Posted by cdrnsf 7 hours ago
Of course he's "thankful" for that, since in our "beautifully democratic and capitalistic" society, Flock can use their $658 million of VC funding [1] to wage lawfare against the have-nots with their armies of lobbyists and lawyers. [2]
1. https://websets.exa.ai/websets/directory/flock-safety-fundin...
2. https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/lobbyis...
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/felony-contempt-busine...
In an authoritarian regime, it's all competition, no co-operation. Whoever the big dog is gets to say what happens, right up until a bunch of the little dogs drag him down and then fight each other to replace him. If he's lucky and skillful he'll have worked this out and kept the little dogs at each other's throats so they don't gang up on him.
The whole operation of government becomes about "who's the boss?" and the boss gets to run the government to favour himself and his cronies, acquiring more power and wealth.
Any pause to consider the ordinary folks caught up in this is a weakness, that will be taken advantage of by the other wannabe bosses.
It's not a utopia for any of them because of the constant paranoia and fighting. Try to rest on your laurels and enjoy the spoils of what you got for a second, and boom; you get thrown out of a window.
In reality they are very much interested in facts, because they give them info who to oppress harder
The goal is not to accurately target people, the whole point is you don't care. The exercise of power is the point.
It doesn't matter who's door you kicked in: you were right to do it no matter what, and they were guilty no matter what.
They don't need it, but it's convenient.
"When the last tree has fallen
and the rivers are poisoned
you cannot eat money, on no."
-- Aurora, The Seed
I mildly disagree mostly because I can’t get hard evidence, but everything’s I’ve heard from faang workers is that they are basically run like nation states on a logistical level. Complete with their own forms of courts to handle interdepartmental disputes and PMCs that they like to keep very quiet about.
The US military is famously a logistics network that dabbles in shooting things, and companies like Amazon are already very very good at that.
Cards that only work because of the current system that they are hacking away at. Revolutions tend to eat their young, wannabe American oligarchs should check on how things turned out for the majority of post-soviet Russian oligarchs.
If you own everything, and you bomb the populace, you bomb your own stuff.
If everybody works for you, and you bomb the populace, you bomb your own serfs.
And those faceless individuals who are actually holding the weapons, and actually know how they work, and actually know, in a detailed, hands-on way, how to do coordinated violence with them? It turns out they're secretly members of the populace. You'd better make sure they think it's in their interest to keep using the weapons the way you want them to.
You can bomb people into oblivion but if you actually want to control them, most of the things that give superiority to a fixed group of rich are useless. Violence is still democratic if you're trying to get anything useful out of the people you seek to control. If you have 5 people and 3 of them are slaves with an AK-47 and a donkey, you have 0 slaves not 5 slaves.
Obviously the rich/powerful can't stay that way in a glass desert with no plebs to do their bidding, at least for now, so most of the technology the government and rich have are useless for subjecting a hostile populace.
Tech CEOs can easily outlive their usefulness once the machinery is built, and can easily find themselves labeled "terrorists" if they try to fight back with whatever feeble power they have.
Political factions, purges and patronage is what comes next, amd despite their inflated egos, they won't be the patrons.
Possessions that are "yours" are only yours insofar as you can either defend it or others recognize it as yours. Thus you end up with situations like "Barbeque" in Haiti owning the streets and much of the rich's land/assets are now magically in the hands of barbeque or his crew and whatever money that one thought they could use to resist that turned out to not be their money anymore. The "rich" thus still hold all the cards but who is rich and who isn't isn't the same as when it started.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_images_in_the_So...
> Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov (Russian: Николай Иванович Ежов, IPA: [nʲɪkɐˈlaj ɪˈvanəvʲɪtɕ (j)ɪˈʐof]; 1 May 1895 – 4 February 1940), also spelt Ezhov, was a Soviet secret police official under Joseph Stalin who was head of the NKVD from 1936 to 1938, at the height of the Great Purge. Yezhov organized mass arrests, torture, and executions during the Great Purge, but he fell out of favour with Stalin and was arrested, subsequently admitting in a confession to a range of anti-Soviet activity including "unfounded arrests" during the Purge. He was executed in 1940 along with others who were blamed for the Purge.
This guy was head of the secret police, didn’t help him out when he was purged aka murdered.
Which also tends to lean on a political set. But poor people will be deprived of their liberties be them left or right. For those useful to power it will take just a little bit longer to notice.
Given how much the typical Apple consumer skews left and has extreme brand loyalty, if Apple got tariffed simply because Tim failed to bow down, Apple would be in a stronger position to fight it than any other tech company. They could have stood up, but chose not to.
it's always interesting to hear the silent part out loud. in this case, he's saying "I can get what I want because I can game the courts".
And really, why should they? We've learned now that there was actually a worldwide network of child rapists purchasing girls from other wealthy child traffickers in positions of power in seemingly every Western nation, and the consensus thus far is to do exactly nothing about it.
Laws are for the poors.
The rich aren't the only ones who can "flood the field".
File all the lawsuits, Flock. Let's get some discovery going. Who is the CEO cozied up with?
Probably not great for investor relations for him to be hyping up the democracy angle. They get a big chunk of their funding from Andreesen Horowitz.
Capitalism is great… when it has limits.
Why they supported the fascist:
https://a16z.com/podcast/trump-is-about-to-change-everything...
People today can become wealthy, and wealthy people can lose wealth, much much easily than nobility was created or revoked under feudalism.
There's objectively more social mobility. That's an improvement. Don't confuse "it's an improvement" with "it's an acceptable and desirable end state".
How many people in the US have been born into a lower to middle class family, and gone on to make more than $10 million in the last 30 years?
False, he is forcing Flock on EVERYONE
No one has permitted themselves to be surveilled. And no, under the radar agreements with local cops and govts do NOT constitute my permission to be surveilled. If they want to go in with fully informed referendums in each community, then I'd accept it. But that is not Flock's business model.
I might accept it for this specific case. But, in general, just because the majority wants to do something doesn't mean it's legitimate to force everyone to accept it.
> No one has permitted themselves to be surveilled
As much as I dislike Flock, this is bad logic. There's no such thing as opting out of surveillance in public spaces. Public spaces are defined by being public, in that everyone (even governments/corporations!) is free to observe everyone else in that same setting.
So in reality, everyone has permitted themselves to be surveilled, purely through the act of being in public.
This idea that there's some kind of difference between me watching you in public and Flock watching you in public is, quite frankly, bogus.
Okay: Just how long would you permit someone to follow you around with a camera, recording everything you do?
The thing about a stranger watching you in public is that eventually you go somewhere else, and they can't watch you anymore. A surveillance organization like Flock, however, is waiting for you wherever you go. In this sense they're much more like a stalker following you around than a stranger who happens to see you.
This analogy bears out in practice: Cops have used Flock data to stalk their exes.¹
[1]: https://www.kwch.com/2022/10/31/kechi-police-lieutenant-arre...
If this is what they thought was possible, why write the 4th Amendment?
Unreasonable search and overbearing government was one of the key issues of the American Revolution.
They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety - Ben Frank
Iirc he was a founder
Being okay with people watching me in public does not imply being okay with someone aggregating the information about my whereabouts 24/7 even though it's "the same" information.
Btw it's a fallacy similar to the one debunked in "what colour are your bits". The context matters, not just the abstract information.
Courts made a pretty reasonable set of tradeoffs around the 4th amendment for search warrant vs. subpoena, police officers observing you, etc.
During the 19th century.
Unfortunately, modern data processing completely undermines a lot of the rationale about how reasonable and intrusive various things are. Before, cops couldn't follow and surveil everyone; blanket subpoenas to get millions of peoples' information weren't possible because the information wasn't concentrated in one entity's hands and compliance would have been impossible; etc.
There are even weirder stuff than companies being considered a "moral person". For example if a person speeds way too much in France (say more than 50 kilometers/hour above the speed limit on the highway, e.g. 180 km/h // 111 mph instead of the 130 km/h // 80 mph)... Well then that person gets arrested. And his driving license is confiscated on the spot. But here's the absolute crazy thing: even if the car belong to someone else, to a company, to a rental company... Doesn't matter: the French state consider that the car itself was complicit in the act. So the car is seized too (for 8 days if it doesn't belong to the person who was driving it and potentially much more if it does belong to the person driving it).
Companies are persons and cars (I'm not even talking about self-driving cars) have rights and obligations. That's the world we live in.
>> No one has permitted themselves to be surveilled
> As much as I dislike Flock, this is bad logic. There's no such thing as opting out of surveillance in public spaces.
You're agreeing that he is forcing flock on people. Legality doesn't make it not-forced. Not needing consent is different from receiving consent.
Again, I'm pretty anti-Flock, but place the blame where it's due and use good logic to support that.
I mean, you're welcome to buy an Apple Vision Pro, but you making poor decisions with your money doesn't make Apple responsible for that.
If you followed me around all day taking photographs of my every move for no other reason than you felt like it, I would very likely have recourse via stalking and harassment laws.
There is no difference to me that some company does it via technology.
If I'm interesting enough to get a warrant for surveillance of my activities - fair game. Private investigators operate under a set of reasonable limits and must be licensed in most (all?) states for this reason as well.
It's quite obvious laws have simply not caught up with the state of modern technology that allows for the type of data collection and thus mass-surveillance that is now possible today. If you went back 50 years ago and asked anyone on the street if it was okay that every time they left the house their travel history would be recorded indefinitely they would talk to you about communist dystopias that could never happen here due to the 2nd amendment.
There is a difference, the company is doing it to everyone, technology enables new things to happen and laws don't cover it. Before it was impractical for police to assign everyone a personal stalker but tech has made it practical.
By default if something is new enough it has a pretty good chance of being legal because the law hasn't caught up or considered it in advance.
> There is no difference to me that some company does it via technology.
I feel like it's telling that no one has yet taken this logic to court. I think that means that while there may be no difference to you there is a difference according to the law. This gets at your later point.
Speaking of:
> If you went back 50 years ago and asked anyone on the street if it was okay that every time they left the house their travel history would be recorded indefinitely they would talk to you about communist dystopias that could never happen here due to the 2nd amendment.
I think you're doing a subtle motte-and-bailey here. As far as I'm aware, Flock has strict retention policies, numbering in the low single-digit months (Google says 30 days "by default"). There is no "recorded indefinitely" here, which significantly changes the characteristics of the argument here. This is roughly on par with CCTV systems, to the best of my knowledge.
I don't disagree that laws haven't caught up yet, but I also think a lot of the arguments against Flock are rife with hyperbolic arguments like this that do meaningfully misrepresent their model. I think this leads to bad solutioning, as a consequence.
I'd much rather have good solutions here than bad ones, because ALPRs and other "surveillance technologies" do drive improvements in crime clearance rates/outcomes, so they shouldn't be banned--just better controlled/audited/overseen
Read some cases of who's suffering now. Cops (or ICE) can choose a passing vehicle to run a ALPR search on, finding out what states it just passed through. When they consider it "suspicious", said driver gets stopped, searched, and even detained.
Look at how ALPR is being used and whose rights are being violated as a result. Hint: it's not criminals.
I think the suffering/abuse is able to be reasonably controlled through increased/better oversight, more publicly available information, and more strict regulations around the use of the data produced by these devices.
I also think they're able to impart a whole lot of good on their communities. If they contribute to an increase in the number of arrests and convictions for crimes, that might end up being a net good.
I think starting from the assumption that they are net bad, and then telling me I should only look at the negatives is an uncompelling argument.
I need not look further than the testimony of people who used to commit crimes in areas with increased surveillance (i.e., San Francisco), and I see a compelling argument for their upsides. Now I have to weigh the positives and negatives against each other, and it stops being the clear-cut argument you're disingenuously presenting it as.
This is a really silly thing to say. It’s the “stop hitting yourself” of surveillance bullshit. Come on. Calling them “fixed cameras” so you can ignore the intent in the original comment is middle school shit.
You "come on". I expect reasonable discourse here, not blind acceptance of nonsense arguments just because you happen to agree with their conclusions or premises.
I made it clear at the start I'm not a fan of Flock.
I'm also not a fan of the hyperbolic nonsense people are trying to use to demonize them. It makes it too easy for them to respond in kind, and be right.
Don't give them that out.
> This idea that there's some kind of difference between me watching you in public and Flock watching you in public is, quite frankly, bogus.
Might I interest you in the concepts of stalking and restraining orders?
I mean, it might be a viable way to push back against them.
The idea that me an individual observing you, and a large, well funded company allied with the US government observing you has no difference, quite frankly, leads me to conclude* you are arguing in bad faith.
You can make an ideological argument that is the case, but not one based on fact and reality.
*edited for spelling
The idea that there's not a scale difference is, quite frankly, bogus.
I don't disagree that quantity has a quality of it's own in some circumstances, but that's not an inherent property of "quantity".
Everyone doing it 24/7 via their cameras and running it through AI analysis and providing it to the cops for $$$ is not.
What if I recruit a few friends around my town to do the same, and we share data and findings? Is that also fine?
What if I pay a bunch of people I don't know to collect this data for me, but do all the analysis myself?
Where do you draw the line? Being able to concretely define a line here is something I've seen privacy proponents be utterly incapable of doing. Yet it's important to do so, because on one end of the spectrum is a set of protected liberties, and on the other is authoritarian dystopia. If you can't define some point at which freedom stops being freedom, you leave the door wide open to the kind of bullshit arguments we see any time "privacy in public" comes up: 100% feels, and 0% logic.
To paraphrase the quote, quantity has a quality of its own.
The central dogma of machine learning. Which Flock and its defenders know very well.
they could instead be limiting flock to private places.
> This idea that there's some kind of difference between me watching you in public and Flock watching you in public is, quite frankly, bogus.
if you followed me everywhere and took pictures of me everywhwre i went outside from my door in the morning to my door in the evening, id want to get a restraining order on you as a stalker. this is stalking
But again, this is not what Flock is doing.
By this same logic, traffic cameras and CCTV surveillance are "stalking", which doesn't seem accurate?
I’d like to give the benefit of the doubt, but it feels very sea-liony and intentionally disingenuous.
If you can't refrain from immediately strawmanning the argument, I would argue that you are the one with the "deeply unserious position".
Have a little more rigor, please.
https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/privacy/2026/02/flock-came... > A separate “statewide lookup” feature had also been active on 29 of the city’s 30 cameras since the initial installation, running for 17 straight months until Mountain View found and disabled it on January 5. Through that tool, more than 250 agencies that had never signed any data agreement with Mountain View ran an estimated 600,000 searches over a single year, according to local paper the Mountain View Voice, which first uncovered the issue after filing a public records request.
A different town (Staunton, VA) also turned of their Flock installs after their CEO sent out an email claming:
https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/flock-ceo-goes-... > The attacks aren't new. You've been dealing with this for forever, and we've been dealing with this since our founding, from the same activist groups who want to defund the police, weaken public safety, and normalize lawlessness. Now, they're producing YouTube videos with misleading headlines.
Santa Clara County (which includes MV) seems on the precipice of doing the same
Evanston, IL found them to be in violation of state privacy laws and disabled them in Sep.
In Eugene, OR the police tried to disable them in December but Flock turned them back on
Here is a map of upcoming city council meetings in the US where Flock surveillance will be discussed: https://alpr.watch/
In fact, if anyone knows of municipalities that have done so let me know. I'd like to spend tourist money in those places that I haven't been able to spend in authoritarian-leaning locales as a reward for valuing freedom over suffocation of the constitution for little to no benefit.
Hows that for taking no as an answer? My god, we are in big trouble if this is going to be a regular thing. IMHO we need to shut this country down.
[0]: https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/09/29/after-evanston-fir...
"...and then unfortunately there is terroristic organizations like DeFlock, whose primary motivation is chaos. They are closer to Antifa than they are anything else."
"We're not forcing Flock on anyone..."
It is a short 1:32 video, I encourage people to watch it for themselves.
I thought DeFlock was just publishing locations of cameras and lawfully convincing local governments to not use Flock, primarily through FOIA requests.
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/weakness-strongmen-step...
Some geniuses proudly, openly self describe as anti antifa. Guess what that double negation makes you?
Antifa is an adjective that people with no connection to one another self-apply. I'm antifa, and I imagine you are too, but it doesn't mean that we've ever met or coordinated with one another in any meaningful way.
The word "antifa" is basically meaningless altogether, since virtually every person since the end of WW2 claims to oppose fascism.
If a loose-knit ideology/movement called "Anti-Rapists" emerged that evolved into a cohort of various disconnected thugs who targeted homosexuals for violence, would being Anti-"Anti-Rapist" make you a supporter of rapists or rapist-adjacent supporter?
Obviously, in the scenario you describe, people will continue describe themselves as "anti-rapist" and everybody will understand that they mean that they are opposed to rape.
There is no "loose-knit ideology/movement" called "antifa" - there are groups like SDS and Don't Shoot PDX and a zillion others who describe themselves as "antifa", using it as an adjective. I'm aware of no person or organization who has attempted to proclaim that they are the one true antifa org.
Leading isolated cells by social media is the new techique to cause change/chaos (depending on your viewpoint).
Are some people who call themselves antifa secretly fascists? I'm sure they are. So?
So they just said "These people are anti-fascist and this is a bad thing"
Aren't authoritarians great.
A: "Hey guys, I think think this PATRIOT act thing is bad"
B: "Wait, you're saying patriots are bad? What are you, some sort of seditious non-patriot?"
If Antifa’s record speaks for itself, then you don’t need to play these kinds of word games. If some CEO spoke unflatteringly of The Red Cross or Habitat For Humanity, that would say more about them than anything, not because they have virtuous sounding names (though they admittedly do) but because they’ve established a specific track record of public service.
But I _do_ know that when someone tags someone as "antifa" they are making a political statement and aligning themselves with a certain group that perceives "antifa" a certain way. "See, I hate those damn' antifa terrorists, I'm in the same camp as you! Please help my company make money!"
If Flock's reputation spoke for itself, their CEO wouldn't have to play these kind of legal games.
> If some CEO spoke unflatteringly of The Red Cross or Habitat For Humanity,
Those are organizations. "Antifa" is a descriptive term that many people and organizations use, whether they have connections to one another or not. What is the comparison you are trying to draw here?
> If Antifa’s record speaks for itself, then you don’t need to play these kinds of word games.
You are using the possessive here, "Antifa's", in a way that seems grammatically incorrect to me.
"Antifa" is usually an adjective, but sometimes a known, like "vegan" or "blonde". Saying "if blonde's record speaks for itself", it seems like obviously broken English.
Usually you'd use this phraseology to describe a person or organization, "Joe's record", "Nabisco's record", etc.
What is the entity or entities whose record(s) you are trying to describe?
How's this different than say how "alt right" is pejoratively used by the left?
On the AltRight side people might point to, say, Steven Miller and his Nazi adjacent statements, or to Nick Fuentes and the Groypers, or to Andrew Anglin and The Daily Stormer for more trad. Nazi views.
To be honest I'm not entirely sure what the leading antifa groups in central north america might be.
I'm deeply curious why you think someone would identify as an anti-fascist if they were not, in fact, anti-fascist. Do you think they just really like the flag logo or...?
that's literally what it means in theory and in practice
It may seem an obvious or insignificant point, but it is critical here. If they physically oppose fascism by following and filming ICE, I'm very much on board. If they oppose it by molotoving innocent local government buildings, I am against. If both of these actions are the concept of opposing fascism, what does it mean to be against that?
Antifa are belligerants. They undermine protests by having the maturity to die for a cause but not to live for one. One can be against that without being fascist.
So, I will say that far right, comservatives and fascists are against anti-fascism of any kind. Whether it is the boogeyman antifa or anything else. And there are a lot of people like that. Including in goverment.
They do take issue with anyone who openly opposes fascism.
> So they just said "These people are anti-violence and anti-hate and this is a bad thing"
(Frankly, our political situation is rife with insanity. I think the hotheads across the political spectrum need more nous and less thumos.)
[1] https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2026/02/antifa-safehouse...
You don't even need to use examples that westerners find polarizing because they want to minimize or maximize their badness for political reasons.
Africa is full of factions with grand names doing less than grand things that nobody here has any attachmennt to and do not cause complexities when comparing to.
"Despite the name, Antifa is not just 'anti-fascist' but is actually _________"
What goes in the blank?
And anyone from the OTHER group is the enemy. Stop thinking, you have arrived to the conclusion. Now, here are some news ... I mean, entertainment, to make you fear them more.
There is no antifa "organization". It is not centralized, there is no "leadership" or anyone in charge. It's more of a philosophy.
What gets me is how right wing protesters specifically eschew good opsec. "mask off rallys", visible tattoos etc. They love the police state and then look like idiots when that big police state they demanded rounds them up with absolute ease because they took selfies with their swastikas out during a protest.
So when people talk about antifa as if it was the left wing equivalent of Osama Bin Laden's terror network, it's a self report they're forming their views based on strawman style propaganda, not engaging with the reality of it.
That's not "commonly known", that's the spin you'll get from the right-wing in the US who just happen to have heavy fascist tendencies.
People who are "silenced" are not "googleable with 100s of examples."
It is like saying "the woke mob silenced a speaker", it doesn't mean anything. There isn't a 'woke organization' that is planning anything
But okay - I'm confused what sources you would accept? There are "Antifa" groups on social media that literally advocate for doing this, I've seen it first-hand.
It’s a huge diff between someone being ”silenced” for speaking their minds on bike paths versus being ”silenced” for indirectly or even directly promoting a new holocaust. And from your vague responses it is not clear.
>American Enterprise Institute, a prominent center-right think tank in Washington, D.C., that promotes free enterprise, limited government, and individual liberty through research and policy advocacy in areas like economics, foreign policy, and social studies
I too can get paid think tanks to publish hundreds of reports on how communists are taking over America... Doesn't mean communists are actually taking over America.
(Though I agree with you)
This is such an incredibly radicalized and detached from reality statement. It's genuinely scary that there are people who think this way.
You’re not “better” because you vote for political violence, my man, though I get that brings up conflicting feelings for you.
It’s actually weird how often people try to pretend that their shitty actions (vis-a-vis making sure Grok can create CSAM, or that Facebook can more effectively give teenage girls depression) are morally neutral because they’re second order effects. You’re still a pretty shitty human being if you directly enable it, even if you’re not the sole cause. Some of y’all need to stop sniffing your own farts (or Elon’s/Thiel’s/etc.) and learn that.
It doesn't seem like America ended up on the right side of the paradox of tolerance, so I'm curious how you think we could have avoided our current fascist leadership?
Surely you’re not using scare words you don’t understand. Right?
None of his views had anything to do with Naziism but failure to fall in line with all of the Left's current positions makes one "a Nazi" to them. And yes, much the same way as right-wing extremists like to paint all 'liberals' as "gun grabbing Marxists." The difference is you can find a lot more liberals who would happily glorify Marx than you can find Americans of any party who would glorify the Nazi regime or its acts.
In case it's unclear, I do not support Nazis either.
My Polish-German godmother asked me, as a kid, "who would you hide."
I didn't get the question. And 6-year old me wasn't ready for Holocaust with grandma. But it comes back to me from time to time.
Who would you hide. Who would you stake your wealth and life on to keep from undeserved suffering. The stickers are good. But they only mean something if you're willing to fight for them. At least in America, I'm unconvinced most sticker-toters are willing to sacrifice anything. (It's what makes Minnesota and Texas different.)
Terrorist. Racist. Colonist. Fascist. Historically-rooted and precise terms that are collectively decohering in a self-amplifying and propagating way as everyone feels increasingly free to detach more and more words from their original meanings.
[0] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/umberto-eco-ur-fasci...
Didn't say that. I'm saying I've seen the term thrown around wildly to apply to all manner of things. Like the other terms.
The term is probably fundamentally fucked. If you asked Hitler if he's a Nazi, he'd say yes. If you asked Mussolini if he's a Fascist, he'd say yes. These were the words they used to describe themselves. The reason I'm describing the phenomenon versus blaming the folks using the terms broadly is because I don't think this is a personal failing by anyone as much as something that's linguistically happening.
So our desire for word-correctness should be tempered by our desire for word-utility.
Valid. This is a real linguistic process. But it absolutely debases the original term. I’m not convinced we have to choose between empathy, on one hand, and accuracy, on the other hand.
George Orwell - What is Fascism? https://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/e...
How many of those people who got called Nazis are now fighting against the administration's lawless crackdown?
INTERVIEWER: Surveillance is becoming more prevalent everywhere. There's an organization called Deflock that's become fairly well-known in activist circles. They take an aggressive approach—counting cameras and maintaining a Discord channel where they discuss potential activities to move against surveillance expansion and stop organizations like Flock. What's your perspective on this organization and their methods?
FLOCK CEO: I see two distinct groups of activists here. There are organizations like the ACLU and the EFF that take an above-board approach to fighting for their viewpoint. We're fortunate to live in a democratic, capitalistic country where we can fight through the courts. I have a lot of respect for those groups because they engage in reasonable debate while following the law.
FLOCK CEO: Unfortunately, there are also what I'd call terroristic organizations like Deflock, whose primary motivation appears to be chaos. They're closer to Antifa than anything else. That's disappointing because I don't want chaos - I value law and order and a society built on safety.
FLOCK CEO: For those groups, I think it's regrettable they haven't chosen a more constructive approach to achieve their goals. They do have the right to their views, but that's why we have a democratically elected process. We're not forcing Flock on anyone. Elected officials understand that communities and families want safety, and Flock is the best way to create safe communities.
INTERVIEWER: Deflock probably wouldn't agree with the "terroristic" label you've applied to them, but...
----
Yeah. "They have a right to their views" buuut also, they are terrorists, and implicitly therefore deserve to have their freedom taken away because of said views. So giving the public a map of flock cameras and organizing to advocate against these being used in our communities is terroristic, I suppose. There's one party here that should be in jail here. Seems like that ought to be the creeps that are filming everyone against their consent, but I guess that makes me a terrorist...
Aggressive? Any more passive and it would be nil!
so at the very beginning, the thing that threatens him the most is: simple ideas that sound objective and that make Gary Tan wary of putting $50m instead of $25m.
that said, very few things do that, bring "unseen crime" from N to 0. for example, legalization of something does that! he has found a very successful business nonetheless. it's more interesting to explore why. if he wanted to level constructive criticism at Deflock, i suppose we should wonder: how do they disrupt enterprise sales? flock is just, yet another failed IT project. it shouldn't be too hard. obviously, the best thing you can do is getting elected, and simply putting it in the law to not adopt the technology.
Well I think this is the issue. The value of Flock is not what it says on the tin, it's everything else. Solving petty crimes yeah sure, yadda yadda. Ever had your bike stolen and told a cop about it?
It's the tracking part. That's where the juice is. Well obviously it'd violate the 4th amendment to slap a GPS tracker on your car to see if you're going to [known antifa member's] house - we'd never do that, but gee, this private company just happens to have a database of everywhere every person's car has ever been ...
Pointing cameras at cameras? Terrorist organization
It's to make people like Garrett Langley feel protected from us.
Are they though? The odds of any kind of coordinated response that could seriously threaten the billionaires seem next-to-none. Flock seems to be a lot more offensive than defensive - it enables the targeting and mass surveillance in order to find and punish the 'right people', as well as mass tracking to create yet another datapoint to understand the way people move, think and coordinate. The defensive side is already covered through internet services, like social media. They don't have much to fear. I reckon that a powerful/rich enough person could kill a stranger on the street in plain view of a huge crowd and have absolutely nothing happen to them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_SxlRQhHOA&list=RDZD8N9tDDQT4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vzXHhRBLnA&list=RDTgoAgYR4584
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHCg47cWIUc&list=RDXHCg47cWIUcIt is pretty informative, even in the dramatic context of the show, to see police interactions and the respect for / erosion of individual rights when you view the seasons before 9/11/2001 and after 9/11/2001.
And it's ironic because there are clearly "real terrorists" (i.e. 9/11 guys).
And that they're sharing their data with other non-local agencies (eg. ICE as it stands) without a warrant? That's outrageous, IMHO.