Posted by pseudolus 1 day ago
It's really not. These systems are bought and paid for predominantly by local governments. Most of whom don't spend any resources on immigration enforcement. Some of which have policies prohibiting such co-operation.
pretending that it is only "pro illegal immigration" people that are against what happened here is misguided at best, or purposefully manipulative and bad faith
If every new proposed law to combat „child abuse“ was well intentioned and actually worked, there wouldn’t be much opposition either. But since they are mostly an underhanded tactic to censor the internet, there is.
So to use this legitimate actually useful example of fighting illegal immigration leaves a very bitter taste.
My understanding is that entering without getting inspected is misdemeanor (or felony in some cases), but that's often not the case. Usually people just overstay and that's civil case. And because it's treated as a civil matter a lot constitutional protections do not apply (to clarify: some still do).
That's just untrue.
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S8-C18-8...
> Shaughnessy v. United States ex rel. Mezei, 345 U.S. 206, 212 (1953); see also Mathews v. Diaz, 426 U.S. 67, 77 (1976) ("There are literally millions of aliens within the jurisdiction of the United States. The Fifth Amendment, as well as the Fourteenth Amendment, protects every one of these persons from deprivation of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.");
If I'm overseas and overstayed my visa and broke, it's a huge favor if the authorities there pay my airfare to come home -- not a human rights violation.
the user 'righthand' didnt define it that way...
its how the government defined it in 8 U.S.C. § 1325
>Also non-citizens don’t have any particular rights beyond the Geneva Convention.
this is also wrong. the constitutions protections generally extend to all people in the US
I'm not saying people should be harmed. I'm saying they should be fingerprinted (to track repeat offenders) and sent home.
IMHO part of why things have gotten so toxic, stuff like ICE etc. is that one side of the debate has staked out the position that coming here illegally should be met with zero consequences whatsoever - not even being gently walked back across the border with a stern but toothless warning! And any response other than complete acceptance of this form of immigration is a crime against humanity, racist, evil, fascist.
And most of the Democrats who hold those opinions live in large cities in the North with manageable amounts of such migration, not the rural border areas where the impact is most felt. So, with this going on for 30 years or so and not being taken seriously by Washington, it's in turn radicalized the other side of the debate, such that they are more likely to support measures we should all view as probably too extreme, like armed ICE agents being sent out on exploratory missions.
Strangely I've never seen that idea pick up ground (and it's a basic idea, there's no way I'm the only one to have ever come up with it).
Whereas a stationary camera can scan the license plates of ~100% of cars that go past it and save that data for later fishing expeditions. And is cheap enough that we can (and have) blanketed roads with them.
Eliminating competition comes with the territory of survival.
> you can’t have a country of rights if you don’t extend those rights to non-citizens within your borders.
Sophistry. "Rights" asserted by contractual violation are invalid. If you pirate Windows you don't get to sue Microsoft when WGA denies you access. Expectation otherwise is an assertion of dominance by the weaker party.
You don't have a country at all if you don't enforce borders, which become meaningless in practice once you extend ingroup rights to outgroups. But you know this, hence your phrasing.
The borders are enforced quit making up lies. In United States of America we still extend due process because that allows us to punish actual criminals. Instead you want to label everyone and deport them to a safe distance but do not want to actually punish anyone with the law or determine innocence. You have no respect for any law, and just use your own ideas of how things should work. So what is the point of the laws and punishment system if we can’t use it? When you just deport someone without due process you’re letting the “illegal” off the hook without consequences. But you know this, hence your phrasing.
Flock is required to comply with "lawful" requests and seems happy to do so.
This is largely the same for all major cloud camera operators. See also: Verkada and their facial recognition. These things are installed all over the place in public areas. And you think their facial recognition is compartmentalized to their specific tenant?
Simplified: you can make something illegal locally, but federal law will almost always win out.
The local governments are in compliance with state law until the feds use it for immigration enforcement. Then the supremacy clause takes over and more or less nullifies it. As long as it isn’t the local agency using it for enforcement, then they are in the clear.
I think that Flock contracts are getting cancelled due to unpopularity, not because of compliance worries. Can you point to any actual cases where enforcement of the state law led to a termination of service?
Probably not. A state can regulate how its own resources are used. It can't block a federal warrant.
Exactly. If they all submit to federal warrants, and the state has a law effectively against that, then it becomes illegal to use the cameras.
https://www.courierpress.com/story/news/local/2025/07/22/eva...
https://www.wyso.org/news/2026-05-01/dayton-suspends-automat...
https://www.daytondailynews.com/local/dayton-suspends-licens...
https://www.daytondailynews.com/local/dayton-suspends-licens...
I think it's fairly obvious why this got so aggressively flagged.
If your imagined competitor doesn't offer that feature, then how is it a competitor?
If your competitor does offer it, then why would it even matter whether ICE gets access to inferences derived from the cloud vs. some federation of local storage devices?
You can put a camera on a pole with a cell router and enable the LPR plugin in your recording software pretty darn cheap. But you probably can't do that with a single subscription apart from Flock.
Flock provides a fire-and-forget service. The city contracts Flock, and then the cameras are put up and managed. I'm asking if anyone else does this without Flock's baggage.
Other coverage:
Dayton mayor demands accountability after plate-reader data breach
https://www.wdtn.com/news/mayor-commissioner-demand-alpr-dat...
Randomly inserting “allegedly” where it doesn't belong isn't a requirement for news organizations, its sloppiness. Inserting it appropriately may be a requirement or at least a reasonable effort to avoid overstepping the facts (and avoid liability for things like defamation where overstepping would harm reputations), but this is not that. The source they are attributing the claim to did not say that the data was allegedly used, they said that the data was IN FACT used. Either of these headlines would be reasonable and accurate given the facts in the body:
“Authorities say Flock cameras' data used for immigration enforcement”
or
“Flock cameras' data allegedly used for immigration enforcement”
The actual headline is, OTOH, just plain wrong.