The law enforcement agencies which behaved the way law enforcement agencies always behave and did what anyone with even the slightest familiarity with how law enforcement acts thought they would do with the data. This outcome was 1000% predictable even if the details were not.
If you're gonna be angry at someone be angry at the people among us were in favor of the creation of this data set because they foolishly thought it would be used to combat mundane property crime or because perhaps they thought that subjecting motorists to an increased dragnet would be a good thing for alternative transportation, or some other cause, think that they have done no wrong despite warnings of the potential for something like this being raised way back when the cameras and the ALPRs were being put up.
These things will keep happening until it is no longer socially acceptable to advocate for the creation of data collection programs that are a necessary precondition.
> These things will keep happening until it is no longer socially acceptable to advocate for the creation of data collection programs that are a necessary precondition.
The root issue here is that the government is no longer able or willing to control and bind their own law enforcement agencies. Agreed that this program was a bad idea, but the wider issue that law enforcement agencies can and do wantonly disregard direct orders from the state. There's the direct issue of impact on people as a result, and the more intangible idea of the questionable legitimacy of a government that is not able to control its own enforcement agencies.
This needs to be met with swift repercussions for both the individuals that participated, as well as the agencies that allowed it. Lacking that, it seems a reasonable inference that enforcement agencies are no longer bound by the will of the people and are in fact the ruling government.
> The root issue here is that the government is no longer able or willing to control and bind their own law enforcement agencies.
You're correct, but the bigger picture here is: privacy violation rely on benevolence.
We're completely at the whim of parties more powerful than us, and we MUST trust that they will act in our best interests.
Now, we could just hope and cross our fingers that people are good people forever. Do you think that's going to be the case? Because I don't. So the only path forward that makes any sense is to simply not give bad actors the potential to even be bad. Meaning, we shouldn't even collect this data.
We have so many laws of this variety, which rely on our leaders remaining benevolent. This is in stark contrast to the US constitution, which explicitly says NOT to rely on benevolence, and rather construct systems so that we can dismantle our leadership should the time come.
> This needs to be met with swift repercussions for both the individuals that participated, as well as the agencies that allowed it.
That’s not going to happen. Cross out that sentence and reason as if we’ve already asked for that and it failed. We’ve heard this song too many times to pretend we don’t know the first verse.
Aren't those agencies doing exactly what the government is expecting them to do? So yes the government isn't willing to control - because the agencies are doing whatever the government isn't willing to say in the open because... elections and other technicalities. Thus, there's no repercussions swift or slow, because who should complain? Calling your representative only does so much, and if you do a mass protest you get labeled and possibly worse. Ok, maybe I'm exaggerating a bit. Just a bit.
The US has a long history of agencies that decide by themselves to do things that are frequently illicit with the excuse that they're protecting the public. From police to 3 letter agencies, they're all operating illegal programs that should be stoped by the public. Whenever someone tries it, they protect their power using the excuse that they're doing this for the "benefit" of democracy or some similar BS.
For any dataset you collect, think about how it can be miss-used. Because in all likelihood it will. Maybe not by you. But maybe by your successor. Or the hacker.
Although it is interesting how inconsistently this principle of is applied to other areas. For example, if you come to HN and advocate against encryption or AI because they can amplify the dangers of bad actors, you are going to be met by fierce opposition. So why do these hypothetical bad actors only become valid concerns in certain conversations?
Its noteworthy to me that it took till 1943 for the reality of the threat to be taken seriously for this outcome
People making parallels I feel have been inaccurate, as the parallels right now are much closer to Europe's 1933 happenings, and people act like 1945's happenings is what will happen the very next day
Not sure what to make of that, just noticing that these particular "resistances" didn't have a prior allegory to watch, and made these choices eventually, and still how late into the story we know that these things occurred
Interestingly, as a direct outcome of the Nazis misusing this data Germany did not have a census for the longest time.
Here is an article from 1987 on the German protests against the new census, that was also the last Germany-led census: https://www.nytimes.com/1987/05/10/world/germans-stand-up-no... (BUT Germany has fairly strict rules on registration of your place of living, so perhaps a census is now unnecessary)
Before the Nazi's invaded the main guy who advocated for the civil registry which allowed the Nazi's to easily find jewish people went to his grave believing he did nothing wrong in advocating for such a database.
Clearly we all need to be thinking much more deeply on these issues.
Fair enough, but it is also valid to be angry at your local law enforcement if they are acting against the community's preferences. Especially when local law enforcement is breaking state law in the process.
Maybe true, but at a certain point you're just getting angry at the wind for blowing. The system is a scorpion: It cannot, will not go against its nature.
As someone who works with sensitive healthcare data, I can tell you that the mere existence of a dataset doesn't guarantee its misuse, nor it does it absolve anyone who interacts with that data of responsibility for proper stewardship.
Yes, you are right that we should think carefully before creating a sensitive dataset. If we insist on creating such a dataset, the people involved must put in place guardrails for stewardship of those datasets. But the stewards of that data, past, present, and future, also share responsibility.
Of course if the incentive structures don't line up with concern for mitigation of harm to vulnerable people as is the case with law enforcement in the US, then all of that is out the window.
Anyway, what you have written implies that we need not think about accountability for those who misuse of datasets after they are created, which is clearly absurd as I and anyone else familiar with healthcare data can tell you.
Also, be angry at those who didn't follow through with promises to severely reduce funding to their police departments in 2020. If an organization consistently behaves in a way we don't like, we should seek alternatives to that organization, not continuously act surprised when they act out and keep giving them more money.
> be angry at those who didn't follow through with promises to severely reduce funding to their police departments in 2020
This was tried. It generated a generational backlash against the left as petty crime and visible homelessness rose.
To the extent police reform has historically worked, it’s been by rebooting a police department. (Think: replacing the Mets with the NYPD.) Not replacing police with a hippie circle.
These people were mostly defeated in elections and the ones promising to shovel even more money got elected, just look at Eric Adams in NYC.
I seriously hope what is happening right now finally radicalizes the rest of the population that law enforcement as it is right now does not work for the public interest.
"Defund the police" was and remains wildly unpopular with almost everyone, especially minorities (as a reminder to any of those out touch reading this: there are large racial disparities in who is affected by crime, particularly violent crime) . It was quintessential "progressives are out of touch" ammunition, not only used by republicans (obviously), but also establishment democrats in competitive districts.
As another commenter posted, its about not allowing the creation of the data set in the first place.
We really need everyone in this country to go read "Nothing to Hide" by Daniel Solove, because thats how this crazy shit gets through in the first place: innocuous citizens go "Sure, I got nothing to hide"
To be fair, systems like Flocksafety really help departments being squeezed for funding. It's one of the ways the system is sold. It's an effective tool.
I'm not sure how to think about this. It doesn't make sense to me that the only alternative is one in which traffic laws get brazenly ignored, and shoplifting and property crime is endemic, to prevent any more data gathering by law enforcement.
At some point it seems like we have to trust that governments can act responsibly, in the interest of voters -- in this case local voters, or we should all just pack it in.
The other thought: I get the thought that people will always care more about local concerns of car break ins, shoplifting, and quality of life than larger ideas like privacy and law enforcement abuse. It seems to convince people to care about the larger issues, the local things have to be solved, and not just ignored.
I've lived in San Francisco for over 10 years now, and it's been disappointing to see the lack on progress on basic quality of life issues.
> It doesn't make sense to me that the only alternative is one in which traffic laws get brazenly ignored, and shoplifting and property crime is endemic, to prevent any more data gathering by law enforcement.
The only reason either of these happen is because law enforcement is lazy and dangerous.
We pretty much gave up on most traffic enforcement because law enforcement officers can't help shooting people they pull over. That's a problem - if they would just start acting somewhat decent, the PD would stop losing a few hundred million a year in lawsuits.
To be frank, I have no idea what law enforcement even does these days. They don't speed trap, they barely respond to calls, they're not pulling people over. Are they just sitting on their asses and getting a check, petrified of public discourse?
This same argument is true for every bit of authority we give to law enforcement agencies (and really, the government in general). We expect they'll use those powers responsibly and within the limitations that we've ascribed, but it's always a risk that they're used irresponsibly and in situations we don't approve of.
Yes, this is an argument for not giving them more authority than necessary, but it's also an argument for holding them accountable when they do act out of bounds.
To this point, any law that gives power to government officials also needs to have explicit and painful consequences for abuse of those powers. Civilians who break the law face punishment and penalties, but government employees are almost never held to account. That needs to change.
There are mobile survalience cameras systems at my very family friendly park. Everyone has asked the city to tow them away but they refuse. There was no vote on this.
> These things will keep happening until it is no longer socially acceptable to advocate for the creation of data collection programs that are a necessary precondition.
One or two cops locked up for it can also work wonders. But somehow the western world has come to believe that lots of pretty laws with no consequences for transgressions is a wonderful thing. I think not.
If you are a district attorney in a city, you depend on the help and cooperation of the police in your daily work. If you became unpopular with the police they can make your work very difficult and you could also become politically very unpopular. I think district attorneys and police want to do what they think is right but its very understandable to me why a DA does not want to prosecute police.
Click through to the law in question. It's the Civil Code not Criminal Code, and states, "an individual who has been harmed by a violation of this title, including, but not limited to, unauthorized access or use of ALPR information or a breach of security of an ALPR system, may bring a civil action in any court of competent jurisdiction against a person who knowingly caused the harm."
So you have to prove actual harm. You have to identify the individual person who caused the harm. You have to prove they knowingly caused the harm. You have to quantify the harm in monetary terms. Then you can sue them for actual damages + attorneys' fees.
> The law enforcement agencies which behaved the way law enforcement agencies always behave and did what anyone with even the slightest familiarity with how law enforcement acts thought they would do with the data. This outcome was 1000% predictable even if the details were not.
It was predictable that law enforcement agencies would... try to enforce the law?
> If you're gonna be angry at someone be angry at the people among us were in favor of the creation of this data set because they foolishly thought it would be used to combat mundane property crime or because perhaps they thought that subjecting motorists to an increased dragnet would be a good thing
Nah, be mad at both the people who enabled the data collection and the agency that abused that data.
This should be grounds for laws that limit or eliminate the use of Flock Safety in the state, and laws that meaningfully punish agencies that use that data inappropriately as well as the individuals who authorized it.
> be angry at [...] the people among us [who] foolishly thought it [...] would be a good thing for alternative transportation
Yikes. That is one tortuous sentence you needed to construct just to blame this on leftists. I applaud your wordcraft. But no, that's ridiculous. Urban transit hippies are very much not to blame for ICE overreach. Just for the record.
>If you're gonna be angry at someone be angry at the people among us were in favor of the creation of this data set
Perhaps I am gifted, but I contain enough anger within for both guilty parties. However, the bulk of is aimed at the police who unambiguously broke the law and will face no consequences for doing so.
If someone points out that the system you're building can be abused, and you don't stop and come up with a solid plan to prevent abuse then you're just building the system for abuse.
> Don't be angry at the people building them for good.
I am angry because the same people who've argued for years against the kinds of education systems that teach actual social systemic thinking and who've called me naive and cynical for suggesting their pretty toy is going to get people killed are now throwing up their hands and saying "how could we have known?"
Nope. If you're one of them, as a practitioner you should damn well be able to reasonably foresee the pathological use case. Hell, I only cut myself minimal slack for having grown up believing constant exhortations by Oldtimers that "Kid, no one in their right mind would do that," only to see my peer group replacing them do exactly what the Oldtimers were insistent that common sense dictated wouldn't be done.
It is on us to be realistic about how the systems we create will actually be used. I think we lost sight of that in the last couple decades, or figured it wasn't our problem. And the chickens have come home to roost.
A lot of people raised similar objections to dna databases, and later when those same databases was used by law enforcement. It did not take very long until law makers and law enforcement made i praxis that such data bases are up to grab for trawling through. Any objection is meet with the handful of cold cases that was closed because that trawling of data.
Sadly I dont see a realistic stop to the databases. If there are none, law makers will just dictate the creation of it. If there is one, they will argue terrorism or cold cases to start the process of getting access. If car manufacturers get gps logs, those will sooner or later end up being available to law enforcement. They currently have access to every call, when where and to whom. Every internet use. Every movement mobile phones does. Every payment through a credit card, where and to whom. Mass transports get more and more into personal tickets, and those get logged.
I hope we will see unreasonable searches to be expanded/enforcement against trawling of data, but i dont have any hope left to the idea that databases wont be created. Not even gdpr in eu stops law makers from dictating that databases must be created, or stopping law makers from trawling it.
Yeah, I think both things can be true: one is that it is absolutely utterly unacceptable to be in the year 2025 advocating for new data collection programs in the name of "fighting crime" - it should be absolutely abundantly clear to even the most naive of us now that A) the cops have absolutely zero interest in pursuing the kinds of crime we're actually interested in - the closure rate on shoplifting, car and package theft, and other property crime is basically zero, and that's not because the cops don't have enough resources, and B) any of these systems will be abused immediately to target whoever it is the feds have decided are the bad guy this week, be it palestine protestors, trans people, immigrants, ex-girlfriends, or whoever else we've decided is outside the circle of protection today.
At the same time, it's also absolutely goddamn unnacceptable that we've come to just accept that our LEOs are just going to act like unaccountable criminal gangs, and that that mentality has crept so far into the police forces that a thin blue line punisher sticker is an acceptable bit of kit for a cruiser. There are systems that are intended to hold these groups accountable, and we need to keep pressing until they do, because throwing up our hands and just saying "Boys will be boys" ain't cutting it.
> LEOs are just going to act like unaccountable criminal gangs, and that that mentality has crept so far into the police forces that a thin blue line punisher sticker is an acceptable bit of kit for a cruiser.
Well, they are unaccountable state-sanctioned gangs.
They can legally steal (forfeiture).
They can 'smell something' and legally trespass.
They can shoot and kill you for basically any reason. But they can fall back and say 'I thought they were reaching for a weapon'.
SCOTUS, even with more liberal justices, have repeatedly said they are shielded from 'official capacities', and that they have absolutely no requirement of protecting and serving.
You think the police have adequate resources to solve package theft? I’m sorry, what? That’s ridiculous. Here’s the 2023 stats for SF:
Porch thefts: 25,000
Cops: 2000
Obviously not all of those cops are on duty simultaneously, let’s assume they do a 12 hour shift every single day: they would have 25 porch thefts each to solve!
This isn’t a US centric phenomenon either: 70,000 cell phones were stolen in London last year.
Sending people back to their home country, especially when 50% are criminals, is not the same as the holocaust. Comparing it to such is disgusting and insulting to the actual victims of Nazi violence.
ICE is often operating in a racist and dehumanizing way, but it is nowhere near the level of organized atrocity that it is regularly compared to.
I agree that it this comparison is overblown, and do not believe in general that this kind of overstatements do any good to the cause of those who make them.
There is something in common though: that very dangerous belief that lying and ignoring the law is justified by the end goal. Speaking of lies, where did you get this statistics that 50% of expulsed immigrants are criminals? Even their own statistics (https://www.ice.gov/statistics) show that a small minority have ever been convicted (and I would assume that most of those convictions would not be very serious crimes)
> In the autumn of 1941, approximately 338,000 Jews remained in Greater Germany. Until this point, Hitler had been reluctant to deport Jews in the German Reich until the war was over because of a fear of resistance and retaliation from the German population. But, in the autumn of 1941, key Nazi figures contributed to mounting pressure on Hitler to deport the German Jews. This pressure culminated in Hitler ordering the deportation of all Jews still in the Greater German Reich and Protectorate between 15-17 September 1941.
Nah, I think as a society we should be able to set up speed cameras to crack down on speeding, without worrying about how it could be misused maliciously against law abiding motorists. Get angry at the people doing bad things. Otherwise we shouldn't build anything that could potentially be misused.
Voters will nearly always fall for "Think of the children!" Trying to point out how bad of an argument that is has only earned me screaming arguments from my wife. Some people do not prioritize liberty, and so, get less as result of their choices.
Flock is absolutely designed to facilitate and encourage this kind of abuse. They have extensive data sharing built in to their system while promising agencies that the users "own" the data.
My local police department just recently got a grant for these and is in the process of setting them up, and I'm working with a number of local technologists and activists to shut it down. We are showing up at every police commission meeting and every city council meeting and keeping actively engaged with local press. I spent almost three hours yesterday having coffee with a police commissioner and I have meeting requests from a number of other local officials. There are similar efforts ongoing in other cities across the U.S.
Immediately after setting up the system -- before all of the devices were even fully online -- our local PD began sharing access with departments in non-sanctuary states. When we asked questions about it, they hid that section from their transparency page. We are cooking them publicly for that.
Flock is VC-funded commercialized mass surveillance.
The type of crime common here is nearly impossible to address without technological assistance. People steal cars, drive into neighborhoods, then break into other cars and houses. They're gone sometimes before a 911 call can even be made, and far before the police arrive. The criminals know this and are just incredibly brazen about it. They'll finish the job with people watching and recording because they know there's no way for them to be caught. People get followed home and held up in their driveway. The criminals are often armed, and people have been shot and killed for even the mildest of resistance. One guy was killed a block from where I was standing for knocking on the window of a getaway car of some guys stealing another car in broad daylight.
Leaving aside broader and more fundamental fixes for crime, which are much longer term projects, the only near-term thing that actually reduces this kind of crime is arrest and conviction rates. In SF, drones have helped reduced car break-ins, because they've actually caught some crews. Oakland doesn't have drones that I know of, but Flock cameras have enabled enough tracking for police to sometimes actually find these people quickly, even several miles away, and make an arrest.
Those are just the plain facts of the situation. It's understandable that people want some kind of solution here. Without at least starting from that understanding, it'll be very difficult to convince people that a solution that is having a positive impact already is not worth the other costs and risks.
And to me, this is the core conflict at a really high level: the economic and societal fixes for crime are usually opposed by the same people who abuse these kind of surveillance systems for authoritarian purposes. To me it's no coincidence that their preferred solution to crime just happens to help them keep an eye on the whole population.
There's a hugely material difference between deterring local property crime and handing ICE this information.
ICE is deporting people to death camps (e.g. CECOT), not giving people due process, operating masked and with military support. ICE is a gestapo in all but name.
By all means, find ways to get your community police departments to address crime in your communities. Work with systems outside of police to fix the systemic root causes (crime doesn't "just happen", it's a symptom of other problems). But you don't need the secret police to fix car jackings and break-ins.
My comment shouldn't be read in any way as supporting ICE or giving ICE this information. Doing so is clearly illegal under California law, and what ICE is doing right now is terrible.
But the prevailing sentiment in these comments is the the cameras shouldn't exist at all, not just that the data shouldn't be shared with ICE. My comment is about how useful the cameras are today. If you want them to not exist you need to understand why they do and probably offer up an alternate solution to the very real problems they address.
This is hardly a philosophical debate. Oakland is a mess. The previous police chief was fired, and the person that fired him, the mayor, was recalled by voters. And the DA in 2023-2024 was recalled by voters.
The governor warned Oakland in the past to reverse its policy on not engaging in police pursuits. Not surprisingly, the new police chief is proposing changing that policy.
Between this and the abortion story [1] (CEO deflected blame and took zero ownership [2]), it looks like Flock leans into enabling this sort of lawlessness. They should be torn out of our cities.
Do we have a list of their clients?
EDIT: Apparently my town installed them in 2023 [3]. Inciting a couple council members over for dinner this week.
What a ridiculous response. Just say "Flock cameras are designed for law enforcement to use however they see fit, even if it's to chase down abortion-getters, even if it's to kidnap people off the street into unmarked vans"
Occasional reminder that YC application required applicants to give an eample of how they cheated a system for personal gain. YC prefers "naughty" founders over honest ones.
Just so everyone remembers: automated collection is an unlawful search by the constitution. Stop advocating for a police state and expecting something different. (Mandatory registration of objects, mandatory medical procedures, mandatory facial accessories, mandatory automatic government payments to fund all of this)
> The OPD didn’t share information directly with the federal agencies. Rather, other California police departments searched Oakland’s system on behalf of federal counterparts more than 200 times — providing reasons such as “FBI investigation” for the searches
Does this mean it wasn't exactly to Oakland Police that violated state law, but rather other CA based law enforcement entities?
it's also possible the other agencies only shared findings rather than specific records.
For example if the law says "plate reader records cannot be shared" and the CHP just confirms the presence of the records , and does not share the records, no violation occurred.
You did a good job reading the article from bottom to top. The headline and lead are usually misleading.
But from my quote, it sounds like federal agencies couldn't actually search the data themselves. Rather the Feds would do something like make a request to the Sacramento PD (random example), and then Sacramento would then search the OPD database, and then, presumably, give that data to the feds.
"The OPD (Oakland PD) didn’t share information directly with the federal agencies. Rather, other California police departments searched Oakland’s system on behalf of federal counterparts more than 200 times —
So the headline is misleading. It seems like oakland made their records available to state agencies like CHP, and one of those agencies queried the records and shared the query results with federal agencies.
And the article doesn't specify which results were shared.
So it's clear Oakland didn't violate the law, and there is reasonable doubt that the other agencies didn't violate the law either.
As part of a Flock search, police have to provide a “reason” they are performing the lookup. In the “reason” field for searches of Danville’s cameras, officers from across the U.S. wrote “immigration,” “ICE,” “ICE+ERO,”
Readit News
If you're gonna be angry at someone be angry at the people among us were in favor of the creation of this data set because they foolishly thought it would be used to combat mundane property crime or because perhaps they thought that subjecting motorists to an increased dragnet would be a good thing for alternative transportation, or some other cause, think that they have done no wrong despite warnings of the potential for something like this being raised way back when the cameras and the ALPRs were being put up.
These things will keep happening until it is no longer socially acceptable to advocate for the creation of data collection programs that are a necessary precondition.
The root issue here is that the government is no longer able or willing to control and bind their own law enforcement agencies. Agreed that this program was a bad idea, but the wider issue that law enforcement agencies can and do wantonly disregard direct orders from the state. There's the direct issue of impact on people as a result, and the more intangible idea of the questionable legitimacy of a government that is not able to control its own enforcement agencies.
This needs to be met with swift repercussions for both the individuals that participated, as well as the agencies that allowed it. Lacking that, it seems a reasonable inference that enforcement agencies are no longer bound by the will of the people and are in fact the ruling government.
You're correct, but the bigger picture here is: privacy violation rely on benevolence.
We're completely at the whim of parties more powerful than us, and we MUST trust that they will act in our best interests.
Now, we could just hope and cross our fingers that people are good people forever. Do you think that's going to be the case? Because I don't. So the only path forward that makes any sense is to simply not give bad actors the potential to even be bad. Meaning, we shouldn't even collect this data.
We have so many laws of this variety, which rely on our leaders remaining benevolent. This is in stark contrast to the US constitution, which explicitly says NOT to rely on benevolence, and rather construct systems so that we can dismantle our leadership should the time come.
That’s not going to happen. Cross out that sentence and reason as if we’ve already asked for that and it failed. We’ve heard this song too many times to pretend we don’t know the first verse.
For any dataset you collect, think about how it can be miss-used. Because in all likelihood it will. Maybe not by you. But maybe by your successor. Or the hacker.
People making parallels I feel have been inaccurate, as the parallels right now are much closer to Europe's 1933 happenings, and people act like 1945's happenings is what will happen the very next day
Not sure what to make of that, just noticing that these particular "resistances" didn't have a prior allegory to watch, and made these choices eventually, and still how late into the story we know that these things occurred
Here is an article from 1987 on the German protests against the new census, that was also the last Germany-led census: https://www.nytimes.com/1987/05/10/world/germans-stand-up-no... (BUT Germany has fairly strict rules on registration of your place of living, so perhaps a census is now unnecessary)
Clearly we all need to be thinking much more deeply on these issues.
Deleted Comment
As someone who works with sensitive healthcare data, I can tell you that the mere existence of a dataset doesn't guarantee its misuse, nor it does it absolve anyone who interacts with that data of responsibility for proper stewardship.
Yes, you are right that we should think carefully before creating a sensitive dataset. If we insist on creating such a dataset, the people involved must put in place guardrails for stewardship of those datasets. But the stewards of that data, past, present, and future, also share responsibility.
Of course if the incentive structures don't line up with concern for mitigation of harm to vulnerable people as is the case with law enforcement in the US, then all of that is out the window.
Anyway, what you have written implies that we need not think about accountability for those who misuse of datasets after they are created, which is clearly absurd as I and anyone else familiar with healthcare data can tell you.
This was tried. It generated a generational backlash against the left as petty crime and visible homelessness rose.
To the extent police reform has historically worked, it’s been by rebooting a police department. (Think: replacing the Mets with the NYPD.) Not replacing police with a hippie circle.
I seriously hope what is happening right now finally radicalizes the rest of the population that law enforcement as it is right now does not work for the public interest.
As another commenter posted, its about not allowing the creation of the data set in the first place.
We really need everyone in this country to go read "Nothing to Hide" by Daniel Solove, because thats how this crazy shit gets through in the first place: innocuous citizens go "Sure, I got nothing to hide"
At some point it seems like we have to trust that governments can act responsibly, in the interest of voters -- in this case local voters, or we should all just pack it in.
The other thought: I get the thought that people will always care more about local concerns of car break ins, shoplifting, and quality of life than larger ideas like privacy and law enforcement abuse. It seems to convince people to care about the larger issues, the local things have to be solved, and not just ignored.
I've lived in San Francisco for over 10 years now, and it's been disappointing to see the lack on progress on basic quality of life issues.
The only reason either of these happen is because law enforcement is lazy and dangerous.
We pretty much gave up on most traffic enforcement because law enforcement officers can't help shooting people they pull over. That's a problem - if they would just start acting somewhat decent, the PD would stop losing a few hundred million a year in lawsuits.
To be frank, I have no idea what law enforcement even does these days. They don't speed trap, they barely respond to calls, they're not pulling people over. Are they just sitting on their asses and getting a check, petrified of public discourse?
Respectfully, I believe you have it backwards.
Yes, this is an argument for not giving them more authority than necessary, but it's also an argument for holding them accountable when they do act out of bounds.
To this point, any law that gives power to government officials also needs to have explicit and painful consequences for abuse of those powers. Civilians who break the law face punishment and penalties, but government employees are almost never held to account. That needs to change.
One or two cops locked up for it can also work wonders. But somehow the western world has come to believe that lots of pretty laws with no consequences for transgressions is a wonderful thing. I think not.
So you have to prove actual harm. You have to identify the individual person who caused the harm. You have to prove they knowingly caused the harm. You have to quantify the harm in monetary terms. Then you can sue them for actual damages + attorneys' fees.
Excuse me. While a minority of rabid Anarchists might agree with you, the vast majority of people in Denmark happen to really like our police force.
This is largely an American problem. Don't blame it on "the western world".
It was predictable that law enforcement agencies would... try to enforce the law?
By breaking a different one?
I mean, yeah, it's predictable. But it's not great.
Dead Comment
Nah, be mad at both the people who enabled the data collection and the agency that abused that data.
This should be grounds for laws that limit or eliminate the use of Flock Safety in the state, and laws that meaningfully punish agencies that use that data inappropriately as well as the individuals who authorized it.
Yikes. That is one tortuous sentence you needed to construct just to blame this on leftists. I applaud your wordcraft. But no, that's ridiculous. Urban transit hippies are very much not to blame for ICE overreach. Just for the record.
Perhaps I am gifted, but I contain enough anger within for both guilty parties. However, the bulk of is aimed at the police who unambiguously broke the law and will face no consequences for doing so.
Do be angry at the people misusing the systems. Don't be angry at the people building them for good.
I am angry because the same people who've argued for years against the kinds of education systems that teach actual social systemic thinking and who've called me naive and cynical for suggesting their pretty toy is going to get people killed are now throwing up their hands and saying "how could we have known?"
Because we fucking told you, that's how.
It is on us to be realistic about how the systems we create will actually be used. I think we lost sight of that in the last couple decades, or figured it wasn't our problem. And the chickens have come home to roost.
Sadly I dont see a realistic stop to the databases. If there are none, law makers will just dictate the creation of it. If there is one, they will argue terrorism or cold cases to start the process of getting access. If car manufacturers get gps logs, those will sooner or later end up being available to law enforcement. They currently have access to every call, when where and to whom. Every internet use. Every movement mobile phones does. Every payment through a credit card, where and to whom. Mass transports get more and more into personal tickets, and those get logged.
I hope we will see unreasonable searches to be expanded/enforcement against trawling of data, but i dont have any hope left to the idea that databases wont be created. Not even gdpr in eu stops law makers from dictating that databases must be created, or stopping law makers from trawling it.
At the same time, it's also absolutely goddamn unnacceptable that we've come to just accept that our LEOs are just going to act like unaccountable criminal gangs, and that that mentality has crept so far into the police forces that a thin blue line punisher sticker is an acceptable bit of kit for a cruiser. There are systems that are intended to hold these groups accountable, and we need to keep pressing until they do, because throwing up our hands and just saying "Boys will be boys" ain't cutting it.
Well, they are unaccountable state-sanctioned gangs.
They can legally steal (forfeiture).
They can 'smell something' and legally trespass.
They can shoot and kill you for basically any reason. But they can fall back and say 'I thought they were reaching for a weapon'.
SCOTUS, even with more liberal justices, have repeatedly said they are shielded from 'official capacities', and that they have absolutely no requirement of protecting and serving.
I’m genuinely curious for data on whether these data have been helpful with property crime in San Francisco and Oakland.
Porch thefts: 25,000 Cops: 2000
Obviously not all of those cops are on duty simultaneously, let’s assume they do a 12 hour shift every single day: they would have 25 porch thefts each to solve!
This isn’t a US centric phenomenon either: 70,000 cell phones were stolen in London last year.
I think it's okay to be angry at public servants for "following orders" too.
We didn't let the Nazis get away with that bullshit for a good reason.
ICE is often operating in a racist and dehumanizing way, but it is nowhere near the level of organized atrocity that it is regularly compared to.
There is something in common though: that very dangerous belief that lying and ignoring the law is justified by the end goal. Speaking of lies, where did you get this statistics that 50% of expulsed immigrants are criminals? Even their own statistics (https://www.ice.gov/statistics) show that a small minority have ever been convicted (and I would assume that most of those convictions would not be very serious crimes)
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madagascar_Plan
The Holocaust involved quite a bit of large-scale deportation to concentration camps.
https://www.theholocaustexplained.org/how-and-why/how/deport...
> In the autumn of 1941, approximately 338,000 Jews remained in Greater Germany. Until this point, Hitler had been reluctant to deport Jews in the German Reich until the war was over because of a fear of resistance and retaliation from the German population. But, in the autumn of 1941, key Nazi figures contributed to mounting pressure on Hitler to deport the German Jews. This pressure culminated in Hitler ordering the deportation of all Jews still in the Greater German Reich and Protectorate between 15-17 September 1941.
I heard CA built up a large amount of money anticipating a lot of litigation against Trump 2.0.
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My local police department just recently got a grant for these and is in the process of setting them up, and I'm working with a number of local technologists and activists to shut it down. We are showing up at every police commission meeting and every city council meeting and keeping actively engaged with local press. I spent almost three hours yesterday having coffee with a police commissioner and I have meeting requests from a number of other local officials. There are similar efforts ongoing in other cities across the U.S.
An interesting one to keep an eye on is Cedar Rapids, which includes a neat teardown of one of the devices: https://eyesoffcr.org/blog/blog-8.html
Immediately after setting up the system -- before all of the devices were even fully online -- our local PD began sharing access with departments in non-sanctuary states. When we asked questions about it, they hid that section from their transparency page. We are cooking them publicly for that.
Flock is VC-funded commercialized mass surveillance.
The type of crime common here is nearly impossible to address without technological assistance. People steal cars, drive into neighborhoods, then break into other cars and houses. They're gone sometimes before a 911 call can even be made, and far before the police arrive. The criminals know this and are just incredibly brazen about it. They'll finish the job with people watching and recording because they know there's no way for them to be caught. People get followed home and held up in their driveway. The criminals are often armed, and people have been shot and killed for even the mildest of resistance. One guy was killed a block from where I was standing for knocking on the window of a getaway car of some guys stealing another car in broad daylight.
Leaving aside broader and more fundamental fixes for crime, which are much longer term projects, the only near-term thing that actually reduces this kind of crime is arrest and conviction rates. In SF, drones have helped reduced car break-ins, because they've actually caught some crews. Oakland doesn't have drones that I know of, but Flock cameras have enabled enough tracking for police to sometimes actually find these people quickly, even several miles away, and make an arrest.
Those are just the plain facts of the situation. It's understandable that people want some kind of solution here. Without at least starting from that understanding, it'll be very difficult to convince people that a solution that is having a positive impact already is not worth the other costs and risks.
And to me, this is the core conflict at a really high level: the economic and societal fixes for crime are usually opposed by the same people who abuse these kind of surveillance systems for authoritarian purposes. To me it's no coincidence that their preferred solution to crime just happens to help them keep an eye on the whole population.
ICE is deporting people to death camps (e.g. CECOT), not giving people due process, operating masked and with military support. ICE is a gestapo in all but name.
By all means, find ways to get your community police departments to address crime in your communities. Work with systems outside of police to fix the systemic root causes (crime doesn't "just happen", it's a symptom of other problems). But you don't need the secret police to fix car jackings and break-ins.
But the prevailing sentiment in these comments is the the cameras shouldn't exist at all, not just that the data shouldn't be shared with ICE. My comment is about how useful the cameras are today. If you want them to not exist you need to understand why they do and probably offer up an alternate solution to the very real problems they address.
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The governor warned Oakland in the past to reverse its policy on not engaging in police pursuits. Not surprisingly, the new police chief is proposing changing that policy.
https://oaklandside.org/2025/05/23/oakland-police-pursuit-po...
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety
Do we have a list of their clients?
EDIT: Apparently my town installed them in 2023 [3]. Inciting a couple council members over for dinner this week.
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/05/she-got-abortion-so-te...
[2] https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/statement-network-sharing-u...
[3] https://atlasofsurveillance.org/search?vendor=Flock+Safety
I've heard of "startup founder hubris" before but this is a new level.
I'm honestly surprised they weren't too woke for them.
> Please tell us about the time you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage.
What HN thinks YC I asking: "how they cheated a system for personal gain"
lol.
Source: Me, I got into YC by answering the question that way.
Does this mean it wasn't exactly to Oakland Police that violated state law, but rather other CA based law enforcement entities?
For example if the law says "plate reader records cannot be shared" and the CHP just confirms the presence of the records , and does not share the records, no violation occurred.
You did a good job reading the article from bottom to top. The headline and lead are usually misleading.
When they signed up to these systems, did they know that federal agencies could search their data without OPD needing to do anything?
And the article doesn't specify which results were shared.
So it's clear Oakland didn't violate the law, and there is reasonable doubt that the other agencies didn't violate the law either.
Judgements come from judges, not journalists.
They are aware this is happening and are taking no action. They are as culpable as the other agencies.