Posted by chaps 18 hours ago
Also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vU1-uiUlHTo – This Flock Camera Leak is like Netflix For Stalkers
There are Flock-specific bad things happening here, but you have to dig through the video to get to them, and they're not intuitive. The new Flock "Condor" cameras are apparently auto-PTZ, meaning that when they detect motion, they zoom in on it. That's new! I want to hear more about that, and less about "I had tears in my eyes watching this camera footage of a children's playground", which is something you could have done last week or last year or last decade, or about a mental health police wellness detention somewhere where all the cops were already wearing FOIA-able body cams.
If open Flock cameras gave you the Flock search bar, that would be the end of the world. And the possibility that could happen is a good reason to push back on Flock. But that's not what happened here.
Often it is more impactful to address one major/tangible player in a particular space than it would be to "boil the ocean" and ensure that we are capturing every possible player/transgressor. I agree that some of the video was overly breathless, but if that's what wakes people up to the dangers of unsecured cameras/devices then so be it.
This response would make sense if I was saying "why focus on Flock, there are so many other ALPR cameras out there" (also true, but not relevant to my point).
But this is a video that is mostly about things that are true of all IP cameras, of the kind that we've had staring out onto public streets for decades, plural decades. People celebrated those cameras, thought they were super neat, built sites indexing them. All of them do most of the same things this video says those Flock cameras did, the tiny minority of Flock cameras you can access publicly.
The video in question is linked from the toptext above.)
Just to give you a sense of the kind of company we're dealing with, the CEO of Flock called the guy who made a Flock camera map an "antifa terrorist". He's unhinged.
The other video is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp9MwZkHiMQ but I don't recall which one goes more into it.
It's also possible I'm just remembering Flock-specific stuff from other sources, and the things he shows in these videos are more general issues with security camera companies (using Flock as the example).
It would be great if this stuff was (also?) published as blog posts so that it could be easily skimmed...
In case it helps: my thing here is, the video we were commenting on thread seems to be about all public cameras, not just AI-assisted smart cameras or even security cameras more broadly. That was my complaint.
It's not that I don't think there's a video to do about 60 open Flock admin consoles; I'm sure there is. I'm just not sure what the implications are, because that video spent all its time talking about stuff that is trivially true of all public cameras, many of which are indexed on Google already, not through Google-dork searches for open console but instead with searches like "open IP camera live streams".
(I was struck by this in part because I vividly remember when Russia invaded Ukraine flipping between dozens of different live camera streams in places like Mariupol; that's obviously not the US, but you can do very similar stuff in the US, and on a lot more than 60 random misconfigured Flock cameras).
I think there may be something to the PTZ on the new Flock cameras that makes this worse? I just think he should make a better, sharper video case against them.
Thank you for giving me a link!
Other camera companies would like to see steady year-over-year growth in camera sales. Flock would like to see the world blanketed in 24/7 surveillance.
They make themselves a lightning rod as a business strategy.
(I helped get Flock cancelled in Oak Park, where I live, and before that led the passage of what I believe to be the most restrictive ALPR regs/ordinance package in the country. I'm not an ALPR booster.)
But I'm going to keep saying: my thing about this video is that he's describing mostly things that are true of all public IP cameras. There are zillions of those!
It was not some nerd† principled stand against "surveillance". My experience working on the public policy of this stuff is that when you take a stand against "surveillance", normal people --- and I'm in what I believe to be one of the 10 most progressive municipalities in the country, the most progressive municipality in Chicagoland --- look at you like you're a space alien.
† I am, obviously, a nerd, fwiw.
It's all a matter of perspective. I'm sure to some executive somewhere, the person/s who approved all of this is seen as heroes, as they shaved of 0.7% or whatever from the costs of the development, and therefore made shareholders more money.
Until there are laws in place that makes people actually responsible for creating these situations, it'll continue, as for a company, profits goes above all.
Remember that ISPs often have people who come to your home to hook stuff up.
> Remember that ISPs often have people who come to your home to hook stuff up.
I can't recall a single time a technician wasn't required to come to my flat/house to install a new router. I'm based in Spain, maybe it's different elsewhere, but I think it's pretty much a requirement, you can't setup the WAN endpoint or ISP router yourself.
Worked 4/5 times (all with cable), only time it failed was because I had apparently subscribed to a DSL plan from CenturyLink without realizing and they needed to wire up the extra lines upstream for the "modern" version of DSL to work in my apartment. After insisting multiple times that the self-install kit was 100% plug-n-play at my new address despite my intense skepticism since I really needed reliable internet from Day 1 during COVID remote work.
I was seriously missing Comcast/cable by the time that 1 yr contract was up, the devil you know and all...
Anyone that cares about their perspective has missed the point.
Personally I think tech CEOs should be put in stocks in the town square on the regular but they're protected from any form of repercussions besides extreme cases of fraud. Even then, they're only held accountable when the money people have their money effected, not when normal people are bulldozed by the abuse.
Regarding remedy, we really need laws on this stuff yesterday. The problem is that we have to gut first amendment freedoms for some of this stuff, which wont go anywhere because there will always be too much overreach with today's representatives.
> Until there are laws in place that makes people actually responsible for creating these situations, it'll continue, as for a company, profits goes above all.
They obviously meant that we ought to be holding these people responsible.
Congrats you spotted the thing we agreed on between comments. If you fail to see the agreement through parity of the part that was echoed, idk what to tell you. Education system is failing everyone in it these days.
Don't know how you reached that conclusion, I obviously isn't trying to justify anything. But maybe something I said was unclear? What exactly gave you the idea I'm trying to justify anything of this?
At the end of the day your rationalization only affords comfort to those that have a vested interest in this stuff being successful and it needs to be clear to those people driving this that they’re not doing something popular or even good.
Fix the corporate incentives and engineers will be able to do the right thing without suffering. Not everyone gets the luxury of a secure career doing morally ok things.
t. Former QA veteran
But if your spouse/SO/sister/mother/girlfriend/whatever was assaulted while jogging in a park that had Flock cameras, and it allowed law enforcement to quickly identify, track, apprehend and charge the criminal, you'd absolutely be grateful for the technology. There's nothing worse than being told "we don't have any leads" when someone you care about has been attacked.
“It is better, so the Fourth Amendment teaches us, that the guilty sometimes go free than the citizens be subject to easy arrest.” - Former Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas
> There's nothing worse than being told "we don't have any leads" when someone you care about is attacked.
I'd argue worse is "we know exactly who did it and we're not going to do anything about it (but we would do something if you try to do something about it yourself)".
Anyhow, if you read the flock database, they're overwhelmingly not using them for the purposes of public safety or random crime.
That would seem to be very relevant information.
Appealing to emotions, tsk tsk, but going right for the jugular? Yikes.
Also, elephant in the room: if your sister was going to be raped or beaten, it would probably be by someone in her home, in her family. Like her cop husband.
No, I don't want these cameras. I don't care if they make law enforcement's job easier. They are an invasion of privacy and a part of the disgusting dragnet surveillance state.
They need to go.
A decade ago, I was attacked on a public sidewalk by three men, who roughed me up a bit and stole from me. The police were utterly unhelpful, and as far as I know, they never caught anyone. But ultimately, that didn't really matter. I was traumatized for a while, but eventually worked through it. Whether or not they were caught would not have changed any part of that process.
I get that, emotionally, we want some sort of justice when things like this happen, but I am not willing to put up with even more constant surveillance in order to feel a little bit better about a bad thing that happened to me. I would much rather criminals sometimes went free.
As though personal rights/liberties are trumped by a cop needing to do paperwork or leave his desk.
Plus, when you follow this to its natural/extreme conclusion, the absolute easiest thing for law enforcement would be to arrest you for no reason at all.
The rationalization for this policy of course could simply be that probable cause is "inconvenient."
There is freedom to and freedom from as they say in The Handmaid’s Tale.
We can make up situations all day where it can or can not be validated but the reality is that this is a defacto surveillance state. If every move you make can be monitored, you should assume that the state can and will abuse it to hurt innocent people in the name of politics or whatever.
And what a dumb way to frame it. "Think of the woman" is the same argument as "think of the children". Why not just say if you were attacked you'd want it to be on camera? Afraid it'll make you sound weak? Well, so does bootlicking.
While both are a problem I am far more concerned about the power this gives our, increasingly authoritarian, government than about individual stalkers/creeps.
Is mass vandalism the final answer to this problem?
And this would absolutely work at scale too. Streetlights are already being vandalized for their copper and most cities cannot afford to hire more technicians to even keep up with streetlight repair. I believe I’ve seen the backlog for streetlight repair in LA is over 10x what the current street services crew is capable of repairing in a year of constant work and growing by the day.
Municipalities and these technology companies cannot keep up against a motivated crew and can’t afford to scale either. Totally asymmetric.
Therefore if only say one of a thousand gets caught, it still costs the people doing it more than the state on average (unless their life/time is worth basically nothing for years on end).
There have been cases of people getting into baby monitors and yelling at the baby.
But as a tech company, this is extremely irresponsible
BTW, Benn Jordan is also known as The Flashbulb, an ambient legend