Flock Credibility Lost as It Repeatedly Lies to City Councils, Police, & Public

spiderfarmer

Were they ever credible?

t1234s

I doubt the surveillance state is going away any time soon.

int0x29

Repeatedly lying about working with ACLU is an interesting choice. I'm kind of tired of the culture of words don't mean anything.

graywh

they (and others like them) also make zero effort to install poles complying with highway safety standards

cute_boi

How come we allowed all these cronies to put camera and do surveillance. Any politician advocating this should have cameras in their home for safety reason.

0xbadcafebee

The worst thing about this isn't that a company or CEO lied. It's that a private corporation that runs the largest mass surveillance system in the country habitually lies about what it does so local governments will adopt it and it can then secretly give that access to the government. What happens when the cameras get so good they can read lips? Or they add directional long-range mics to the cameras?

cm2012

ACLU credibility lost with such a sensationalist headline. The only people you convince with that rhetoric are ones who already are on your side.

wilbo

This seems to me to be the inevitable outcome of a society that celebrates winners who claim their lies are merely "alternative facts" This relevant post is flagged, but yes, I do think this is a symptom of America crossing the asshole threshold where it pays to outright lie and call your fact checkers insincere: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48837460

joering2

when I was a kid, my mom used to say "think about something nice and pleasant if you cannot fall asleep". So sometimes I think about scenario in which some disgruntled IT manager in one of AWS data centers, knowing which CDN server belongs to Flock, unplugs one of their RAID drives and plug it to their own laptop and copies the whole database of all plates, coordinates, etc, and Flock didn't even find out because most soft raids won't report an issue, and if they do, then what is there to troubleshoot if everything got back to normal 2 hours later? And then post it all in form of a torrent, so everyone can download it and see who went where. Imagine politicians caught visiting strip clubs or their mistresses, patterns of cops going to places where bad guys hang out (to collect bribes), highway patrol going over speed limits without genuine emergency. Thinking about all this I fell asleep much easier...

TurdF3rguson

Am I the only one picturing the Oshkosh mayor and Oshkosh city council as a group of toddlers in overalls?

pclowes

People always want high trust societies. They are incredibly hard to create and incredibly easy to destroy. However, once the cameras go up, you will never ever create one there. High trust requires, well, actual trust. You can’t build real trust in a panopticon just a sickly police state facsimile of it. Society and progress moves at the speed of trust. Without it many uniquely human and beautiful things disappear.

nikkwong

Even with all this said, surveillance like this is certainly going to be one of the best ways to catch criminals and reduce crime over the long term. I hope the misgivings that we have around Flock won't close the door to us ever using this type of technology, in some way, in the future.