Every time law enforcement is given surveillance tools the same thing happens, the people with legal and approved access will abuse it.
Politicians are completely naive in their understand how people works, if it's abused, the system isn't locked down enough or that one person circumvented the procedure. They completely fail to understand that there exists people to whom you cannot grant access and screening people in advance probably impossible. Some cop checks all the boxes, gets access to databases, then their partner leaves them and they are now no longer safe to grant access.
I don't understand why it's hard to grasp that surveillance tools are dangerous and rather using them to protect others, law enforcement will use these tools to do bad things. It's as if that we assume that cops are better people and follow rules better. Even in countries that actually train their police force this isn't remotely true.
The US might be different, I doubt it, but society is getting increasingly SAFE, there is less and less need for these tools.
This is a great point, and one that really isn't played up because it doesn't fit the whole profit-from-attention narrative that literally every media surface seems to be following.
It almost seems as if law enforcement 'need' these additional tools to keep them busy; find new, more trivial crime that's been hiding behind no one reporting it or being hurt by it.
Maybe if law enforcement resources could be applied to more corporate crime, that'd keep em busy till the cows come home.
Indeed, in my experience all these tools do is offset policing to "easy" crimes and the harder problems continually get ignored. It's largely been accepted in my city, for example, that traffic enforcement no longer happens.
Exactly my thought. It is so naive to think that this is not going better than planned. Imagine having dozens, if not hundreds of crimes, and still get away of all of them because you got a new job.
Using third party systems like Flock for warrantless police work has not been fully tested in courts yet. With the current SCOTUS, I fully expect them to find it constitutional somehow if it lands there.
As a general policy, every policy and system should be designed with the worst possible user in mind.
- German address registers with religious affiliation were a good idea until the Nazis came to power.
- Pegasus spyware was developed and sold to governments to fight terrorism and serious crime — until it was used to spy on journalists, human rights activists and political opponents, including in authoritarian states.
- Rwandan identity cards listed ethnicity for administrative purposes — until militias used them to identify and execute Tutsis at roadblocks during the 1994 genocide.
Bottom line: Even if you trust the current administration (do you?), are you sure you want 5o give that power to all future ones?
<< The US might be different, I doubt it, but society is getting increasingly SAFE, there is less and less need for these tools.
Oh man, I have to assume you live in a nice little enclave and are reading old statistical reports. I have the misfortune of sometimes having to travel into the city. I can assure you, it is not getting safer. In fact, just last week I saw first sign of Chicago turning into Philly.
This chart is up to 2024. If you look up 2025 and 2026 data for the US you will see that it has continued to decline YoY.
Judging by your comment I assume that you have personally witnessed some criminality recently and are drawing conclusions about the entire US, if so I’m sorry you had to endure that, but that doesn’t mean that your conclusions apply to the general trend in the US as the GP was referring to.
It’s such a shame that media (social and traditional) really plays up loss aversion. My local news is basically fear mongering. My local social media page is filled with people who have nothing better to do with their time than complain about all of the negative stuff happening in this town. They take every isolated incident and project it as some major pattern. It’s really sad.
To some extend I'd argue that even true crime shows are complicit. Hour long "documentaries" about obscure murders 40 years in a place you're not entirely sure exists. The streaming services just keeps digging deeper and deeper for anything that could lure in viewers, covering crimes that you wouldn't have known of 20 years ago.
My local news just did a whole special program on high profile plane issues/crashes. Modern ones, like over the last few years. I saw an ad for it yesterday I was just so grossed out by the flagrant fear mongering. Pieces like that have real world consequences.
They aren’t doing hard hitting journalism exposing negligence, they are making people terrified of planes. They’re stressing people out about something that is not reasonably within their control AND it’s not a real risk for us all. The numbers don’t support scaring people over this.
People will need to come together and fix the system.
If a definite majority wants to do so, the system will change. Until then the oligarchs will keep playing one side againts the other, as can currently be seen with Trump amplifying the hate in the population, in order for his cronies to steal more money, start more wars and so forth. He will lose the upcoming elections but he will continue to worship theft and destruction.
The purge movies are interesting to me. They came out when I was already and adult, so I missed the cultural moment. If you watch the movies, the plot is patently stupid (if not emotionally gripping) -- so stupid, that I was really surprised to find out how much they resonated with people. Governments don't benefit from violence, and normal everyday people wouldn't want to be violent one day year. Most violent people are regularly violent; they beat their girlfriends for years, and finally kill one of them. They have a long, long rap sheet or an active warrant while they fight the police after being pulled over. etc. Further, general mass violence is extremely destabilizing to governments because most people abhor it, and a government that cannot prevent mass violence is a government with no validity.
The idea that a movie could get so many basic things so badly wrong, that it could float a scenario that made zero sense, but still gain such cultural traction was one of the first times I felt old. It's speaking to a youth with crazy and new ideas. They're ready to make their own grand and terrible mistakes, which a future youth will one day hate them for.
I feel like maybe you missed the point? The concept of the Purge movies is the government is using the Purge as a smoke screen to eliminate the people it considers undesirable. It's supposed to be like Kristallnacht with plausible deniability.
What I think everdrive is saying is that for it to be a smokescreen, there needs to be smoke: if it was only the government participating in the Purge to eliminate undesireables, it'd be extremely obvious and rallied against. But it's not, regular people are engaging with it in droves, which is what they believe to be the unrealistic part.
But most people don't participate, they just hunker down and wait it out. It's a small minority who are aligned with the government who do most of it. The prequel makes this very clear, where the government sent masked mercenaries to participate in the test purge to give them the results they wanted. The movies aren't high art or anything, but their message is pretty clear that they think the average person wouldn't be violent.
You need to consider that what regular people consider normal depends on little more then social consensus. Once you recognize this, the unrealistic part does not sound as unrealistic.
The Purge was a terrible movie in so many ways but its message is still extremely resonant. It's also about as subtle as a brick wall, yet I'm afraid that it might have been still a tad too subtle.
Im all for fighting for digital privacy rights. But referencing the purge with a smile begs the question, are you yearning for a purge-like scenario? Some fantastical idea that you’ll be the main character in an anarchic chaos?
> Politicians are completely naive in their understand how people works
They understand exactly how people work. You are naive for thinking that they aren't aware of this. Their entire job is essentially a popularity contest in which they promise you things, that they almost never deliver on.
Michael Corleone: "Oh, who's being naïve, Kay?"
put the cynical aside.
I would not say they are all liars. some of them sure have good hearts and want to make the world better. sometimes, they promised things they weren't sure, but they said things anyway.
Like they deliberately want a system that can be abused, or that they actually know that it can and will be abused, but not voting for it would make them appear soft on crime?
Honestly I think the majority aren't smart enough to do the cost benefit analysis of these system, so they just ignore the warning.
it seems everyone in this thread is focusing on the wrong issue; the problem was not that "sign-in procedures are too lax", it's that these individuals have access, period - or that the system exists in the first place.
Myriad ways, pretty standard on most corporate networks, to restrict access to corporate devices. I cannot access any of my client's resources, including Web apps, without their laptop.
Simple method is IP whitelisting, easy in some ways painful to keep updated. Vpn is another easy option. But then you can have client side certs, hardware tokens, and endpoint security mechanisms which are probably more robust. Either way, it's not a weird unique thing, it's pretty ubiquitous :)
I have to be logged in to azure vpn to access the development environment of the web application I work on because heavens forbid if our users stumble upon a non-production version of the application on the Internet and yet these people just put everything out there for everyone to see. At least I think it should require a CAC card or a PIV card to access sensitive data like this, shutting down immediately if the card presence is not detected somehow.
Probably the department's fault for not using (presumably) Entra Conditional Access to restrict SSO to corporate devices / corporate subnets.
This is why if you're building a product, please give SSO for free (see sso.tax) - you shift responsibility, requirements and posture to the tenant's IdP.
Unfortunately that will make you a lot less money. The whole premise of the sso.tax seems based on that it's not intentional.
It is intentional and deliberate price discrimination to charge enterprises more. One example: why do you think enterprises don't just stack consumer/teams Codex or Claude subs with significant subsidies; given that all enterprise seats are API/PAYG now? SSO/IdP + ability to opt out of training globally
SSO is a core security feature, not a value add. I do not mind charging extra for say SCIM or advanced RBAC. I have a different view to business than most SaaS apps, and feel when you bring value and delight to the customer, they take you as a trustworthy partner and want to grow with you. Trust is very important and I feel so bitter paying Bitwarden, Adobe, and all the other enshittified stacks that 30-100% uplift on the base plan to get SSO. I also love my homelab stuff and it's a sour taste when I need to set up some system with local auth. yeah, maybe some nerd's A/B test show charging SSO makes more money, that's a shame and I think long term it's simply harmful (and probably less profitable due to my comment on stickyness and delighting customers being good business sense).
Only a tech nerd would think the solution to massive overreach by government organizations and illegal use of mass surveillance tools is more technology from one of the participating technology companies...
We typically use VPC Endpoint Services or equivalent for enterprise customers, ie connect our private VPC with their private VPC. Pretty much the best way to do this, no VPNs to manage or IP whitelists to maintain and all traffic is local to the cloud provider.
In addition to the other things mentioned, some very sensitive applications in my organization must be run from a virtual desktop, which is itself must be run from a locked down corporate laptop.
I can’t run any web apps from my employer unless I’m on one of their computers. Tokens are only generated on corporate systems. IP access only allowed from corporate VPN.
You can buy flock credentials to access all the data very easily on many marketplaces. They aren't tightly controlled secrets, they are distributed on a massive scale.
In Chatrie v. United States (June 2026) the SCOTUS ruled that individuals maintain a reasonable expectation of privacy in their digital location history and that geofence warrants constitute a search under the 4th Amendment. It's only a matter of time until a similar case involving Flock comes before them and they rule that a search of the Flock database constitutes a search under the 4th Amendment and that every single search requires a specific warrant.
I think there have been a positive number of cases gone in favor of digital privacy recently. This being one of them. It’s unfortunate, but it’ll just take time for these manners to go through the courts.
I’m quite naive regarding the details of the legal system, wonder why we can’t expedite certain cases when a SCOTUS precedent has been established, or some form of expedited legal notice. We shouldn’t have to wait for a perfect case of a flock violation, then wait for someone to be brave enough to spend the money (or if pro bono just their time/reputation) to file a case and go through the system for the next x years
Police regularly slaughter those they swore to "protect and serve" and since they have qualified immunity nothing can ever happen to them. The purpose of a system is what it does.
Who do you expect to charge the woman with a crime: the local prosecutors who are basically cop-adjacent, Georgia's attorney general who supports the lawless ICE, or a federal prosecutor working under the Trump administration?
I mean, maybe you'd like to do something about it via a civil lawsuit, at which point you ought to acquaint yourself with something called "qualified immunity."
And a great big poisoned tree for anything that comes from the data. But it’s not like the Americans have been following the rules when deporting people anyways.
That rule only applies in courtrooms. As ICE doesn't really do courtrooms, the rule is moot. (Not a joke. ICE moves prisoners around so quickly specifically to avoid dealing with courtrooms.)
The regime has figured out that the people don’t like certain things, but not nearly enough to do anything uncomfortable about them. Now they’re calibrating on the best ways to do things without stirring the people up too much. Apparently if you make gas cost too much that’s where Americans draw the line. And who says capitalism doesn’t work!
You can make gas cost too much if your media bubble says it's someone else's fault. Their target audience is people who only watch Fox News, and they will never connect the gas prices to the president unless he's a democrat.
I also do not understand how this doesn't break stuff like CFAA.
If I worked at a company and gave my work login credentials to a friend and that friend used it to access my work's network then I'm pretty sure I'd go to jail.
Most of the federal government predates the current administration. They really do want to follow the law. It's their job, not an ideology.
ICE is the President's personal force, screened for their loyalty to him. They have no interest in the law. The rest of the government doesn't like them any better than you do.
Voting data says there are large portions of the population loyal to Trump with no interest in the law, and even larger portions in the law enforcement agencies. If I was working in those departments, I would assume at least 2/3 (the portion of the general population fine with Trump's behavior) is not going to be on my side.
Its funny how nobody was making this argument when it was Obama ignoring international law to launch drone strikes on weddings and 18 yr old American citizens.
I guess the way I'd put it is that we've been increasingly allowing and not punishing privacy breaches and government/authorities overstepping and after 20+ years of boiling the frog the latest, most extreme variant has pretty much pushed it over the edge of dystopian.
So it's not all Trump, but his administration has definitely pushed the lack of accountability to new heights and combining it with the new wave of surveillance tech with limited oversight or legislation it's all just become ingrained with nobody to fight it.
There are probably systems that even if they should exist (debatable for some), they should do so only in secured facilities that the government worker must badge into physically to access.
This would at least reduce some of the avenues for abuse.
Ironic that defending "justice" makes them to break several laws.
It is almost like they are always on the verge of not respecting the laws anyway until they are the ones controlling the laws.
What could possibly go wrong?
Wonder how many low level Lowes or Home Depot asset protection employees would also happily hand their credentials over for nationwide search access, too.
I have Home Depot employees using Flock announcements to shadow me now.
Last two visits, some guy named "Victor" shadowed me, and made it a point to call me by my first name twice.
I spend as little money at Home Depot as possible now.
The flock system is being abused by every organization across the entire country, because thats where peoples heads are at today.
2 out of 3 adults in the US are not considered "psychologically mature" by psychologists.
Nation of adult children + spying and tracking technology ... of course its being abused. The only question is how much, and Flock isn't going to tell us the truth of it, ever, because they dont track abuse, they track victims.
Home Depot and Lowes are the 2 largest US home store ( construction materials, appliances, etc ) retail chains in the US.
They have Flock cameras installed on mobile trailers, parked in their parking lots. The cameras track your vehicle as you are parking, and issue alerts for anyone that has been flagged in the database.
In my case, I have classmates from school, who have friends at the local county EMS operations center, who are using the system to stalk me.
Just 3 days ago, I tried to have a quiet conversation with my girlfriend at a little park, in a small neighborhood. Less than 10 minutes after arriving, a car with 4 or 5 people showed up, positioned themselves within ear shot, and then began making fun of us in order to prevent us from thinking and discussing issues clearly. This event by itself seems innocent and random, except, it happens like clockwork, in multiple locations, and its an established pattern in my life, making it decidedly non-random. The "actors" think of it as street theatre, the police think of it as "policing", and what you get as the target is pure psychological hell.
When a victim begins to try and explain verbally what is happening to them, they relive the trauma of the events that have been "staged" and people assume the victim is mentally unstable. It is the same strategy as kicking a dog in the head repeatedly, until it becomes an agry mad dog, and then putting it down because it was dangerous. Create the problem, then appear to solve it.
What may have started out as a joke now has them guilty of human trafficking, so they have adopted a strategy of "running me out of town" via harrassment.
They know if they emotionally destablise people, they will voluntarily leave or self destruct via drugs, stress, acting out, etc.
This is what "community policing" now means.
There are any number of videos on youtube of people having meltdowns, claiming they are being 'gangstalked', etc. and they seem very disturbed. This is why this works. They disturb you, then dismiss any allegations as you being disturbed.
Watch the movie "Closetland" for how psychological abuse works.
It sounds like you have a good basis for some lawsuits (and criminal charges if you can convince someone), hopefully at least one of which will be financially worth it. Of course you need to gather good evidence first. Consult with a lawyer first.
There is an entire "targetted individual" community on the internet.
You can tell that something has happened to them, but its ephemeral, because its psychological, and what do all of us do when we don't understand someone ?
We dismiss them. We other them. We isolate them. We walk away.
Not as a group decision, but the outcome of our collective individual decisions.
Abuse someone long enough, psychologically, and if they are not educated and self-aware, their behavior becomes erratic and they lose all social support.
It's not unlike veterans of a war, who understand what each other went through, when the public doesn't.
Just to be clear, they don't have access to the "full package", only the cameras on their property, right? Or is it cross referenced with vehicles flagged by others?
That is fucking insane. I'm also separately sorry your friends are being stalked. I'd like to give a perspective here without sounding holy. Yes we have ANPR (what you'd call ALPR). There are national police databases and I am sure the cameras are very effective, but every search would require a justification of proportionality and access is not sold to the highest bidders. I think the furthest stretch of users would be the tax authorities' investigations departments. That a private company can profile citizens' movements like this is insane.
I think you may have misread. I am being stalked. My friends are not.
My "former classmates" due to some grudge, are using their friends in power, to abuse me. The two classmates spearheading it, know everyone who is anyone in this county, because one was the President of a womens organization, and the other has been a bartender downtown for 20 years.
I'm being harassed by the digital good ole boy network. This behavior isn't new, its just morphed into a sci fi dystopia.
Sorry, I did misread that. Stay safe I guess :/ I just find it bizarre this whole thing is a private company with a sales@ email the Home Depot etc can contact. I won't be political but a) unlike many countries you can elect your sheriffs, remind them who they work for, b) you have a thing coming up in a few weeks, remind your lawmakers who they work for too.
I'd be happy to complete a test for you, that demonstrates im not paranoid, and merely repeating what I am observing in my life.
The Flock system has these risks built into it, no matter what its proponents claim. A person with one too many beers in them, in any downtown area, in any city, in any country, could say something to offend the wrong person. A person with access to Flock, who happens to be a police officer, who then stalks them.
Your reality is composed of what you have observed, what you have experienced, and what people tell you is real, and people tell 9 lies a day.
Your reality, some part of it, is not what you think. If you place a person in a reality that you control, and then execute a "rug pull" where you drop the veil and reveal a different reality, it causes stress, and stress kills after enough of it.
It's alright if you can't accept that this is happening to other people, but you are doing so because the idea scares you, and its not happening to you, so you reject it, and that is why it works.
Its the new digital Jim Crowe era, and US history is repleat with stories of people whos rights have been abused by others.
The comment described a plausible scenario of how flock could be used in the described stalking. Instead of assuming the commenter is paranoid and delusional, we should make sure that surveillance cameras cannot be used in that way, especially given that there are actual documented cases of flock being used for stalking and no apparent safeguards to prevent it.
At it's basics, it's a camera software suite like any other security software like Genetec or the open source Frigate that companies can buy. Obviously the access allowed for a private company like home depot would be limited to only their cameras but home depot could then make those cameras available to law enforcement sort of like how Fusus allows private businesses to set up their local Police department with access to their camera system through a Fusus access box just that with Flock it's built into the software and isn't a third party add-on.
Lowes and Home Depot, two retailers of tools and home repair supplies, got Flock cameras for all their parking lots after a wave of organized thefts in multiple states. By tracking license plates, they were able to end several rings of thieves who had been stealing millions of dollars worth of goods.
But this sounds like a policing problem not a private enterprise problem. By all means let them have an ALPR reader at the parking lot egress. 'Hi 911 yes we saw this pickup truck XX1ABC steal our shit at 2359hrs this evening', not 'cool we'll play cops & robbers with highly sensitive PII and no accountability or due process'
Correct. Lowes and Home Depot pay for "private" Flock cameras for asset protection purposes.
They use the licence plate hotlist internally to track when "organized retail crime(tm)" shows up and get pings when "thieves" come back to the store.
Thus, any Lowes/HD asset protection employee/manager can log into Flock, and see all of the ones "owned" by their corporation (which is nationwide, and installed well beyond the confines of the store property, often covering entire shopping plazas or parks where they're located). They won't be able to see outside of those bounds, but that's still a SUPER powerful tool if you consider ~1700 Lowes and 2000 Home Depots in the US alone.
And of course, combined with "small town" mentality and "backing the blue", of course someone with a modicum of power (the mall cop AP employee) will LARP up and want to whack out with ICE/the local PD and be happy to help them if it means getting a challenge coin!
Well this slightly (but only slightly) makes this a little better. So Cory at the Home Depot cannot stalk his ex by tracking the nationwide Flock network, but _in effect_ has a mini nationwide network available to him because he can see any Home Depot/Lowes which is a huge dragnet anyways?
Anything that can be abused through collusion in a wide scale scenario will eventually happen.
This is not a contingent issue, it’s a fundamental integrated flaw of any system that put general totalitarian spy as an aimed outcome. Whatever the way it’s green-washed over safety tradeoffs won’t change this obvious fact.
I'm not completely opposed to 'camera, cell, solar, battery on a pole'. Its pretty low tech honestly... But there absolutely be a minimum standard of search warrant approval in front of a judge before using it. AND it should be a criminal offense to use it without a search warrant.
However there's this whole problem of "illegal for government to do it but whitewashing through for profit company to do illegal thing".
@Americans who laugh at China and Russia thinking you're still much better off in freedom and rights: That is exactly how you look like to the rest of the world.
> Interim Maj. Max Nowinsky sustained the allegation and recommended an eight-hour suspension
Lots of explanations provided for wanting to go easy on her. Is the same logic applied for the many victims of a police department? If it's preferential treatment then maybe Interim Maj. Max Nowinsky should also be kicked to the curb.
> Tyler Harpe, a federal ICE agent
Federal ICE agent Tyler Harpe, may you enjoy your new found fame.
I’m less surprised that such things are happening (much worse has been happening for over 20 years) than by the fact that many people seem to genuinely believe that voting, protesting, or calling some representative is going to get us out of this.
A rollback here and there only delays the inevitable. There has been no meaningful progress in individual rights in a Western country in at least 30 years.
They're taking the more nihilistic stance that progress now is just a delay, and the outcome is treated as inevitable. Honestly, it's hard to see it going any other way: plenty of towns, cities, and counties are just waiting out the storm of public opinion and will move on once people get tired of protesting the same thing over and over.
Doesn't mean I don't think that protest and outrage over surveillance aren't good things, just that these things require constant vigilance or else we're stuck with them. Personally, what I see happening is a further bifurcation of American life, where we see communities opposed to constant surveillance contrasted with those that embrace the panopticon.
People thought the same thing about nuclear proliferation. Turns out we can do hard things if we make the effort as a populace. I’m all for being a realist but 1984 is not inevitable, it’s just very difficult to prevent.
I'd assume that the Plutocrats, their loyal politicians, and the Creep State have worked very hard to convince people to "fight back" with ineffectual tactics.
Which is not to say that voting can't be extremely effective, if organized at suitable scales over time. Trump wasn't re-elected because all the swing voters who'd replaced him with Biden in '20 were overjoyed with how Joe and his Dem's had handled things.
Trump and his predecessors have all been advancing mass surveillance on an unimaginable scale. This particular topic is probably the strongest argument against the power of voting.
Against the power of n=1 voting, or the against the power of "we got 53%" voting?
I was pointing out that the former is virtually meaningless, but the latter tends to be decisive.
Yes, mass surveillance is a huge problem. But most of the time, most of the voters do not behave as if they meaningfully care about most of the aspects of mass surveillance. That's pretty much the same rule as for the Pentagon buying $5,000 screwdrivers, and bizarre loopholes appearing in the tax code to benefit a few billionaires who are extremely "generous" to their good friends in Congress. Both R's and D's may loudly denounce those practices - but they know that actually fighting against them, where it counts, will not be good for their political careers.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, the abuse is tangential to the fact that "the system working as intended" is designed to comprehensively and cheaply subjugate us all to the whims of whoever or whatever has the ear of government at any particular minute.
If you wave a magic wand and fix the abuse you will not fix the very nature and purpose of these systems. 1984 would not magically become acceptable if cops couldn't stalk their girlfriend or creds could not be shared among agencies off the books.
A large enough to be a problem subset of the people decrying abuse fancy themselves an armchair central planner (the more self aware ones fancy themselves armchair despots). In the back of their mind they're thinking "if only we got rid of the abuse then the public would buy into this Orwellian system then I could get the government enforce my pet policies with an iron fist and get minimal pushback". Beware of these people. They are the true evil. They all seek to take a bite out of your day to day freedom and it doesn't take all that many of them getting their way before there is nothing left. The politicians feeling emboldened to sign contracts with Flock or any other surveillance vendor only feel emboldened to do so due to the existence and frequency of these people.
Abuse or not these systems are rotten and incompatible on a fundamental level with a free society.
And ICE in turn guns down US citizens, as is already documented.
This is literally a repeat, with modification, of Europe in the
1930s. It is not 1:1 comparable, also in part because the US
justice system, even if undermined by orange scumbag loyalists,
works to some extent still. I am not saying all of it works, but
on youtube you can often listen to discussions by several judges
discussing issues at hand. I forgot which one it was, but it was
linked in "Audit the Audit", and the judges there asked very good,
and very objective questions. In the end they denied a cop immunity
by default, based on very logical arguments they made. I was quite
surprised when I listened to that. It also means that the Trump
oligarch team is not able to kill all of the US justice system,
even though they placed their agents into it already.
Is this any different, legally, than sharing your Netflix login etc?
Because the data is purchased, most jurisdictions don't require a warrant. The only legal issue I can see currently is that Flock lost revenue from having another subscriber.
What if sharing of Netflix passwords could lead to bodily harm or an “illegal” activity that wouldn’t hold up in court? Probably the one sharing Netflix password wouldn’t remain unscathed, legally speaking?
A lot of downvotes for this comment but I think it's an interesting question and shouldn't be downvoted.
It's easy to argue (as lot of people have in this thread) that there is a huge moral difference between sharing access to a streaming service and sharing access to a mass surveillance tool.
But was any criminal law broken? Is it just a violation of Flock's ToS and the biggest consequence is the police department losing access for violating the contract?
It's an important question, because if there isn't really any legal consequences for any of the parties involved then it's worth understanding that and, hopefully, addressing!
If we interpret OP's question in good faith, I don't think they are implying that it should be legal, just asking if it is.
Your employer probably would, and Anthropic as well.
—
In any case, these Netflix and LLM subscription comparisons are utterly beside the point, the equation is hilariously different when it’s a surveillance tool used by
the state violence monopoly that we’re talking about. The standard should be absurdly higher than "no big deal, everyone shares their Netflix".
Politicians are completely naive in their understand how people works, if it's abused, the system isn't locked down enough or that one person circumvented the procedure. They completely fail to understand that there exists people to whom you cannot grant access and screening people in advance probably impossible. Some cop checks all the boxes, gets access to databases, then their partner leaves them and they are now no longer safe to grant access.
I don't understand why it's hard to grasp that surveillance tools are dangerous and rather using them to protect others, law enforcement will use these tools to do bad things. It's as if that we assume that cops are better people and follow rules better. Even in countries that actually train their police force this isn't remotely true.
The US might be different, I doubt it, but society is getting increasingly SAFE, there is less and less need for these tools.
This is a great point, and one that really isn't played up because it doesn't fit the whole profit-from-attention narrative that literally every media surface seems to be following.
It almost seems as if law enforcement 'need' these additional tools to keep them busy; find new, more trivial crime that's been hiding behind no one reporting it or being hurt by it.
Maybe if law enforcement resources could be applied to more corporate crime, that'd keep em busy till the cows come home.
what happens when society solves its issues and theres no need to 'keep them busy' :(
The real revelation comes when you realize this is not true.
- German address registers with religious affiliation were a good idea until the Nazis came to power.
- Pegasus spyware was developed and sold to governments to fight terrorism and serious crime — until it was used to spy on journalists, human rights activists and political opponents, including in authoritarian states.
- Rwandan identity cards listed ethnicity for administrative purposes — until militias used them to identify and execute Tutsis at roadblocks during the 1994 genocide.
Bottom line: Even if you trust the current administration (do you?), are you sure you want 5o give that power to all future ones?
Oh man, I have to assume you live in a nice little enclave and are reading old statistical reports. I have the misfortune of sometimes having to travel into the city. I can assure you, it is not getting safer. In fact, just last week I saw first sign of Chicago turning into Philly.
This chart is up to 2024. If you look up 2025 and 2026 data for the US you will see that it has continued to decline YoY.
Judging by your comment I assume that you have personally witnessed some criminality recently and are drawing conclusions about the entire US, if so I’m sorry you had to endure that, but that doesn’t mean that your conclusions apply to the general trend in the US as the GP was referring to.
It’s such a shame that media (social and traditional) really plays up loss aversion. My local news is basically fear mongering. My local social media page is filled with people who have nothing better to do with their time than complain about all of the negative stuff happening in this town. They take every isolated incident and project it as some major pattern. It’s really sad.
They aren’t doing hard hitting journalism exposing negligence, they are making people terrified of planes. They’re stressing people out about something that is not reasonably within their control AND it’s not a real risk for us all. The numbers don’t support scaring people over this.
If a definite majority wants to do so, the system will change. Until then the oligarchs will keep playing one side againts the other, as can currently be seen with Trump amplifying the hate in the population, in order for his cronies to steal more money, start more wars and so forth. He will lose the upcoming elections but he will continue to worship theft and destruction.
Some are, others aren't. They just accept it willingly.
Just as in the Purge movies politicians are exempt ;-)
The idea that a movie could get so many basic things so badly wrong, that it could float a scenario that made zero sense, but still gain such cultural traction was one of the first times I felt old. It's speaking to a youth with crazy and new ideas. They're ready to make their own grand and terrible mistakes, which a future youth will one day hate them for.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rally_%27round_the_flag_effect
> normal everyday people wouldn't want to be violent one day year
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice
I will never understand the reason of mentioning works of fictions to make a real life point
We should engineer a society immune to that.
Not Starship Troopers, though.
They understand exactly how people work. You are naive for thinking that they aren't aware of this. Their entire job is essentially a popularity contest in which they promise you things, that they almost never deliver on.
Honestly I think the majority aren't smart enough to do the cost benefit analysis of these system, so they just ignore the warning.
You'd be shocked how many people cannot process basic hypotheticals. I've been in countless dialogues like this one:
- How would you feel now if you had not eaten breakfast?
- But I did eat breakfast.
Simple method is IP whitelisting, easy in some ways painful to keep updated. Vpn is another easy option. But then you can have client side certs, hardware tokens, and endpoint security mechanisms which are probably more robust. Either way, it's not a weird unique thing, it's pretty ubiquitous :)
This is why if you're building a product, please give SSO for free (see sso.tax) - you shift responsibility, requirements and posture to the tenant's IdP.
It is intentional and deliberate price discrimination to charge enterprises more. One example: why do you think enterprises don't just stack consumer/teams Codex or Claude subs with significant subsidies; given that all enterprise seats are API/PAYG now? SSO/IdP + ability to opt out of training globally
If the authorities want people to accept systems like Flock etc. then they need to severely punish abuse like this.
Assuming that’s true, why wouldn’t he have his own flock account to do his searches?
I’m quite naive regarding the details of the legal system, wonder why we can’t expedite certain cases when a SCOTUS precedent has been established, or some form of expedited legal notice. We shouldn’t have to wait for a perfect case of a flock violation, then wait for someone to be brave enough to spend the money (or if pro bono just their time/reputation) to file a case and go through the system for the next x years
[reality] It's just the police, beating us with better batons, same as it ever was.
And while federal crimes are legal now, couldn't it be against state law too?
Who do you expect to charge the woman with a crime: the local prosecutors who are basically cop-adjacent, Georgia's attorney general who supports the lawless ICE, or a federal prosecutor working under the Trump administration?
I mean, maybe you'd like to do something about it via a civil lawsuit, at which point you ought to acquaint yourself with something called "qualified immunity."
Living in a police state is fun, right?
If I worked at a company and gave my work login credentials to a friend and that friend used it to access my work's network then I'm pretty sure I'd go to jail.
And just about everyone in the position to prosecute them actively wants this, so this is just another example of laundering the blame.
ICE is the President's personal force, screened for their loyalty to him. They have no interest in the law. The rest of the government doesn't like them any better than you do.
The president has always ignored the law.
So it's not all Trump, but his administration has definitely pushed the lack of accountability to new heights and combining it with the new wave of surveillance tech with limited oversight or legislation it's all just become ingrained with nobody to fight it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%BChrerprinzip
This would at least reduce some of the avenues for abuse.
Last two visits, some guy named "Victor" shadowed me, and made it a point to call me by my first name twice.
I spend as little money at Home Depot as possible now.
The flock system is being abused by every organization across the entire country, because thats where peoples heads are at today.
2 out of 3 adults in the US are not considered "psychologically mature" by psychologists.
Nation of adult children + spying and tracking technology ... of course its being abused. The only question is how much, and Flock isn't going to tell us the truth of it, ever, because they dont track abuse, they track victims.
We are the victims of Flock.
Home Depot and Lowes are the 2 largest US home store ( construction materials, appliances, etc ) retail chains in the US.
They have Flock cameras installed on mobile trailers, parked in their parking lots. The cameras track your vehicle as you are parking, and issue alerts for anyone that has been flagged in the database.
In my case, I have classmates from school, who have friends at the local county EMS operations center, who are using the system to stalk me.
Just 3 days ago, I tried to have a quiet conversation with my girlfriend at a little park, in a small neighborhood. Less than 10 minutes after arriving, a car with 4 or 5 people showed up, positioned themselves within ear shot, and then began making fun of us in order to prevent us from thinking and discussing issues clearly. This event by itself seems innocent and random, except, it happens like clockwork, in multiple locations, and its an established pattern in my life, making it decidedly non-random. The "actors" think of it as street theatre, the police think of it as "policing", and what you get as the target is pure psychological hell.
When a victim begins to try and explain verbally what is happening to them, they relive the trauma of the events that have been "staged" and people assume the victim is mentally unstable. It is the same strategy as kicking a dog in the head repeatedly, until it becomes an agry mad dog, and then putting it down because it was dangerous. Create the problem, then appear to solve it.
What may have started out as a joke now has them guilty of human trafficking, so they have adopted a strategy of "running me out of town" via harrassment.
They know if they emotionally destablise people, they will voluntarily leave or self destruct via drugs, stress, acting out, etc.
This is what "community policing" now means.
There are any number of videos on youtube of people having meltdowns, claiming they are being 'gangstalked', etc. and they seem very disturbed. This is why this works. They disturb you, then dismiss any allegations as you being disturbed.
Watch the movie "Closetland" for how psychological abuse works.
That sucks though.
You can tell that something has happened to them, but its ephemeral, because its psychological, and what do all of us do when we don't understand someone ?
We dismiss them. We other them. We isolate them. We walk away.
Not as a group decision, but the outcome of our collective individual decisions.
Abuse someone long enough, psychologically, and if they are not educated and self-aware, their behavior becomes erratic and they lose all social support.
It's not unlike veterans of a war, who understand what each other went through, when the public doesn't.
My "former classmates" due to some grudge, are using their friends in power, to abuse me. The two classmates spearheading it, know everyone who is anyone in this county, because one was the President of a womens organization, and the other has been a bartender downtown for 20 years.
I'm being harassed by the digital good ole boy network. This behavior isn't new, its just morphed into a sci fi dystopia.
And you blame the "adults of America" that supposedly are "psychologically inmature", which to me looks like an absurd and unsubstantiated claim
The Flock system has these risks built into it, no matter what its proponents claim. A person with one too many beers in them, in any downtown area, in any city, in any country, could say something to offend the wrong person. A person with access to Flock, who happens to be a police officer, who then stalks them.
Your reality is composed of what you have observed, what you have experienced, and what people tell you is real, and people tell 9 lies a day.
Your reality, some part of it, is not what you think. If you place a person in a reality that you control, and then execute a "rug pull" where you drop the veil and reveal a different reality, it causes stress, and stress kills after enough of it.
It's alright if you can't accept that this is happening to other people, but you are doing so because the idea scares you, and its not happening to you, so you reject it, and that is why it works.
Its the new digital Jim Crowe era, and US history is repleat with stories of people whos rights have been abused by others.
They use the licence plate hotlist internally to track when "organized retail crime(tm)" shows up and get pings when "thieves" come back to the store.
Thus, any Lowes/HD asset protection employee/manager can log into Flock, and see all of the ones "owned" by their corporation (which is nationwide, and installed well beyond the confines of the store property, often covering entire shopping plazas or parks where they're located). They won't be able to see outside of those bounds, but that's still a SUPER powerful tool if you consider ~1700 Lowes and 2000 Home Depots in the US alone.
And of course, combined with "small town" mentality and "backing the blue", of course someone with a modicum of power (the mall cop AP employee) will LARP up and want to whack out with ICE/the local PD and be happy to help them if it means getting a challenge coin!
This is not a contingent issue, it’s a fundamental integrated flaw of any system that put general totalitarian spy as an aimed outcome. Whatever the way it’s green-washed over safety tradeoffs won’t change this obvious fact.
I'm not completely opposed to 'camera, cell, solar, battery on a pole'. Its pretty low tech honestly... But there absolutely be a minimum standard of search warrant approval in front of a judge before using it. AND it should be a criminal offense to use it without a search warrant.
However there's this whole problem of "illegal for government to do it but whitewashing through for profit company to do illegal thing".
Lots of explanations provided for wanting to go easy on her. Is the same logic applied for the many victims of a police department? If it's preferential treatment then maybe Interim Maj. Max Nowinsky should also be kicked to the curb.
> Tyler Harpe, a federal ICE agent
Federal ICE agent Tyler Harpe, may you enjoy your new found fame.
Doesn't mean I don't think that protest and outrage over surveillance aren't good things, just that these things require constant vigilance or else we're stuck with them. Personally, what I see happening is a further bifurcation of American life, where we see communities opposed to constant surveillance contrasted with those that embrace the panopticon.
Look, I get it, we're clearly in the backsliding zone right now, but midterms are here.
Town canceled their contracts, the stock went down.
Two measurable metrics
Which is not to say that voting can't be extremely effective, if organized at suitable scales over time. Trump wasn't re-elected because all the swing voters who'd replaced him with Biden in '20 were overjoyed with how Joe and his Dem's had handled things.
I was pointing out that the former is virtually meaningless, but the latter tends to be decisive.
Yes, mass surveillance is a huge problem. But most of the time, most of the voters do not behave as if they meaningfully care about most of the aspects of mass surveillance. That's pretty much the same rule as for the Pentagon buying $5,000 screwdrivers, and bizarre loopholes appearing in the tax code to benefit a few billionaires who are extremely "generous" to their good friends in Congress. Both R's and D's may loudly denounce those practices - but they know that actually fighting against them, where it counts, will not be good for their political careers.
If you wave a magic wand and fix the abuse you will not fix the very nature and purpose of these systems. 1984 would not magically become acceptable if cops couldn't stalk their girlfriend or creds could not be shared among agencies off the books.
A large enough to be a problem subset of the people decrying abuse fancy themselves an armchair central planner (the more self aware ones fancy themselves armchair despots). In the back of their mind they're thinking "if only we got rid of the abuse then the public would buy into this Orwellian system then I could get the government enforce my pet policies with an iron fist and get minimal pushback". Beware of these people. They are the true evil. They all seek to take a bite out of your day to day freedom and it doesn't take all that many of them getting their way before there is nothing left. The politicians feeling emboldened to sign contracts with Flock or any other surveillance vendor only feel emboldened to do so due to the existence and frequency of these people.
Abuse or not these systems are rotten and incompatible on a fundamental level with a free society.
This is literally a repeat, with modification, of Europe in the 1930s. It is not 1:1 comparable, also in part because the US justice system, even if undermined by orange scumbag loyalists, works to some extent still. I am not saying all of it works, but on youtube you can often listen to discussions by several judges discussing issues at hand. I forgot which one it was, but it was linked in "Audit the Audit", and the judges there asked very good, and very objective questions. In the end they denied a cop immunity by default, based on very logical arguments they made. I was quite surprised when I listened to that. It also means that the Trump oligarch team is not able to kill all of the US justice system, even though they placed their agents into it already.
Because the data is purchased, most jurisdictions don't require a warrant. The only legal issue I can see currently is that Flock lost revenue from having another subscriber.
I am not a lawyer, just curious.
But even if it were legal, this only shows the core problem:
That data should not be available to anyone at all.
It's easy to argue (as lot of people have in this thread) that there is a huge moral difference between sharing access to a streaming service and sharing access to a mass surveillance tool.
But was any criminal law broken? Is it just a violation of Flock's ToS and the biggest consequence is the police department losing access for violating the contract?
It's an important question, because if there isn't really any legal consequences for any of the parties involved then it's worth understanding that and, hopefully, addressing!
If we interpret OP's question in good faith, I don't think they are implying that it should be legal, just asking if it is.
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In any case, these Netflix and LLM subscription comparisons are utterly beside the point, the equation is hilariously different when it’s a surveillance tool used by the state violence monopoly that we’re talking about. The standard should be absurdly higher than "no big deal, everyone shares their Netflix".