Thread

Federal judge calls Flock 'indiscriminate mass surveillance'

483 points · 267 comments · sbulaev

hypfer · 1791066044 · focus · HN ↗
> The deputy then used the woman’s travel history in Flock as part of the justification for searching her car, where he allegedly discovered 91 pounds of meth.
That sentence does make this less of a win tbh, given that with it, it's just an actual example of the technology doing the job it is supposed to do.
Like this, it's almost a trojan horse of something pretending to be PR for A, but actually being effective PR for B.
1. JumpCrisscross · 1791066502 · focus · HN ↗
  91 pounds? That’s 2 million doses at 20 mg/dose [1].
  [1] <a href="https://dancesafe.org/speed/" rel="nofollow">https://dancesafe.org/speed/
  1. NDlurker · 1791066989 · focus · HN ↗
    That's less than $130,000 worth of product. It's a lot, but not crazy
  2. KingMachiavelli · 1791067309 · focus · HN ↗
    That’s more like a therapeutic/occasional recreation dose and habitual users consume it multiple times a day.
    A survey found that average daily consumption was 0.9g and median 0.35g.
    92lb=41.73 kg = 41730g / 0.9g / 365 =127.032 average-user-years. Or basically a month’s supply for a small town.
    Like most consumption, the top 10% easily account for >80% of total consumption.
    [deleted] · 1791070329 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
  3. junofan · 1791067418 · focus · HN ↗
    A gram a day is more typical [1].
    Still, that’s a lot to be tailgating like this lady was as shown in the court filing. Also, “[the arresting officer] told another officer that he ‘could see her carotid artery in my car. That thing was about to pop out of her neck.’”
    Sounds like some wild decisions were being made.
    [1]: <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40385390/" rel="nofollow">https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40385390/
  4. mitxela · 1791072898 · focus · HN ↗
    Why is that relevant?
2. saghm · 1791066902 · focus · HN ↗
  The point it's not just people with 91 pounds of meth who are getting tracked; it does what it's "supposed to" by treating everyone as a suspected criminal. An exterminator who blows up your house to get rid of termites still gets rid of the termites, but that doesn't make it a good solution.
  1. greggoB · 1791070743 · focus · HN ↗
    > An exterminator who blows up your house to get rid of termites still gets rid of the termites, but that doesn't make it a good solution.
    Defos swiping this analogy for future use
3. newspaper1 · 1791068811 · focus · HN ↗
  I don't think rolling out mass surveillance to get some meth is a "win". How many innocent people were tracked by the same cameras used to track this single woman?
4. ACCount39 · 1791068842 · focus · HN ↗
  A major issue with surveillance tech like this is that it actually works.
  It does what it's advertised to do: it lets the police track and catch criminals easier.
  This is especially meaningful in cases of crimes where either the information availability or the effort of tracking the criminal down often make enforcement prohibitive.
  If Flock had better PR people, they'd have no shortage of shoplifters, joyriders, car window smashers, porch poachers, carjackers and drug mules that were caught using their tech to parade around.
  It's just that this benefit comes at the cost of privacy being diminished for everyone.
  1. SonOfKyuss · 1791069683 · focus · HN ↗
    And they’ve carelessly put zero safeguards in place to prevent abuse and that is where all of their bad PR has come from. If a warrant were required for every query, it would be a completely different story
    ACCount39 · 1791070228 · focus · HN ↗
    No, it would be the same story. "Warrantless surveillance" is just a thing for people to latch on to that might be actually illegal about Flock.
    But people don't hate Flock because it's legally questionable. People hate Flock because they don't like a corporation spying on them and selling data to cops - regardless of how legal or illegal that is. The rest is downstream from that. People only ask "how is this legal" because they hate it already.
  2. sneak · 1791071205 · focus · HN ↗
    It also lets the police stalk and harass people much easier, without consequences because laws don’t apply to any police in practice.
    ACCount39 · 1791072017 · focus · HN ↗
    The police is on the receiving end of surveillance too: body cams are increasingly expected and increasingly mandated. It's harder to get away with "stalking and harassing people" when you have a camera strapped to you, and any sufficiently pointed inquiry would result in footage getting looked at.
    newspaper1 · 1791072816 · focus · HN ↗
    More often than not the police just turn those off or they "malfunction". Even the prison cameras "malfunctioned" when Jeffery Epstein "killed himself".
  3. cucumber3732842 · 1791071430 · focus · HN ↗
    The root problem here is that we've got a government that has a hundred years of legal "litter" they can enforce on a whim.
    No one bad law is too bad on it's own, like litter in the park. But you add it all up and it's disgusting. There's a law for everything but each one is defensible in abstract in a "my litter isn't responsible for this whole mess" way.
    The prospect of all those laws potentially being enforced and cheaply on the whim of the government really lays bare how bad our laws are in their totality.
    But people are not capable of confronting the tough compromise of giving up the laws for things they like so here we are screeching about this easy button that law enforcement has at its disposal.
5. nkrisc · 1791068908 · focus · HN ↗
  I find it concerning that your recorded movements by mass surveillance devices can be used as justification subject you to a search.
6. MichaelDickens · 1791084184 · focus · HN ↗
  It's very common for civil liberties to be tested on cases where the person is actually guilty.
7. samrus · 1791108928 · focus · HN ↗
  To a layperson yes. But in american legal philosophy, you cant allow the state to break laws to catch legitimate criminals. It is considered better for society to let the criminal walk free then to create a precedent and incentive for the state violating a citizen's rights.
  Basically this will only prove mass surveillance effective to people who think only guilty people pleade the 5th

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