Idk why people bother cutting them. The poles they use are two part you can zip out the screws with a torx safety bit and just pull it off the pole. Cutting definitely takes more time
Apparently the government stores hundreds of dollars in the cameras as a reward for helping take them down!
If the surveillance cameras can’t even catch the persons who removed all of their cameras, then they have proven to be worthless at catching real criminals, with their only proven worth is stalking police officers ex wives.
That’s just not true. Sometimes they haven’t even met the women they’re stalking.
People removing surveillance cameras taxpayers didn’t approve aren’t “criminals”. The proper term is heroes.
All Flock cameras do is identify cars. If you aren’t a car, they can’t see you. They aren’t just mindlessly recording everything like an ordinary camera, so police can’t look through the recordings to identify you.
That is simply not true. The first 60 seconds of this Benn Jordan & 404 Media video proves otherwise - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vU1-uiUlHTo.
He goes on to talk about flocks condor cameras, which specifically track people.
Me when I’m a liar who’s eternally loyal to peter theil:
I’m against Flock cameras. I didn’t expect to run into people on the anti side who are in denial about how the things work. Like, Flock truthers.
“they can’t see you if you’re not a car” is how they work?
I misunderstood. I didn’t realize that they also functioned as ordinary cameras.
That’s the whole point of their use of the “licence plate reader” euphemism. They are high definition, high refresh-rate cameras, and cloud-based as opposed to a CCTV system (would be OCTV I guess) that 100% can and do track people as has been shown by independent research
They won’t create a searchable database of faces, assuming they work as advertised. However, the footage is streamed to a server (sometimes publicly accessible) and available for manual review.
Edit: also BT/Wi-Fi MAC addresses of devices, whether on cars or not, are recorded, and can link drivers to their licence-plate-equipped cars even when they’re walking with the same phone or earpods
All the news stories I’ve seen talk about concerns over tracking movement. This is the first I’ve heard about people worried about the actual video.
Look up Benn Jordan’s videos on these things. They are NOT just license plate readers.
Correct but Flock’s own system, if their public statements can be trusted, doesn’t do facial recognition itself. The main use is tracking vehicles using license plates and all kinds of visual cues, and Bluetooth/Wi-Fi devices by their MAC address and properties, and linking this huge swath of data together. Still, faces are recorded as video that can be checked manually or processed by third-party tools, including “AI” facial-recognition ones. Therefore, if a pedestrian destroys all Flock cameras and has Bluetooth earpods on them, there will be an easy way to link the events, and then the police will check if their face is visible in surviving footage and check the country-wide database if the person ever used the earphones in a vehicle near the cameras.
Hey man, it was higher power as far as I’m concerned.
It’s called “Flock.” Obviously, they all flew away! But you can’t blame the PD for not knowing that; pigs don’t know much about flying.
Whomever the suspect was they were fucking my mother that night and there is no way they could have done it because it was going on all night long.
All of Winona, Minnesota was with me, in Switzerland, on a river on an inflatable raft, enjoying the heat wave. Couldn’t have been them.
This is a known issue with flock systems, sometimes they just do that.
This is a city of ~25K people, so quite small. Several articles have pointed out that the city, not Flock, bears the costs of the vandalism, so in this instance the city counsel that enabled the city to enter into the contract with Flock to the detriment of its citizens have now burdened the city with a substantial budget item. If the cameras are replaced, you can bet that they will likely be torn down again. At some point there will be a reckoning with voters, and hopefully the idiots that enabled the surveillance state will be voted out.
Even if it’s the city that beats the cost, at some point they will decide it’s no longer worth the cost to replace them.
Probably still paying for them even if not there. Some stupid contract.
That money will be gone either way, might as well not have the dystopian cams.
Lol. You know that last sentence is satire or you are an idiot.
Fuck off. Voting works when people do it.
We shouldn’t be waiting for elections to come around to get rid of fascist politicians.
The catch here is the question of democratic legitimacy: If people believe that governments derive their just power from the consent of the governed and that this consent should be established and communicated through the results of a popular vote, it’s gonna be hard to get them to support a replacement whose mandate doesn’t derive from such an election.
So you can take out the fascists, but that doesn’t mean that you can install non-fascists and have the relevant organs of government obey them.
It doesn’t really matter if they support it. As we’ve seen with the current administration, things can be forced through in spite of the will of the governed.
…because the people carrying out the orders obey the people giving them. My argument is that they do so because they believe that the people giving these orders have the right to give them (legitimacy).
If you installed an illegitimate (in the sense of “not democratically elected”, even if it had broad support anyway) government, people loyal to the democratic system rather than any particular faction may not be so cooperative.
No one working for the current administration is loyal to the democratic system. That went out the window as soon as Trump got in office and started pumping out executive orders.
Flock off
How did they destroy the cameras without being seen by all the damn cameras?
If you wear all black, do not show any skin or indicating marks, and vary your gait with a consistent stumble, then the cameras are useless. Remember to park out of sight of any cameras.
Best thing would be to not use ur car but go by foot or bicycle, but then again, it’s the US, where u are literally trapped in ur home if u don’t have a car lol
The flock flew away to the southern hemisphere for their yearly migration, I’m sure their babies will be back next year.
If a group of birds are called a flock.
Is a group of flocks called a bird?
I’m very much against the government surveillance apparatus but I’m torn in a couple ways. I don’t believe a centralized system like this can exist by our current, and probably any political apparatus, without being abused.
However, we need to ensure we’re being reasonable. I’m torn because even without flock millions of people are going to pay for and install their own cloud-connected security cameras and those corporations mostly act like the flock middlemen for government agencies
But I’m not against people having their own cameras, heck I’m not even against them recording to a cloud device. I’m against the abuse of thst data though ny the government and corporations. And that is the real issue where we need to be demanding the most from our government officials.
Most people are so caught up in wedge issues that Democrats and Republicans can hand over your privacy and data to corporations, or greatly reduce your privacy in countless other ways, and it is going entirely unnoticeable and unchallenged. I live in Washington, a blue state, and there are multiple red states with better privacy rights and CCPA-like protections. Yet it never gets brought up in a primary or election, or challenged. They’d rather people be fighting over culture war issues.
AND, what concerns me as well is some of these anti-flock activists—which I think is a reasonable position—are soon going to become overzealous about any type of camera, and you’ll see them destroying and vandalizing home security systems as well. And I do take issue with that because I’ve seen enough people leaving domestic violence situations, those who were victims of sexual abuse or those who had burglars break into their personal space, etc., to know that not all security cameras are there for nefarious purposes and some people legitimately need some early warning for their homes and a way to have proof to seek justice when their safety is jeopardized.
And so you may have thousands or millions of people saying destroy flock cameras, but it doesn’t feel like a single one of them are saying they care about privacy enough to demand the politicians they’re electing to actually commit in meaningful ways or codify in law the protections from government and corporate abuse. And once they start seeing other cameras as targets of surveillance as well…those on homes, businesses, etc. The movement will quickly lose support and end up making things worse, not better.
Simple solution is to stop giving cops/corporations access to these surveillance systems without a warrant. It’s private data and it should remain so. If people didn’t have to worry about being tracked by this shit then they wouldn’t be hostile towards it.
Being hostile towards flock is understandable. Being hostile to everyone holding a phone or with a security camera on their house is not. Again, take the issues to the people you elect. I’m not even sure I’ve seen a single candidate make it a pillar of their campaign.
Nah. I don’t want to be surveilled by my neighbors every time I grab my mail either. The difference is, I didn’t pay for my neighbor’s cameras.
