first video, note the checkbox in the analysis program for displaying vehicles with "strange plates" which were in range for reading but not read. Trying to obscure a plate draws automated attention.
Big Brother has AI, too.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qJsvBW05RI
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5U2LWuBFIR0
Flock will use things like bumper stickers, tow hitches, roof racks, body panel color differences, wheels/rims, and window tints to add to vehicle identification metadata".
What would happen if you stenciled paintings of license-plate-like patterns all over the back of your car? Then you're not tampering with the plate itself, but I guess you end up with a goofy-lookin' car.
Why do you think tons of fleets have 6-char alphanumeric vehicle IDs?
Gotta have some number on the thing for your own ID purposes and if it saves tou a $50 semi truck toll bill 1/500th of the time that's icing on the cake.
Sure, if you're doing a going to prison any% glitchless.
I live in the neighborhood where Flock started. The three Georgia Tech grads moved into a house in the West End in Atlanta. It’s a great neighborhood but like any urban neighborhood, you often deal with car break-in’s, so the roommates built a prototype security cam.
All fine so far. Except that the direction it was pointed at was the neighborhood middle school. Which means these three notably white college students started flock by surveilled predominantly black young kids.
The neighborhood was pissed - but what are you going to do?
Eventually Flock took off and they moved out.
My point is that if your product started as surveillance on not just another age demographic but a racial and class demographic, is it any surprise that all of this is fundamentally in the DNA of the company?
Even if you leave the race baiting out it's still wholly unacceptable.
Change the race of the parties up all you want and it doesn't change a thing.
Isn't this what Palantir also does?
And you think OpenAI, Anthropic, and Co. will not do exactly the same, when you engage in a wrongthink?
Larry Ellison said it best a few months ago: "AI will keep you on your best behavior"[1].
[1] Meeting with Sam Altman, President Trump, and Masayoshi Son, announcing $500 million infrastructure deal.
Welcome to the future. Minority Report's coming. How terrifying.
We're getting to the point where the thing making Minority report look unreasonable is that they had three (extremely drugged, troubled) humans making decisions as a consensus instead of just using an algorithm or a police officer's vibes. Nobody really doing these things today would slow down enough for that or risk someone having empathy and derailing the whole operation.
The last ten years have stuck out as a continuous loop of "this is so messed up it wouldn't be a believable/good movie plot".
"They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks." - big tech / small tech / startups (every year)
People ITT talking about probable cause like the rule of law still exists in the US