Musician-turning-tech anarchist (?) Benn Jordan is making a very interesting series of videos about Flock cameras, their poor safety, and their gray-area interfacing with local governments:
I think his comment about "why dogs might provide actual neighborhood safety" is a good reminder that the thing that makes communities safe is "knowing your neighbors." You don't get safety by building a castle with a moat and a million cameras. You get safety by building a community with context that can respond without having to just "react" to the 6s version of "what happened".
I'm reminded of prepper forum discussions. Where some do little more than hoard supplies, weapons and gadgets yet don't network and build communities. In an actual societal breakdown scenario these isolated individuals will become loot drops for others who actually band together.
I agree that there is a parallel between governments and corporations multiplying surveillance and preppers impractically multiplying gadgets. I perceive both to be responding to some sort of psychological issue relating to control or insecurity, not to be practically pursuing resilience.
A government with aggressive surveillance ambitions but a decaying police department and justice system looks to me very much like the guy with a mountain of guns and ammo but no parallel investment in something like battlefield medicine. Whatever you're telling yourself about the reason for what you're doing, it is manifestly not correct, at least going by other investments I would expect to see and find neglected.
It's not that they'll be able to call on one another - you can't guarantee who else will be around after The Bad Event (whatever it is).
It's that they don't have the basic strength of building alliances in the first place - something every kid is supposed to learn through the joys and pains of playing together. Bullies are not generally the popular ones, but neither are the loners.
To put it another way: castles can't survive siege forever. They are a delaying tactic until outside help can arrive.
"The Dauphin, whom of succors we entreated,
Returns us that his powers are yet not ready
To raise so great a siege. Therefore, great king,
We yield our town and lives to thy soft mercy."
-- Henry V, Act 3, scene 3
Heh, I never thought about that but its so true. If society breaks down on the extreme level they anticipate the smart thing to do is probably join a super tight-knit community with lots of young people - maybe the furries or the Amish.
If society breaks down it will be too late to join such groups for nearly all outsiders. Unless you bring very valuable skills or other attributes to the table.
The time to build your community is now, before things get so bad every helpless individual is looking for a group to save them.
I wonder whether The Walking Dead ever did episodes with a surviving Amish community among it's many spinoffs. Potential problem for them is being outgunned by any aggressive community nearby.
And the cameras can provide them with solar panels.
I’m lucky to live in a walker-friendly neighborhood where most homes aren’t walled off by privacy fences. I’ve found our communal strength in talking to neighbors about the cameras that feed and feed off our fear in isolation. It’s a choice.
yeah, it doesn’t a lot of thought to realize that societies thrived when they were… social. this has been repeated throughout history.
the people who go off into the woods as uber survivalists or whatever die alone and forgotten from an infected toenail or something equally as stupid while the society full of people down the mountain thrive and people remember each other.
its wild to me how many people are suckered in by the never ending fear mongering that prepper businesses push on them without ever thinking it through.
Many may find it unintuitive, but one of the best things you can do for the actual security of a neighborhood is to design it for pedestrian and "loitering" friendliness.
This is extremely salient. Check out Phoenix, AZ sometime in street view. It's a brutalist grid of wide roads (even in "residential zones") where every property is lined in a six-foot block wall. As a result, sight lines are excellent for drivers (encouraging high speeds) but terrible for homeowners. Kids can't reasonably roam free, neighbors rarely meet, and everyone is viewed with suspicion. Most of my neighbors are really decent people, but I see them so rarely we might as live in different cities.
Vietnam is extremely safe because there are communities everywhere. There are old folks watching young folks. One viet friend said there's an expression "rice-powered cameras" which refers to people that start filming when something is happening.
I need you to reread my comment, and then paraphrase what you think I said, for me. Cause I don't get how this is someone's response to my comment in a million years unless it's like intentional rage bait, or something.
Benn's videos along with this one from a very chill middle-aged engineer/state rep made the difference in swaying our town to discontinue its Flock contract: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwbE5ks7dFg
Someone complaining about local governments having data while directing them to YouTube, whose owner does surveillance at a scale far exceeding all local governments of all countries combined, is ironic.
Why don’t these people use Peertube at least. Fact of the matter is they’d like to personally profit off the same nonsense they complain about. This person has a million subscribers, they aren’t some random whistleblower. It’s a job, like all media, generating outrage.
If all of them used peertube maybe we’d have a solid competitor.
During the KMT military dictatorship in Taiwan, the KMT used the radio to spread its anti-democratic propaganda and disparage pro-democracy activists. Activists meanwhile spread their messages via pirate radio.
>[1] Would crime go up, down or stay the same if all surveillance cameras were removed? The answer to that is the only one that matters.
At least 40,990 [2] innocent people died in the US in 2023, without significant outcry - that is, on the road, in car accidents. People in the US clearly value the freedom of driving over the deaths of innocent people. In 2023, there were an estimated 19,800 [3] homicides in the US. But even if you assume surveillance like Flock could prevent a meaningful fraction of those homicides - and there's little evidence it does [4] - that's still asking people to give up their most sensitive freedom, the right to move without being tracked, for speculative gains. People are not willing to sacrifice their freedom to save 40,990 people from cars, why should our constant locations be monitored?
The abuse isn't speculative. Police have been caught stalking exes, tracking abortions, and innocent people [5] have been held at gunpoint due to a flock misread. The "safety" these cameras provide comes with a surveillance that's already being turned against ordinary people.
[4] Flock can't even demonstrably reduce car break-ins. The drop in San Francisco started months before cameras were installed (https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/sf-car-breakins/). If it can't prevent car beak-ins, how can we expect it to make a dent in homicides.
>misreads by Flock's automated license plate readers... resulted in people who hadn't committed crimes being stopped at gunpoint, sent to jail, or mauled by a police dog, among other outcomes.
It seems like this article buried the best lede of the story on paragraph ten, which explains Flock's new business of surveillance drones launched in response to 911 calls (and also presumably triggered by other alerts configured by police and private businesses).
> Flock has recently expanded into other technologies... Most concerning are the latest Flock drones equipped with high-powered cameras. Flock's "Drone as First Responder" platform automates drone operations, including launching them in response to 911 calls or gunfire. Flock's drones, which reach speeds up to 60 mph, can follow vehicles or people and provide information to law enforcement.
These companies build this tech in SF and Seattle, cities with some of the gnarliest public safety problems in the country, then turn around and sell it to smaller towns where it does more harm than good.
Most places in America don't have problems that surveillance solves. They have problems they already know about and won't act on. Cameras don't fix homelessness or addiction or underfunded services. They just make life harder for regular people.
But that's the whole appeal for bureaucrats. Buying a product looks like doing something without having to do any of the actual work.
I'm surprised Garrett Langley still has a job, he seems wildly out of touch. For instance he really believes that his Panopticon as a service is the reason crime is down in cities, conveniently ignoring crime rates prior to COVID.
I realize how unpopular flock is, and I will first say that I have literally never personally looked into the privacy concerns. But one city you don’t see named here is SF, which has cited Flock as a primary driver of its 10x reduction in car break-ins, and 30% reduction in burglaries. Those were a quality of life plague while I lived there
Non-US citizens - what's the situation with cameras in public spaces where you live? In my town every 2nd hour or building entrance has a private camera pointed at the street. It's very depressing because the cops don't care - I've asked 2 in a patrol car when there was a mild case of vandalism I witnessed. Technically it's illegal, but nothing happens. The public cameras are on intersection and some bus stops. Too much, if you ask me, but the private cameras are everywhere.
I'm glad Flock made it as far as they did before the ass-handing commences. Even some my normie friends and family are aware of the scourge because of their initial success, where they would otherwise think we're talking about a group of birds.
If you want to hear from the man himself, see link below. It was a fairly soft interview. I listened mainly because it was Noah and wasn't expecting him to be so pro-surveillance. So, even though I don't agree with them, it might be worth listening to their reasoning.
It's funny, if the company had just sold cameras to cities, they probably could have avoided this whole mess. But they just had to hit some keywords for Wall Street (like "AI" "cloud" and "SaaS"), which had the side-effect of making it appear (true or not) that they were part of a Palantir-style surveillance panopticon that tracks you everywhere.
That’s a big misconception, flock is a car identification system not a license plate one. I have seen many videos of some crime documentaries where flock was used to ID cars with no license plates, and weeks later they still have them in the system to track, coupled with phone tracking, they know exactly all the details needed.
this kind of headline might have some scholarly name, because, no... actually the number of cameras and feeds in the San Francisco Bay Area is multiplying rapidly, along with the entirety of California with few exceptions.. long ago, San Diego county, a military-led area, was the exception and to many pariah on the constant increase in tracking of vehicles, people and "events".. now, what used to be thought of as harsh and creepy, is not only matched in hardware, but exceeded in backend capacity, across almost every populated area
flock says customers own their data and control access. but their national lookup tool means 5,000+ agencies can search your city's cameras without your city's permission. 'customer-owned data' that anyone in the network can query isn't customer-owned in any meaningful sense.
Getting involved in local decision making is great, but theres always wire cutters and spray paint for those more inclined on a direct approach. Resisting an the rule of unjust law is always acceptable.
Someone in my hometown was arrested for vandalizing them. The media chose to say "city owned security camera". It's amazing how they will rush to defend private enterprise.
I drove into a very affluent subdivision this weekend, and like most others around here it had a flock camera recording every car on the way in. This camera, however, had the gall to advertise its presence as a neighborhood security measure. "Flock Safety watches this neighborhood" read the sign on the post, or some such. Of course the residents there had no choice but to accept its installation, as the local police support it. Nefarious framing and marketing in the name of "safety".
Couple that with age verification at the OS levels.
Devices tracked on the internet
Car tracked outside the house
Wifi 7 to track you in the house
Think of the children, the few deaths. Instead we need better policy enforcement. Expire licenses sooner, stricter driving tests, penalties on big tech, breaking up of monopolies, better social care programs, police that are trained in descalating and have empathy towards the community being policed, law makers listening to people and not lobbyists.
All of the right solutions require work. So we are left with an authoritarian fear driven state
436 comments
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMIwNiwQewQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB0gr7Fh6lY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vU1-uiUlHTo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp9MwZkHiMQ
I recommend them.
A government with aggressive surveillance ambitions but a decaying police department and justice system looks to me very much like the guy with a mountain of guns and ammo but no parallel investment in something like battlefield medicine. Whatever you're telling yourself about the reason for what you're doing, it is manifestly not correct, at least going by other investments I would expect to see and find neglected.
It's that they don't have the basic strength of building alliances in the first place - something every kid is supposed to learn through the joys and pains of playing together. Bullies are not generally the popular ones, but neither are the loners.
To put it another way: castles can't survive siege forever. They are a delaying tactic until outside help can arrive.
"The Dauphin, whom of succors we entreated, Returns us that his powers are yet not ready To raise so great a siege. Therefore, great king, We yield our town and lives to thy soft mercy." -- Henry V, Act 3, scene 3
The time to build your community is now, before things get so bad every helpless individual is looking for a group to save them.
that said, I wouldn't be surprised if the Amish already have a small stockpile for practical use cases like hunting and keeping away the English
I’m lucky to live in a walker-friendly neighborhood where most homes aren’t walled off by privacy fences. I’ve found our communal strength in talking to neighbors about the cameras that feed and feed off our fear in isolation. It’s a choice.
the people who go off into the woods as uber survivalists or whatever die alone and forgotten from an infected toenail or something equally as stupid while the society full of people down the mountain thrive and people remember each other.
its wild to me how many people are suckered in by the never ending fear mongering that prepper businesses push on them without ever thinking it through.
When some folks came by checking for unlocked back doors years ago… they skipped my house.
Don’t even need the dog sometimes.
Would we have such a problem with cameras if the videos were stored locally and not in the cloud?
Happy to provide sources when back at my keeb if rqstd.
> Cameras move crime around.
Yea, so the the next layer is, why are people committing crimes? I've made it clear I don't think you can just "turn on safety."
> Wealth inequality raises crime risk
So would we have that big of a problem with cameras everywhere if they recorded locally and we had UBI?
> but community cohesion partially buffers that effect.
How do you measure "community cohesion?"
Dog barking at mail delivery person. Delivery person goes away. Dog thinks barking saved the home.
What a great analogy.
I feel like nowadays with all the political FUD about "crime and safety" here in LA, this should be required reading
Also, I can't help but feel like I'm watching a young Dr. Emmett Brown.. Great Scott!!
There’s more of us techno anarchists out there apparently!
Why don’t these people use Peertube at least. Fact of the matter is they’d like to personally profit off the same nonsense they complain about. This person has a million subscribers, they aren’t some random whistleblower. It’s a job, like all media, generating outrage.
If all of them used peertube maybe we’d have a solid competitor.
> Fact of the matter is they’d like to personally profit off the same nonsense they complain about.
Benn Jordan's YouTube channel is a registered Nonprofit https://www.patreon.com/posts/nonprofit-has-82858569
It is very clearly because YouTube has a higher reach than any other platform in that space.
>[1] Would crime go up, down or stay the same if all surveillance cameras were removed? The answer to that is the only one that matters.
At least 40,990 [2] innocent people died in the US in 2023, without significant outcry - that is, on the road, in car accidents. People in the US clearly value the freedom of driving over the deaths of innocent people. In 2023, there were an estimated 19,800 [3] homicides in the US. But even if you assume surveillance like Flock could prevent a meaningful fraction of those homicides - and there's little evidence it does [4] - that's still asking people to give up their most sensitive freedom, the right to move without being tracked, for speculative gains. People are not willing to sacrifice their freedom to save 40,990 people from cars, why should our constant locations be monitored?
The abuse isn't speculative. Police have been caught stalking exes, tracking abortions, and innocent people [5] have been held at gunpoint due to a flock misread. The "safety" these cameras provide comes with a surveillance that's already being turned against ordinary people.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47690237
[2] https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/2022-traffic-deaths-202...
[3] https://bjs.ojp.gov/document/hvus23.pdf
[4] Flock can't even demonstrably reduce car break-ins. The drop in San Francisco started months before cameras were installed (https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/sf-car-breakins/). If it can't prevent car beak-ins, how can we expect it to make a dent in homicides.
[5] https://www.businessinsider.com/flock-safety-alpr-cameras-mi...
>misreads by Flock's automated license plate readers... resulted in people who hadn't committed crimes being stopped at gunpoint, sent to jail, or mauled by a police dog, among other outcomes.
> Flock has recently expanded into other technologies... Most concerning are the latest Flock drones equipped with high-powered cameras. Flock's "Drone as First Responder" platform automates drone operations, including launching them in response to 911 calls or gunfire. Flock's drones, which reach speeds up to 60 mph, can follow vehicles or people and provide information to law enforcement.
Most places in America don't have problems that surveillance solves. They have problems they already know about and won't act on. Cameras don't fix homelessness or addiction or underfunded services. They just make life harder for regular people.
But that's the whole appeal for bureaucrats. Buying a product looks like doing something without having to do any of the actual work.
https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Flock_license_plate_readers
And more about the company behind the cameras:
https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Flock_Safety
I have not done any research if that's out of the frying pan and into the fire or an improvement
https://open.spotify.com/episode/2V5m4J0tjYg1shWXWrOG8k?si=k...
> means the installation of ALPR cameras
That’s a big misconception, flock is a car identification system not a license plate one. I have seen many videos of some crime documentaries where flock was used to ID cars with no license plates, and weeks later they still have them in the system to track, coupled with phone tracking, they know exactly all the details needed.
https://deflock.org/map#map=17/41.468996/-90.483817
Devices tracked on the internet Car tracked outside the house Wifi 7 to track you in the house
Think of the children, the few deaths. Instead we need better policy enforcement. Expire licenses sooner, stricter driving tests, penalties on big tech, breaking up of monopolies, better social care programs, police that are trained in descalating and have empathy towards the community being policed, law makers listening to people and not lobbyists.
All of the right solutions require work. So we are left with an authoritarian fear driven state
In the USA in 2026, "capitalism", "politics", and "evil" have all become synonymous.
Maybe I am naive, and the corruption is too deep and pervasive.