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Comments (129)

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  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.
• SXX
  What we really need is to journalists and cybersecurity community to use these systems to track few hundred of politicians and publish the results. Just like some crooked cops already used it to stalk their exes.We know how much some billionares hate their jets tracked even though they have small army of bodyguards and three letter agencies spending budget of small country protecting them.Lets see how comfortable much less protected US politicians gonna be with a fact that everyone knows what time they leave their house by minute, what routes they take and where their cars gonna be.
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  graywh
  they (and others like them) also make zero effort to install poles complying with highway safety standards
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  t1234s
  I doubt the surveillance state is going away any time soon.
• trolleski
  Lies are the norm for BigTech. BigLies. So why should it play any different?
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  abhinai
  I respect ACLU but this article seems a fair bit biased. They're stretching the imagination quite a bit in some of their examples. Seems to me that someone has already made up their mind and are now looking for any example to support their narrative.I'd love for them to build a case more impartially and drop the activist nature of the language they use.
• anon
  undefined
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  spiderfarmer
  Were they ever credible?
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  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.
• alfiedotwtf
  Everyone in the comments so hopeful, but here’s the reality - nothing will happen, they’ll get more money from more local governments signing up, and industry groups that have problems with protesters like forestry, and everyone will go about their day without anything changing moving onto the next rage bait.
• elAhmo
  Losing credibility means someone had it. I don't think anyone thinks Flock had any credibility. This was known from the beginning.
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  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.
• 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.
• 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?
• 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...
• awllau
  [dead]
• anon
  undefined
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  cm2012
  [flagged]
• TurdF3rguson
  Am I the only one picturing the Oshkosh mayor and Oshkosh city council as a group of toddlers in overalls?
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  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