A friend of mine had the cops called on her by a neighbor because her kids were playing in the front yard and she wasn't out there with them.

I don't know what world people here live in, but I am not expecting kids in a front yard in the middle of the day in a quiet neighborhood on a dead end road to be snatched up.

Could it happen? Sure. Should we force our kids to live under fear that it will happen as soon as a parent isn't watching them? Absolutely not.

I have feeling that how safe you feel is correlates strongly to your media diet, and weakly to your surroundings. I'd be curious to see what studies have been done.

I heard about this story somewhere and couldn’t really believe it. I also thought that the US/German comparison videos about the fact we Germans let our kids go to school alone etc are a bit over the top. Seems no. But to be fair. Also in Germany things around security have changed. Where it was normal in my youth that my parents had actually no clue where I was while I was roaming the streets of Berlin (Courtesy to a Berlin wide public transport ticket I got for school). Today that doesn’t fly anymore. Kids have phones and get tracked every step. It’s the more controlled level of freedom. Another connected anecdote that left me puzzled at the time: I spend some days in D.C last year (right before the National Guard got deployed) and wanted to do a short run from the Hotel. It was already going dark and I didn’t check for the weather and asked at the desk if it was ok outside to run. The answer was “yes it’s pretty safe around here.” See my mind never made the connection that something harmful would be out there waiting for me.

> “it doesn’t feel safer.”

> This conversation is usually about how no one lets their kids play outside unsupervised anymore,

Those two show overall fear is higher, not that reasonable fear is higher.

There's so much in current society that sells fear, that I'm not surprised. FOMO for the next Musk stock promotion. Stalkers, scammers, pedophiles. Burglar alarms being sold with a subscription at 70% profit margins (Verisure here in Sweden.) I recently calculated that I'd pay about $300k-600k in fees for every actual burglary where I live. The insurance deductible is way way lower than that, and I doubt they'd actually change the outcome. Incidentally, insurance companies care about water and fire damage, not burglary. But the scary marketing video with masked men in your garage sells well...

Of course, insurance is a a whole other chapter on selling fear. Sometimes warranted, mostly not. The Freetrailer app, used to book and pay for trailers, defaults to me paying for a deductibility reduction. With a big fat warning if I remove that, that if something happens, I might be liable for up to $700!

Not to mention the economy is always just one bad quarter away from a 1929 crash.

I blame media (new and old) for the fearmongering that sells my attention on low probability outcomes.

I’m wrong with no real evidence or, and this is verbatim, “it doesn’t feel safer.”

At in part due to media fear mongering and lying 24/7? Fear, lies, doubts, hatred, division... all of this gets clicks, gets the ad dollars.

This is so depressing; my parents in the late 60’s/early 70’s would be serving a life sentence for negligence according to current standards, given how utterly (but basically harmlessly) feral we were back in the day.

The issue is overpopulation. In an underpopulated area neighbors tend to be neighbors, in an overpopulated one they tend to call police on your noisy kids to take you down a peg.

I think it's only safer since we're doing less. We're more immobile; sitting on our phones, TVs, iPads. We order stuff online instead of going to the store. There's also less adventure without immediate reconciliation. We can corroborate if what we're doing out-and-about is correct from a simple google search anywhere, which reduces person-to-person interaction.

This is basically the core premise of "defund the police"

Society solves its issues? Don't worry, there will be lots of warning signs before this happens. Pigs will be flying all over the place, for one.

I don't expect many people to be okay with justice being enforce by the average citizen.

People will always have conflicts from time to time, the only question is whether we let them deal with it themselves or have an authority with a uniform and a badge who is supposed to be trustworthy enough to handle it.

  He knew it would be stupid to post that tweet. He had actually said to himself, as he thumbed-up the "send" gesture, "It's probably stupid to post this tweet." But he'd done it anyway. He was mad, he needed to vent. The internet would know just how, his joining in with a cacophony of other angry voices. He hadn't given his own concern a second thought at the time, though, nor of the 8chan brigade that immediately descended from the cyber-ether to light up his n-list with death threats, hate speech, his address (or, at least the fake one he spoofed), his phone number (ditto). That was normal. The people who wrote these things were typically hundreds of miles away, where the conservative half of the country had anaphased years earlier. There were, of course, always the stories of young black men, reckless online, being dragged out of their homes, never seen again. But in a world ruled by informed probabilistic behavior, an educated adult worried little about things with a 1/10000th chance of killing you.

  But then he'd gotten the email. The one on his personal account. The account his parents had set up for him as a child, that was only used for official business, that he was to guard more closely than an SSN (after all, it was worth more). The email that included his real address, his real phone number. And suddenly, he didn't feel safe in his apartment anymore. So he'd stayed home from work, begun packing clothes, batteries, replacement s-cells, food; backed up and wiped his home storage, just to be safe. That took too long. It was another thing he shouldn't have done.

  At 6:45 pm, a knock sounded on the door, and a gruff voice announced, "POLICE, OPEN UP," and his heart froze in his chest. This was how it always started. It was a callback to when there WERE police: before the public lost confidence in law enforcement; before their rights to weapons, their unofficial immunity in the courtroom, all of that, was stripped, deemed too dangerous in the hands of an institution rife with corruption and abuse; before departments around the nation, unable or unwilling to face a reality where they had to use amiable coercion rather than cruel force to maintain order, disbanded en masse; before the people, true to the American spirit of ingenuity, turned to technology and dogged practice to self-police their own communities.

  That had been the good news. Ubiquitous personal surveillance, accountability to one's neighbors, and a nationalized forensics service that provided unbiased expertise when necessary had lowered crime to previously unimaginable levels (after a brief rise, during which many activities previously deemed crimes were recognized as the treatable social dysfunction that they were). The bad news was that many of America's men in blue were unprepared for the realities of unemployment, being unemployable, pariah-hood. So some - a fractional minority, to be sure, but enough - fell back on what they knew, the core traditions ensconced and enshrined in police practice from the days when departments had first formed, as slave-catchers and Ku Klux Klan offshoots, security for the wealthy or sundown towns: they ganged up and started killing n*ggers and poor people.

>what happens when society solves its issues and theres no need to 'keep them busy' :(

Look at the engineering and surveying firms over the past 50yr. Cops will likely see something like that. Like they'll get written into all sorts of laws and processes despite the scope of the "value" they provide being narrower than ever.

It'll turn into a low effort make-work job. Like Realtors(TM) with extra steps to justify their existence.

Like no amount of 1080p Ring footage of your door getting kicked in will suffice, the insurance company will not believe your house has been broken into until a certified license holding cop shows up and signs off on it.

There's a whole host of laws that people break daily. Even a book about it "3 felonies a day".

Most of those 'crimes' shouldnt be. And thats what parts of the jury nullification movements are all about; judging the law BEFORE judging the person.

Also the more data captured about every human, the more criminality can be found, especially in things that shouldnt have ever been criminal. And having higher "bust" numbers and proof of evil criminality element (regular humans doing normal things that are criminalized by the elite) then allows them to write bigger checks for more pervasive surveillance.

Its the classic long tail, and exponential cost increases for of a logarithmic decay of detection.

Our society could restart with a good review of all laws. And those laws with nobody else harmed should be scrapped.

A "fun" observation I've had is that politicians and police tells us that they are focusing on crimes that increases the perception of safety. Then for some reason they spend time on petty drug deals, gangs that mostly fight internally and other crimes that the average person would never experience.

If they wanted to do something to increase feeling of safety, and justice, they'd crack down on bike theft.

If I would have to rate difficulty of Traffic enforcement, I would have put it quite low... What makes it so difficult?

Yes.

The police protect "property owners" and "property rights."

And this is why the homeless remain homeless.

No matter where they stand, its someone elses property, and they have little to no rights.

You can't feed yourself if you are forced to keep walking.

DeShaney v. Winnebago County Department of Social Services (1989) held that the Constitution generally does not require the government to protect people from harm inflicted by private individuals.

Town of Castle Rock v. Gonzales (2005), held that a woman did not have a constitutional entitlement to police enforcement of a restraining order.

You are forced to pay taxes for service that you may/may not actually receive.

You are forced to tell the truth to people who are allowed to tell you lies.

The system is designed to protect the system, and we are just passing through it while we are alive.

This seems like a pretty abstract claim to me. What does "protect the people" mean vs "whatever makes the rich people happy"? There are laws on the books which the police enforce.

Now, I agree that the police are not your friends, and they are incentivized to find crimes when there may not really be any at times, but I disagree with the notion that they are simply the lapdogs of the wealthy. In fact, it seems like in a lot of places in California it's the law-abiding, wealthier citizens that are hassled most by the police for minor infractions, because they know they can actually extract revenue from them.

that's quite interesting. I'm not from the US and I don't know this history. Where can I learn more about this?

Why would you control for that (other than to find some way to disagree with a page full of charts going down)?

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.

You're betting that someone's going to get a jail sentence for this? Because I doubt it.

police often avoid jail for killing people, unlikely this results in anything more than a change of location

I wouldn't offer bad policing and bad prosecution the benefit of "shouldn't." They can attempt to enforce the way they want, our rights still supersede crime rates and fear.

I suspect it's human nature, earlier today I was reading about how some hospital staff had been fired [in the UK] for looking up details of patients they shouldn't have been involved with.

They should have known better, but despite constant training people just seem unable to help themselves.

When we are in kindergarten, on day 1, we are told what ?

"The police officer is your friend."

What else did we do immediately ? We learned to pledge our allegience.

5 year olds .... pledging allegience to an ideology they can't possibly comprehend.

It was always right there in front of us.

I remember being told by a teacher in grade school that our country (usa) doesn't produce propaganda. Only other countries do that.

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.

> Governments don't benefit from violence

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

most people's exposure to philosophical concepts is through narrative abstraction, you may be an exception but if you want to interact with laypeople this is inevitably going to be your experience.

You never use a parable to metaphor to clarify something or make a point?

I think calling them ideologues is overly generous for most American politicians. They're vehicles for influence via bribery (which is usually done in a technically legal fashion).

Technology is an expression of power, always has been and always will be. Pretending otherwise is naive and dangerous.

The majority of them cares mainly for their own wellbeing and going against the police is generally not associated with wellbeing and comfort.

I think they are smarter than you give them credit for, especially in the "how can I stay in power" game.

> the majority aren't smart enough

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.

> 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?

They don't care either way. They do whatever they think is popular to garner support. If it was popular to bring slavery back, they would advocate for that.

> Honestly I think the majority aren't smart enough to do the cost benefit analysis of these system, so they just ignore the warning.

I honestly wonder why many of you keep on giving these people the benefit of the doubt. Please don't quote Hanlon's razor at me. There's another side of it that often isn't discussed.

Nefarious individuals know (if they can't verbalise it) that most people will assume a mistake is made rather than malice and they will routinely use this to their advantage. Anyone that is in the political space, I automatically assume malice.

There is an old joke "How do you know if a politician is lying? Their lips are moving."

These people have us arguing about nonsense while they line their pockets.

Stop assuming that these people have your best interests at heart. Cynicism is warranted because their class has earned the (poor) reputation.

Sure, sure, just a major metropolitan area in the midwest and not a barometer for anything at all. One would think that either stats are misleading or my population sample is wrong.

But I have no need to convince anyone. It is just weird to me that I need to explain the obvious.

I agree the data says that. Also weird that as long as the people responsible for statistics were replaced by new appointees the data shifted direction almost immediately. What could have been going there?

Maybe just a coincidence. I'm sure it is just a coincidence. For real

hmm would need to at least adjust for the ageing population. how grandpa gonna beat yo ass?

Is it practical to give weapons and combat vehicles to under-qualified but readily-available individuals to enforce laws they don't understand (let alone have knowledge of) like we do now?

It's not. We just accept it as a default because it's easy to dismiss something obviously good (making sure police are mentally stable, law-aware, and held to a level of scrutiny commensurate to the job) because it may require effort.

Someone being handed a gun and told to go "keep people in line" should be held to an almost absurd standard before ever being let on the streets. That we don't already do this speaks volumes about the underdeveloped state of our civilization (despite our hubris to the contrary).

It's almost never like that. Usually some team collaborates with some other team and sets something up with approval from departments A, B, and C with director X signing off. There's rarely one person you can point to. Also, wait a year and all those As, Bs, Cs, and Xs have switched to different roles or don't exist.

Insurance. It's always insurance.

well, today can never be dystopian.

dystopia /dɪs'toʊpiə/ noun A vision of a future that is a corrupted (usually beyond recognition) utopian society. A miserable, dysfunctional state or society that has a very poor standard of living. (medicine) Anatomical tissue that is not found in its usual place.

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.

I think the idea of Flock (and all modern software, pretty much) is not just to offer a service, but to offer it as dirt-cheap and lazily as possible with the intent of creating reasonable margins for a product that otherwise shouldn't even be profitable in the first place.

Doing things, "correctly" is sort of no longer the place of software. The idea is to build solutions that are comprised of toothpicks and sticky tacky so you can force out whatever the alternative was and make money for the shareholders at the same time.

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

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...

That assumes the customers have cloud computing in use, which many do not.

Look at their profile. “Public sector software”. I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions, and any relation to the topic of TFA.

FWIW, I totally agree with you, that's why I wrote "Digital recording and powerful search features certainly change the calculus".

But my point was just that it's absolutely not a fait accompli given the current makeup of SCOTUS. Gorsuch' rationale doesn't fit within Kagan's at all and is wholly dependent on the private relationship between Google and the consumer, so that brings it to 5-4, and I could easily see Roberts or Kavanagh (who voted with the majority in Chatrie) finding enough differences between the circumstances in Chatrie compared to Flock to change their vote.

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.

police rarely face serious consequences for misconduct.

Of course it was illegal.

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?

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!

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.

Nobody?

Plenty of people were making this argument. The main difference is the previous presidents didn’t fill their cabinet with literal neofascists.

I know leftists were criticizing Obama for drone strikes. If the Republicans weren't criticizing Obama for murdering civilians, it's because they agreed with it. They attacked him on pretty much everything else, after all.

Yes, America has thought itself to be above international law for quite some time. But with Trump, we’re talking national laws… the Constitution.

No, its not.

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.

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.

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.

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!

Everything that Flock does is completely legal for anyone to do in the USA, because there are no privacy laws.

I mean, the Flock cameras coming down is meaningful progress?

A stock price went down. This is a serious and has impact on the real world.

People getting what they want isn't an argument against voting.

It started under bush jr. That mass surveillance was illegal and then-respected media outlets like NYTimes and WaPo knew about it prior to the 2004 elections and deliberately covered it up until after that election. Congress then retroactively legalized that illegal activity in order to protect bush & themselves.

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 don’t think anyone is implying that it not being illegal would make it ok.

It doesn’t seem like any criminal charges being brought in this case. So sure, an argument could be made that this violates the 4th amendment, but under the current application of the law this seems legal. Which means all and ICE agent needs to get access to flock data is a friend with access. Surely trying to understand that isn’t lazy or justifying anything?

"I think the annoying part is that it is clearly illegal under most understandings of the Fourth Amendment"

Source?

I think the legal understanding are different than the colloquial one you are thinking of.

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".