I'm surprised the flock cameras aren't being disabled in a more subtle fashion.
All it takes is a tiny drone with a stick attached, and at the end of that stick is a tiny sponge soaked with tempera paint. Drone goes 'boop' on the camera lens, and the entire system is disabled until an expensive technician drives out with a ladder and cleans the lens at non-trivial expense.
A handful of enterprising activists could blind all the flock cameras in a region in a day or two, and without destroying them, which makes it less of an overtly criminal act.
Obviously not advocating this, just pointing out that flock is very vulnerable to this very simple attack from activists.
The goal here by activists isn't to directly physically disarm every camera. Like with any act of protest, it's at least as much about the optics and influence of public opinion. Visibly destroying the units is more cathartic and spreads the message of displeasure better. Ultimately what needs to change is public perception and policy.
One or two cameras getting bashed is basically a fart in the wind for flock, and I'd argue that it doesn't actually move the needle in any direction as far as public opinion goes. Those who dislike them don't need further convincing, those who support them are not going to have their opinion changed by property destruction (it might make them support surveillance more, in fact).
But hey, it's provocative I guess.
On the other hand flock losing their entire fleet is an existential problem for them, and for all the customers they're charging for the use of that fleet. Their BoD will want answers about why the officers of the company are harming shareholders with the way they're operating the business. Cities that have contracts with them may have grounds to terminate them, etc etc.
Why would I fly an expensive drone close to a camera, fumble about for a minute trying to get it painted like a renaissance artist, when I can get a paintball gun for much less?
Or use a powerful enough laser pointer. Bonus points if you use infrared since other humans can't see the beam and won't know what you're up to.
Though you either need a laser powerful enough to harm human eyes or lots of patience. Hong Kong protesters innovated a lot of these sort of resistance using lasers
Where I am (Sydney Australia) we have fixed speed cameras that automatically create speeding fines to drivers going too fast (well, technically the registered owner of the vehicle via ANPR).
They eventually had to equip pretty much every speed camera with a speed camera camera, usually on a much higher pole to make vandalism more difficult.
Sounds like a new remit for the NRO. Park a billion dollar satellite over an area to keep an eye out for petty vandalism. Then the sheriffs office can team up with Space Force: papers will be served immediately by LEO MIRV deployment, which may also count as execution depending on visibility and aim on the day.
/s - but it wouldn't surprise me at the rate things are going.
"In NSW, paintball is classified as a "prohibited firearm" under the Firearms Act 1996. However, it can still be legally played under strict licensing conditions. Unlike in some states where it is more loosely regulated, players and operators in NSW must comply with a range of legal requirements to ensure safety and legality."
These rules have changed, I think back before COVID they reclassified them as sporting equipment instead of firearms, but still brought in a whole bunch of licensing rules and requirements similar to gun ownership.
You can't just walk into KMart and walk out with a paintball gun here. |Or paintball markers.
A paintball gun might not invoke the federal government to hunt you down; an over-powered laser absolutely will. The FAA has a very low tolerance for that sort of thing. Do not ever, ever, ever use lasers in open air that are capable of damaging the human retina without the appropriate licenses. The last thing cities need right now is another federal agency going on a witchhunt. Firing eye-damaging lasers into the air would just serve them that excuse on a silvered platter.
The CCDs in cameras can be damaged with low-power lasers, or so I thought. No need for anything crazy. And the FAA won't become involved unless you're pointing them skyward. Pointing them across the street, or anywhere not visible from the air isn't going to sic federal agencies on you.
> And the FAA won't become involved unless you're pointing them skyward.
The point here is that 'skyward' is where the laser's beam goes when you're trying to aim it at a camera up on a pole. It's practically impossible to point a non-fixed position laser at something a non-trivial distance higher than you without spilling a large amount of laser beam into whatever happens to be behind your intended target; which is very often the sky.
Ownership of paintball guns is regulated under the state-level firearms act in most (all?) states and territories.
You can use them under the direct supervision of the licensed owner, but it's still quite restrictive. If you were to take one and shoot at cameras on the street it would vandalism plus firearms offences, most of which start at inversion of innocence, massive fines and move pretty quickly into prison time.
If you actually purchased one yourself in Queensland, you would need a Cat A firearms license, genuine reason, permit to acquire, safe storage etc as for a firearm.
NSW used to be similar, but a few years ago the state government had a rare moment of common sense and did away with most of that pointless bullshit.
We have most of that in <pick some European city/country>, and the statistics show it makes a big difference compared to the USA, but drivers still exceed the speed limit, run through red lights etc and cause injuries and death to pedestrians and cyclists.
Removing automatic enforcement of speed limits would not improve the situation.
Where I live, the speed limit keeps getting reduced so the city can make money off of fines, especially because nobody follows speed limits that are ridiculously low for wide, straight roads where following the limit would make traffic ground to a halt.
This happened in my hometown. Arterial roads that were 40mph when I was a kid are posted at 25 today and they just passed legislation to make the automated speed cameras near school zones active 24/7.
The use of a drone also ups the ante from a prosecutor’s perspective. Charging a vandal caught with a paintbrush and a ladder is nothing out of the ordinary. A routine misdemeanor.
Someone who has the wherewithal to jerry rig a paintball gun to a drone is someone scary. Plus, any officer who witnesses such a drone is almost certainly going to misidentify the paintball gun as an actual gun. I can imagine the operator would be charged with several felonies.
Yeah like we gotta be serious here, US cops and courts are out to screw people over because that is how they increase their budget, pay, and bonuses. If they think they can twist some law into giving you a felony, they will, regardless of the spirit of the law.
Attaching any kind of potential weapon on a drone has no real precedent so they can dig through 19th century law and combine it with some 21st century law and punishment and screw your life over with bull crap unless you got $100K+ sitting around to throw on a good lawyer. The risk of being caught may be a bit lower, but the potential punishment if caught could be absolutely enormous.
Last I heard, putting a glock on a quadcopter was creating an "illegal weapon system" or similar fancy sounding BS but I wonder what the accusation would be for a paintball gun on a drone?
On the list of "laws you don't want to screw with", National Firearms Act violations are high on my list. Regardless of whether something is or isn't a violation, I'm certainly not interested in paying expensive lawyers to argue they're not.
The point of resistance is commonly to harm the counterparty in a fashion that the perpetrator finds morally acceptable such as to disincentivize them not convince them.
Vietnamese vs US Grunts not cute useless protestors holding signs that threaten to hold different signs longer.
What is the threshold for eye vs sensor damage and am I correct in assuming that duration is a factor. Basically less juice for a longer duration ruins a sensor but humans blink? For science.
I picked up an Axis security camera rated for ALPR use (the Q1700 series) and it has a safety warning telling me I shouldn't look at the built in IR LEDs for more than a minute...
You want to fly a multi-hundred dollar device loaded with radios that constantly broadcasts out a unique ID and possibly your FAA ID and use it for crime?
Or even better yet, get arrested halfway to trying to dip your drone into paint on a sidewalk?
In 1950s UK every country kid had a catapult in their pocket. Maybe that is what we should do. Give the kids catapults and tell them not to use them on Flock cameras. That is usually effective at making kids so stuff
Drones over 250 grams or for any drone operated commercially under part 107 registration is required. But, its easy to just build your own or desolder the id chip if you dont want it.
Because advocating things which are moral/ethical but illegal is often against the TOS :(
We need laws which are explicitly based on moral principles. Barring that, we should at least have laws which treat sufficiently large platforms as utilities and forbid them from performing censorship without due process.
You think we should give people being moderated on a forum due process? How would we ever run forums if every contentious and necessary moderation action could lead to a 5k-50k legal bill.
I wouldn’t suggest doing that, it will result in more regulation restricting drones. I joined before few workshops that included the government too, and there were discussions about requiring a whole license every time you modify the drone, not limited to the airframe, but the flight purpose and payload. So you can imagine in the future, modding or repurposing your drone could be a “federal crime” if you don’t go and re-license the drone every time you change the payload.
Because destroying them sends a different message. People want them gone, not merely disabled. They're not joking or messing around with drones and tempera about it. Using a firearm to wreck the camera lens before tearing the whole thing down would be nice though.
That would be detectable by the FAA and they would send the FBI after you, unless you used a junk toy drone but that would not cover much distance between charges.
> A handful of enterprising activists could blind all the flock cameras in a region in a day or two, and without destroying them, which makes it less of an overtly criminal act
No, that would likely end in a RICO or terrorism case if it continued. Just because the cameras aren't destroyed doesn't mean CorpGov won't want to teach a lesson.
>All it takes is a tiny drone with a stick attached, and at the end of that stick is a tiny sponge soaked with tempera paint. Drone goes 'boop' on the camera lens, and the entire system is disabled until an expensive technician drives out with a ladder and cleans the lens at non-trivial expense
Americans don’t care enough
Too busy enjoying S&P500 near 7,000 and US$84,000/year median household income
> All it takes is a tiny drone with a stick attached, and at the end of that stick is a tiny sponge soaked with tempera paint
I (EDIT: hate) Flock Safety cameras. If someone did this in my town, I’d want them arrested.
They’re muddying the moral clarity of the anti-Flock messaging, the ultimate goal in any protest. And if they’re willing to damage that property, I’m not convinced they understand why they shouldn’t damage other property. (More confidently, I’m not convinced others believe they can tell the difference.)
Flock Safety messages on security. Undermining that pitch is helpful. Underwriting it with random acts of performative chaos plays into their appeal.
> flock is very vulnerable to this very simple attack
We live in a free society, i.e. one with significant individual autonomy. We’re all always very vulnerable. That’s the social contract. (The fact that folks actually contemplating violent attacks tend to be idiots helps, too.)
We have (a relatively recent phenomenon) elected Police and Crime Commissioners. They are elected with a tiny turnout. Next election in your area see if a candidate is anti-surveillance and run a campaign to support them. 10,000 extra votes to any of the mainstream candidates will get them elected.
Another addition to this thread of things that will never happen.
Flock cameras are assisted suicide for dying neighborhoods. They don't prevent crime, they record crime. Cleaning up vacant lots, planting trees, street lighting, trash removal, and traffic calming like adding planters and crosswalks reduce crime.
The vast majority of crimes are committed by a small percentage of people. The real issue is prosecutors who refuse to incarcerate repeat offenders. But having video evidence is a powerful tool for a motivated prosecutor to actually take criminals off the streets
You have to understand that the people who want mass incarceration/neo slavery are never going to want to stop locking people up.
Of course he thinks the incarceration rate is too low; people who express this opinion are at some level a justification for incarceration rates continuing to rise.
Who do you think those people are that are incarcerated in the USA?
I come across this rather frequently among people from sheltered backgrounds like those who graduated from mom and dad taking care of them, all the way through to Mega Corp/university taking care of them, and absolutely cannot fathom why everyone doesn’t just eat cake.
I have a working theory that this effect, whatever one wants to call it, of people being too abstracted from reality, is ultimately the source of collapse of all kinds of organizations of humans… including civilizations.
It is, for example also why America can have so many vile warmongering people, because not only do they not have to lead troops into battle, have their children drafted into the front lines, or pay for the invariable disaster and murder they perpetrated and orchestrated; but in the most grotesque way, they profit from it and immensely; usually also combining it with other types of fraud like “money printing”, i.e., counterfeiting, which they use to plunder the wealth they accumulated through murder, mayhem, and fraud.
We spend $80 billion a year on incarceration in the US, and have the highest incarceration rate in the world. Your plan increases both. Do you honestly think that if we spend $160 billion or $240 billion a year and double or triple our incarcerated population that we'd solve crime?
Look at places and countries with low crime. They don't have the most Flock cameras, the most prisoners, or the most powerful surveillance evidence because while those may solve a crime, they don't solve crime as a whole.
The real problem with prosecutors is that they don't want to prosecute. When I was on the grand jury in my city a couple of years ago, there was a slow morning and the assistant DA said that there were about 4000 cases per year and that they brought 30 of those to trial. He didn't think anything of it, for him it was a story about how they loved trials because "they were so much fun". But if they were so much fun, why are less than 1% of cases going to trial?
Plea deals.
Plea deals subvert justice for both those innocent who are bullied into pleading out, and for those who are wickedly guilty and get a big discount on the penalty exacted. Plea deals give the system extra capacity for prosecution, encouraging the justice system to fill the excess capacity, while simultaneously giving an underfunded system that doesn't have enough capacity the appearance of being able to handle the load. Bad all around.
Depends a lot on the city/state.
Check super blue cities like Seattle or San Francisco, and the people there complain that the justice system doesn't work as repeat offenders are let go, for one reason or another.
The big incarceration states are most likely deep red states.
The incarceration rate of every single US state is higher than that of every country in the European continent except Belarus, Russia and Turkey. Each state's incarceration rate is also higher than that of every country in the OECD (a club of mostly rich countries) except Chile, Costa Rica and Turkey.
Of the exceptions I have listed, Turkey has the highest incarceration rate of 366 per 100k. Even so, it is still lower than that of 41 states, falling between Hawaii (367) and Connecticut (326).
I live in Canada, to me the US is a whole. I am pretty sure one can find close to crimeless areas there along with something totally opposite. does not matter from the outside.
there exists evidence proving that a fraction of individuals commit the majority of violent crime. thus, incarcerating those particular individuals would inherently reduce the majority of violent crime. is something missing from this equation?
I read that as questioning whether better evidence would actually help. Which I assume is a reference to some prosecutors ignoring certain crimes as a matter of policy, for example there was news a bit ago about CA choosing to ignore shoplifting under some amount.
If you’d like to have an informed opinion, at least engage with the academic material. Otherwise you come off sounding naïve, insisting that complex problems have simple solutions.
Edit: maybe my ears are a bit sensitive, but I can’t help but hear a faint whistle in the wind, maybe only at a frequency a dog could hear. But no, surely not here in gentlemanly company.
That’s not what I’m disputing, of course. I’m disputing that the grandparent’s assertion that if we (by your stats) simply lock up 1% of the population that violent crime would drop by 60%.
I mean, trivially, using our brains for a nanosecond, what if that 1% of the population is almost always 16-18 year olds when they commit those violent crimes. The 16-18 demographic is roughly 4% of the US population (Google). That would mean locking up 1 in 4 high school students for 6-20 of their most formative years, and thrusting them back into society with a “Mission Accomplished” banner hanging behind you.
Play with the numbers a bit (maybe it’s 1 in 20), but the point stands. Using imprisonment to try to quarantine a demographic that is perceived as irreparably violent is a barbaric, sophomoric idea that has very little evidence of success in the modern era.
Don't jail criminals because maybe they're young, that's your argument? Sounds like a something that's already part of the sentencing policy, leniency of first time offenders.
There are two ideas here - locking up actual criminals and locking up people who happen to fit the pattern of a criminal even without committing any crime. You're arguing against the latter, but I don't think anybody was proposing that.
you are accusing me of virtue signalling without discussing the evidence. this in itself is a virtue signal. I'm not trying to insult you by saying this ... you are behaving hypocritically. lots of people don't treat that gently, I genuinely suggest you be careful towards whom you act that way. if you have an actual point I'm happy to chat about it, however my tolerance of snippy snappy rhetoric is running low
Nah man I’m going to continue to proudly call out people who skirt the line of racism by advocating for the same policies that racists have championed since the fall of the Confederacy. Say it with your chest next time, there’s a reason that it’s not tolerated in polite company. I guess maybe some of YCombinator would enjoy it though, judging by their investments and the rhetoric of those they are associated with.
it sounds to me like you would prefer moral grandstanding about north american politics instead of sharing discussion. not interested, thanks for the opportunity to practice my patience
If you're in the bay area, on Monday at 6:30 there's a mountain view city council meeting where flock is on the agenda. If this surveillance bothers you, show up!!
Id argue they run this site as a forum for tech discussions, because that alone gives them a huge boost to their image and name recognition, without any need for meddling.
flock safety were in one of y combinators incubator programs but to be fair, saying you want to make a camera company to improve public safety but then being used in a dystopian way... well it should have been foreseeable shouldn't it? Im conflicted in this, I love camera tech and its probably not going away any time soon, but wonder how it could be used responsibly for public safety only.
There's a real distinction worth making here between surveillance infrastructure and investigative tools. Flock is mass passive collection -- camera on every corner, running 24/7, feeding a database law enforcement queries at will. What people are actually hungry for is the opposite: targeted, on-demand tools that regular people control. The same instinct that has people pulling down cameras is what's driving grassroots OSINT communities -- they want to be able to find things themselves without being watched by someone else's system. ghostcatchers.net
I personally wouldn't want police to have access to Flock's data unless they have a warrant to follow the movements of a specific individual. If private organizations and citizens had at-will access to this kind of data it would be worse than a panopticon. It'd be a prison where every inmate is under constant surveillance, not just by guards, but by other inmates. There would be criminals using this data to track down and harass judges. Burglers using it to find empty homes. Rapists using it to track down victims. You name it.
Surveillance systems are, normally, a trade-off between privacy and safety. You lose one but gain the other. The reason Flock cameras are being torn down now is because they take away privacy while simultaneously reducing safety.
Is funny reading this from the UK because this ship sailed here years ago, you just have to assume if you drive a car anywhere except small roads in the countryside you are potentially being tracked by ANPR.
Of course, actual serious criminals who are actively committing serious crimes just use fake plates so they aren't affected, it only really helps catch people who commit crimes on the spur of the moment (while also obviously eroding every "normal" person's privacy)
Good. Throw a monkey wrench into their gears at every opportunity you're comfortable with. Don't let them get away with tearing down our basic needs for privacy and safety. We don't have to give in to Big Tech and its surveillance for profit goals.
This is cool and all but Ring is the vastly more important target.
I don't think we can pretend the definition of "public" didn't change, now that it means "something is likely recorded for all time and you have no control over where it goes and literally everyone in the world can see it."
Meanwhile, in Brazil, a market is growing for stolen surveillance cameras. Just think how lovely: a technology created to restrict crime is actually feeding it.
People always hated the cameras. It's just that now that people feel comfortable that the government won't move heaven and earth to come after them for daring to vandalize it's infrastructure they're finally acting up. But they wanted to all along.
> In Chicago, where speed cameras are abundant, the camera program improperly gave out over $2.4 million in fines from 2013 to 2015. Using a random sample analysis, the Chicago Tribune estimated the number of bad tickets to be somewhere around 110,000. The erroneous fines were issued in areas without proper speed limit signs or during times when the cameras should have been turned off. (Cameras near parks and schools operate within a specific timeframe.) The Chicago Tribune found that over half the cameras in use were giving out faulty speeding tickets.
> Unsurprisingly, the misuse of speed cameras has also become a massive source of revenue for local government. In Chicago, 300 of the city's speed cameras would bring in about $15 million each year.
> In March, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot lowered the speed limit threshold for speed cameras to trigger a citation. Cameras now trigger when a driver goes over the limit by 6 miles per hour, rather than 10 miles per hour, the previous threshold.
I think we need to make it easier for people to fight back against automatic tickets like this. The onus should be on the state not the individual. And individuals should still be entitled to their data
I have similar and deep privacy concerns. But I also know that cameras have helped find criminals and assist crime victims. I don't want to let fugitives go without punishment. In fact, I must admit that cameras are a realistic choice given the current technology.
Flock Safety must be under public evaluation. Tech companies tend to hide technical specs, calling them trade secrets. But most internet security standards are public. What should be private is the encryption key. The measure to protect development effort is patents, which are public in the registry.
Why are tech specs relevant here? The problem with Flock is that once the data is collected, and once it's made accessible to law enforcement without any legal review, it's going to be used for solving heinous crimes, for keeping tabs on a vocal critic of the police commissioner, and for checking what the officer's ex-wife is up to.
If the cameras were installed and operated by the DHS or by the local PD, would that make you feel better? The data should not exist, or if it must, it shouldn't be accessible without court approval. The model you're proposing doesn't ensure that; in fact, it moves it closer to the parties most likely to misuse it.
The cameras aren't the problem, it's the companies behind them.
Everybody wants murderers and rapists in jail, nobody wants to 24/7 share their location and upload their every thoughts to palantir and other companies operated by degenerates like Thiel
There's no money to be made arresting criminals. Sure you get a few police contracts, and you need to show enough results to keep them.. but your moat is mostly how hard it is to even submit bids.
There's a lot more money to be made knowing that Accountant Mary's Lexis is looking kind of banged up and she could be sold on a new one.
This has nothing to do with the actual problem, which is Flock itself.
The fact that Flock controls all of the cameras, all of the data and said data is easily accessible means police and the state have access to information that they should only get with a warrant. A business having a camera storing video data that's completely local isn't an issue. A business having a camera which is connected to every other business that has a camera is.
Since when are warrants required for footage of people in public? Does a red light camera need a judge's warrant before it snaps a photos of a car running the light?
I'm surprised the flock cameras aren't being disabled in a more subtle fashion.
All it takes is a tiny drone with a stick attached, and at the end of that stick is a tiny sponge soaked with tempera paint. Drone goes 'boop' on the camera lens, and the entire system is disabled until an expensive technician drives out with a ladder and cleans the lens at non-trivial expense.
A handful of enterprising activists could blind all the flock cameras in a region in a day or two, and without destroying them, which makes it less of an overtly criminal act.
Obviously not advocating this, just pointing out that flock is very vulnerable to this very simple attack from activists.
The goal here by activists isn't to directly physically disarm every camera. Like with any act of protest, it's at least as much about the optics and influence of public opinion. Visibly destroying the units is more cathartic and spreads the message of displeasure better. Ultimately what needs to change is public perception and policy.
If it's about sending a message, I think using a drone to defeat mass surveillance is quite evocative.
Yes. It will invoke the state to pass even more draconian laws surrounding useful technology.
You want to evoke the people and not the state.
That poor printer in Office Space…
It had it coming.
Sure, but por que no los dos.
One or two cameras getting bashed is basically a fart in the wind for flock, and I'd argue that it doesn't actually move the needle in any direction as far as public opinion goes. Those who dislike them don't need further convincing, those who support them are not going to have their opinion changed by property destruction (it might make them support surveillance more, in fact).
But hey, it's provocative I guess.
On the other hand flock losing their entire fleet is an existential problem for them, and for all the customers they're charging for the use of that fleet. Their BoD will want answers about why the officers of the company are harming shareholders with the way they're operating the business. Cities that have contracts with them may have grounds to terminate them, etc etc.
Why would I fly an expensive drone close to a camera, fumble about for a minute trying to get it painted like a renaissance artist, when I can get a paintball gun for much less?
Or use a powerful enough laser pointer. Bonus points if you use infrared since other humans can't see the beam and won't know what you're up to.
Though you either need a laser powerful enough to harm human eyes or lots of patience. Hong Kong protesters innovated a lot of these sort of resistance using lasers
So you can do it without your image being captured by the camera?
The camera doesn't have a 360 field of vision, besides COVID masks aren't uncommon now.
Where I am (Sydney Australia) we have fixed speed cameras that automatically create speeding fines to drivers going too fast (well, technically the registered owner of the vehicle via ANPR).
They eventually had to equip pretty much every speed camera with a speed camera camera, usually on a much higher pole to make vandalism more difficult.
This will never be a thing in America. Good luck putting the camera on a pole higher than a redneck can shoot a rifle.
Sounds like a new remit for the NRO. Park a billion dollar satellite over an area to keep an eye out for petty vandalism. Then the sheriffs office can team up with Space Force: papers will be served immediately by LEO MIRV deployment, which may also count as execution depending on visibility and aim on the day.
/s - but it wouldn't surprise me at the rate things are going.
We've already got this and it's maybe more capable than you'd think.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARGUS-IS
I just have to say: this whole thread is great absurd comedy - I don't think I have laughed at something on HN that much before :).
https://www.wsfa.com/2026/02/07/police-use-drone-technology-...
will you stop giving these folks ideas on how to spend more tax payers money?
/s (but not really)
We already have speed cameras Al over NYC. Often the posted speeds there are 25 leading to some absurd tickets.
1. Shooting rifles in an urban area sounds like a great way to go to prison.
2. As of 2026, most rednecks seem to be all for the police state. Don't expect them to come save you.
Oof, I really hate this automated enforcement. Might be time to get a paintball gun.
Also here:
"In NSW, paintball is classified as a "prohibited firearm" under the Firearms Act 1996. However, it can still be legally played under strict licensing conditions. Unlike in some states where it is more loosely regulated, players and operators in NSW must comply with a range of legal requirements to ensure safety and legality."
These rules have changed, I think back before COVID they reclassified them as sporting equipment instead of firearms, but still brought in a whole bunch of licensing rules and requirements similar to gun ownership.
You can't just walk into KMart and walk out with a paintball gun here. |Or paintball markers.
And this is the reason I can’t wait for self driving cars that just follow the speed limit.
Tbh an overpowered laser off alibaba probably works a lot better at longer range
A paintball gun might not invoke the federal government to hunt you down; an over-powered laser absolutely will. The FAA has a very low tolerance for that sort of thing. Do not ever, ever, ever use lasers in open air that are capable of damaging the human retina without the appropriate licenses. The last thing cities need right now is another federal agency going on a witchhunt. Firing eye-damaging lasers into the air would just serve them that excuse on a silvered platter.
The CCDs in cameras can be damaged with low-power lasers, or so I thought. No need for anything crazy. And the FAA won't become involved unless you're pointing them skyward. Pointing them across the street, or anywhere not visible from the air isn't going to sic federal agencies on you.
> And the FAA won't become involved unless you're pointing them skyward.
The point here is that 'skyward' is where the laser's beam goes when you're trying to aim it at a camera up on a pole. It's practically impossible to point a non-fixed position laser at something a non-trivial distance higher than you without spilling a large amount of laser beam into whatever happens to be behind your intended target; which is very often the sky.
> Might be time to get a paintball gun
Just wait until you find out that paintball guns are considered firearms are require licensing in the aforementioned region.
I played paintball in Australia and I just had to sign a normal waiver about them not being responsible for injuries
Ownership of paintball guns is regulated under the state-level firearms act in most (all?) states and territories.
You can use them under the direct supervision of the licensed owner, but it's still quite restrictive. If you were to take one and shoot at cameras on the street it would vandalism plus firearms offences, most of which start at inversion of innocence, massive fines and move pretty quickly into prison time.
If you actually purchased one yourself in Queensland, you would need a Cat A firearms license, genuine reason, permit to acquire, safe storage etc as for a firearm.
NSW used to be similar, but a few years ago the state government had a rare moment of common sense and did away with most of that pointless bullshit.
What else could make life safer at a realistic cost for people outside of vehicles?
Urban planning that separates pedestrians and vehicles.
Roads that are narrow in places where a lower speed is desirable.
Heavy taxation on vehicles with more mass and lower visibility.
Actual licensing standards other than driving down a couple of city streets and parking.
More crossings, with lights or bridges, instead of long four-lane arterial roads with nowhere to safely cross.
We have most of that in <pick some European city/country>, and the statistics show it makes a big difference compared to the USA, but drivers still exceed the speed limit, run through red lights etc and cause injuries and death to pedestrians and cyclists.
Removing automatic enforcement of speed limits would not improve the situation.
Where I live, the speed limit keeps getting reduced so the city can make money off of fines, especially because nobody follows speed limits that are ridiculously low for wide, straight roads where following the limit would make traffic ground to a halt.
This happened in my hometown. Arterial roads that were 40mph when I was a kid are posted at 25 today and they just passed legislation to make the automated speed cameras near school zones active 24/7.
When Flock helps you lay out camera placements they make sure camera pairs are facing each other.
If you want to hit the lens with the paintball gun, wouldn't you need to be in its field of vision?
The wind could curve the ball around slightly.
It depends if its field of vision is 180° or 10°.
Drones with a paintball gun attached?
Realistically that’s going to attract a lot of negative attention.
The use of a drone also ups the ante from a prosecutor’s perspective. Charging a vandal caught with a paintbrush and a ladder is nothing out of the ordinary. A routine misdemeanor.
Someone who has the wherewithal to jerry rig a paintball gun to a drone is someone scary. Plus, any officer who witnesses such a drone is almost certainly going to misidentify the paintball gun as an actual gun. I can imagine the operator would be charged with several felonies.
Yeah like we gotta be serious here, US cops and courts are out to screw people over because that is how they increase their budget, pay, and bonuses. If they think they can twist some law into giving you a felony, they will, regardless of the spirit of the law.
Attaching any kind of potential weapon on a drone has no real precedent so they can dig through 19th century law and combine it with some 21st century law and punishment and screw your life over with bull crap unless you got $100K+ sitting around to throw on a good lawyer. The risk of being caught may be a bit lower, but the potential punishment if caught could be absolutely enormous.
Plus now you're technically arming an aircraft with something, and that might piss off the feds a little bit.
I don’t think they make commercial paintballs with hard to remove enamel or tempura paints.
True but maybe you can fill them yourself?
Last I heard, putting a glock on a quadcopter was creating an "illegal weapon system" or similar fancy sounding BS but I wonder what the accusation would be for a paintball gun on a drone?
Must less recoil too.
I don't think there's a drone in this proposal.
On the list of "laws you don't want to screw with", National Firearms Act violations are high on my list. Regardless of whether something is or isn't a violation, I'm certainly not interested in paying expensive lawyers to argue they're not.
Somewhat related, I'm pretty sure there was a guy in China who did exactly this as protest against their surveillance. Seems effective.
Shooting them with a paintball gun might be a lot simpler and has the same effect. Just needs paint that's a bit harder to remove
>All it takes is a tiny drone with a stick attached, and at the end of that stick is a tiny sponge soaked with tempera paint.
This must be the most hi-tech solution to a low tech problem I've seen this week ;)
The point of civil disobedience is to get arrested. That's what calls attention to the injustice of the thing being protested against.
The point of resistance is commonly to harm the counterparty in a fashion that the perpetrator finds morally acceptable such as to disincentivize them not convince them.
Vietnamese vs US Grunts not cute useless protestors holding signs that threaten to hold different signs longer.
> soaked with tempera paint Or even etching liquid, then you need to replace the lens.
The should disable them all in an area and pile them on a platter in a public space. Like a CiCi's takeover.
Silly string is fast, cheap, easy, and fun when it freezes onto the camera in colder environments.
Maybe some spray foam?
Goring them is about sending a message.
In Minecraft it’s well known that lasers of even moderate power can ruin camera sensors. Only in Minecraft though.
LIDAR has been screwing up traffic cameras.
Reflections are a concern regarding bystanders' eye safety, be safe.
What is the threshold for eye vs sensor damage and am I correct in assuming that duration is a factor. Basically less juice for a longer duration ruins a sensor but humans blink? For science.
I picked up an Axis security camera rated for ALPR use (the Q1700 series) and it has a safety warning telling me I shouldn't look at the built in IR LEDs for more than a minute...
You want to fly a multi-hundred dollar device loaded with radios that constantly broadcasts out a unique ID and possibly your FAA ID and use it for crime?
Or even better yet, get arrested halfway to trying to dip your drone into paint on a sidewalk?
Just throw a rock at the stupid thing.
In 1950s UK every country kid had a catapult in their pocket. Maybe that is what we should do. Give the kids catapults and tell them not to use them on Flock cameras. That is usually effective at making kids so stuff
Do all drones do this now? Is this required by law for manufacturers to implement?
Drones over 250 grams or for any drone operated commercially under part 107 registration is required. But, its easy to just build your own or desolder the id chip if you dont want it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_ID in the US (FAA) at least.
Why wouldn’t you advocate it? A much easier way of doing this is using paintballs with the appropriate paint.
> Why wouldn’t you advocate it?
Because advocating things which are moral/ethical but illegal is often against the TOS :(
We need laws which are explicitly based on moral principles. Barring that, we should at least have laws which treat sufficiently large platforms as utilities and forbid them from performing censorship without due process.
You think we should give people being moderated on a forum due process? How would we ever run forums if every contentious and necessary moderation action could lead to a 5k-50k legal bill.
...How can we run a government when every contentious and necessary moderation leads to a 5k-50k legal bill?
Oh wait... Maybe that's the problem.
I wouldn’t suggest doing that, it will result in more regulation restricting drones. I joined before few workshops that included the government too, and there were discussions about requiring a whole license every time you modify the drone, not limited to the airframe, but the flight purpose and payload. So you can imagine in the future, modding or repurposing your drone could be a “federal crime” if you don’t go and re-license the drone every time you change the payload.
Because destroying them sends a different message. People want them gone, not merely disabled. They're not joking or messing around with drones and tempera about it. Using a firearm to wreck the camera lens before tearing the whole thing down would be nice though.
That would be detectable by the FAA and they would send the FBI after you, unless you used a junk toy drone but that would not cover much distance between charges.
> A handful of enterprising activists could blind all the flock cameras in a region in a day or two, and without destroying them, which makes it less of an overtly criminal act
No, that would likely end in a RICO or terrorism case if it continued. Just because the cameras aren't destroyed doesn't mean CorpGov won't want to teach a lesson.
You can put a garbage bag over them if you don’t want to sawzall the pole and dispose of the hardware.
What you want is for this to become a Tiktok craze.
>All it takes is a tiny drone with a stick attached, and at the end of that stick is a tiny sponge soaked with tempera paint. Drone goes 'boop' on the camera lens, and the entire system is disabled until an expensive technician drives out with a ladder and cleans the lens at non-trivial expense
Americans don’t care enough
Too busy enjoying S&P500 near 7,000 and US$84,000/year median household income
> All it takes is a tiny drone with a stick attached, and at the end of that stick is a tiny sponge soaked with tempera paint
I (EDIT: hate) Flock Safety cameras. If someone did this in my town, I’d want them arrested.
They’re muddying the moral clarity of the anti-Flock messaging, the ultimate goal in any protest. And if they’re willing to damage that property, I’m not convinced they understand why they shouldn’t damage other property. (More confidently, I’m not convinced others believe they can tell the difference.)
Flock Safety messages on security. Undermining that pitch is helpful. Underwriting it with random acts of performative chaos plays into their appeal.
> flock is very vulnerable to this very simple attack
We live in a free society, i.e. one with significant individual autonomy. We’re all always very vulnerable. That’s the social contract. (The fact that folks actually contemplating violent attacks tend to be idiots helps, too.)
Oh no! Not property damage! We can't possibly go that far!
> Not property damage! We can't possibly go that far!
Anyone can go that far. The question is if it’s smart. The answer is it’s not. Acting out one’s need for machismo on a good cause is just selfish.
If I were a Flock PR person, I’d be waiting for someone to pull a stunt like this. (Better: they shoot it.)
> I haste Flock Safety cameras.
Was this a typo? If not, what does "haste" mean in this context? (I'm not messing with you; I'm genuinely wondering.)
It was a typo. Fixed.
Oh please. Its tempera paint. It'll probably wash off in the next rain.
> Its tempera paint. It'll probably wash off in the next rain
If they do it right. If they don’t, it doesn’t. And between the action and the next rain, Flock Safety gets to message about vandalism.
In the UK these cameras are everywhere.
We have (a relatively recent phenomenon) elected Police and Crime Commissioners. They are elected with a tiny turnout. Next election in your area see if a candidate is anti-surveillance and run a campaign to support them. 10,000 extra votes to any of the mainstream candidates will get them elected.
Another addition to this thread of things that will never happen.
PCCs are being scrapped and their role reverted to national government
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c93d4dd3l3lo
Party because people haven’t got a clue what they do, partly as they have very little power, and party as it’s just a popularity vote on the rosette.
Personally I’m more worried about ring door bells, but I’ve spent years being told I’m paranoid.
Flock cameras are assisted suicide for dying neighborhoods. They don't prevent crime, they record crime. Cleaning up vacant lots, planting trees, street lighting, trash removal, and traffic calming like adding planters and crosswalks reduce crime.
What is crime anymore when a felon is the president?
What is a felony anymore when the felony is "submitted bad paperwork"?
I love how we in Africa can finally see open corruption in US. You guys can't be high and mighty anymore. You are one of us now.
like the somali daycares?
Fuck me, that is a deeply depressing sick burn.
The vast majority of crimes are committed by a small percentage of people. The real issue is prosecutors who refuse to incarcerate repeat offenders. But having video evidence is a powerful tool for a motivated prosecutor to actually take criminals off the streets
It's wild that you think the problem with the US is too low of an incarceration rate. 25% of all prisoners in the world are in the US
You have to understand that the people who want mass incarceration/neo slavery are never going to want to stop locking people up.
Of course he thinks the incarceration rate is too low; people who express this opinion are at some level a justification for incarceration rates continuing to rise.
It can be true (and likely is) that both:
a) much more time and effort should be focused on catching and stopping the most persistent repeat offenders (sometimes by locking them up); and
b) orders of magnitude too many Americans are currently in prison.
Who do you think those people are that are incarcerated in the USA?
I come across this rather frequently among people from sheltered backgrounds like those who graduated from mom and dad taking care of them, all the way through to Mega Corp/university taking care of them, and absolutely cannot fathom why everyone doesn’t just eat cake.
I have a working theory that this effect, whatever one wants to call it, of people being too abstracted from reality, is ultimately the source of collapse of all kinds of organizations of humans… including civilizations.
It is, for example also why America can have so many vile warmongering people, because not only do they not have to lead troops into battle, have their children drafted into the front lines, or pay for the invariable disaster and murder they perpetrated and orchestrated; but in the most grotesque way, they profit from it and immensely; usually also combining it with other types of fraud like “money printing”, i.e., counterfeiting, which they use to plunder the wealth they accumulated through murder, mayhem, and fraud.
We spend $80 billion a year on incarceration in the US, and have the highest incarceration rate in the world. Your plan increases both. Do you honestly think that if we spend $160 billion or $240 billion a year and double or triple our incarcerated population that we'd solve crime?
Look at places and countries with low crime. They don't have the most Flock cameras, the most prisoners, or the most powerful surveillance evidence because while those may solve a crime, they don't solve crime as a whole.
> The real issue is prosecutors who refuse to incarcerate repeat offenders.
Sometimes judges contribute as well.
The real problem with prosecutors is that they don't want to prosecute. When I was on the grand jury in my city a couple of years ago, there was a slow morning and the assistant DA said that there were about 4000 cases per year and that they brought 30 of those to trial. He didn't think anything of it, for him it was a story about how they loved trials because "they were so much fun". But if they were so much fun, why are less than 1% of cases going to trial?
Plea deals.
Plea deals subvert justice for both those innocent who are bullied into pleading out, and for those who are wickedly guilty and get a big discount on the penalty exacted. Plea deals give the system extra capacity for prosecution, encouraging the justice system to fill the excess capacity, while simultaneously giving an underfunded system that doesn't have enough capacity the appearance of being able to handle the load. Bad all around.
>"The real issue is prosecutors who refuse to incarcerate repeat offenders"
Sure. US prosecutors are so lenient that the US is the capital of incarceration
Depends a lot on the city/state. Check super blue cities like Seattle or San Francisco, and the people there complain that the justice system doesn't work as repeat offenders are let go, for one reason or another.
The big incarceration states are most likely deep red states.
The incarceration rate of every single US state is higher than that of every country in the European continent except Belarus, Russia and Turkey. Each state's incarceration rate is also higher than that of every country in the OECD (a club of mostly rich countries) except Chile, Costa Rica and Turkey.
Of the exceptions I have listed, Turkey has the highest incarceration rate of 366 per 100k. Even so, it is still lower than that of 41 states, falling between Hawaii (367) and Connecticut (326).
Source: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/global/2024.html
I live in Canada, to me the US is a whole. I am pretty sure one can find close to crimeless areas there along with something totally opposite. does not matter from the outside.
This is literally true and you think you are being snarky but just look ignorant.
I can't tell which element(s) of the previous post you are criticizing.
Ignorant of what may I ask? Also I do not "think".
Any evidence of what you're saying about prosecutors and video surveillance?
there exists evidence proving that a fraction of individuals commit the majority of violent crime. thus, incarcerating those particular individuals would inherently reduce the majority of violent crime. is something missing from this equation?
I read that as questioning whether better evidence would actually help. Which I assume is a reference to some prosecutors ignoring certain crimes as a matter of policy, for example there was news a bit ago about CA choosing to ignore shoplifting under some amount.
> is something missing from this equation?
Decades of historical evidence to the contrary.
If you’d like to have an informed opinion, at least engage with the academic material. Otherwise you come off sounding naïve, insisting that complex problems have simple solutions.
Edit: maybe my ears are a bit sensitive, but I can’t help but hear a faint whistle in the wind, maybe only at a frequency a dog could hear. But no, surely not here in gentlemanly company.
What evidence to the contrary? 1% of the US population does commit over 60% of violent crime: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3969807/
That’s not what I’m disputing, of course. I’m disputing that the grandparent’s assertion that if we (by your stats) simply lock up 1% of the population that violent crime would drop by 60%.
I mean, trivially, using our brains for a nanosecond, what if that 1% of the population is almost always 16-18 year olds when they commit those violent crimes. The 16-18 demographic is roughly 4% of the US population (Google). That would mean locking up 1 in 4 high school students for 6-20 of their most formative years, and thrusting them back into society with a “Mission Accomplished” banner hanging behind you.
Play with the numbers a bit (maybe it’s 1 in 20), but the point stands. Using imprisonment to try to quarantine a demographic that is perceived as irreparably violent is a barbaric, sophomoric idea that has very little evidence of success in the modern era.
Don't jail criminals because maybe they're young, that's your argument? Sounds like a something that's already part of the sentencing policy, leniency of first time offenders.
There are two ideas here - locking up actual criminals and locking up people who happen to fit the pattern of a criminal even without committing any crime. You're arguing against the latter, but I don't think anybody was proposing that.
you are accusing me of virtue signalling without discussing the evidence. this in itself is a virtue signal. I'm not trying to insult you by saying this ... you are behaving hypocritically. lots of people don't treat that gently, I genuinely suggest you be careful towards whom you act that way. if you have an actual point I'm happy to chat about it, however my tolerance of snippy snappy rhetoric is running low
Nah man I’m going to continue to proudly call out people who skirt the line of racism by advocating for the same policies that racists have championed since the fall of the Confederacy. Say it with your chest next time, there’s a reason that it’s not tolerated in polite company. I guess maybe some of YCombinator would enjoy it though, judging by their investments and the rhetoric of those they are associated with.
it sounds to me like you would prefer moral grandstanding about north american politics instead of sharing discussion. not interested, thanks for the opportunity to practice my patience
If you're in the bay area, on Monday at 6:30 there's a mountain view city council meeting where flock is on the agenda. If this surveillance bothers you, show up!!
Do you have a link to the agenda? The only Monday meeting I see on the mountain view site is a Board of Library Trustees meeting
It’s listed on the agenda here as “Automated License Plate Reader Contract.” https://mountainview.legistar.com/MeetingDetail.aspx?ID=1352...
> If this surveillance bothers you, show up!!
Bothers me, but not enough to drive to city hall
Doesn’t even bother me enough to send an email quite frankly
What bothered you to make this comment?
Political apathy is not an aspiration. It's the reason we're in this mess.
Learned helplessness is contagious. So is hope.
Here's a list of Flock's investors:
- Andreessen Horowitz
- Greenoaks Capital
- Bedrock Capital
- Meritech Capital
- Matrix Partners
- Sands Capital
- Founders Fund
- Kleiner Perkins
- Tiger Global
- Y Combinator
Y Combinator's CEO promotes and praises them almost every day.
I am absolutely shocked
Pretty clear already that Ycombinator runs this very site as a community fueled decoy for their actual values (or complete lack thereof).
Id argue they run this site as a forum for tech discussions, because that alone gives them a huge boost to their image and name recognition, without any need for meddling.
flock safety were in one of y combinators incubator programs but to be fair, saying you want to make a camera company to improve public safety but then being used in a dystopian way... well it should have been foreseeable shouldn't it? Im conflicted in this, I love camera tech and its probably not going away any time soon, but wonder how it could be used responsibly for public safety only.
They actively WANT the dystopian surveillance state.
There's a real distinction worth making here between surveillance infrastructure and investigative tools. Flock is mass passive collection -- camera on every corner, running 24/7, feeding a database law enforcement queries at will. What people are actually hungry for is the opposite: targeted, on-demand tools that regular people control. The same instinct that has people pulling down cameras is what's driving grassroots OSINT communities -- they want to be able to find things themselves without being watched by someone else's system. ghostcatchers.net
I personally wouldn't want police to have access to Flock's data unless they have a warrant to follow the movements of a specific individual. If private organizations and citizens had at-will access to this kind of data it would be worse than a panopticon. It'd be a prison where every inmate is under constant surveillance, not just by guards, but by other inmates. There would be criminals using this data to track down and harass judges. Burglers using it to find empty homes. Rapists using it to track down victims. You name it.
Surveillance systems are, normally, a trade-off between privacy and safety. You lose one but gain the other. The reason Flock cameras are being torn down now is because they take away privacy while simultaneously reducing safety.
> I personally wouldn't want police to have access to Flock's data unless they have a warrant to follow the movements of a specific individual.
LOL
> If private organizations and citizens had at-will access to this kind of data it would be worse than a panopticon.
... They do, are you joking?
Is funny reading this from the UK because this ship sailed here years ago, you just have to assume if you drive a car anywhere except small roads in the countryside you are potentially being tracked by ANPR.
Of course, actual serious criminals who are actively committing serious crimes just use fake plates so they aren't affected, it only really helps catch people who commit crimes on the spur of the moment (while also obviously eroding every "normal" person's privacy)
It also encourages councils to regularly change their road signs for side roads, to catch suddenly new trespassers in real time.
Good. Throw a monkey wrench into their gears at every opportunity you're comfortable with. Don't let them get away with tearing down our basic needs for privacy and safety. We don't have to give in to Big Tech and its surveillance for profit goals.
This will start happening to Ring cameras as well soon if it's not already.
Hello! You are being recor--hey what are you doing stop that, I'm afraid, Dave, I'm afraid...
This is cool and all but Ring is the vastly more important target.
I don't think we can pretend the definition of "public" didn't change, now that it means "something is likely recorded for all time and you have no control over where it goes and literally everyone in the world can see it."
False dichotomy. Both are bad.
Next they can work on the Adhan speakers
Meanwhile, in Brazil, a market is growing for stolen surveillance cameras. Just think how lovely: a technology created to restrict crime is actually feeding it.
Why is the market growing for stolen surveillance cameras in Brazil?
Because they're easy to steal.
That's honestly kinda beautiful. If they want more useful/advanced cameras, it just makes them more worth stealing
Wait til they hear about Obvio https://www.obvio.ai/
People always hated the cameras. It's just that now that people feel comfortable that the government won't move heaven and earth to come after them for daring to vandalize it's infrastructure they're finally acting up. But they wanted to all along.
Ultra-based. Fuck these creepy things and anyone who installs them.
Speed cameras next. Just another privacy violating device that is also a revenue source for irresponsible local leaders.
Hmm your comment made me curious so I looked into it. I guess the error rates are so incredibly high it seems likely they aren't "errors" at all.
https://reason.com/2022/02/03/unreliable-speed-cameras-line-...
> In Chicago, where speed cameras are abundant, the camera program improperly gave out over $2.4 million in fines from 2013 to 2015. Using a random sample analysis, the Chicago Tribune estimated the number of bad tickets to be somewhere around 110,000. The erroneous fines were issued in areas without proper speed limit signs or during times when the cameras should have been turned off. (Cameras near parks and schools operate within a specific timeframe.) The Chicago Tribune found that over half the cameras in use were giving out faulty speeding tickets.
> Unsurprisingly, the misuse of speed cameras has also become a massive source of revenue for local government. In Chicago, 300 of the city's speed cameras would bring in about $15 million each year.
> In March, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot lowered the speed limit threshold for speed cameras to trigger a citation. Cameras now trigger when a driver goes over the limit by 6 miles per hour, rather than 10 miles per hour, the previous threshold.
I think we need to make it easier for people to fight back against automatic tickets like this. The onus should be on the state not the individual. And individuals should still be entitled to their data
I have similar and deep privacy concerns. But I also know that cameras have helped find criminals and assist crime victims. I don't want to let fugitives go without punishment. In fact, I must admit that cameras are a realistic choice given the current technology.
Flock Safety must be under public evaluation. Tech companies tend to hide technical specs, calling them trade secrets. But most internet security standards are public. What should be private is the encryption key. The measure to protect development effort is patents, which are public in the registry.
Why are tech specs relevant here? The problem with Flock is that once the data is collected, and once it's made accessible to law enforcement without any legal review, it's going to be used for solving heinous crimes, for keeping tabs on a vocal critic of the police commissioner, and for checking what the officer's ex-wife is up to.
If the cameras were installed and operated by the DHS or by the local PD, would that make you feel better? The data should not exist, or if it must, it shouldn't be accessible without court approval. The model you're proposing doesn't ensure that; in fact, it moves it closer to the parties most likely to misuse it.
> I don't want to let fugitives go without punishment.
There is a famous quote about this that needs to be updated for the modern age.
"I'd rather let ten fugitives go unsurveilled, than to surveil one innocent person."
The cameras aren't the problem, it's the companies behind them.
Everybody wants murderers and rapists in jail, nobody wants to 24/7 share their location and upload their every thoughts to palantir and other companies operated by degenerates like Thiel
A significant number of people do not seem to want copper thieves, porch pirates, and organized retail thieves in jail.
If it requires constant public surveillance to catch them then yeah they can stay out of jail.
> 24/7 share their location and upload their every thoughts to palantir and other companies operated by degenerates like Thiel
It's so funny though that the majority of all people are doing exactly this, 24/7.
Follow the money.
There's no money to be made arresting criminals. Sure you get a few police contracts, and you need to show enough results to keep them.. but your moat is mostly how hard it is to even submit bids.
There's a lot more money to be made knowing that Accountant Mary's Lexis is looking kind of banged up and she could be sold on a new one.
This has nothing to do with the actual problem, which is Flock itself.
The fact that Flock controls all of the cameras, all of the data and said data is easily accessible means police and the state have access to information that they should only get with a warrant. A business having a camera storing video data that's completely local isn't an issue. A business having a camera which is connected to every other business that has a camera is.
Since when are warrants required for footage of people in public? Does a red light camera need a judge's warrant before it snaps a photos of a car running the light?