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Posted by mikece 5 hours ago

Americans are destroying Flock surveillance cameras(techcrunch.com)
446 points | 271 commentspage 2
arbitrary_name 2 hours ago|
Could someone explain how they are doing this, safely and without detection or damage to municipal property?
belinder 4 hours ago||
All they had to do was not air a very expensive superbowl commercial
igor47 4 hours ago|
Are you thinking of the Ring camera commercial or did I miss a flock one during the same Superbowl?
linkjuice4all 4 hours ago||
The easier fix seems like doxxing politicians and embarrassing them until they protect all of their constituents against things like this. We got a small modicum of privacy with the Video Privacy Protection Act [0] after Bork's video rental history was going to be released.

[0] https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=video+r...

xt00 2 hours ago||
I imagine there is a process in place to allow cities / states / communities to place the cameras on polls. If Vegas somehow got around public comment process to put these on poles, then what would stop any random company from requesting to put their own camera there? Like lets say a motivated individual went through some process to put a camera on a pole someplace near somebody that would definitely make the govt official / flock exec etc nervous, what is stopping them? It sounds an awful lot like Flock is basically going to town's and saying "we will put up a bunch of cameras in a bunch of places" probably based upon algorithm's etc. How do they decide where these get put, who gets to decide that? Why can't any random company request to put up a camera on a random power pole? After they give the map to the govt officials, do they get a chance to say "oh this one by my house, can you move that?"
dyauspitr 3 hours ago|||
Many in this administration are the lowest, least educated parts of their respective societies. They don’t have shame. You cannot shame them because this is literally their only way to make money.
irl_zebra 3 hours ago||
If shame were a motivator for this administration or the current grifter class, neither of these things would exist to the current Armageddon-level they currently do. That is to say, completely agree with your take here. There are plenty of government-entity examples of this, but my favorite I've seen recently was a video montage of Elon saying annually, like clockwork, that sully autonomous driving would be here in 2-3 years for the last 12 years or so. If these people had shame, he wouldn't be doing that, as an example.
pessimizer 4 hours ago||
That's not easier, and they don't have shame. They're proud of becoming wealthy.
linkjuice4all 3 hours ago||
I certainly agree about the lack of shame - but even if you destroyed all of the Flock cameras (and any other public traffic cams) you're still left with no actual protection for your private data.

There's more of us then there are of them - so their wealth can't protect them from everything. They can and do buy privacy so there must be something worth protecting that the masses can expose using their same methods.

LeoPanthera 4 hours ago||
America is really now two Americas. The divide between traditional freedoms and neo-authoritarianism is getting wider. But America is so large that even the minority (just) that believes in freedom is still 167 million people. Even if only a small percentage of that number, from either side of the divide, believes in violent activism, things are going to get worse before they get better.
jvm___ 4 hours ago||
They talk about a K shaped recovery in economics.

It just depends on if you're on the up portion of the K or the down stick. The larger picture might show an increase but if you split the data apart one leg is actually declining while the other is growing.

etrautmann 4 hours ago||
while an important consideration, I'm sure there are many on the up side of the k-economy that don't believe that persistent surveillance is warranted or ethical.
elektronika 2 hours ago||
They will fall in line as property crime increases.
sigwinch 1 hour ago|||
Trump won the election with less than 50% of the popular vote. He has never enjoyed an approval rating equal to or higher than 50%.
josefritzishere 4 hours ago|||
This is the most important comment here. There is a future reckoning to be had between the radical authoritarian fringe and normal Americans who do not want to live in an open air prison. The conflict is completley preventable, and makes a less safe place to live for us all.
LeoPanthera 4 hours ago|||
America is converting into a radical authoritarian state, yes, but they're not a "fringe". They are, by a small margin, the dominant faction in the US. Popular vote counts prove it.
mrtesthah 3 hours ago||
Unfortunately this country has literacy and education problems, and many voters were plainly ignorant of what they were voting for.
pessimizer 4 hours ago||||
There isn't a radical authoritarian fringe in the US. There are multiple, competing radical authoritarian perspectives in the US, and I wouldn't be surprised if the sum of them constituted a majority.

They disagree on the authority, not the methods, and help the two institutional parties cooperate to destroy civil liberties by accusing their counterparts of abusing ("weaponizing") civil rights to commit crimes, spy for foreign governments, and/or abuse children.

slowmovintarget 4 hours ago||||
The back and forth between "the Left" and "the Right" seems to actually be about who gets to run the prison instead of whether we should run a nation like one.
add-sub-mul-div 4 hours ago||
The right has become so untenable that the only viable defense of it is a bad faith distraction tactic to pretend that it's comparable to the left.
scottyah 3 hours ago||
You're in a bubble. It's not wholly a bad faith distraction tactic, and denying wrongdoing by anyone flying the "left" banner is a scary thought.
mrtesthah 3 hours ago||
So one one hand we have Nazi ideas[1] being platformed by the ruling political party which has barely disguised its support for ethnically cleansing the country of all non-white people[2]. And on the other hand we have radical democratic socialist candidates proposing stabilized rent[3]. What am I missing here?

1. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/04/republican-part...

2. https://www.esiweb.org/newsletter/100-million-expulsions-pro...

3. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/06/europe-zohra...

scottyah 46 minutes ago||
The main cases I've seen against people on the left (non-exclusive) are:

- Lots of them in Epstein files

- Mass importations of unchecked non-citizens

- Trying harder to look cool to Europe vs helping Americans

- Overregulation (things like California Coastal Commission)

- Massive fraud (LA -> SF bullet train, tens of billions for "homelessness" that don't go towards homeless at all, building permits, etc)

- Antifa burning down 3rd party businesses for reasons unknown

- Attempts to squash 1st amendment, particularly on gender

Since you linked sites like the Guardian and Atlantic, I figured the bar was low enough that you can just google any of these points and find an opinionated piece of similar quality.

The bubble I refer to is the fact that seemingly all you see is the bad on one side and good on the other. As easy as you claim one side are Nazis trying to kill off non-whites, the people on the other side claim the left is trying to force movie/music propaganda to eradicate all white people. Both sides have millions of posts from terminally online people wildly claiming outrageous things. Both "sides" have bad people. If you can't agree to that, you are in a bubble or just lying.

boc 4 hours ago|||
As your net worth increases, the concern about what you have to lose from a personal safety perspective skyrockets. You start becoming far more paranoid and seeing crime everywhere. Tech CEOs and billionaires will build the dystopian panopticon society 100 times out of 100 because they don't care about other people, they just want to feel safe. If that means mass surveillance for the rest of the world, so be it.

If you don't believe me, just look at the CCP. It already happened there.

newfriend 4 hours ago||
Being anti-crime doesn't mean lacking compassion. Crimes have victims, and reducing crime results in fewer of them. Poor people don't want to be victims any more than rich people do.
baconbrand 3 hours ago||
Building the panopticon does not reduce crime.
stuffn 4 hours ago||
You're implying here, I assume, that anyone who voted R is pro neo-authoritarianism. It is interesting too that you've also implicitly stated that the D's are pro-freedom. Both statements are false on their face and highly influenced by terminally online behavior.

I would suggest you go look at polls. Dems have been polling in the dirt among their own party since they decided to usurp Bernie in 2016 and embrace the rich, Repubs have been polling in the dirt since Trump took office last year.

Absolutely no one is happy about the state of America. You can argue semantics, but it's pointless navel gazing at the larger national issue. No one, of any political affiliation, believes the government can govern. It's probably the single uniting factor across all political stripes. No one is happy. No one believes America has gotten measurably better in the last 10-15 years, and everyone is suffering in one way or another. The flock/authoritarian bent is simply the last gasps of a neoliberal government that has realized there's no easy way out of the last 40 years of anti-citizen policies.

kobieps 4 hours ago|||
Yeah, it doesn't seem productive to paint this as a partisan issue
LeoPanthera 4 hours ago||||
Your assumptions are probably reflective of my downvotes, but I choose my words carefully.
stuffn 4 hours ago||
Downvotes are a good sign you made someone think about their own internal biases and they didn't like it. So they lash out in the only way the know how. Pathetic and weak.
novemp 4 hours ago|||
No one said the Democrats are pro-freedom. Both parties are authoritarian. One is just less effective.
reilly3000 3 hours ago||
Doesn’t that just mean Flock makes more money from making replacements?
mrtesthah 3 hours ago||
I'm sure they'd charge the municipalities and private entities for those replacements one way or another, which ultimately decreases the reliability and value proposition of their product.
doctorpangloss 3 hours ago|||
the damage is showing that Flock, from an objective technology point of view, is really quite much more limited in terms of its efficacy than its sellers are leading the buyers to believe.

what good is their platform if it is easily defeated by a guy with a ladder and a hammer?

phendrenad2 50 minutes ago|||
"Ah, see, criminals hate Flock cameras. We'll send you a replacement for free, but you should buy two more and point it at that one so you can catch the bastard next time." is how I imagine that goes.
nceqs3 2 hours ago||
All paid for by taxpayers because a few extremists have appointed themselves kings
lm28469 2 hours ago||
They're supposed to serve you, not the other way, and you're supposed to start chopping heads off when they abuse the power you gave them.
_ink_ 3 hours ago||
Why were those installed in the first place?
apparent 2 hours ago||
Speaking only for areas near where I live, it was in response to a persistent uptick in home invasions. Police can't be everywhere at once, and LPR cameras flag stolen cars and mismatched plates that thieves like to use.
lm28469 2 hours ago||
Harvest data and let the techno fascist state that is slowly emerging figure out a use case later. For potential scenarios: if you like sci fi you can watch minority report, if you like history you can look at central Europe around 1930
ToucanLoucan 4 hours ago||
> Merchant reports instances of broken and smashed Flock cameras in La Mesa, California, just weeks after the city council approved the continuation of Flock cameras deployed in the city, despite a clear majority of attendees favoring their shutdown.

Well who could've seen that coming.

ChrisArchitect 4 hours ago||
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47095134
palad1n 4 hours ago|
This is my America. Bravo.
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