What did they think would happen? Installing surveillance systems to monitor people is acceptable, as long as they're only used against the majority? I don't understand the logic here.
What kind of innane logic are you using here?! Yes, if the systems are installed for a reason approved by the public, and then they're used for a different reason, people don't like that.
That is rarely the case that they are “approved by the public” in anything even remotely close to a legitimate process. In cases like, was it Denver, where the city council voted against the approval of the $250,000 contract to surveil everyone’s movements, for the mayor to only immediately use his discretionary spending limit of up to $150,000 (or so) to approve a presumably smaller scope of surveillance.
In several other cities it has also led to all kinds of resistance by city councils and mayors in what can only be called an odd resistance against its own populace and constituents.
At least it seems that maybe something good will come of it when local people get more engaged and pay more attention and maybe even run for office against the corrupt narcissists of society that usually hold offices in local politics because people have not paid attention for a very long time.
Do you know your sheriff? Your city/county council members? The city manager? The mayor?
When you look at the deflock.me map and are astonished at how many cameras there are, you can thank people not paying attention in local politics and who their sheriff is, and you can thank the traitors at YC leadership who brought about this Orwellian system.
Flock is a bad actor and untrustworthy (misleading departments and officials about how data is shared/accessed, literally reinstalling cameras that cities have demanded to be taken down). Regardless of whether the local municipality wants surveillance or not, Flock is not a trustworthy company to buy it from.
Dear God I hate this particular breed of techbros. These people don't give a damn about democracy, about human rights or anything else other than their stab at entering the history books in a "positive" light...
> misleading departments and officials about how data is shared/accessed
Many times this isn't misleading, per se, but nudge nudge wink wink. "We trust you to follow your own data privacy policy. It's not our job to police how access to your data is configured." In Washington, for example, there is data that LE cannot collect, and LE cannot pay someone to collect directly for them to bypass that...
... but if someone just so happens to ALREADY be collecting it, they can pay to access it.
I think this is a case of, tools used to fight one type of crime are being used to fight another type of crime that disrupting the community. Kind of an unforeseen consequences situation.
This type of use and expansion of scope was totally foreseeable by anyone paying attention to history. It always starts as some targeted thing, then it becomes the path of least resistance for similar subsequent things as the barrier to entry is extremely low.
Exactly. Same goes for expansion of presidential powers. It’s all fun and games as long as your “good” team controls the executive, but there will come a time when bad guy takes over. A good system of government limits the impact any single bad player might have.
> It always starts as some targeted thing, then it becomes the path of least resistance for similar subsequent things as the barrier to entry is extremely low.
This new technology will improve existing procedures. How can you oppose it?
This new procedure will use existing technologies. How can you oppose it?
In my country you'd have to get a warrant. You'll get pretty much carte blanche for an Amber Alert but the judge isn't going to let you hunt down brown people.
But I guess if you elect judges pretty much all bets are off, no? Just find yourself a card carrying MAGA judge willing to sign off.
Some states elect state judges. Some states appoint state judges. Federal judges are appointed. Appointed judges in the US and other countries show the same problems as elected judges.
The appointed federal judges in the US are nominated by a political President, and confirmed by a simple majority in a two-party-system Senate, and serve for life. They have (unsurprisingly) become quite political, with either party appointing judges who'd be likely to judge in their favour.
This is not at all comparable to appointed judges in other countries, where politicians usually don't have any input on the appointment process. Usually they are chosen by the current judges at that level, or by an entity like a bar association.
After all, how can you have a Trias Politica if the three branches aren't independent?
Some governments reject separation of powers. Some countries have politicians select judges openly. Some countries' politicians worked around or subverted the systems intended to prevent politicians influencing judge selection.
Appointment is the most common method of selecting lower- and higher-court judges in common-law countries, and for supreme and constitutional courts in civil- and mixed-system countries. In most countries, this appointment is by the executive, but there are systems that assign the minister of justice and members of the judiciary a role in the appointment process.[1]
This is the most foreseeable consequence I can imagine. It’s up there with “When I throw this baseball where will it land?”. It shouldn’t even require conscious thought.
Specifically interesting is the section "State and local law enforcement agencies may not provide nonpublicly available personal information about an individual..." which puts police in a bind with Flock data: if the data is public, anyone can request it (including ICE) and they have to provide it to all comers. If they declare it not to be subject to public records request, then they also can't share it with ICE -- which is outside their control in practice, since Flock independently sells access to AI summaries of the data. In the face of this contradiction, turning the things off seems to be the only way to stay legal until the courts get done chewing on this.
The government does not enjoy constitutional rights. Constitutional rights ensure that the federal government cannot take certain actions against individuals.
It's pretty simple: People will tolerate surveillance technology if it promises to promote order and justice. People imagine them being instrumental in convicting murders, rapists, etc. ICE raids have been shown to be (I'm being generous here) sloppy and chaotic and seemingly targeting towards working people to grind towards a government-mandated quota - not the "bad guys" that plague our streets. Few are interested in a massive surveillance network to clamp down on what are essentially civil infraction of otherwise law-abiding and productive members of the community.
Who? I don't understand your logic either. I don't think anyone said this "is fine as long as it's used against the majority". Virtually every large city uses Flock. This is the norm.
They had never picked up a history book so they didn't realize that the systems they envisioned being used to stop the jackboot upon people they don't like would eventually be used to stomp people they do.
Back in a day, you did not have cameras yet, so one had to hire snitches. Luckily this is not the case anymore, as demonstrated by Chinese leading by an example:
Facts are no match for my ability to use short sighted emotion and motivated reasoning to convince myself it'll be different this time. /s
Kinda funny if you think about it, the snitches are cut from the same cloth as the people clamoring for more cameras, more jackboot. If anything they should be pissed about being cut out.
I agree with this. As a resident of a neighboring suburb to Redmond, I would have welcomed more automated cameras to cut down on street racing, package thefts, and car prowls. In fact I want all of the suburbs around me to implement this so that criminals can't just flee to another jurisdiction and escape justice.
> so that criminals can't just flee to another jurisdiction and escape justice.
I think it's a fair deal so long as you can't escape to Utah/Idaho/Colorado when you realize the dystopia you've created isn't the kind of place you want to raise a family.
Great idea: make it a crime to move away from Flock-laden neighborhoods once you put your name on a petition to have them installed. See how quickly they short-circuit.
Some generalized version would work great for to keep people from peddling all sorts of short sighted stuff. I have no idea how to do it. This sort of "must have skin in the game" criteria was what the founding fathers were trying to do with the property owning requirement (but that was so imperfect they started undermining it pretty much before the ink was dry).
Seattle is in such a tough spot. I lived there from 2001 to 2010 and left and then went back in 2018 or so and it looked like the homeless population had doubled, or tripled in the time since. And then I went back again after COVID and it was just sad. The entire downtown area is just homeless camps. There used to be a big beautiful Macy's department store on 4th Ave that's just all boarded up now. You can't browse around outside Westlake Center without being bombarded and accosted by aggressive panhandlers. Even the iconic Pike Place Market was overrun with druggies.
The entire city is so poorly run they just have no answers, and nobody can do anything about it. Pick something. Build more housing, do a basic income. Something, anything. But they can't. And their politics just let it keep getting worse and worse.
> The entire downtown area is just homeless camps.
This isn’t even remotely close to true.
> You can't browse around outside Westlake Center without being bombarded and accosted by aggressive panhandlers. Even the iconic Pike Place Market was overrun with druggies.
I live on Pike Street. There’s homeless, but it’s not “overrun” and for the year+half I’ve lived here I haven’t been “accosted by aggressive panhandlers”. These are areas with constant foot traffic.
Yes 3rd & Pike is bad, but it’s improved since then. Late at night it’s not the best—but it’s never been.
If this is truly your experience, I urge you to visit again. Seattle is a large and beautiful city with a lot to offer.
In general the homeless problem downtown has gotten better but a few hotspots are still bad, notably Chinatown/International District. I used to enjoy taking visitors there until about 5 years ago when a few Asians got their heads bashed in or shot around Chinatown and Belltown. It was a politically inconvenient time to highlight who exactly was attacking Asians, and the issue was swept under the rug. Now we just stay in Bellevue, which luckily seems to be getting all the new Asian small businesses.
I don't know why you're being downvoted. I've lived in the area for nearly 20 years and I agree that his description is far exaggerated. It was true in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic (when any eviction or forcible displacement of people was prohibited), but not since then. Today, the visibility of homeless encampments in Seattle is roughly the same as it was 20 years ago.
> The homeless encampment problem in Seattle today is roughly now back at the same level of problem we had 20 years ago.
See, this is wild to me. Seattle has a long-time notorious problem with Tent Cities and even now it's just completely normal. I remember The Jungle under I-5 at Beacon Hill was a big problem. I'm sure it still is.
"The Jungle" isn't at all the same now, and is mostly cleared out from its heyday in ca 2018.
The larger problem with "The Jungle" is that nobody can agree on what it means, and where it is. I used to live on Beacon Hill, and the way journalists used the phrase was all over the place. Incidents anywhere from the I-90/I-5 interchange to the camps under I-5 all the way south to Georgetown, to the camps up in the woods in the East Duwamish greenbelt were all called "The Jungle".
This sounds like the perspective of a beat-down Seattlite that thinks all the problems are just "normal". I lived there for a very long time, and have lived in several other major cities since then.
Seattle's problems are not "normal". And they should not be normalized by thinking this is just how it is. It is not that way in other places.
It sounds like your last visit was during the COVID-19 pandemic. Homeless encampment conditions in downtown Seattle and throughout the city have much improved since then. Today, visible homelessness is effectively the same as it was back in ~2005.
Deflecting is a fun game, but I won’t play it. I’m challenging your hyperbole here—on the other hand, you’re making assumptions about me.
Explain to me how “the entire downtown area is just homeless tents”. By all means bring some proof of Pike Place being “overrun with druggies”. Get real.
Walk from Pike Place Market, 1st and Pike, east up Pike St toward Capitol Hill. Count the number of homeless camps you see sitting on cardboard boxes in the middle of the sidewalks. All along Pike St, 3rd Ave, 4th Ave. And then count the number of SPD officers you see (ignoring the fanny-pack guys handing out naloxone). You'll get it.
I’m so glad you mention “going up Pike towards Capitol Hill” because I live right on the section where Cap Hill & First Hill starts.
My lived experience is that I could walk the length of Pike from Bellevue Ave towards the waterfront and see two-three tents at most. Homeless yes, but encampments? “Overrun”? “Tent city”?
It’s so easy to make hyperbolic statements and a pain to prove them wrong. I can see how you get away with spouting this nonsense—and people believe it.
Let me know if anyone wants a YouTube video or something, I’ll be glad to take a fun evening stroll and prove you wrong.
That street view was filmed taken two months ago, when it was still warm and nice out, so tent activity would've been at its peak.
I wish I had seen your post earlier because I literally walked that stretch of road earlier this evening -- a couple friends of mine from out of town are going to the Patti Smith show at the Paramount tonight and we had drinks nearby. No tents in sight though we did encounter someone walking around with a blanket wrapped around their head. But still, one probable homeless drug addict is hardly "overrun".
It's really not as you describe... I agree things were getting worse in ~2019 and then became way worse during the pandemic, but it's much different now.
In the interest of saving myself an hour of time uploading a video, I’ll attest that yes—that street view is as “average day on Pike” as it gets.
To be clear, there are homeless who walk around the area… and Capitol Hill isn’t exactly the nicest area these days. 3rd and Pike isn’t nice. But Seattle in 2025 isn’t real-life World War Z.
All the west coast port cities (SF, Portland, Tacoma, Seattle, Vancouver) imho have always had a similar s.hole vibe. For most of the last 40 years SF was the worst. But now Seattle has the top place. Clearly complex issue with many causes but also clearly someone in SF did something to improve the situation and someone in Seattle didn't do that thing.
Seattle was highly functional for a while. When the tech industry grew, the region attracted a huge population of people from
California and it destroyed the local and state politics. SF policies came to Seattle and in a worse way. SF has at least swung back a tiny bit but Seattle hasn’t, and it’s why there is rampant crime, trash, and encampments.
The problem here is that the law and order politicians world wide pretty consistently follow a pattern that starts by demanding surveillance tools to fight very serious crimes and those crimes only. Once they get that, they eventually start another campaign to allow use of the tools that they now have access to for less serious crimes. After a few cycles of this, you get a massive erosion of citizen rights.
>they eventually start another campaign to allow use of the tools that they now have access to for less serious crimes.
Don't forget the part where the useful idiots cheer because "I hate street racers and package thieves" or "I hate cults and drugs" depending on the decade
People aren’t useful idiots for wanting to avoid being victims of crime. They’re rational. Stop trivializing the big negative impact street racing and theft have on people.
Weird. There's an article right here showing them turning off the cameras when the line was crossed and now that data can't be used the way they don't want.
So clearly we're allowed more nuanced takes than you think.
"There's an article right here showing them turning off the cameras when the line was crossed and now that data can't be used the way they don't want."
Not exactly true. This happened after the arrests and won't affect those arrests. This also doesn't prevent ICE from installing and using Flock cameras on federal properties (like the post offices). I would also bet that they could still comb the existing data if they wanted to, hence the shutdown of the cameras on the fear that they can't keep the data safe.
The Redmond City Council made a recommendation to turn off the cameras on Nov 3rd, two days before the ICE arrests. There had been local concern aired the week prior about feds/ICE possibly accessing Flock camera data. I think it was on its way to being shut down but the ICE activity perhaps hastened it.
Are you proposing everyone make the optimal decision in advance, when outcomes are all speculative, and just be sure to get it right so there’s no need to learn and adapt to circumstances?
I would hope so because no we are obviously not turning back the clock to a time when cameras did not exist.
Most people kind of find surveillance cameras reassuring.
They're installing them in my mom's apartment complex after a vote.
Did they also vote on giving the federal government or any govermental authorities access to that footage? Did they ask if they want all the neighbors to be able to watch any of it? Did they ask if they would give it to cops to use against residents?
Because im willing to bet a lot of answers would change when they knew the answer to those questions.
what that wikipedia article doesn't mention is that Franklin continued to own people for almost his entire adult life, while paying lip service to abolition.
i can confidently say that i don't personally engage with any activities that constitute extreme deprivation of another individual's liberties while simultaneously advocating for those liberties, which is what i was specifically talking about. please, if you must, accuse me of something concrete.
"Those (the Penn family) who would give up essential Liberty (money & power), to purchase a little temporary Safety (a veto over a taxation dispute, trying to raise money from the Penn family), deserve neither Liberty (said money & power) nor Safety (the defense that said taxed money would've bought from the present French & Indian wars)"
It's kind of funny if you think about it. Franklin spent so many years arguing for liberty, low taxes and limited government that when he tried to argue in favor of taxation and federal power he unintentionally still argued in favor of the former.
A lot of our political discussions and systems these days are warped by a failure to understand the ways that state-versus-federal differences have changed over time.
Even today, it's not necessarily hypocritical for someone to argue that states should do more X while the federal government should do less X.
It doesn't, but at that point you're not referencing what a person meant, you're saying something they didn't intend with their words. You might as well make your point with your words, instead of misleadingly quoting someone else.
> Those (the Penn family) who would give up essential Liberty
No, you've got it half-backwards.
He's saying the democratic legislature shouldn't forever give up the citizens' collective Liberty to tax the ultra-mega-rich (Penns) in exchange for a one-time Security payment from those rich near-nobles.
You don't understand why they may want surveillance to curb or investigate violent crime, but not why they oppose surveillance used by the Gestapo to kidnap members of their community? Seriously?
It's like saying I'm hypocritical for loving to write with pencils but being offended when someone else stabs me with one.
> Bro, you said you liked pencils, make up your mind!
No. I'm calling them idiots for giving a bunch of 3rd graders piles of newspapers and matches and expecting the eventual end result to be anything other than a fire.
This shit was wholly foreseeable but they flew right into the sun, not too close to it, right the fuck into it, because they just couldn't stop lusting after the idea of sending the jackboot after someone for a crime that amounts to petty deviance (I'd like to say they were using it to go after petty thieves, but we all know they weren't doing that).
This is just victim blaming people for assuming they lived in a polite society with safeguards for their rights at a higher level.
People are allowed to leverage trust in society to make tradeoffs. Or should we ban all forms of delivery because it can be abused at the extremes of the system to mug the drivers? Should every single store have every product locked behind glass and armed guards to light up any shoplifters, lest it be their fault for being robbed?
You're acting like they should have known the President would take complete control of the government and all other branches should cede while a Gestapo was deployed against the populace. And even then, they would only be buying time. The fascists will install their own mass surveillance anyway whether you like it or not. They're fascists!
Maybe blame every Republican and Republican voter for installing a fascist government instead of a city that had the audacity to think they could leverage stability to make their lives a little better.
And, for what it's worth, I know folk here like to pretend "this is just to spy on you", but that's just your rhetoric. The city doesn't care about where you go. But this kind of data is used frequently rape and murder cases, as traffic cameras are often some of the best evidence available. And the analytics collecter can be useful for all sorts of civil engineering, policy, and architectural decisions.
Now do I agree with the mass surveillance? Do I think the motivations were entirely pure? No, not really. But do I think you're being a bit of a drama queen and blaming the wrong people? Absolutely.
> You're acting like they should have known the President would take complete control of the government and all other branches should cede while a Gestapo was deployed against the populace.
People should know Germany was a republic before the Nazis took control.
>This is just victim blaming people for assuming they lived in a polite society with safeguards for their rights at a higher level.
Karen (I actually have spicier thoughts about exactly who's at fault here but "Karen" will have to do) who provided the political will to set up the cameras is not the victim here.
Her hapless landscaper (or whatever) is the victim.
This was not unforeseeable. This was playing with fire. For years we build up the police state's capabilities and made it VERY cheap to run (with all these cameras and whatnot). Something like this was unenviable. If not the feds going whole hog on something that some states didn't agree with it would likely have been some states doing their own similar thing in some other policy area. Every government accountability group, every privacy group, they've been screeching for years. It's not like every warning wasn't sounded.
>The city doesn't care about where you go. But this kind of data is used frequently rape and murder cases, as traffic cameras are often some of the best evidence available.
This is a BS red herring. "serious" crime has been very solvable for years with cell location data, metadata, private security cameras, etc. But all that takes "work" (read: nontrivial amounts of money and labor the expenditure of which must be authorized and somewhat justifiable), a single unaccountable bureaucrat can't do all the heavy lifting of determining who to dispatch the boots on the ground to go after from the comfort of their desk
The entire purpose of the government having these systems like Flock is exactly what it's being used for. It's so that the .gov can still do jackboot things (like round up illegals, or whatever) without the oversight of Amazon, Verizon, etc, (companies with public images they care about) saying "hey man, this is too much, we don't like the look for our business" and pushing back. The only reason we're even hearing a peep is any strife here is because the local governments interests aren't aligned with the feds.
The city doesn't care where "I" go until I check the right (wrong) boxes and then they'll be waiting for the chance to harass me. The government didn't "care" until something flipped, and then the .gov was all over them. The same is true for you and everyone else.
And yes I'm being sloppy with with my wording and my reasoning, I could not be, but I don't really care to write to that high a standard.
"I don't respect facts I don't like" is not a very respectable point of view and makes me not want to engage at all.
> with cell location data, metadata, private security cameras, etc
I'm sure you'd argue that the government should have access to all of that data and it could never be used for "jackbooting"?
EDIT: Even if you did genuinely support all that, you're doing exactly what this city did! Making a subjective judgement call about where to put the proverbial line, but still giving the government the ability to use this data because you value its ability to benefit us / provide safety guarantees.
All that data can just as easily be stolen and abused by a fascist government.
> It's so that the .gov can still do jackboot things (like round up illegals, or whatever)
You are quite literally posting in the context of TFA about them turning them off explicitly because they did not intend them to be used for "jackboot things". FFS.
The police (local or federal) don't have integrations with private CCTV, historical location data, etc, etc. When they want that stuff they have to email someone, ask someone, have a reason, maybe even get a warrant, etc. Heck, even to snoop on someone's facebook they create a paper trail going through the law enforcement portal This is not a big deal for "real crime" but for stuff the public doesn't actually support serious enforcement of it's a big PITA, creates a risky paper trail they don't fully control, there's potential oversight, etc. All that constrains how far they can go without local public support.
Being able to just "go fishing" from your desk like you can with Flock (and to a lesser extent Ring), like the NSA can with all our emails and metadata, etc, etc, and all that other 1984 type dragnet stuff, is a categorical difference and nobody should have that power.
If stabbing people is so wrong, why don’t we lock up all the surgeons?
Of all the poor thinking and rhetorical skills out there, the one that drives me the craziest is this insistence that ignoring context is not just acceptable but essential.
