I live in an Atlanta neighborhood where one of the founders lived. A prototype for Flock Camera was designed by three Georgia Tech grads because someone kept breaking into their car (not uncommon in our neighborhood tbh).
The trick is that the camera was pointed towards a middle school. Which means they were constantly recording kids without adult consent.
Now, years later, Atlanta is the most surveilled city in North America and one of the most in the world. Flock cameras are everywhere. There are 124 cameras for every 1,000 people. Just last week, a ex-urb police chef was arrested for using the Flock network to stalk and harass citizens.
I know a lot of people who work at Flock. I’m shocked that they do though.
That makes a lot of sense… I’m in the rich/middle class north Atlanta burbs visiting family, and the entrance to every cul-de-sac has a flock LPR pointing inwards.
I didn’t notice it at all last year but the cameras were there. Benn blew the cap off and now they’re omnipresent.
Honestly, not really. If you actually want to have decent coverage to observe crimes and track criminals, that's a ballpark reasonable figure.
And it's not really that expensive, and the idea is that it ultimately saves money in terms of the crime it prevents and fewer police and detectives needed.
I'm not defending it, but in terms of economic sense it's quite well justified. Opposition to it is moral/ideological around privacy/freedom, not economic.
It's wild how stalking isn't considered by these people from day one.
Hire anyone whos worked in healthcare privacy or compliance and they will tell you without a doubt ex-girlfriends, bitter rivals and celebrities are the #1 item people abuse their access for.
Why do they need consent in a public place? Children vandalize, steal, etc. as well - should they just be immune from detection because they are below some arbitrary age?
Do banks just shut off all surveillance when a child walks past their front door?
He has said his goal is for a "world with no crime. Thanks to Flock." and his goal is not aspirational, visionary, but quite literal.
He sees false negatives as more problematic than false positives. He has admitted being inspired by Minority Report (to me it's always very telling when someone takes a cautionary tale like this and finds it "inspirational").
“Are the fires of Hell a-glowing?
Is the grisly reaper mowing?
Yes! The danger must be growing
For the rowers keep on rowing
And they're certainly not showing
Any signs that they are slowing!” - Willie Wonka
How are they conspiring to destroy it? Are you saying that coordinating attempts to change policy counts as destroying the previous policy, or are you drawing a line from identifying and locating the cameras to (possibly other) people actively vandalizing them?
If they were doing that, that would be a criminal conspiracy, not terrorism. Authoritarians often like to call ordinary criminals, political opponents, and dissenters terrorists to delegitimize them and justify harsher behavior against them. I assume that's what Garrett Langley was trying to do when he called them a "terroristic organization".
Luckily for DeFlock they're not doing anything "terroristic" or even criminal.
As another commenter said, it's a criminal conspiracy or something to that effect. If terrorism is supposed to be the use of violence against non-combatants to attain a political or ideological goal... then would de-Flock be anti-terrorism? Removing Flock cameras makes me feel less terrorized.
The main difference seems to be that the number of jobs posted to HN has dropped significantly lower, well below the low point of 2020. It's really pretty dismal, which seems to have started around the middle of 2022. Maybe the types of jobs that get posted to HN are doing even worse than "technology" in general.
It'd be interesting to correlate this against total posting activity on HN as well, to account for it being progressively a more popular website to post on
They're not usually doing surveillance on people, they're mostly used as a quick way to get eyes overhead when something else is happening--foot pursuit, high speed pursuit, just about anything really where an aerial perspective might be helpful. They can fly anywhere in LA pretty quickly.
In 2003, "Los Angeles Mayor Jim Hahn, along with Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton, Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca, the California Highway Patrol, the Los Angeles Police Chiefs’ Association and the Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners sent a letter Feb. 26 to news directors of television stations asking them to consider reducing the amount of police car chase coverage they broadcast."
Officials asserted in their letter that live continuous coverage
causes dangerous police chases to be looked upon as entertainment,
and encourages suspects to flee in pursuit of instant fame.
“Dangerous suspects are acquiring instant celebrity status when they
recklessly evade police over our streets and highways. This form of
notoriety is life threatening and should not occur,” said Los Angeles
County Sheriff Lee Baca in the press release.
"There have been instances where drivers look out windows and wave. Many
[suspects] have made it abundantly clear that they’re enjoying the whole
thing,” said Julie Wong, director of communications for the mayor’s
office.
I think of it every time I see 'ansible' come up, because the ability to create and run what everyone calls 'playbooks' now should have beeen integrated into the terminal like it was back in the 80s over dialup. I'm all for being able to git commit the resulting script (they’re just text files!) but being able to launch a playbook and halt it and repair it and resume was, like.
It seems like the article has been updated: "Sources told AVweb Sunday that the focus of the investigation is on a weather balloon payload." This is far more likely than a meteor.
Space is big, but the upper atmosphere is pretty big, too!
I understand that there are a lot of planes and they cover a lot of miles, and there are a lot of weather balloons too... but each windshield is merely tracing a 40cm high by 150cm wide rectangle across an entire country, through an airspace 12km tall covering 10 million square kilometers.
My son brings his glove when we go to a game for the local minor league baseball team in case of a foul ball or home run, we've spent a couple dozen hours in seats near enough to the action to give it a chance...but that glove has not yet intersected with the path of a baseball in an environment that's significantly more target-dense.
What's the probability that the path of a plane windshield randomly intersects with a weather balloon payload? I would have said it's negligible, but apparently not!
It's good to be careful. A popular ADS-B network used to distribute a raspberry pi image that let the maintainers ssh into your machine whenever they wanted.
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