I have gotten in arguments about these Flock cameras, because people will use the "if you're not doing anything wrong you got nothing to worry about" defense.

Basically the entire point of the fourth Amendment (and sort of the Bill of Right as a whole) seems to be based on the assumption that we cannot trust the government to not abuse its power, so we purposefully limit its power. At least that's the impression I got, IANAL disclaimer I guess.

If we cannot safely assume that every cop is above-board, which we obviously cannot, then it's trivial to come up with cases of "if you got nothing to hide you got nothing to fear" defense. A bad cop could use Flock to stalk an ex-girlfriend. A bad cop could find some unsavory-but-not-illegal behavior from a politician (e.g. visiting a porn shop) and blackmail them. A bad cop could, as demonstrated by this article, simply use a Flock camera to harass someone they don't like.

I didn't think this was a controversial opinion, but I do see a lot of Flock/mass-surveillance defenders so I guess it is.

In my opinion, there was never any doubt that there would be over-policing. Rather, people doubt that they would belong to the over-policed parties. I hear similar arguments about NSF funding from my relatives: "yes, funding has been illegally cut, but it will not be cut for the people I know, only for the 'bad' researchers."

Are you aware of any current country or any country throughout history that has granted the government powers like this and hasn't been abused? I think you're mistaken to blame lack of accountability and lack of public oversight. I think it's simply not possible.

There was an audit trail for improper access using the technology and a lawsuit. How is this "lack of accountability" and "lack of public oversight"? Here are the 100 instances:

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wied.11...

I'm pretty sure license plate readers and other surveillance tech have been abused constantly in the past, but we see more articles about Flock because they have better logging & auditing compared to smaller competitors or government-owned cameras.

There wasn't for anyone who paid attention. That "logic of surveillance" article a few years ago got it 100% correct: surveillance is immediately used against those who object to its use.

> How was there ever any doubt that these cameras and this access would be used in this way?

Strawman. I have never heard of one single ingenuous person that believed these would only be used appropriately.

The main issue is that our government has too much power as to be unstoppable.

I personally blame Y Combinator for looking at Flock and going "Well, there is potential for abuse, but that's a risk we're willing to impose on society to make some money."

Really only three or four things you ought to say during a stop

“( Name and address, or license registration and insurance if in a vehicle)” -required by law pretty much everywhere.

“I’m exercising my right to silence. I will not answer questions without a lawyer”

“I do not consent to any searches”

“Am I being detained, or am I free to go”- say this one anytime you think the officer might be done with the reason he stopped you, because it “starts a clock” of unlawful extension

Pick whichever one makes the most sense at any given moment. Don’t say anything else. If the officer says you are free to go, leave.

As for what you can refuse, you really can’t during the stop. You have to fight in court. LISTEN CAREFULLY to the words of the officer and do not respond to QUESTIONS, only ORDERS. They are trained to ask you to do things that might be unlawful if they were orders, like can you step out of the car for me please, can you follow my flashlight for me, can you roll down your window all the way. If you are unclear, ask “are you ordering me, officer?”

If any part of the stop was unlawful your defense attorney can iron that out later in court (and if so, typically everything occurring after the unlawful gets thrown out)

If you want to go a step further and be polite etc, know that many police won’t give you brownie points for it, but if they ask you questions like “where are you coming from” or “where are you going” or “who are/were you with” redirect your answers only to plainly obvious facts about YOURSELF ONLY and the PRESENT time, e.g. “I am out for a drive officer”

Caveat: IANAL, this is not legal advice

Source: SWIM has extensive experience in this area

> Then that officer tracked him thru flock over 100 times for some personal vendetta.

That's not quite accurate according to the article. It was actually worse: There were over 100 searches and some of them were done by officer in question, but some were done by other officers. This was due to lieutenant's order in connection with Jones' citizen complaint. So it wasn't just one officer abusing the system.

This is disgusting, and I continue to argue that we should not excuse Flock Safety for this kind of misbehavior. They created the tech and marketed it to police departments without providing good protections against this kind of thing. Making something cheap and automatic changes how people use it. If this cop had to tail the guy around himself, maybe he wouldn't have done it.

But the far worse problem IMO is that this cop is dirty, corrupt, untrustworthy, and should be punished for stalking this man, and yet he surely will not be. Worst case, he might catch some administrative sanction or maybe be fired - he won't go to jail like he should for this misbehavior.

If you have 1 dirty cop and 100 who ignore his bad behavior, you actually have 101 dirty cops. We need a way to deal with this in our society without resorting to the absolutes of "defund the police" or "back the blue".

sounds like an easy win for a prosecutor for felony stalking.

there needs to be more separation from prosecutors and cops. I know a lot of places now have prosecutors who are actively against cops, that is not what I mean.

the prosecutors are supposed to be unbiased and make decisions on evidence. we know they don't regardless of their political leaning. but that is the standard we (citizens) should hold them accountable. unfortunately there are too may bootlicking voters who just want to feel "safe" and have zero courage of their own even in the voting booth.

we need to stop giving agencies money based on stats. that is one cause to a lot of these problems. then the cops and agencies get all twisted and in a tissy when a tool that made stat pumping easier like right now the flock cameras.

Pretty cut and dried civil liberties case there

Infuriating, yes, but apparently getting shot for no reason is also quite popular. This sounds like the better deal.

You don't need a special speedy system. A regular warrant is just fine. A warrant in this case would never have been granted because there was no suspicion of wrongdoing. There's already processes for expedited search warrants outside of business hours, the problem is that warrants are simply never required to use these services.

Using minority report as an example of a good policing system is a bit unsettling.

> Surely access to footage can be gated behind some sort of expedited digital court warrant?

These are police-owned cameras filming public areas. A better solution would be to require court approval to buy and vote these cameras, or where they can be pointed.

In practice, the odds overwhelmingly favor abuse. And even if the "proper and lawful" version was somehow achieved, it would require constant maintenance, security, and expensive oversight that would also be at risk of degenerating back into abuse.

If you think judges who are unaccountable and regularly abuse their powers are a solution for oversight of surveillance, I have a bridge to sell you. (I don’t have a bridge.)

It would be even easier to track criminals if we required all people* in the country to wear always on devices with GPS, always on cameras, always recording audio that are illegal to disable or turn off.

But that would be OK as long as a warrant was required to access it, right?

* - All people unable to pay the government to disable the device.

Requiring a warrant would be better than the status quo, but the very existence of the data is too high a risk, in my opinion.

The tool shouldn't exist, period.

That people defend this is shocking. Absolutely zero foresight.

If oligarchs can opt-out it shouldn't exist.

They can live in gated communities, travel by chauffeured cars owned by contracted businesses multiple LLCs deep, fly in private airports on private jets, or just go live on a yacht in international waters.

Anything can be made to go away.

Maybe have something on the plate that prevents reading from certain angles? There was a ticket dismissed in Quebec a few years ago for an "unreadable plate" because the car had a bike rack hiding the plate but the ticket had the plate number on it so it was not unreadable

They are being removed from hundreds of municipalities, what do you mean?

I know if you douse these cameras with flammable liquids they burn up pretty well. I’m in support of the same for the people pushing these Flock cameras. Because if you’ve elevated yourself above the rest of us, well then we don’t need you anymore. Tie whomever voted for these cameras to the mast and light them the fuck up.

We need an actual democracy(not rich people's puppets). In this country almost 75% of voting population are against the war in Iran and yet most of congress supports that war.

Surveillance tech very much can be and is going away in plenty of places

321 down, Dallas: https://thehill.com/policy/technology/6065838-dallas-police-...

150 down, El Paso: https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/public-safe...

ALL on state roadways, Florida: https://www.tallahassee.com/story/news/state/2026/09/01/whic...

A dozen agencies cancelling Flock in Wisconsin https://www.fox6now.com/news/flock-camera-pushback-fond-du-l...

Human nature itself.

Why is it not going away?

not installing them. Voting out anyone that does

Does that company also have three pounds of copper in their cameras, like Flock?

As a veteran I agree, with a significant caveat:

Generally those who support the police in general (especially those with the thin blue line American flag displayed somewhere) espouse support for veterans. The clash of a veteran operating legally with police operating illegally helps foster cognitive dissonance and disentangle these two institutions in their mind.

In other words these types of articles are helpful for causing those individuals to confront the issues in their belief structure.

I use them this way all the time with my parents, as they continue to insist that I (a retired Navy vet) should mindlessly support the police. They are not interested in the LONG history of those two populations clashing.

Hopefully they remove cops who abuse their powers. While I agree that victims require compensation, ultimately these payouts only hurt the taxpayers who have to cover for these cops who at worst just move to another town to do it again.

A way to think of the Baumol effect in more local terms:

High-productivity organizations have increased revenue and reduced expenses, almost by definition. These profits can be "spent" in various ways like charging customers less, paying workers more, paying investors more, and blue-sky research. (I'm remembering the early days of Google here.) Or it could fund various forms of corruption.

Paying employees more helps drive up local wages. Also, wealthier people want higher-end services and are price-insensitive, so they're inevitably going to be charged more. They'll bid more for houses and pay more to eat in fancier restaurants.

People discount the "trickle-down" effect but everyone notices when the cost of living goes up because there are a lot of rich people around who will pay more.

Not only is policing not immune against perfidy, but I would argue perfidy is built into the police system as a core tenet. There is a lot of widely available evidence

> Everyone has heard all the libertarian and contra-libertarian arguments going back decades; no one is learning from yet another go-round

People are generally massively uninformed if not misinformed. People have not heard real arguments or data for most issues in general.

Why not the other way around? First make sure the police department is capable of using them legally and reliably investigating abuse, then we can consider allowing them.

Don't remove freedom from society - Be kind to people and give them equal opportunities to make sure they use their freedom for good. Prosecute bad apples with actual police work and don't let them ruin a good thing.

Want to track what people are doing all the time? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyeurism#Treatment

Absolutely. First let's install an extreme surveillance state and give them full police power unlimited by the Constitution. Then, later, if we have any regrets, no problem. Just restore democracy.

But we decided as a country long long long ago that we wouldn't abet abuse, unwarranted search and seizure, and would treat people as innocent until proven guilty even if that meant elevated crime was the price to pay for that

"bad apples" = one rotten apple ruins the bunch.

There are no "good apples" the article itself shows that other "apples" were helping him illegaly surveil. The "good apples" thought it was a good idea to give every apple access to a problematic system.

There are no good apples if there's a rotten in the bunch, we need public oversight of the only people that are allowed to enact violence on behalf of the state.

Nice shitty astroturfing campaign, bro. How much does Flock provide in payola? Five figures and I'll start singing the praises, too, bro.