15 ms·

Everett shuts down Flock camera network after judge rules footage public record

485 points by aranaur 7mo ago

_slih 7mo ago
shutting down the cameras rather than releasing the data tells you everything about what was being collected. the system was designed around the assumption that nobody outside law enforcement would ever see the footage.
- AlexeyBelov 7mo ago
  LLM comment.
cj 7mo ago
URL is 404'ing. Another article.. > Cameras that automatically capture images of vehicle license plates are being turned off by police in jurisdictions across Washington state, in part after a court ruled the public has a right to access data generated by the technology. https://www.geekwire.com/2025/washington-state-cities-turn-off-license-plate-reader-cameras-amid-ruling-on-data-access/ https://www.geekwire.com/2025/washington-state-cities-turn-o...
altairprime 7mo ago
The above link 404's for me, but https://www.wltx.com/article/news/nation-world/281-53d8693e-77a4-42ad-86e4-3426a30d25ae https://www.wltx.com/article/news/nation-world/281-53d8693e-... works.
dzink 7mo ago
The link is broken. Here is a working one. https://www.king5.com/article/news/community/facing-race/washington-immigration/everett-shuts-down-flock-cameras-judge-rules-footage-public-record/281-53d8693e-77a4-42ad-86e4-3426a30d25ae https://www.king5.com/article/news/community/facing-race/was...
- flexagoon 7mo ago
  This just redirects me to the king5 YouTube channel
fuzzfactor 7mo ago
This appears to be an informative link; https://www.everettpost.com/local-news/everett-temporarily-suspends-license-plate-cameras/ https://www.everettpost.com/local-news/everett-temporarily-s...
GiorgioG 7mo ago
Great now let’s follow suit in all 50 states.
- sriram_malhar 7mo ago
  Red states have zero crime, so they don't need them in the first place. /s
  - Ancapistani 7mo ago
    This isn’t a red/blue issue. Flock is no more populate on the right than it is on the Left.
SlightlyLeftPad 7mo ago
Does them removing it simply because it’s public record imply that they were up to no good?
- timschmidt 7mo ago
  Well if they had nothing to hide... /s
  - SlightlyLeftPad 7mo ago
    > “We were very disappointed,” Franklin said. “That means perpetrators of crime, people who are maybe engaged in domestic abuse or stalkers, they can request footage and that could cause a lot of harm.” No concern over the dozens (or hundreds?) of cases of police or government employees themselves doing exactly what they’re afraid of here. Strange.
    - timschmidt 7mo ago
      Or for what can already be purchased from a data broker on the open market.
    - sonzohan 7mo ago
      While I agree with the risks of DA/stalkers getting that data, this data is not known for being well protected against LoveInt. Quite the opposite it is usually sold on grey markets.
    - randallsquared 7mo ago
      > No concern over [...] government employees themselves Three paragraphs later someone else is paraphrased as including immigration enforcement agents among the problematic users, and in the current political environment, federal law enforcement being made more effective might be the real problem for state and local government.
      - throwaway173738 7mo ago
1123581321 7mo ago
This is a good article about some of the legal particulars. https://www.heraldnet.com/2026/02/24/snohomish-county-judge-rules-flock-camera-footage-is-public-record/ https://www.heraldnet.com/2026/02/24/snohomish-county-judge-... The defense of the photos not being government business until accessed seems shaky. That the physical camera installations were purposeful intentions to conduct government business in those areas is a reasonable line; this doesn't set precedent for Google's information becoming public records because the police might do a google search, to use an extreme example. The proposed legislative amendment that would exclude Flock footage from public records (which would make this judgment moot) makes sense in the light of red light cameras already being excluded by the same legislators. However, I'd like to see a more incisive law covering both that would compel a reasonable amount of public insight into the footage.
- CamperBob2 7mo ago
  The defense of the photos not being government business until accessed seems shaky. It's reminiscent of the NSA's argument that data "collection" occurs only when a search is performed on existing "gathered" data. File under "Stuff that's only legal when the government does it."
  - dotancohen 7mo ago
    What should I be reading?
    - CamperBob2 7mo ago
      Scott Alexander has a decent article (or rather a guest blog post) at https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/all-lawful-use-much-more-than-you https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/all-lawful-use-much-more-th... that brings up the subject in the context of Anthropic and OpenAI's dealings with the Department of War (sic), and how their contracts with the DoW might be interpreted with regard to mass surveillance of Americans. Worth checking out. I'm not personally knowledgeable enough to vouch for the veracity, though.
    - masfuerte 7mo ago
hyperific 7mo ago
According to the article, the Flock cameras are still in place but are "offline". Why does that not convince me?
- bl4kers 7mo ago
  Are there cameras pointed at the offline Flock cameras? I sure hope so because it would be a shame if they disappeared...
chkaloon 7mo ago
Awesome. I think I'll put in an open records request for the cameras down the street in my little Wisconsin town. See what happens
- hypercube33 7mo ago
  Funny I was thinking of doing that in my little Wisconsin town too. Howdy sorta neighborish HN user.
- datahack 7mo ago
  Wonder if we should coordinate doing it simultaneously in like 10,000 cities and towns?
  - techdmn 7mo ago
    And my axe! Let me know if you do. (Also WI)
N_Lens 7mo ago
"The masses/general populace are the enemy" - once you understand that this is the fundamental belief at the root of the elites behaviour, everything will make sense. Flock cameras and AI surveillance is designed to reign in 'the enemy'.
neverkn0wsb357 7mo ago
I think the person requesting to access the data was doing the right thing and I agree with the judge’s ruling. The fact that they’re gonna shut it down, implies the scale of indiscriminate nature of data capture and the volume of data being captured. These cameras are popping up all over the nation and if people realize how much data is being captured and where that data is going (or who it’s being sold to) and how it’s being used by government and private entities they would be appalled. There’s been exposés about these cameras, everything from AI misidentification of “stolen” (not) vehicles and erroneous arrests and police encounters, to analysis of shopping patterns being sold back to private entities for better ad targeting. It’s wild.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- Gigachad 7mo ago
  The laws need to be updated. CCTV in public used to be fine because no one was actually watching it unless there was an incident. Now it’s possible to have AI watch every camera and correlate everything everywhere we need new privacy laws to reflect this capability.
  - thfuran 7mo ago
    And the government needs to be restricted from buying data it wouldn’t be permitted to collect itself.
    - throwawayqqq11 7mo ago
      Yep, ban collection and pruchase of such data for everyone. Exceptions usually mean private companies hop in to offer the "service". I think the current insane development are surveilance capitalists, trying to rush their panopticon to solidify their power. Guess that means no reasoable privacy law for the US, even under hypothetical president newsom.
    - bilbo0s 7mo ago
      Meh. If the government is only restricted from buying the data, then they'll just have someone else buy it. Palantir is not the government. So they can buy the real time feed, analyze it in real time, and give the real time results of that analysis to the government without issue. Restricting the government from buying that data does nothing. If you want to stop the government taking advantage of the data, then you would have to outlaw the collection of the data altogether. So that the initial collection of the data by anyone, is illegal. Personally, I don't think that's gonna happen. There's way too many people making way too much money telling the government who hangs out with who, who cheats with who, and so on and so forth.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
seltzered_ 7mo ago
Somewhat related discussion on Redmond Washington & Flock cameras: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45879101 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45879101
p0w3n3d 7mo ago
Anyone can tell, why were those cameras installed in first place? Some company just said "lol for the fun" or what? Who paid for them?
- sonzohan 7mo ago
  A mix of public (city councils) and private (think HOAs that then donated access/equipment to the city) contracted with Flock in the past few years. The questions of exactly who, when, and why, are very muddy especially with the HOAs who operate rather privately.
  - p0w3n3d 7mo ago
    Thanks. I don't live in US and this subject is quite unknown to me
- Lammy 7mo ago
  Relevant federal payola: - https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/summary?id=D000116304 https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/summary... - https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/lobbyists?cycle=2025&id=D000116304 https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/lobbyis...
jmward01 7mo ago
I might be good with legal guarantees, meaning jail time for those involved, that the only place images on these devices went was local to the municipality collecting them and that they were only accessed for very well defined reasons by very specific people. The core issues are that aggregation and exfiltration of this data means that privacy is dead and the AI world allows analysis for almost no cost. We need an idea in our laws that puts back the limited scope that technology has removed. If the police have to expend one person's worth of time to listen to a wiretap then it really isn't possible to get out of control. We need that level of cost associated with ALPR and all surveillance so that the abuse of these systems doesn't get out of control. Make it appropriately hard and it won't be a problem.
- sneak 7mo ago
  Then the feds come in with a national security law and bypass all those state/local protections and slurp it all up into an AI-powered Palantir database, the very existence of which is classified. Suddenly you’re the victim of parallel construction and don’t even know it. The database CANNOT EXIST SAFELY. Why don’t people who “might be okay with this IF…” understand that? Collect the data and it WILL be misused, eventually, with 100% certainty. Has nobody read Snowden’s book? They even have a name for intel agents casually spying on their partners/crushes. The law does not apply to everyone equally. The intelligence agencies get to break any laws they want without consequences, by longstanding tradition (remember 007’s “license to kill” or the CIA’s famous heart attack gun?). There are NO legal safeguards that can prevent abuse, no matter how you word them, because there will always be some animals who are “more equal than others” to whom they do not apply (“national security carve-out”, “LEO exception”, etc). Sadly, those to whom they do not apply are now coordinating with the new wannabe SturmAbteilung in what are called “fusion centers”.
  - bsder 7mo ago
    > The database CANNOT EXIST SAFELY. Why don’t people who “might be okay with this IF…” understand that? You have to point out the Jews in Amsterdam. They had nothing to hide--until they did. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1943_Amsterdam_civil_registry_office_bombing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1943_Amsterdam_civil_registry_... Or Martin Niemoller: a good Protestant German pastor who viewed the anti-theist attitudes of the Socialists and Communists as more threatening than Nazis. And then the Nazis put him in a concentration camp. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Niem%C3%B6ller https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Niem%C3%B6ller https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_They_Came https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_They_Came
sneak 7mo ago
I am less worried about Flock ALPR (which are aimed in the direction of traffic flow to read rear number plates) as I am about the THOUSANDS of facial recognition cameras installed in the last year in all four directions at nearly every intersection in southern Nevada and many many cities in southern California (LA notably excepted). These are mounted above the stoplights and aimed against traffic at stoplights to read faces. I mention these locales specifically only because I have directly observed them. I would be surprised if this isn’t also happening in many other US metro areas, given how eagerly DHS/TSA/CBP/ICE are mass collecting facial geometries at every available opportunity.
- boisterousness 7mo ago
  > These [cameras] are mounted above the stoplights and aimed against traffic at stoplights to read faces. Those cameras are for traffic detection, so the signal can turn green when a car comes. They aren't reading faces.
- Ylpertnodi 7mo ago
  > I would be surprised if this isn’t also happening... "I wouldn't be surprised if this is also happening..." Only the second sounds correct to me.
  - jen20 7mo ago
    I believe both to be correct but “would be surprised if this isn’t happening” to be a stronger statement than “wouldn’t be surprised if it were”.
- filoeleven 7mo ago
  Flock cameras are advertised as ALPR but have facial/vehicle/etc recognition systems running on them as well. You can see one panning up to track other people near the end of this Benn Jordan video on the cameras. https://youtu.be/vU1-uiUlHTo https://youtu.be/vU1-uiUlHTo
- throwaway173738 7mo ago
  The statute in Washington that allows these to be used to enforce speeds and signals also prohibited photographing the driver using another or the same camera.
sneak 7mo ago
*Flock (YC S17) https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety
zombot 7mo ago
The fact that they shut it down to avoid it becoming public record proves that light is still the best disinfectant against vermin.
autoexec 7mo ago
> Everett Mayor Cassie Franklin said the city disagrees with the ruling and is concerned about who could obtain the footage. “We were very disappointed,” Franklin said. “That means perpetrators of crime, people who are maybe engaged in domestic abuse or stalkers, they can request footage and that could cause a lot of harm.” These people are fooling themselves if they think that keeping the cameras but not allowing the public to see the data will stop domestic abuse or stalkers. We've already seen these cameras used to stalk people and it wasn't random members of the public doing it, it was police officers. As long as this data is being collected it will be abused. If not by the public, then by police, or by Flock employees, or by hackers. The only way to protect people is to not gather the data at all. Anyone who keeps these cameras doesn't actually care about the public's safety.
- darig 7mo ago
  [dead]
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- Zigurd 7mo ago
  Cops and DV. And crash coverups.
- schiffern 7mo ago
  The mayor is making a great argument for not blanketing your city in a surveillance dragnet. Policymakers were warned about precisely these dangers ahead of time. They went ahead anyway, and now they want to play blameless and are trying to shift the blame on anyone but themselves.
- techdmn 7mo ago
  Two such instances of police using Flock to track current or former romantic partners: * https://www.kansas.com/news/politics-government/article291059560.html https://www.kansas.com/news/politics-government/article29105... * https://www.fox6now.com/news/milwaukee-police-officer-charged-flock-camera-misuse-case https://www.fox6now.com/news/milwaukee-police-officer-charge...
DrScientist 7mo ago
I always think that the best way to get stuff regulated is make those in power feel the risks. So if people started using something like flock to embarrass politicians, business leaders, or newspaper leader writers then suddenly privacy might become a big issue.
- toofy 7mo ago
  don’t worry, normal people will never ever see this data to use it against the powerful. our public data can only be seen by billionaires and cops, not us. it can be used against us, but never the other way around. the faster we realize this, the faster we can move out of our “divisive” phase and get back to making billionaires dreams come true.
  - DrScientist 7mo ago
    Indeed - but as compute costs come down, it doesn't have to be that way - ultimately there are 8 billion eyes out there. There are also public data examples - for example the public data on charter flights or ship locations had people like Elon Musk bleating about privacy.
sidewndr46 7mo ago
So whenever these cameras could actually be used by the public (potentially for good), the government is allowed to just shut them down?
JKCalhoun 7mo ago
For reasons I have been unable to articulate, I have believed that if license plate readers are a thing, someone should open-source one that the general public could share. When a comment comes back that someone malicious will use the tech to stalk someone I really have no answer for that. That is indefensibly a bad thing. Of course the tech exists nonetheless (not open source as far as I know) and it could be argued it is even being used maliciously—or at least without the kind of judicial oversight we assumed would be in place. But one actor behaving badly does not justify the use of the tech by everyone. I read about the citizens of Minneapolis using decidedly low-tech means to track ICE vehicles prowling their community and it suggested a scenario where an open license-plate-tracking solution could "balance the scales" a bit (that is if you believe the scales to be imbalanced). I imagined not a license-plate reading dragnet but rather software where you had first to enter in very specific strings of ASCII characters and the software would only announce when there was a specific string match from the camera. To that end I vibe-coded an app for iOS in about 15 minutes using iOS's Vision framework and the built-in phone camera. Anyone could do the same. Nonetheless I only tested it with "HELLO" and "WORLD" using scraps of paper in my kitchen and never tried it outside as the craziness in Minneapolis seemed to have quieted down. I moved on to other projects.
- jermaustin1 7mo ago
  There had been a fairly decent open APLR library called OpenALPR. It used to be updated fairly regularly, but then was "acquired" and now sits abandoned for almost a decade without any updates, while the company that acquired it (REKOR) has commercialized it and extended it as a closed source API and platform. ALPR is fairly trivial now days, and a modern CPU can process thousands of plates per second (dozens of plates per frame, hundreds of frames per second coming multiple cameras pointing at different lanes of traffic). The "product" around all of these is linking the plates traveling together, tracking routes through various cameras, identifying common travel patterns, and more disturbing travel patterns that are outside norm for a given plate or route (i.e. do they normally drive these 3 cameras M-F, but this Th, they went a different route and stopped somewhere for a while). All that used to be done by the police/detectives/investigators on their own. Now the AI is automating this, and that is truly terrifying, especially for how often misreads occur.
cmckn 7mo ago
Please contact your representative in Olympia and tell them to kill the bill that would exempt this footage from public record requests. It passed the Senate on Feb. 6. This is the bill: https://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary/?BillNumber=6002&Chamber=Senate&Year=2025 https://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary/?BillNumber=6002&Chamber=... Find your reps: https://leg.wa.gov/legislators/ https://leg.wa.gov/legislators/ Washington State Legislative Hotline: 1-800-562-6000
siffland 7mo ago
My issues is with false arrests due to people blindly following AI. People pulled out of their cars are gunpoint due to the AI misreading a single letter on the plate, the lady who was arrested for stealing amazon packages just because flock saw her enter and exit a neighborhood and she had to get doorbell camera to prove her innocence. Also i think it should be public record about every single point of data flock collects and retention period. I am not saying they have to release the data itself, but I want to know what my tax dollars are collecting, how long they are keeping it, who can access it and who they are selling, er i mean sharing it with.
newzino 7mo ago
[flagged]
unethical_ban 7mo ago
The government's power over its citizens should mainly derive from its legitimacy in the eyes of citizens, not from its technological and military superiority over the people. This kind of ubiquitous surveillance is so dangerous to democracy and the ability of the citizens to do anything without the government knowing.

485 points by aranaur 7mo ago

_slih 7mo ago

shutting down the cameras rather than releasing the data tells you everything about what was being collected. the system was designed around the assumption that nobody outside law enforcement would ever see the footage.

AlexeyBelov 7mo ago
LLM comment.

cj 7mo ago

URL is 404'ing. Another article.. > Cameras that automatically capture images of vehicle license plates are being turned off by police in jurisdictions across Washington state, in part after a court ruled the public has a right to access data generated by the technology. https://www.geekwire.com/2025/washington-state-cities-turn-off-license-plate-reader-cameras-amid-ruling-on-data-access/ https://www.geekwire.com/2025/washington-state-cities-turn-o...

altairprime 7mo ago

The above link 404's for me, but https://www.wltx.com/article/news/nation-world/281-53d8693e-77a4-42ad-86e4-3426a30d25ae https://www.wltx.com/article/news/nation-world/281-53d8693e-... works.

dzink 7mo ago

The link is broken. Here is a working one. https://www.king5.com/article/news/community/facing-race/washington-immigration/everett-shuts-down-flock-cameras-judge-rules-footage-public-record/281-53d8693e-77a4-42ad-86e4-3426a30d25ae https://www.king5.com/article/news/community/facing-race/was...

flexagoon 7mo ago
This just redirects me to the king5 YouTube channel

fuzzfactor 7mo ago

This appears to be an informative link; https://www.everettpost.com/local-news/everett-temporarily-suspends-license-plate-cameras/ https://www.everettpost.com/local-news/everett-temporarily-s...

GiorgioG 7mo ago

Great now let’s follow suit in all 50 states.

sriram_malhar 7mo ago
Red states have zero crime, so they don't need them in the first place. /s
- Ancapistani 7mo ago
  This isn’t a red/blue issue. Flock is no more populate on the right than it is on the Left.

SlightlyLeftPad 7mo ago

Does them removing it simply because it’s public record imply that they were up to no good?

timschmidt 7mo ago
Well if they had nothing to hide... /s
- SlightlyLeftPad 7mo ago
  > “We were very disappointed,” Franklin said. “That means perpetrators of crime, people who are maybe engaged in domestic abuse or stalkers, they can request footage and that could cause a lot of harm.” No concern over the dozens (or hundreds?) of cases of police or government employees themselves doing exactly what they’re afraid of here. Strange.
  - timschmidt 7mo ago
    Or for what can already be purchased from a data broker on the open market.
  - sonzohan 7mo ago
    While I agree with the risks of DA/stalkers getting that data, this data is not known for being well protected against LoveInt. Quite the opposite it is usually sold on grey markets.
  - randallsquared 7mo ago
    > No concern over [...] government employees themselves Three paragraphs later someone else is paraphrased as including immigration enforcement agents among the problematic users, and in the current political environment, federal law enforcement being made more effective might be the real problem for state and local government.
    - throwaway173738 7mo ago

1123581321 7mo ago

This is a good article about some of the legal particulars. https://www.heraldnet.com/2026/02/24/snohomish-county-judge-rules-flock-camera-footage-is-public-record/ https://www.heraldnet.com/2026/02/24/snohomish-county-judge-... The defense of the photos not being government business until accessed seems shaky. That the physical camera installations were purposeful intentions to conduct government business in those areas is a reasonable line; this doesn't set precedent for Google's information becoming public records because the police might do a google search, to use an extreme example. The proposed legislative amendment that would exclude Flock footage from public records (which would make this judgment moot) makes sense in the light of red light cameras already being excluded by the same legislators. However, I'd like to see a more incisive law covering both that would compel a reasonable amount of public insight into the footage.

CamperBob2 7mo ago
The defense of the photos not being government business until accessed seems shaky. It's reminiscent of the NSA's argument that data "collection" occurs only when a search is performed on existing "gathered" data. File under "Stuff that's only legal when the government does it."
- dotancohen 7mo ago
  What should I be reading?
  - CamperBob2 7mo ago
    Scott Alexander has a decent article (or rather a guest blog post) at https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/all-lawful-use-much-more-than-you https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/all-lawful-use-much-more-th... that brings up the subject in the context of Anthropic and OpenAI's dealings with the Department of War (sic), and how their contracts with the DoW might be interpreted with regard to mass surveillance of Americans. Worth checking out. I'm not personally knowledgeable enough to vouch for the veracity, though.
  - masfuerte 7mo ago

hyperific 7mo ago

According to the article, the Flock cameras are still in place but are "offline". Why does that not convince me?

bl4kers 7mo ago
Are there cameras pointed at the offline Flock cameras? I sure hope so because it would be a shame if they disappeared...

chkaloon 7mo ago

Awesome. I think I'll put in an open records request for the cameras down the street in my little Wisconsin town. See what happens

hypercube33 7mo ago
Funny I was thinking of doing that in my little Wisconsin town too. Howdy sorta neighborish HN user.
datahack 7mo ago
Wonder if we should coordinate doing it simultaneously in like 10,000 cities and towns?
- techdmn 7mo ago
  And my axe! Let me know if you do. (Also WI)

N_Lens 7mo ago

"The masses/general populace are the enemy" - once you understand that this is the fundamental belief at the root of the elites behaviour, everything will make sense. Flock cameras and AI surveillance is designed to reign in 'the enemy'.

neverkn0wsb357 7mo ago

I think the person requesting to access the data was doing the right thing and I agree with the judge’s ruling. The fact that they’re gonna shut it down, implies the scale of indiscriminate nature of data capture and the volume of data being captured. These cameras are popping up all over the nation and if people realize how much data is being captured and where that data is going (or who it’s being sold to) and how it’s being used by government and private entities they would be appalled. There’s been exposés about these cameras, everything from AI misidentification of “stolen” (not) vehicles and erroneous arrests and police encounters, to analysis of shopping patterns being sold back to private entities for better ad targeting. It’s wild.

deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
Gigachad 7mo ago
The laws need to be updated. CCTV in public used to be fine because no one was actually watching it unless there was an incident. Now it’s possible to have AI watch every camera and correlate everything everywhere we need new privacy laws to reflect this capability.
- thfuran 7mo ago
  And the government needs to be restricted from buying data it wouldn’t be permitted to collect itself.
  - throwawayqqq11 7mo ago
    Yep, ban collection and pruchase of such data for everyone. Exceptions usually mean private companies hop in to offer the "service". I think the current insane development are surveilance capitalists, trying to rush their panopticon to solidify their power. Guess that means no reasoable privacy law for the US, even under hypothetical president newsom.
  - bilbo0s 7mo ago
    Meh. If the government is only restricted from buying the data, then they'll just have someone else buy it. Palantir is not the government. So they can buy the real time feed, analyze it in real time, and give the real time results of that analysis to the government without issue. Restricting the government from buying that data does nothing. If you want to stop the government taking advantage of the data, then you would have to outlaw the collection of the data altogether. So that the initial collection of the data by anyone, is illegal. Personally, I don't think that's gonna happen. There's way too many people making way too much money telling the government who hangs out with who, who cheats with who, and so on and so forth.

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

seltzered_ 7mo ago

Somewhat related discussion on Redmond Washington & Flock cameras: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45879101 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45879101

p0w3n3d 7mo ago

Anyone can tell, why were those cameras installed in first place? Some company just said "lol for the fun" or what? Who paid for them?

sonzohan 7mo ago
A mix of public (city councils) and private (think HOAs that then donated access/equipment to the city) contracted with Flock in the past few years. The questions of exactly who, when, and why, are very muddy especially with the HOAs who operate rather privately.
- p0w3n3d 7mo ago
  Thanks. I don't live in US and this subject is quite unknown to me
Lammy 7mo ago
Relevant federal payola: - https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/summary?id=D000116304 https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/summary... - https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/lobbyists?cycle=2025&id=D000116304 https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/lobbyis...

jmward01 7mo ago

I might be good with legal guarantees, meaning jail time for those involved, that the only place images on these devices went was local to the municipality collecting them and that they were only accessed for very well defined reasons by very specific people. The core issues are that aggregation and exfiltration of this data means that privacy is dead and the AI world allows analysis for almost no cost. We need an idea in our laws that puts back the limited scope that technology has removed. If the police have to expend one person's worth of time to listen to a wiretap then it really isn't possible to get out of control. We need that level of cost associated with ALPR and all surveillance so that the abuse of these systems doesn't get out of control. Make it appropriately hard and it won't be a problem.

sneak 7mo ago
Then the feds come in with a national security law and bypass all those state/local protections and slurp it all up into an AI-powered Palantir database, the very existence of which is classified. Suddenly you’re the victim of parallel construction and don’t even know it. The database CANNOT EXIST SAFELY. Why don’t people who “might be okay with this IF…” understand that? Collect the data and it WILL be misused, eventually, with 100% certainty. Has nobody read Snowden’s book? They even have a name for intel agents casually spying on their partners/crushes. The law does not apply to everyone equally. The intelligence agencies get to break any laws they want without consequences, by longstanding tradition (remember 007’s “license to kill” or the CIA’s famous heart attack gun?). There are NO legal safeguards that can prevent abuse, no matter how you word them, because there will always be some animals who are “more equal than others” to whom they do not apply (“national security carve-out”, “LEO exception”, etc). Sadly, those to whom they do not apply are now coordinating with the new wannabe SturmAbteilung in what are called “fusion centers”.
- bsder 7mo ago
  > The database CANNOT EXIST SAFELY. Why don’t people who “might be okay with this IF…” understand that? You have to point out the Jews in Amsterdam. They had nothing to hide--until they did. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1943_Amsterdam_civil_registry_office_bombing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1943_Amsterdam_civil_registry_... Or Martin Niemoller: a good Protestant German pastor who viewed the anti-theist attitudes of the Socialists and Communists as more threatening than Nazis. And then the Nazis put him in a concentration camp. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Niem%C3%B6ller https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Niem%C3%B6ller https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_They_Came https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_They_Came

sneak 7mo ago

I am less worried about Flock ALPR (which are aimed in the direction of traffic flow to read rear number plates) as I am about the THOUSANDS of facial recognition cameras installed in the last year in all four directions at nearly every intersection in southern Nevada and many many cities in southern California (LA notably excepted). These are mounted above the stoplights and aimed against traffic at stoplights to read faces. I mention these locales specifically only because I have directly observed them. I would be surprised if this isn’t also happening in many other US metro areas, given how eagerly DHS/TSA/CBP/ICE are mass collecting facial geometries at every available opportunity.

boisterousness 7mo ago
> These [cameras] are mounted above the stoplights and aimed against traffic at stoplights to read faces. Those cameras are for traffic detection, so the signal can turn green when a car comes. They aren't reading faces.
Ylpertnodi 7mo ago
> I would be surprised if this isn’t also happening... "I wouldn't be surprised if this is also happening..." Only the second sounds correct to me.
- jen20 7mo ago
  I believe both to be correct but “would be surprised if this isn’t happening” to be a stronger statement than “wouldn’t be surprised if it were”.
filoeleven 7mo ago
Flock cameras are advertised as ALPR but have facial/vehicle/etc recognition systems running on them as well. You can see one panning up to track other people near the end of this Benn Jordan video on the cameras. https://youtu.be/vU1-uiUlHTo https://youtu.be/vU1-uiUlHTo
throwaway173738 7mo ago
The statute in Washington that allows these to be used to enforce speeds and signals also prohibited photographing the driver using another or the same camera.

sneak 7mo ago

*Flock (YC S17) https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety

zombot 7mo ago

The fact that they shut it down to avoid it becoming public record proves that light is still the best disinfectant against vermin.

autoexec 7mo ago

> Everett Mayor Cassie Franklin said the city disagrees with the ruling and is concerned about who could obtain the footage. “We were very disappointed,” Franklin said. “That means perpetrators of crime, people who are maybe engaged in domestic abuse or stalkers, they can request footage and that could cause a lot of harm.” These people are fooling themselves if they think that keeping the cameras but not allowing the public to see the data will stop domestic abuse or stalkers. We've already seen these cameras used to stalk people and it wasn't random members of the public doing it, it was police officers. As long as this data is being collected it will be abused. If not by the public, then by police, or by Flock employees, or by hackers. The only way to protect people is to not gather the data at all. Anyone who keeps these cameras doesn't actually care about the public's safety.

darig 7mo ago
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deleted 7mo ago
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Zigurd 7mo ago
Cops and DV. And crash coverups.
schiffern 7mo ago
The mayor is making a great argument for not blanketing your city in a surveillance dragnet. Policymakers were warned about precisely these dangers ahead of time. They went ahead anyway, and now they want to play blameless and are trying to shift the blame on anyone but themselves.
techdmn 7mo ago
Two such instances of police using Flock to track current or former romantic partners: * https://www.kansas.com/news/politics-government/article291059560.html https://www.kansas.com/news/politics-government/article29105... * https://www.fox6now.com/news/milwaukee-police-officer-charged-flock-camera-misuse-case https://www.fox6now.com/news/milwaukee-police-officer-charge...

DrScientist 7mo ago

I always think that the best way to get stuff regulated is make those in power feel the risks. So if people started using something like flock to embarrass politicians, business leaders, or newspaper leader writers then suddenly privacy might become a big issue.

toofy 7mo ago
don’t worry, normal people will never ever see this data to use it against the powerful. our public data can only be seen by billionaires and cops, not us. it can be used against us, but never the other way around. the faster we realize this, the faster we can move out of our “divisive” phase and get back to making billionaires dreams come true.
- DrScientist 7mo ago
  Indeed - but as compute costs come down, it doesn't have to be that way - ultimately there are 8 billion eyes out there. There are also public data examples - for example the public data on charter flights or ship locations had people like Elon Musk bleating about privacy.

sidewndr46 7mo ago

So whenever these cameras could actually be used by the public (potentially for good), the government is allowed to just shut them down?

JKCalhoun 7mo ago

For reasons I have been unable to articulate, I have believed that if license plate readers are a thing, someone should open-source one that the general public could share. When a comment comes back that someone malicious will use the tech to stalk someone I really have no answer for that. That is indefensibly a bad thing. Of course the tech exists nonetheless (not open source as far as I know) and it could be argued it is even being used maliciously—or at least without the kind of judicial oversight we assumed would be in place. But one actor behaving badly does not justify the use of the tech by everyone. I read about the citizens of Minneapolis using decidedly low-tech means to track ICE vehicles prowling their community and it suggested a scenario where an open license-plate-tracking solution could "balance the scales" a bit (that is if you believe the scales to be imbalanced). I imagined not a license-plate reading dragnet but rather software where you had first to enter in very specific strings of ASCII characters and the software would only announce when there was a specific string match from the camera. To that end I vibe-coded an app for iOS in about 15 minutes using iOS's Vision framework and the built-in phone camera. Anyone could do the same. Nonetheless I only tested it with "HELLO" and "WORLD" using scraps of paper in my kitchen and never tried it outside as the craziness in Minneapolis seemed to have quieted down. I moved on to other projects.

jermaustin1 7mo ago
There had been a fairly decent open APLR library called OpenALPR. It used to be updated fairly regularly, but then was "acquired" and now sits abandoned for almost a decade without any updates, while the company that acquired it (REKOR) has commercialized it and extended it as a closed source API and platform. ALPR is fairly trivial now days, and a modern CPU can process thousands of plates per second (dozens of plates per frame, hundreds of frames per second coming multiple cameras pointing at different lanes of traffic). The "product" around all of these is linking the plates traveling together, tracking routes through various cameras, identifying common travel patterns, and more disturbing travel patterns that are outside norm for a given plate or route (i.e. do they normally drive these 3 cameras M-F, but this Th, they went a different route and stopped somewhere for a while). All that used to be done by the police/detectives/investigators on their own. Now the AI is automating this, and that is truly terrifying, especially for how often misreads occur.

cmckn 7mo ago

Please contact your representative in Olympia and tell them to kill the bill that would exempt this footage from public record requests. It passed the Senate on Feb. 6. This is the bill: https://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary/?BillNumber=6002&Chamber=Senate&Year=2025 https://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary/?BillNumber=6002&Chamber=... Find your reps: https://leg.wa.gov/legislators/ https://leg.wa.gov/legislators/ Washington State Legislative Hotline: 1-800-562-6000

siffland 7mo ago

My issues is with false arrests due to people blindly following AI. People pulled out of their cars are gunpoint due to the AI misreading a single letter on the plate, the lady who was arrested for stealing amazon packages just because flock saw her enter and exit a neighborhood and she had to get doorbell camera to prove her innocence. Also i think it should be public record about every single point of data flock collects and retention period. I am not saying they have to release the data itself, but I want to know what my tax dollars are collecting, how long they are keeping it, who can access it and who they are selling, er i mean sharing it with.

newzino 7mo ago

[flagged]

unethical_ban 7mo ago

The government's power over its citizens should mainly derive from its legitimacy in the eyes of citizens, not from its technological and military superiority over the people. This kind of ubiquitous surveillance is so dangerous to democracy and the ability of the citizens to do anything without the government knowing.