They do have a legitimate purpose and help to solve crimes. The network effect, funded by federal grants to make a surveillance infrastructure nationally is the biggest issue.
Closed loop systems that require explicit consent to share outside the organization. Flock is like 50x worse than NSA stuff like PRISM that everyone freaked out about.
The Feds have full access to search everything, are no doubt exempt from any transparency on the platform, and ICE is already using it to abuse and intimidate political enemies.
It’s a nationwide surveillance system posing as a local police tool.
They're pretty comparable in that the people most het up about them tend not to know what either actually was. The feds do not have full access to search everything on Flock's platform except through the same mechanism by which they'd have access to search literally anything (a court order).
Fair. I’d argue that lack of friction is meaningful.
Also, the Feds are creative in their application of the law. Things like HIDTA designated areas led to Flock-predecessors - scaled infrastructure deployed decades ago. One of the “drug corridors” is the I-95 corridor from Miami to Maine.
You still have people with very tempting access to a whole lot of data. I don't see how this is different from the current situation other than it's just different (corruptible) people with access.
I think motivations matter. Putting a for-profit company hired by the police, and the police in charge is just the worst.
There are many other contexts where we trust properly supervised people who lack an immediate and obvious incentive to abuse the system. Combined with good overall software design, auditing and transparency almost all of the harms could be mitigated. And the tech does have some pretty major benefits.
Everybody is filter-bubbled and people on HN are profoundly filter-bubbled. Wait'll you find what a huge number of ordinary people think about NSA surveillance.
The cameras apprehend criminals. I can show with evidence that the juice isn't worth the squeeze, and in fact that the cameras had the effect of tasking our police force with doing municipal debt collection for Melrose Park and Maywood, at the cost of 5-7 hours of sworn officer time per "failure to appear warrant" arrest. But supporters of the cameras will point to multiple stolen car interdictions and recovered firearms.
If you go into these kinds of things assuming that the median resident of a municipality is anti-policing, you're already way, way off. And I find when I talk to anti-Flock advocates (that is: people who have "anti-Flock" as part of their personal identity, not just a person chosen at random who would happen to answer "no" to "should we ALPR") that many of them are operating from anti-policing premises, and so these kinds of responses are very surprising to them.
(Totally reasonable for your reaction to this to be "whoah, that was a lot more than I asked for", I just feel like I've been in these kinds of conversations a lot. It's not personal.)