> The Flock source added “Even if Flock took a stance on permitted use-cases, a motivated user could simply lie about why they're performing a search. We can never 100% know how or why our tools are being used.” A second Flock source said they believe Flock should develop a better idea of what its clients are using the company’s technology for.
In other words, why bother with safeguards when they'll just lie to us anyways?
I think this is a legitimate problem.
But...isn't this what warrants are for? With a warrant, the police have to say why they want to perform a search to a judge, under threat of perjury. They have a powerful incentive not to lie.
So...should warrants be required for this kind of Flock data also? Couldn't Flock set a policy that these searches are performed only under warrant? Or a law be enacted saying the same? I imagine it would make Flock much less attractive to their potential customers, and searches would be performed much less often. [1] So it's not something Flock is going to do on their own. I think we'd need to create the pressure, by opposing purchases of Flock or by specifically asking our elected representatives to create such a law.
[1] If I'm being generous, because of the extra friction/work/delay. If I'm being less generous, because they have no legitimate reason a judge would approve.
Based on another incident [0] I feel Flock's explanation for their actions boils down to:
1. "We are familiar with the customer the person claimed to be an agent for."
2. "We didn't know whether the person was doing something illegal with the data... And we don't want to know, and we don't try to find out."
3. "They didn't force us. They gave us money! We like money!"
As you might guess, I don't find these points especially compelling or exculpating. Certainly nothing that would/should stand up against state or local laws that prohibit the data being shared this way.
_____________
> We just need legislators willing to serve the public and ignore the lobbyists and executive.
It requires us, the people, to stop buying into their games of misdirection.
This is no easy task, but it is critical. They know they can throw a million issues at us and then we'll just argue over what's more important instead of actually solving things. So at this point I'll suggest a nonoptimal, but simple solution: stop arguing over what's more important and just concentrate on what you think is most important. If they're going to throw a million things at us we can be a million little armies. Divide and rule only works by getting those little armies to fight each other. If instead we are on, mostly, the same side then they lose power. They have to fight on a million fronts.
It's far from an optimal solution but it's far better than what we've been doing for the last half century. Because for during that time they've only grown and divided us even more. People are concerned that a small forward isn't enough. They're wrong. It isn't that by not making enough progress we're standing still, we're losing ground. We can't even take a small step forward, we need to first stop losing ground. Once we do that I think we can build momentum moving forward. But it's insane to constantly give up ground in order to maybe make small steps forward. That's certainly a losing battle
Yes.
Flock's entire business model is a flagrant violation of the 4th amendment. What Flock does for their core business is called "stalking", which is a crime.
The issue here is not that the law is inadequate to resolve this problem. The issue is that the current administration has chosen to collude with private corporations that flagrantly violate the law, thereby replacing our entire judiciary system with a protection racket.
Please don't be generous. Fascists depend on our patience to insulate them from consequences.
But it is also correct to say that Trump is a fascist and that Biden wasn't one.
Why should contracting that out to a private company require a warrant?
Flock isn't say Google which collects location data because it needs it for Google Maps to function. Flock is only here because the local government paid it to setup equipment.
It's really an issue for the local community. Do you want your local tax dollars going to support parks or tracking individuals?
Exactly, people act like “warrants” are going to protect you from authoritarians. It’s literally just a piece of paper! All this going on about surveillance and privacy really is futile.
Think of it this way. The government pays somebody to collect data about how many bicyclists use an intersection to decided if they should add a dedicated bike light. Why would the government need to use a warrant to get that information?
That's the same situation here. Flock is placing the cameras because the government has paid them to.
There's a few issues
1. Unreasonable is the key word here. You purposely chose an arguably reasonable thing (counting you anonymously as you pass through an intersection).
Many people think that personally logging your movements throughout the day using automated superhuman means crosses the line into unreasonable.
2. There is also a separate issue that the law allows third parties to willingly hand over/sell information about you that many people think would be subject to warrant rules. You only need a warrant when the information is being held by a party that doesn't want to hand it over willingly.
3. Intent matters in the law. The intent behind counting cyclists is very different than the intent behind setting up a system for tracking people over time, even though the mechanism may be the same.
4. There is also the issue that currently legal != morally correct.
Your claim is that the local governments shouldn't be allowed to collect this data period.
My claim is that the local government doesn't need a warrant to get information from a contractor whose only reason for collecting that information was to produce it as part of their contract.
Not OP but that is obviously not his claim..? The cyclist data doesn't identify specific people. How are you missing the distinction between that and a report on specific individuals?
So when you say
> My claim is that the local government doesn't need a warrant to get information from a contractor whose only reason for collecting that information was to produce it as part of their contract.
You're missing the whole disagreement. Yes, even if the contractor might capture specific license plates so that the report can say "yeah this road has X unique users" its very different from a report that says "the road has these specific users".
There is a monumental difference between counting how many cyclists use an intersection and recording the license plates of cars.
If the former, you don’t store any personal information, all you know is how many pass by. You don’t even know if they were different people, 10 of the 50 cyclists you saw could’ve been the same person going in circles.
In the latter, you know which vehicles went by, and when. Even if you don’t record the time you saw them, from the dates of the study you can narrow it down considerably. Those can be mapped to specific people.
No, they wouldn't need a warrant, because they'd be stalking you.
Correct. In your analogy, the Texas cop is being paid by your community to write down your license plate. (Otherwise, he has no authority to be operating outside his state.)
Having a barrier to accessing data can help prevent casual abuse in my opinion, so that officers can't look up say some ex girlfriend's license plate, but if they get a warrant they can look up some suspect's license plate.
Being able to scope out a small scale example of why something is ok is a very poor indicator of how it operates in a massive one.
I would say that there is an appreciable qualitative difference between a man using his eyeballs and a piece of paper to write down license plate numbers and a technologically sophisticated network of computerized surveillance apparatus installed over a geographically large area being used to track an individual.
Call me old-fashioned I guess
It was implied, both by our department and, more vaguely, by Flock, that sharing was reciprocal: if we didn't enable it, other departments wouldn't share with us. That's false; not only is it false, but apparently, to my understanding, Flock has (or had?) an offering for PDs to get access to the data without even hosting cameras of their own.
That obviously leaves Flock's own attestations of client data separation, and I get the cynicism there too, but basically every municipality in the country relies on those same kinds of attestations from a myriad of vendors, and unlike Flock those vendors have basically nothing to lose (since nobody is paying attention to them).
I think you can reasonably go either way on all this stuff. But you can't run these stacks in their default configuration with their default sharing and without special-purpose ordinances and general ordinances governing them.
I write this mostly to encourage people who have strong opinions about this stuff to get engaged locally. I did, I'm not particularly good at it (I'm a loud message board nerd), and I got what I believe to be the only ALPR General Order in Chicagoland written and what I know to be the only ACLU CCOPS ordinance in Illinois passed.
What’s an ALPR General Order and a ALCU CCOPS ordinance? How did you get them passed?
Flock is an ALPR.
CCOPS is a model ordinance that requires board approval for any surveillance technology deployments.
Anybody interested in more details, you can reach out and I can shoot you our General Order. I should write this up somewhere.
For instance, just making it a rule that they are not allowed to lie to you about how things are being used -- we know that won't work because if they're willing to lie they are also willing to ignore contract violations.
Instead, put in a rule that says misuse of the system costs $X for each documented case. Now the vendor has a financial incentive to detect misuse, and the purchasers have a FINANCIAL incentive to curb misuse by their own employees.
It's not a magic fix, but it's the sort of thing that might help.
Make a neutral third party liable for the cost and then that third party which is mostly disinterested gets to calculate risk and compliance procedures.
The only way we're really going to get data handling under control is to give the victims of data abuse financial beneficiaries of liability through the courts and insurance companies.
This all ends in corporate feudalism, doesn't it?
If the only way we can have rules is if they are 100% followed 100% of the time, then we wouldn’t have any rules to begin with. Very publicly revoke the licenses of people who break your rules. You can’t stop everybody, but you can do something. This is just a lame excuse for in action.
But oddly not for encryption ...
It's amazing to me that people will still trust police narratives.
Police behaviour in public inquiries (usually stonewalling and obfuscating) has been so bad that the government has just passed a law placing a "duty of candour" on the police and other civil servants, with criminal penalties for serious breaches.
That was less than a month ago so we'll see how it works.
Don't hold your breath.
(disclaimer, I'm one of the authors)
American conviction in religion has fallen ~20% since 2000 but that still leaves ~60% bought into skywizards as media owned by older more religious intentionally helps peddle Newspeak that obfuscates attempts to bring science to the masses.
"This is something I believe in firmly and will defend my belief in" is not what makes something a religion.
Real religions have tenets, rituals, and beliefs beyond things like "people deserve to be treated well".
I wouldn't care if they were at least consistent.
What I take issue with is that the same individuals will toss the official narrative if it contradicts their viewpoint. That is a personal moral failing.
For example, I trust NOAA or NASA, used to trust the CDC, would never trust the CIA or FBI (because cops).
- Crime is out of control, requiring deployment of active duty military to multiple cities.
- Police are so bored they are sifting through security cameras on fishing expeditions to maybe find someone accessing medical care.
The governor of my state went out of his way to ask Trump to come crack down on a few cities (all overwhelmingly or somewhat leaning blue) despite drastic drops in crime rates over the last five years. Ignoring the fact that he is the governor and has a super majority Republican legislature, meaning that ultimately he is saying “daddy Trump come save me I can’t do my job uwu,” he also very conspicuously left his home city off the list despite it sharing a similar population size and crime rate as another major city on the list.
It’s all a sham. The data does not bear their message out.
It could be possible that crime is out of control because police are doing these things instead of their actual job.
Compare the efforts police will go through to play with their toys vs the efforts they will go through to actually solve crime.
Despite living in a literal panopticon where the cops can buy infinite tracking information on anyone and even on just a query, violent crime clearance rates are abysmal.
Police just don't do their jobs.
edit: I do not actually believe crime is out of control, because it is not. I believe that cops are bad actors and liars.
https://projects.csgjusticecenter.org/tools-for-states-to-ad...
So naturally, our police budgets increase every year.
> the abortion/miscarriage
Presumably that is neutral enough?
Back to my original point, which is that crime is not out of control. You say that
> Police believed they had identified a crime and investigated it
which is at odds with what the police say:
> No charges were ever filed against the woman and she was never under criminal investigation by Johnson County.
I am guessing the police have more information about this than you do.
The police creeped on a woman, invaded her extremely personal business, wrote reports about it with knowledge those reports could become public, without any of it being in service of crime reduction.
Edit: I'm not fully up-to-date on the law, but my understanding is that there is no justiciable crime in Texas around a woman herself terminating a pregnancy using medical means. Police could have witnessed her consuming the medication and there still would be nothing to charge as no crime would have occurred.
What the fuck are you talking about?
This is almost like hiring an off-duty police officer from your local police department to protect you from corrupt local police department.
The argument isn't take the site offline, it's to not use infrastructure that is openly recognized as being subservient to the same adversary the site's authors are trying to protect people from.
I am also less worried about some random NSA analyst going rogue to come after me. If the NSA is going to abuse its power, it is probably going to be as a whole institution. But some local cop breaking the law because he has a hair up his ass about someone happens literally every day.
Or, you know, we could operate with an ounce of nuance and not oversimplify the complexities of the world we live in.
Accordingly, most US-based companies are not in a position for bulk data collection and assisting the totalitarian surveillance state.
Cloudflare, however, is, and does. They are not a trustworthy party here, no more so than Flock itself.
Why? Because, for many, it's a technical necessity to protect sites from the dark forest of the web (i.e., assholes.)
You can cast aspersions on the implications of that in conjunction with US intelligence access, but you're painting a completely fabricated picture of reality that borders on delusional.
And just to be clear, your formal position is that we should all have faith in the idea the NSA, the organization tasked with collecting intelligence from more or less anything interacting with any part of the entire electromagnetic spectrum, the one that can and has silently compelled US corporations including Facebook, Microsoft, Google, and Apple to share user data with them, without a warrant, with a program that's very existence was classified, is NOT doing the exact same thing to perhaps the single highest-volume chokepoint for 20%+ of global internet traffic, all completely decrypted, a US company subject to the same laws that the PRISM companies were?
It would genuinely border on criminal negligence for the NSA to not be collecting from Cloudflare, given their capabilities and mission.
Additionally, I'd like to point out that your framing presents a false binary: the options are not "Love Cloudflare Unconditionally" or "Abandon all CDN / WAF / security tooling". There are a multitude of other options for every single function, feature, and service Cloudflare offers, including many that can be self-hosted, many that are not US corporations, many that do not infringe upon end-user privacy, many that do not discriminate against tor and vpn users (people living in repressive countries), many that do not discriminate against non-mainstream browsers (aka less untrustworthy browsers).
Finally, just because you don't care about many of these issues doesn't mean they aren't real issues causing real problems for real people, and it's very unkind to call someone delusional for raising these kinds of concerns. If dang is reading this, I hope they can remind you of HN's community guidelines around such conduct.
I'll elaborate.
---
I'm pointing out that, in response to a seemingly innocuous post about a site, you've drawn attention to an unrelated issue, and subsequently framed the entirety of US-based companies as morally complicit with NSA surveillance.
I have no doubt that the NSA likely petitions Cloudflare, among others, for information. But, unlike you, I don't have any indication or context for relationships that would provide the NSA direct, unfettered access to all information processed by Cloudflare.
Further, I believe that the ever-holy north star of capitalism would suggest that Cloudflare, a company that operates globally with significant ties to large organizations outside the US, likely has a sufficient incentive to maintain at least a degree of friction in that access.
What I do know - - The company issues multiple transparency reports. They declare they have never: turned over encryption keys, installed law enforcement software on their network, provided feeds of customer content to law enforcement, modified customer content at government request, or weakened their encryption. - They are a public company, and have SEC filings which the CEO is on the hook for. - The CEO of the company stands to make a lot more money being successful at what Cloudflare does than serving NSA requests the US govt makes -- And the latter would pose great risk to the former.
The best move if the golden goose is at risk is to make an absolute shitstorm of noise, which would put everyone on high alert. In fact, the tranparency report says as much -- "If Cloudflare were asked to do any of these, we would exhaust all legal remedies, in order to protect our customers from what we believe are illegal or unconstitutional requests. -- Accurate as of October 8, 2025"
Cloudflare, like any CDN/reverse proxy, has the technical capability to view customer traffic. There's no evidence of systematic NSA access, and plenty of evidence that would suggest resistance to it.
Suggesting that because the company is US-based that they are somehow "evil" indicates, more than anything, an anti-US sentiment that is looking for reasons to villainize the company.
None of that is to downplay the issues the Cloudflare does, in fact, create. But, proposing that there's a massive conspiracy to "slurp up your data" requires a really, really big stretch that begins to stray into tinfoil territories.
Posting this because of the recent discussion about Flock technology.
1. Create an open network of off-the-shelf cameras watching public roadways
2. Load up the database with license plate numbers of local politicians and/or law enforcement
3. Create a "Where is my senator?" web site that uses that data
4. Watch all hell break loose
5. Get distributed stalking without a warrant outlawed
You shouldn't.
When a company spies on everyone as much as possible and hordes that data on their servers, it is subject to warrant demands from any local, state, or Federal agency.
> Avondale Man Sues After Google Data Leads to Wrongful Arrest for Murder
Police had arrested the wrong man based on location data obtained from Google and the fact that a white Honda was spotted at the crime scene. The case against Molina quickly fell apart, and he was released from jail six days later. Prosecutors never pursued charges against Molina, yet the highly publicized arrest cost him his job, his car, and his reputation.
https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/google-geofence-locatio...
The more data you collect, the more dangerous you are.
I would rather trust companies making a legitimate effort not to collect and store unnecessary data in the first place
But, given that those abuses exist and are ongoing, we should not hand the police state yet another tool to abuse.
> I weirdly actually trust Google's interests in surveillance more than I trust the government's
Turnkey tyranny is a horrific thing. One that I hope more people are becoming aware of as it's happening in many countries right now.[0]
This doesn't make surveillance capitalism good and I absolutely hate those comparisons because they make the assumption that harm is binary. That there's no degree of harm. That two things can't be bad at the same time and that just because one is worse that means the other is okay. This is absolute bullshit thinking and I cannot stand how common it is, even on this site.
[0] my biggest fear is that we still won't learn. The problem has always been that the road to is paved with good intentions. Evil is not just created by evil men, but also my good men trying to do good. The world is complex and we have this incredible power of foresight. While far from perfect we seem to despise this capability that made us the creatures we are today. I'm sorry, the world is complex. Evil is hard to identify. But you got this powerful brain to deal with all that, if you want to
That's all as may be, but you're ignoring the fact that governments are buying[0][1][2][3] the data being collected by those corporations. That's not "friction" in my book, rather it's a commercial transaction.
As such, giving corporations a pass seems kind of silly, as they're profiting from selling that data to those with a monopoly on violence.
So, by all means, give the corporations the "benefit of the doubt" on this, as they certainly have no idea that they're selling this information to governments (well, to pretty much anyone willing to pay -- including domestic abusers and stalkers too), they're only acting as agents maximizing corporate profits for their shareholders. Which is the only important thing, right? Anything else is antithetical to free-market orthodoxy.
People suffer and/or die? Just the cost of doing business right?
[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/us-government-buys-dat...
[1] https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/when-the-government-buy...
[2] https://www.congress.gov/118/meeting/house/116192/documents/...
[3] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/02/28/government...
> but you're ignoring the fact that governments are buying the data being collected by those corporations
>> Even if the government can get the data from those companies there's at least a speed bump. Even if a speed bump isn't hard to get over are we going to pretend that some friction is no different from no friction?
> giving corporations a pass seems kind of silly
>> This doesn't make surveillance capitalism good and I absolutely hate those comparisons because they make the assumption that harm is binary. That there's no degree of harm. That two things can't be bad at the same time and that just because one is worse that means the other is okay.
The reason I hate this is because it makes discussion impossible. You treat people like they belong to some tribe that they do not even wish to be apart of. We're on the same side here buddy. Maybe stop purity testing and try working together. All you're doing is enabling the very system you claim to hate. You really should reconsider your strategy. We don't have to agree on the nuances, but if you can't see that we agree more than we disagree then you are indistinguishable from someone who just pretends to care.
Stop making everything binary. Just because I'm not in your small club does not mean I'm in the tribe of big corp or big gov. How can you do anything meaningful if you stand around all day trying to figure out who is a true Scottsman or not?
Flock does not have an ALPR monopoly.
You fasten your seatbelt in a car and plane for your own (and others’) safety. Not because everything is a conspiracy.
In your answer, please stick to to concrete harms to actual people (living now or in the future) excluding any harm that is a harm only to an abstraction like Democracy or Freedom.
Solving crime is hard work, and dealing with criminals is dangerous work[1], and why would you work hard or risk your life[1] when you can do neither (and can instead brutalize or harass law-abiding people who won't fight back)?
In Seattle[2], emergency police response times are, on average, 70 minutes. Non-emergency response times are 3 hours.
(Meanwhile, the city's third-highest-earning cop was cited for falling asleep in their patrol car in a bus lane, while clocking in overtime. She should be breaking rocks with her teeth in state prison for overtime fraud, not given a badge and a gun... But the whole department is rotten to the core.)
---
[1] Of course, America's cultural obsession with guns and violence means that cops often assume that anyone they are dealing with is actively planning to murder them... And are quick to pre-emptively use (in)appropriate levels of force.
[2] Which is not overrun by 'Rampant Crime' despite what professional liars on television zooming in on a single burning trash can might say.
Yep. There. FTFY. And you're welcome.
I sold my car and have been at peace ever since. No more tickets. Believe it or not, but even when I lived in the distant suburbs, it was generally feasible to bike to the office, particularly if one lives very near to work. Now I live in more crowded suburbs where I can rely on Uber/Lyft or public transportation. If I had to purchase a means to transportation, it's most likely to be an ebike, potentially even a three-wheeled one. The main time when they aren't good enough is in deep winter when the temperature is about 10F or less. Always wear a helmet and highly reflective clothing when on these things, and mind the speed.
My friend, the only thing that's going to diminish is public services that actually help people. The police state is the primary state organ dedicated to protecting people with political power from the hoi polloi, it's the one thing that's never going to go away.
If the past few thousand years of history is any indication, these people will wring every last cent out of you to pay a professional warrior class that will protect them from you.
> It’s bad civic hygiene to build technologies that could someday be used to facilitate a police state.
0: https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2009/07/technology_...
I deal with a lot of mentally-unstable people, and some of them are suicidal.
The thing to realize about suicidal people, is that they can be really dangerous to non-suicidal people.
"I'm not hurting anyone but myself." is a big fat lie.
I have friends that work for the railroad, and train engineers have to deal with folks that suicide by train. It's bad PTSD. In some cases, it may even cause the train to derail, which could injure or kill a lot of others.
Then, there's "suicide by cop." Those people tend to hurt a lot of folks, before they get their wish granted.
Not everyone just wanders off into the desert, or takes a bunch of sleeping pills (by the way, I invite anyone to ask the person that finds one of these "easy" suicides, how they feel about it).
And, then, of course, you have your suicide bombers, but they know what they are doing, and aren't telling themselves the "I'm not hurting anyone but myself." lie.
That's very different from what you describe. Yes, some suicidal people do some very dangerous things that may harm (or risk harm to) others, but in general things that cause harm to others are already going to fall under some criminal statute. Consider someone parking their car on train tracks, potentially derailing it. That act itself would be criminal whether there was an attempted suicide involved or not. The attempted suicide is not the crime (or should not be), in the train/car scenario, it's parking the car on the tracks that creates a crime.
It makes no sense to criminalize attempted suicide except as a way to punish the individual, it does not help them.
Mental health restrictions are something that can be incredibly abused. The CIA and the NSA like to use "mental instability" as a way to discredit and sanction people that "stray off the reservation" -an awful term (why did they hire them in the first place, then, if they are so mentally unstable?). The Soviet Union was notorious for using it as a weapon against dissidents.
It is (and should be) very difficult to restrict the freedom of folks that have issues with mental health. I know of one chap, that I consider a close acquaintance, if not a friend, that is in very bad physical shape. He's about 400 pounds, can barely walk, if he falls down, he can't get back up, yet insists that he can live alone, with no assistance. If any one of us bring up the fact that he's basically a "dead man walking," he shuts us down, so we have to watch him do this to himself. I have asked social workers if there's anything we can do (we live in New York, which is quite a "nanny" state), and they say no. He's of sound mind (arguable), and no one can force him to have a home health aide, or put him in assisted living. He's quite likely to be found dead in his apartment, one day, and he seems fine with that.
But when someone wants to kill themselves, they very much could be a real danger to folks that don't want to go down with them -even if they swear they aren't. It's fairly important that the authorities have the power to intervene.
Ah yes, let's protect a suicidal person by charging them with a crime which they may eventually be able to expunge, but in the meantime will effect their livelihood. That will surely not create any problems which might complicate their lives and drive them further towards suicidal behavior.
That makes perfect sense.
Have you seen any examples of suicidal people being charged or prosecuted for attempted suicide? I can imagine that this could have opportunities for abuse, but not ones that are qualitatively different from probable cause writ large.
If I have a heart attack, does "having a heart attack" need to be criminalized for a police officer to render aid? The notion of criminalizing suicide attempts to protect a person is fundamentally absurd.
Here you go: https://theappeal.org/suicide-attempt-gun-charges-incarcerat...
That said, that man was not prosecuted for attempted suicide. He was convicted for possession of a firearm without a license, and acquitted for stealing his fiance's gun.
That's one view of justice anyway. I'm more inclined towards crimes being against specific persons or groups of distinct persons, in which case your thesis would be correct, but it's a minority opinion.
Neat!