"Thankfully, we live in a beautifully democratic and capitalistic society where we can fight in court."
Of course he's "thankful" for that, since in our "beautifully democratic and capitalistic" society, Flock can use their $658 million of VC funding [1] to wage lawfare against the have-nots with their armies of lobbyists and lawyers. [2]
It isn't even just about money. It's more apparent than ever that freedom, democracy, justice, human rights in this country are increasily reserved for those with the right political alignments.
Why not? They hold all the cards and have aligned one of the most powerful governments in the world with them, while wielding enough money to make almost any nation, let alone individual, more inclined toward doing what they need. They will only become more powerful.
In an authoritarian regime, it's all competition, no co-operation. Whoever the big dog is gets to say what happens, right up until a bunch of the little dogs drag him down and then fight each other to replace him. If he's lucky and skillful he'll have worked this out and kept the little dogs at each other's throats so they don't gang up on him.
The whole operation of government becomes about "who's the boss?" and the boss gets to run the government to favour himself and his cronies, acquiring more power and wealth.
Any pause to consider the ordinary folks caught up in this is a weakness, that will be taken advantage of by the other wannabe bosses.
It's not a utopia for any of them because of the constant paranoia and fighting. Try to rest on your laurels and enjoy the spoils of what you got for a second, and boom; you get thrown out of a window.
Authoritarian regimes don’t run on facts. They run on the primacy of Authority. Cameras record factual information. Facts are inconvenient for Authority. You know, 1984 Department of Truth style.
I don't think fascists are that smart, they will go after those that get in the way and those who they perceive as weak. They are bullies who are cowards and all that.
Yes, that if, the most powerful government stays intact. But as it turns out, tech CEOs want to dissolve the nation state and its government to implement their vision of a utopia. The same nation state, the same government that protect their interests and assets, and make lawfare possible in the first place.
I know about these plans, but even if they end up happening to their fullest extent, I don't see why people are so unanimously predicting that they'll definitely fumble the bag. By the time this can happen, they will almost certainly have the most advanced weaponry available and enormous groups of people working on defending them. Again, they can buy anything. In their dream world, power descends directly from them, making their governments obsolete. The direct power of the governments isn't just erased, it'll transition into their hands.
Tech CEOs are not statesmen, even if they consider themselves smart enough to govern. Nor are they warriors, and historically speaking, feudal lords were trained from early childhood in both the art of war and the art of governing. What I mean by that is that these people have no experience of governing, nor do they have any experience of violence and the horrors of war, i.e. they do not have the competence for being feudal lords, and network states or libertarian communes are essentially feudal-like arrangements. What will they do, if they are confronted with large nation-states such as China or Russia? What will they do when other small states don't respect the libertarian non-aggression principle? Will the Andreessens, Thiel and Zuckerbergs of this world be respected by the military, or will they shit their pants when
confronted with a military coup, or worse, the enemy's military?
I mildly disagree mostly because I can’t get hard evidence, but everything’s I’ve heard from faang workers is that they are basically run like nation states on a logistical level. Complete with their own forms of courts to handle interdepartmental disputes and PMCs that they like to keep very quiet about.
The US military is famously a logistics network that dabbles in shooting things, and companies like Amazon are already very very good at that.
Cards that only work because of the current system that they are hacking away at. Revolutions tend to eat their young, wannabe American oligarchs should check on how things turned out for the majority of post-soviet Russian oligarchs.
Cards can always be taken with violence. Chaos is progression to a state of all versus all, where the most important thing is having the biggest wrench: https://xkcd.com/538/.
And they will almost certainly have the biggest wrench. Before you consider the sheer difficulty of making mass violence happen (especially in a world where tech can be used to regulate a sufficient portion of people's worldviews as required), at some point they'll probably just have the upper hand militarily. As military tech gets better, wealth will be able to shift directly into physical power, amplifying their abilities against a comparatively powerless populace.
If you own everything, and you bomb the populace, you bomb your own stuff.
If everybody works for you, and you bomb the populace, you bomb your own serfs.
And those faceless individuals who are actually holding the weapons, and actually know how they work, and actually know, in a detailed, hands-on way, how to do coordinated violence with them? It turns out they're secretly members of the populace. You'd better make sure they think it's in their interest to keep using the weapons the way you want them to.
Yeah this is why the US fails everytime they try to keep "boots on the ground."
You can bomb people into oblivion but if you actually want to control them, most of the things that give superiority to a fixed group of rich are useless. Violence is still democratic if you're trying to get anything useful out of the people you seek to control. If you have 5 people and 3 of them are slaves with an AK-47 and a donkey, you have 0 slaves not 5 slaves.
Obviously the rich/powerful can't stay that way in a glass desert with no plebs to do their bidding, at least for now, so most of the technology the government and rich have are useless for subjecting a hostile populace.
> And they will almost certainly have the biggest wrench
Tech CEOs can easily outlive their usefulness once the machinery is built, and can easily find themselves labeled "terrorists" if they try to fight back with whatever feeble power they have.
Political factions, purges and patronage is what comes next, amd despite their inflated egos, they won't be the patrons.
Yes the rich have "all the cards" but the thing about societal reorganization is things get completely flip-flopped and the fact society recognizes you as owning a mansion and a screw factory today doesn't mean that they won't recognize Castro's lieutenant as controlling it tomorrow.
Possessions that are "yours" are only yours insofar as you can either defend it or others recognize it as yours. Thus you end up with situations like "Barbeque" in Haiti owning the streets and much of the rich's land/assets are now magically in the hands of barbeque or his crew and whatever money that one thought they could use to resist that turned out to not be their money anymore. The "rich" thus still hold all the cards but who is rich and who isn't isn't the same as when it started.
> Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov (Russian: Николай Иванович Ежов, IPA: [nʲɪkɐˈlaj ɪˈvanəvʲɪtɕ (j)ɪˈʐof]; 1 May 1895 – 4 February 1940), also spelt Ezhov, was a Soviet secret police official under Joseph Stalin who was head of the NKVD from 1936 to 1938, at the height of the Great Purge. Yezhov organized mass arrests, torture, and executions during the Great Purge, but he fell out of favour with Stalin and was arrested, subsequently admitting in a confession to a range of anti-Soviet activity including "unfounded arrests" during the Purge. He was executed in 1940 along with others who were blamed for the Purge.
This guy was head of the secret police, didn’t help him out when he was purged aka murdered.
Which also tends to lean on a political set. But poor people will be deprived of their liberties be them left or right. For those useful to power it will take just a little bit longer to notice.
Same as it's ever been. When the founders of this country cried about freedom, they meant for themselves to not pay taxes that would cover their debts, not freedom for their slaves or lower-class Americans. After all if you are at the top, then you are literally free to do as you wish
Apple has more cash reserves on hand than most countries do and yet its CEO had to scramble to stand behind Trump during the inauguration and offer a million-dollar tribute to stay in his good graces. Power > money.
He didn't have to do a single damn thing. He did the cost-benefit analysis and chose to cozy up to a corrupt administration.
Given how much the typical Apple consumer skews left and has extreme brand loyalty, if Apple got tariffed simply because Tim failed to bow down, Apple would be in a stronger position to fight it than any other tech company. They could have stood up, but chose not to.
The rich are increasingly uninterested in keeping up appearances.
And really, why should they? We've learned now that there was actually a worldwide network of child rapists purchasing girls from other wealthy child traffickers in positions of power in seemingly every Western nation, and the consensus thus far is to do exactly nothing about it.
In the 1300s you could be broke but if you had the blue blood you still had power.
People today can become wealthy, and wealthy people can lose wealth, much much easily than nobility was created or revoked under feudalism.
There's objectively more social mobility. That's an improvement. Don't confuse "it's an improvement" with "it's an acceptable and desirable end state".
I still argue that our current capitalist system is nothing more than an extension of the Norman system. Only capitalist executives see even less of the humanity of their ‘customers’ and the damage from their policies/maximal extraction than medieval lords saw in the serfs of the village that their policies/maximal extraction impacted.
Moments later (~1:13) he also said "we aren't forcing Flock on anyone"
False, he is forcing Flock on EVERYONE
No one has permitted themselves to be surveilled. And no, under the radar agreements with local cops and govts do NOT constitute my permission to be surveilled. If they want to go in with fully informed referendums in each community, then I'd accept it. But that is not Flock's business model.
> If they want to go in with fully informed referendums in each community, then I'd accept it.
I might accept it for this specific case. But, in general, just because the majority wants to do something doesn't mean it's legitimate to force everyone to accept it.
> No one has permitted themselves to be surveilled
As much as I dislike Flock, this is bad logic. There's no such thing as opting out of surveillance in public spaces. Public spaces are defined by being public, in that everyone (even governments/corporations!) is free to observe everyone else in that same setting.
So in reality, everyone has permitted themselves to be surveilled, purely through the act of being in public.
This idea that there's some kind of difference between me watching you in public and Flock watching you in public is, quite frankly, bogus.
I can't imagine that the authors of the Constitution predicted always on, AI enabled facial and license plate recognition on every street corner in America.
If this is what they thought was possible, why write the 4th Amendment?
Unreasonable search and overbearing government was one of the key issues of the American Revolution.
> I can't imagine that the authors of the Constitution predicted always on, AI enabled facial and license plate recognition on every street corner in America.
They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety - Ben Frank
There's a ton of difference between a random person noting my presence at a single point in space-time and a commercial entity tracking and storing my movements all the time.
Being okay with people watching me in public does not imply being okay with someone aggregating the information about my whereabouts 24/7 even though it's "the same" information.
Btw it's a fallacy similar to the one debunked in "what colour are your bits". The context matters, not just the abstract information.
This is an unfortunate thing about a whole lot of legal precedent in the US.
Courts made a pretty reasonable set of tradeoffs around the 4th amendment for search warrant vs. subpoena, police officers observing you, etc.
During the 19th century.
Unfortunately, modern data processing completely undermines a lot of the rationale about how reasonable and intrusive various things are. Before, cops couldn't follow and surveil everyone; blanket subpoenas to get millions of peoples' information weren't possible because the information wasn't concentrated in one entity's hands and compliance would have been impossible; etc.
As the owner of a moral person (a company), I disagree.
There are even weirder stuff than companies being considered a "moral person". For example if a person speeds way too much in France (say more than 50 kilometers/hour above the speed limit on the highway, e.g. 180 km/h // 111 mph instead of the 130 km/h // 80 mph)... Well then that person gets arrested. And his driving license is confiscated on the spot. But here's the absolute crazy thing: even if the car belong to someone else, to a company, to a rental company... Doesn't matter: the French state consider that the car itself was complicit in the act. So the car is seized too (for 8 days if it doesn't belong to the person who was driving it and potentially much more if it does belong to the person driving it).
Companies are persons and cars (I'm not even talking about self-driving cars) have rights and obligations. That's the world we live in.
"Company" is a generic collective noun. "Corporation" is the legal term directly referencing a constructed singular entity with a corpus/body to be treated like a natural person.
> This idea that there's some kind of difference between me watching you in public and Flock watching you in public is, quite frankly, bogus.
If you followed me around all day taking photographs of my every move for no other reason than you felt like it, I would very likely have recourse via stalking and harassment laws.
There is no difference to me that some company does it via technology.
If I'm interesting enough to get a warrant for surveillance of my activities - fair game. Private investigators operate under a set of reasonable limits and must be licensed in most (all?) states for this reason as well.
It's quite obvious laws have simply not caught up with the state of modern technology that allows for the type of data collection and thus mass-surveillance that is now possible today. If you went back 50 years ago and asked anyone on the street if it was okay that every time they left the house their travel history would be recorded indefinitely they would talk to you about communist dystopias that could never happen here due to the 2nd amendment.
>There is no difference to me that some company does it via technology.
There is a difference, the company is doing it to everyone, technology enables new things to happen and laws don't cover it. Before it was impractical for police to assign everyone a personal stalker but tech has made it practical.
By default if something is new enough it has a pretty good chance of being legal because the law hasn't caught up or considered it in advance.
But Flock doesn't "follow you around"? It's fixed location cameras. If you avoid the locations, you avoid the cameras, and thus the tracking.
> There is no difference to me that some company does it via technology.
I feel like it's telling that no one has yet taken this logic to court. I think that means that while there may be no difference to you there is a difference according to the law. This gets at your later point.
Speaking of:
> If you went back 50 years ago and asked anyone on the street if it was okay that every time they left the house their travel history would be recorded indefinitely they would talk to you about communist dystopias that could never happen here due to the 2nd amendment.
I think you're doing a subtle motte-and-bailey here. As far as I'm aware, Flock has strict retention policies, numbering in the low single-digit months (Google says 30 days "by default"). There is no "recorded indefinitely" here, which significantly changes the characteristics of the argument here. This is roughly on par with CCTV systems, to the best of my knowledge.
I don't disagree that laws haven't caught up yet, but I also think a lot of the arguments against Flock are rife with hyperbolic arguments like this that do meaningfully misrepresent their model. I think this leads to bad solutioning, as a consequence.
I'd much rather have good solutions here than bad ones, because ALPRs and other "surveillance technologies" do drive improvements in crime clearance rates/outcomes, so they shouldn't be banned--just better controlled/audited/overseen
But Flock DOES follow you around, in the sense that you can't really escape being observed by a series of ALPRs on a highway network.
Read some cases of who's suffering now. Cops (or ICE) can choose a passing vehicle to run a ALPR search on, finding out what states it just passed through. When they consider it "suspicious", said driver gets stopped, searched, and even detained.
Look at how ALPR is being used and whose rights are being violated as a result. Hint: it's not criminals.
> But Flock doesn't "follow you around"? It's fixed location cameras.
This is a really silly thing to say. It’s the “stop hitting yourself” of surveillance bullshit. Come on. Calling them “fixed cameras” so you can ignore the intent in the original comment is middle school shit.
The original comment was hyperbolic nonsense. Just because you agree with it doesn't make it any less silly!
You "come on". I expect reasonable discourse here, not blind acceptance of nonsense arguments just because you happen to agree with their conclusions or premises.
I made it clear at the start I'm not a fan of Flock.
I'm also not a fan of the hyperbolic nonsense people are trying to use to demonize them. It makes it too easy for them to respond in kind, and be right.
>This idea that there's some kind of difference between me watching you in public and Flock watching you in public is, quite frankly, bogus.
The idea that me an individual observing you, and a large, well funded company allied with the US government observing you has no difference, quite frankly, leads me to conclude* you are arguing in bad faith.
You can make an ideological argument that is the case, but not one based on fact and reality.
What if I run my own cameras, my own local models, and my own analysis? All from the privacy of my own home... Is that okay?
What if I recruit a few friends around my town to do the same, and we share data and findings? Is that also fine?
What if I pay a bunch of people I don't know to collect this data for me, but do all the analysis myself?
Where do you draw the line? Being able to concretely define a line here is something I've seen privacy proponents be utterly incapable of doing. Yet it's important to do so, because on one end of the spectrum is a set of protected liberties, and on the other is authoritarian dystopia. If you can't define some point at which freedom stops being freedom, you leave the door wide open to the kind of bullshit arguments we see any time "privacy in public" comes up: 100% feels, and 0% logic.
> This idea that there's some kind of difference between me watching you from a park bench in public and hundreds of thousands of clones of me watching you from every street corner in public is, quite frankly, bogus
To paraphrase the quote, quantity has a quality of its own.
they could instead be limiting flock to private places.
> This idea that there's some kind of difference between me watching you in public and Flock watching you in public is, quite frankly, bogus.
if you followed me everywhere and took pictures of me everywhwre i went outside from my door in the morning to my door in the evening, id want to get a restraining order on you as a stalker. this is stalking
The idea that a single CCTV feed is at all comparable to aggregatable Flock data is a deeply unserious position. I’m not clear why you think you can pretend that single cameras and a network of cameras are either similar or comparable, in this context? Or why traffic cameras aren’t essentially identical, if they’re used identically?
I’d like to give the benefit of the doubt, but it feels very sea-liony and intentionally disingenuous.
I'm not positing the idea that a single CCTV feed is the same? Most places that run CCTVs run many, so there's already some element of scale. I mean, I literally said "traffic cameras", which are ubiquitous and often elements of sets numbering in the hundreds or even thousands, depending on the size of the jurisdiction.
If you can't refrain from immediately strawmanning the argument, I would argue that you are the one with the "deeply unserious position".
"Thankfully, we live in a beautifully democratic and capitalistic society where we can fight in court [(...) where we can bankrupt the opposition even if we can't win the case.]"
Mountain View recently turned off their Flock installs after they discovered Flock had enabled data sharing without notice and other agencies were searching through MV data.
https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/privacy/2026/02/flock-came...
> A separate “statewide lookup” feature had also been active on 29 of the city’s 30 cameras since the initial installation, running for 17 straight months until Mountain View found and disabled it on January 5. Through that tool, more than 250 agencies that had never signed any data agreement with Mountain View ran an estimated 600,000 searches over a single year, according to local paper the Mountain View Voice, which first uncovered the issue after filing a public records request.
A different town (Staunton, VA) also turned of their Flock installs after their CEO sent out an email claming:
https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/flock-ceo-goes-...
> The attacks aren't new. You've been dealing with this for forever, and we've been dealing with this since our founding, from the same activist groups who want to defund the police, weaken public safety, and normalize lawlessness. Now, they're producing YouTube videos with misleading headlines.
I'd like to see a database of municipalities that have passed an ordinance banning these systems (including 12 hour drone flyovers like they've been doing in Camden, NJ; drones are fine for specific or exigent circumstances, but flying them systematically is concerning!).
In fact, if anyone knows of municipalities that have done so let me know. I'd like to spend tourist money in those places that I haven't been able to spend in authoritarian-leaning locales as a reward for valuing freedom over suffocation of the constitution for little to no benefit.
> A statement provided by a Flock Safety spokesperson said, “Flock helps law enforcement, including hundreds of agencies around Illinois, solve crimes and make communities safer, and we are proud of the results we have achieved in partnership with the Evanston PD. We continue to be optimistic that we will have the opportunity to have a constructive dialogue to address the City’s concerns, and resume our successful partnership making Evanston safer.” [0]
Hows that for taking no as an answer? My god, we are in big trouble if this is going to be a regular thing. IMHO we need to shut this country down.
"...and then unfortunately there is terroristic organizations like DeFlock, whose primary motivation is chaos. They are closer to Antifa than they are anything else."
"We're not forcing Flock on anyone..."
It is a short 1:32 video, I encourage people to watch it for themselves.
I thought DeFlock was just publishing locations of cameras and lawfully convincing local governments to not use Flock, primarily through FOIA requests.
Twenty-some years back, I attended a talk by a classicist who was talking about how the Romans, Caesar specifically I think, basically used "pirate" the same way.
Funnily enough, the currently airing Starz program, Spartacus: House of Ashur does this, has Caesar as a character and all political sides use “pirates” as a bogeyman to justify all sorts of things and stage false flag attacks while pretending to be pirates. It’s meant for entertainment not historicity but it’s kind of reminding me of Battlestar Galactica reboot touching political themes in this one aspect except with swords and prosethetics flying everywhere.
The difference is that North Korea is a place, with an organization that claims to be its government. You can point to it on a map.
Antifa is an adjective that people with no connection to one another self-apply. I'm antifa, and I imagine you are too, but it doesn't mean that we've ever met or coordinated with one another in any meaningful way.
The word "antifa" is basically meaningless altogether, since virtually every person since the end of WW2 claims to oppose fascism.
> Being anti-antifascist just make you a fascist, or a fascist-adjacent supporter.
If a loose-knit ideology/movement called "Anti-Rapists" emerged that evolved into a cohort of various disconnected thugs who targeted homosexuals for violence, would being Anti-"Anti-Rapist" make you a supporter of rapists or rapist-adjacent supporter?
Obviously, in the scenario you describe, people will continue describe themselves as "anti-rapist" and everybody will understand that they mean that they are opposed to rape.
There is no "loose-knit ideology/movement" called "antifa" - there are groups like SDS and Don't Shoot PDX and a zillion others who describe themselves as "antifa", using it as an adjective. I'm aware of no person or organization who has attempted to proclaim that they are the one true antifa org.
But that's really the height of silliness. I can say that all people who describe themselves as 'anticapitalist' are actually capitalists, but that doesn't change anything about those people, the ideology in question, or the world.
Are some people who call themselves antifa secretly fascists? I'm sure they are. So?
Ah yes, I too conflate bills written by organized lobbyists with a loosely affiliated group that says American shouldn't be ran by Nazi's. The Nazi's running America get very mad about that and ensure to flood the airwaves with how cities in the US are mile wide smoking craters due to people who don't like authoritarians.
The point GP was making, which holds as a general rule, is that simply adopting a moniker does not necessarily mean that it accurately describes you. Your argument pre-supposed that just because Antifa self-describes as antifascist, it inherently is, and that the CEO was expressing an opposition to the concept of antifascism, rather than simply expressing opposition to the specific group.
If Antifa’s record speaks for itself, then you don’t need to play these kinds of word games. If some CEO spoke unflatteringly of The Red Cross or Habitat For Humanity, that would say more about them than anything, not because they have virtuous sounding names (though they admittedly do) but because they’ve established a specific track record of public service.
I don't even know what antifa _is_ anymore, honestly. I only see it used as a boogie man by the right in discourse online.
But I _do_ know that when someone tags someone as "antifa" they are making a political statement and aligning themselves with a certain group that perceives "antifa" a certain way. "See, I hate those damn' antifa terrorists, I'm in the same camp as you! Please help my company make money!"
>The point pixl97 was making was that they believed anti-anti-fascist described the Flock CEO.
"anti-anti-fascist" as in "anti [antifa the organization]" or "anti anti [facism the ideology]"? The two are getting intentionally being conflated, so people can make the rhetorical argument "Why are you against [antifa the organization]? You must be be against everyone who opposes [facism the ideology]"
I've read your comment twice, and I can't make heads or tails of what you're trying to say.
> If some CEO spoke unflatteringly of The Red Cross or Habitat For Humanity,
Those are organizations. "Antifa" is a descriptive term that many people and organizations use, whether they have connections to one another or not. What is the comparison you are trying to draw here?
> If Antifa’s record speaks for itself, then you don’t need to play these kinds of word games.
You are using the possessive here, "Antifa's", in a way that seems grammatically incorrect to me.
"Antifa" is usually an adjective, but sometimes a known, like "vegan" or "blonde". Saying "if blonde's record speaks for itself", it seems like obviously broken English.
Usually you'd use this phraseology to describe a person or organization, "Joe's record", "Nabisco's record", etc.
What is the entity or entities whose record(s) you are trying to describe?
> The point GP was making, which holds as a general rule, is that simply adopting a moniker does not necessarily mean that it accurately describes you.
I'm deeply curious why you think someone would identify as an anti-fascist if they were not, in fact, anti-fascist. Do you think they just really like the flag logo or...?
I know we're not supposed to talk about it, but what in the world is happening to this site? Mistaking 'Antifa' for 'the concept of opposing fascism' is not the kind of failure mode I expect here. And this kind of thing has become endemic lately- emotive noise and sarcastic dunks drowning out substance in every thread, especially since the beginning of December. Or am I just imagining this?
Fighting fascist is the primary way to oppose them. The fighting bit often requires violence. That's what it takes, because it involves fighting a group of people that are not a peaceful bunch and have very violent intentions.
Yes, exactly my point. And once you are picking targets and taking violent actions, you can no longer excuse your aim and your violence by saying your heart is in the right place. Antifa has, for many decades, done wrong actions with good intentions. You can oppose them without being fascist.
By physically opposing fascism, I assume you mean they are taking specific practical actions rather than becoming one with the platonic concept of opposition to fascism.
It may seem an obvious or insignificant point, but it is critical here. If they physically oppose fascism by following and filming ICE, I'm very much on board. If they oppose it by molotoving innocent local government buildings, I am against. If both of these actions are the concept of opposing fascism, what does it mean to be against that?
Antifa are belligerants. They undermine protests by having the maturity to die for a cause but not to live for one. One can be against that without being fascist.
> Approximately nobody is against "antifa" because they're fighting "fascists".
So, I will say that far right, comservatives and fascists are against anti-fascism of any kind. Whether it is the boogeyman antifa or anything else. And there are a lot of people like that. Including in goverment.
They do take issue with anyone who openly opposes fascism.
Oh so Antifa is a single formal political party with card carrying members, a clear leadership structure and participation in mainstream public political life? I had no idea. Your analogy makes perfect sense. Where is the Antifa national headquarters?
Kinda funny, Noem claimed to have arrested the "Leader of Antifa" in Portland a few days ago [1]. Turned out it was just some guy who lived near I.C.E. HQ, who let nearby protesters use his bathroom and clean out mace from their eyes.
You don't even need to use examples that westerners find polarizing because they want to minimize or maximize their badness for political reasons.
Africa is full of factions with grand names doing less than grand things that nobody here has any attachmennt to and do not cause complexities when comparing to.
"Despite the name, The Party of Peace and Love is actually authoritarian and horribly repressive, as you can see from the millions of people they've killed."
"Despite the name, Antifa is not just 'anti-fascist' but is actually _________"
The blank is "the OTHER group". Like brown people, poor people, and (say it quickly so it doesn't get too noticed) women.
And anyone from the OTHER group is the enemy. Stop thinking, you have arrived to the conclusion. Now, here are some news ... I mean, entertainment, to make you fear them more.
__an identity claimed by people who are taking direct action against what they perceive as fascism, but currently more often the term is applied as an unthinking boogeyman by right wing authoritarians__
It's wild what the perception is in the right echo chamber right now. I was talking with my brother, who I love, but who, through his practicing Christian faith is essentially pulled into this right-wing cultural environment and propaganda machine. So he was making the point that the politics in the US have drifted so much more to the left that the right is actually the center. My jaw dropped off the floor. How do these thing even get propagated? It's borderline ridiculous and I don't know how this firehouse of bullshit can ever be countered.
Right, but that makes it pretty much impossible to stop anyone from claiming to be antifa or anyone accusing someone of being antifa... a lot of people will accuse anyone who is doing anything they don't like as being antifa
Theres no organisation but they are well organised in a distributed sense. Horizontally, theres lots of tradecraft and opsec details that get spread around to help people fight. Thing is, theres no central pillar you can break to stop that spread.
What gets me is how right wing protesters specifically eschew good opsec. "mask off rallys", visible tattoos etc. They love the police state and then look like idiots when that big police state they demanded rounds them up with absolute ease because they took selfies with their swastikas out during a protest.
I live in Portland. I've met many people that label themselves antifa. They're just protestors that are willing to be a little more aggro. That's literally it.
So when people talk about antifa as if it was the left wing equivalent of Osama Bin Laden's terror network, it's a self report they're forming their views based on strawman style propaganda, not engaging with the reality of it.
> Antifa is commonly known as an ironically fascist organization that uses violence and intimidation to silence speakers — it's like how the "Democratic People's Republic of Korea" is not really democratic.
That's not "commonly known", that's the spin you'll get from the right-wing in the US who just happen to have heavy fascist tendencies.
I Googles that exact string and I can't say that I see even enough cases to count on one hand. Do you have any concrete examples that you think are representative for the behavior that you are referencing?
Googling “earth is flat” nets you thousands of results from very passionate people willing to share their experience and expertise. (I just did to verify)
A movement is better terminology than an organization, fair.
But okay - I'm confused what sources you would accept? There are "Antifa" groups on social media that literally advocate for doing this, I've seen it first-hand.
Which SPECIFIC persons are being silenced and which SPECIFIC topics were they attempting to speak on?
It’s a huge diff between someone being ”silenced” for speaking their minds on bike paths versus being ”silenced” for indirectly or even directly promoting a new holocaust. And from your vague responses it is not clear.
Ah yes, when the first result on Google is from a group known as a right wing think tank...
>American Enterprise Institute, a prominent center-right think tank in Washington, D.C., that promotes free enterprise, limited government, and individual liberty through research and policy advocacy in areas like economics, foreign policy, and social studies
I too can get paid think tanks to publish hundreds of reports on how communists are taking over America... Doesn't mean communists are actually taking over America.
"Antifa" is understood as violent communist street thugs by most huge swaths of people. You may not think that's accurate, but that's the definition he is calling to mind.
That's the intent but most people know it's not true. It's right up there with "woke" and "progressive" as generic, shapeless, boogeyman words. No real meaning besides "something bad".
Pretty sure most who claim the mantle of “Antifa” would welcome that Communist label, and plenty would endorse violence if it’s against the “right” people, so if the shoe fits…
They're kinda famous for punching people (physically) unprovoked at this point. There was a whole discourse around it that comes back up pretty regularly, I don't know how you could miss it.
You vote for my friends to be directly physically harmed, and you think it’s scary that some people respond to your violence with their own?
You’re not “better” because you vote for political violence, my man, though I get that brings up conflicting feelings for you.
It’s actually weird how often people try to pretend that their shitty actions (vis-a-vis making sure Grok can create CSAM, or that Facebook can more effectively give teenage girls depression) are morally neutral because they’re second order effects. You’re still a pretty shitty human being if you directly enable it, even if you’re not the sole cause. Some of y’all need to stop sniffing your own farts (or Elon’s/Thiel’s/etc.) and learn that.
The real question is where do you draw the line with these ideologies? I don't think anyone deserves violence just for thinking the wrong things, but we're currently seeing the result of when those thoughts inevitably turn into actions.
It doesn't seem like America ended up on the right side of the paradox of tolerance, so I'm curious how you think we could have avoided our current fascist leadership?
The air quotes around 'right' are interesting there. Yes, violence against Nazis and Fascists is acceptable. Do you disagree? I thought it was pretty much settled, we did a whole world war about it.
None of his views had anything to do with Naziism but failure to fall in line with all of the Left's current positions makes one "a Nazi" to them. And yes, much the same way as right-wing extremists like to paint all 'liberals' as "gun grabbing Marxists." The difference is you can find a lot more liberals who would happily glorify Marx than you can find Americans of any party who would glorify the Nazi regime or its acts.
In case it's unclear, I do not support Nazis either.
"A majority of individuals involved are anarchists, communists, and socialists, although some social democrats also participate in the antifa movement. The name antifa and the logo with two flags representing anarchism and communism are derived from the German antifa movement." [0]
Funny thing is that in my German neighborhood we have Antifa stickers pretty much on any other street lamp. Given the fascist tendencies all around it actually makes me feel safer...
> in my German neighborhood we have Antifa stickers pretty much on any other street lamp. Given the fascist tendencies all around it actually makes me feel safer
My Polish-German godmother asked me, as a kid, "who would you hide."
I didn't get the question. And 6-year old me wasn't ready for Holocaust with grandma. But it comes back to me from time to time.
Who would you hide. Who would you stake your wealth and life on to keep from undeserved suffering. The stickers are good. But they only mean something if you're willing to fight for them. At least in America, I'm unconvinced most sticker-toters are willing to sacrifice anything. (It's what makes Minnesota and Texas different.)
Is there a general term for metastatic semantic overinclusivity?
Terrorist. Racist. Colonist. Fascist. Historically-rooted and precise terms that are collectively decohering in a self-amplifying and propagating way as everyone feels increasingly free to detach more and more words from their original meanings.
you have seriously got to read and understand Eco's 14 tenets of Ur-Fascism [0] if you think that contemporary applications of the term "fascist" are inaccurate in describing what's happening right now in the US.
> if you think that contemporary applications of the term "fascist" are inaccurate in describing what's happening right now in the US
Didn't say that. I'm saying I've seen the term thrown around wildly to apply to all manner of things. Like the other terms.
The term is probably fundamentally fucked. If you asked Hitler if he's a Nazi, he'd say yes. If you asked Mussolini if he's a Fascist, he'd say yes. These were the words they used to describe themselves. The reason I'm describing the phenomenon versus blaming the folks using the terms broadly is because I don't think this is a personal failing by anyone as much as something that's linguistically happening.
There's also a pragmatic elephant in the room: By the time certain labels are perfectly and undeniably true to say, it's no longer safe for people to speak out and use them!
So there's a kind of "anthropic principle" going on: We cannot "fix" the imperfection, because the circumstances demand it.
> that's a great way to side line people that are actually talking about real harms
Valid. This is a real linguistic process. But it absolutely debases the original term. I’m not convinced we have to choose between empathy, on one hand, and accuracy, on the other hand.
i think a great example to back your point is that the terminally online turn out in droves to apply the nazi label to all those not in favor of maximising immigration , rational discourse seems to have broken down and the resulting vacuum of meaning is filled by hyperbole as people scamble to feel heard in a world of weak voices & closed ears
INTERVIEWER: Surveillance is becoming more prevalent everywhere. There's an organization called Deflock that's become fairly well-known in activist circles. They take an aggressive approach—counting cameras and maintaining a Discord channel where they discuss potential activities to move against surveillance expansion and stop organizations like Flock. What's your perspective on this organization and their methods?
FLOCK CEO: I see two distinct groups of activists here. There are organizations like the ACLU and the EFF that take an above-board approach to fighting for their viewpoint. We're fortunate to live in a democratic, capitalistic country where we can fight through the courts. I have a lot of respect for those groups because they engage in reasonable debate while following the law.
FLOCK CEO: Unfortunately, there are also what I'd call terroristic organizations like Deflock, whose primary motivation appears to be chaos. They're closer to Antifa than anything else. That's disappointing because I don't want chaos - I value law and order and a society built on safety.
FLOCK CEO: For those groups, I think it's regrettable they haven't chosen a more constructive approach to achieve their goals. They do have the right to their views, but that's why we have a democratically elected process. We're not forcing Flock on anyone. Elected officials understand that communities and families want safety, and Flock is the best way to create safe communities.
INTERVIEWER: Deflock probably wouldn't agree with the "terroristic" label you've applied to them, but...
----
Yeah. "They have a right to their views" buuut also, they are terrorists, and implicitly therefore deserve to have their freedom taken away because of said views. So giving the public a map of flock cameras and organizing to advocate against these being used in our communities is terroristic, I suppose. There's one party here that should be in jail here. Seems like that ought to be the creeps that are filming everyone against their consent, but I guess that makes me a terrorist...
Counting cameras and maintaining a discord channel. It's almost like someone doesn't like being surveilled. Maybe by his own logic, Flock is a terrorist organization.
the more prosaic (the bear case) POV is that physically mounted outdoor street cameras have the same enforcement limitations as most other enforcement support technologies. flock isn't really bringing "number of unseen crimes" down from 1 to zero, he's bringing it from like 1000 to 999. a flock being easy to disable by a lay person, and a street corner not having witnesses - they're the same thing, it just isn't as good of a technology as he says (or people imagine) it to be.
so at the very beginning, the thing that threatens him the most is: simple ideas that sound objective and that make Gary Tan wary of putting $50m instead of $25m.
that said, very few things do that, bring "unseen crime" from N to 0. for example, legalization of something does that! he has found a very successful business nonetheless. it's more interesting to explore why. if he wanted to level constructive criticism at Deflock, i suppose we should wonder: how do they disrupt enterprise sales? flock is just, yet another failed IT project. it shouldn't be too hard. obviously, the best thing you can do is getting elected, and simply putting it in the law to not adopt the technology.
Flock is just, yet another failed IT project. it shouldn't be too hard.
Well I think this is the issue. The value of Flock is not what it says on the tin, it's everything else. Solving petty crimes yeah sure, yadda yadda. Ever had your bike stolen and told a cop about it?
It's the tracking part. That's where the juice is. Well obviously it'd violate the 4th amendment to slap a GPS tracker on your car to see if you're going to [known antifa member's] house - we'd never do that, but gee, this private company just happens to have a database of everywhere every person's car has ever been ...
The thing is the billionaires are terrified of US. The point of these surveillance systems isn't to make us safer. Because we're actually pretty safe already. We're not going to be assassinated, kidnapped, or beaten because we pissed someone off.
It's to make people like Garrett Langley feel protected from us.
> The thing is the billionaires are terrified of US.
Are they though? The odds of any kind of coordinated response that could seriously threaten the billionaires seem next-to-none. Flock seems to be a lot more offensive than defensive - it enables the targeting and mass surveillance in order to find and punish the 'right people', as well as mass tracking to create yet another datapoint to understand the way people move, think and coordinate. The defensive side is already covered through internet services, like social media. They don't have much to fear. I reckon that a powerful/rich enough person could kill a stranger on the street in plain view of a huge crowd and have absolutely nothing happen to them.
Friend of mine used to work for a single digit billionaire. No one you know. His name barely comes up in a search. He said he found out after a few years that the guy had been kidnapped and held for ransom.
This is an excellent video documenting some Flock camera vulnerabilities by Benn Jordan, a security hobbyist/researcher: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB0gr7Fh6lY. It's a bit long, but worth it.
His work on this and similar topics is very good, he has deep technical insight and is a good communicator, but it's a bit funny seeing him referred to as a security hobbyist as in my mind he's a musical genius and one of the greatest living US musicians/programmers.
It's amazing at how terrorism has been re-defined. When I was a kid you had to blow up skyscrapers or planes (or both at the same time), set off bombs in a crowded area, or a specifically targeted mass shooter to be labelled a terrorist.
I’m not saying it is historically accurate, but I would encourage anyone who didn’t experience interactions with law enforcement pre-9/11 (in the US) to watch early seasons of Law & Order.
It is pretty informative, even in the dramatic context of the show, to see police interactions and the respect for / erosion of individual rights when you view the seasons before 9/11/2001 and after 9/11/2001.
Yeah, after the initial shock and horror of seeing the Twin Towers go down was an overwhelming sense of dread in how that was going to justify an aggressive police state.
Yeah really does show you how it's now (actually for some time) just a label, conveniently morphing over time for people/groups you don't like, losing any actual meaning because it's applied so liberally.
And it's ironic because there are clearly "real terrorists" (i.e. 9/11 guys).
There are tens of millions of people pirating software and media and blocking ads. There are not enough prisons to hold them all so the law is not enforceable at that scale.
Likewise there have always been and will always be effective non violent forms of resistance with sufficient systems of coordination and communication, because the public is always larger in number than the oppressors.
Everything about his body language screams, "I'm doing something slimy and I know it, but here, listen to these words spoken authoritatively whilst I wave my hands around and forget about it."
This statement essentially boils down to "The only right way to fight me is in an environment where I expect to win"
That's how you know the DeFlock strategy is effective. They aren't playing the game that the CEO wants to play, they are playing the actual game.
The actual game is minimizing the impact of cameras that are now everywhere.
Some individuals may take it upon themselves to vandalize the cameras, which can't be planned via conspiracy (that would be illegal), but those radical individuals can be "set up for success" through information.
This strategy of creating an environment where effective vandalism is easy, is also part of the actual game.
I'm a deflock user - I'm a libertarian. These cameras are a huge privacy violation, its amazing how fast Flock has grown ubiquitous. There is a strong Fourth Amendment argument against Flock, they have a generous interpretation of the constitution that your car has no rights and neither does your license plate therefore you have no privacy while on the road.
I've also been on the receiving end of secret Federal subpoenas for private user information at a YC backed startup. They include gag orders and management does not question the orders - they simply comply. It happens more often than you think.
However you feel about the current administration, imagine this power in the hands of the other.
Flock isn't American in any sense of the word. We should work in our communities, through legal, procedural, and civil means to eliminate these terrible, terrible cameras. The cost is much worse than the benefits on offer.
I “like” how Overton window (??? I hope I use it right) shifted dramatically in USA.
- “law and order” is “good”, when _de facto_ most of constitution is not being applied for a year and laws or court orders are applied selectively. Not to say that “law and order” is vastly different depending on the size of your bank account;
- “terrorist” now is anything you don’t like, especially if it’s anti establishment. True freedom of speech is now apparently “violence” (and of course this dictatorial (adjacent) government would think that, as it’s biggest danger);
- “antifa” is apparently now a boogeyman, though I’d say he used it correctly as he is (apparently) fascist;
Also it is forced against people, how population can choose otherwise?
"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition...There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."
I wonder how he would feel about a competitor putting a flock-like camera outside his house so that anyone who wants to can learn whenever any car, perhaps his car, enters or leaves his home driveway.
Would he be happy with this, or would he become a "terrorist" by objecting?
Their are documented cases of Flock cameras that can see into private residences. What if one of those cameras recorded an underage person? Would Flock be responsible for collecting and distributing CSAM?
Does anyone have a template for a network audit that one could request of a local police department that would disclose access logs for Flock Safety data?
A lot of jurisdictions actually require the data to be public! For example, ctrl-f "download csv" on this page for central LA PD: https://transparency.flocksafety.com/central-la-pd- . Not all jurisdictions require this, but if you can guess the URLs (https://transparency.flocksafety.com/<DEPARTMENT ID>) you can find quite a few, or just Google "YOUR PD flock safety portal". (EDIT: You'll want to regularly download these if you're trying to build a comprehensive record. The PDs I've been monitoring are only required to keep data for 30 days, so the CSVs are just a rolling window cut off at EXACTLY today minus 30 days.)
I'm honestly tired of all these knuckleheads. They've got a few bucks in their bank accounts and pretend that makes them smarter than everyone else. They're just gaming the system, nothing more, and they have every incentive to keep it alive.
He can shove his cameras deep in his ** as far as I'm concerned.
The "system" is not hapless or ignorant here. In fact, this company would not exist, if the "system" didn't have specific desires to effectively enslave the entire population.
Who wouldn't want to become a new age digital pharaoh? Wouldn't this be precisely the type of panopticon they would try to create?
They are building a surveillance state, LOL. The AI, Datacenters, the flock cameras, slow social media ban, the private police, etc. West, especially USA is slowly getting the taste of their own medicine.
This guy gives all villain vibes you see in futuristic movies, funny how he resembles a young version of “Fletcher” in minority report movie, a movie about mass surveillance to provide a “safer community” to all.
Flock btw isn’t just an ALPR, it is a car finger printing technology, I have seen some videos of police IDing cars with no plates and they knew the owner by using flock cams.
These clean-shaven wide-eyed SV types give me the uncanny valley heebie-jeebies. Everything, from their tone of voice, to their appearance, to (most importantly) the way they phrase things... there's an almost AI-generated quality.
The TV series Person of Interest [1] becomes more on point as years go by, even though by now it has been 15 years since its S1. One of the scenes [2] from that series where "terrorist" are shown as being in control over ghoulish CEOs like the one from this posted video.
Anyone aware of people doing something like over here in Europe? And how legal/illegal it might be? I'm talking about putting government-operated security cameras on a map, for the general public to be aware of their locations.
These wretched wastes of skin that contribute to the surveillance system need to have the full brunt of that same surveillance apparatus turned toward them full time, published for all to see. This should include elected officials that voted for and paid for these systems as well. You don't want a system that allows more anonymous movement? You want that data collected and stored and collated and analyzed without end? Ok, pull down your pants and have yourselves offered up as the first and most prominent ones to be tracked and then see if you change your tune.
Good luck trying to subject them to the same level of scrutiny. They live in places with high walls and armed guards, a lot of them don't even drive themselves if they drive at all. Even when using helicopters or planes their private ownership means a lower level of scrutiny. "The plane" was a big part of how Epstein was able to do what he did. Obviously, these types never step foot on public transit.
Even if hypothetically speaking you could support volunteers to follow them around and film them, I would think the asymmetry of resources would practically make it impossible. It's not about privacy, it's about wealth. Take their wealth away and then they'll actually have to live the way they tell you to. They don't care because they don't live in the world they are creating, you do.
Seems like “terrorists” = citizens standing up for their rights. We aren’t past the point of no return but we are rapidly approaching it. What will it be Americans? Liberty or death?
This is a social problem. So long as people want to see Orwellian enforcement on their preferred petty issues (examples abound on HN and elsewhere) this type of activity will ping pong around enforcement subjects likely only growing and ratcheting tighter. Until people get so sick of it on the 11/12 issues they don't like, they're willing to give up the dream of Orwellian enforcement on the thing they do care about.
It was originally shortened in German from ”Antifaschistische Aktion” and ”Außerparlamentarische Opposition”. Then that carried over to other languages as a common name. Feel free to go back to the roots! ;)
disregarding the history of the term, you see that even posters on Hacker News Dot Com dispute the accuracy of the term "fascism" as applied to contemporary american politics, so what difference would it make? people who are okay with fascistic politics will not distinguish opposition with a name change.
Our city council voted 5-0 to install more. A unanimous vote which includes democrats who ran on disrupting a council that had the same members for decades.
I didn't even know about flock, and I still don't quite understand what it is, other than that they seem to want everyone being spied upon every second of their lives they're outside the hose, or something. For our protection / against crime / terrorism / pedophiles / communists / zombies or whatever. Usually it's governments and their law enforcement arms that push for that, but in the US private enterprise is king so I guess in this domain as well?
Anyway, assuming I've gotten the gist of it - I support De-flocking and de-surveillance'ing and will be happily to carry the label of an antifa terrorist all day long :-)
I swear, every fascist has the same playbook. They use the same phrases, same accusations, same lies, sometimes even same wordings. It is like they have a single hive mind - for which everyone else is the enemy and is subject to destruction or enslaving.
That figure is straight from Flok's own press release. There were deep deep methological flaws in the calculation of that figure.
https://archive.is/7iNyQ - this is an excellent piece breaking down the many many flaws in that figure and quotes the 2 academics involved who later said highlighted the issues.
->"“This 'study' rings a cacophony of alarm bells: the closer you look at it, the more it looks like a marketing scheme than data science,” Dave Maass, director of investigations at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told me. “Nobody should be repeating the claims until the data can be verified and the conclusions replicated by independent data scientists without a direct tie to the company that stands to benefit."
That's a claim Flock makes. They poison their own well a bit when they then also claim that Deflock are terrorists. One might point out that one claim was made off the cuff while the other is has a white paper detailing why they're making this claim but said white paper has a number of it's own issues. See, unless perhaps you think they're a terrorist news organization: https://www.404media.co/researcher-who-oversaw-flock-surveil... which quotes one of the consulting academic researchers as saying:
>The researcher, Johnny Nhan of Texas Christian University, said that he has pivoted future research on Flock because he found “the information that is collected by the police departments are too varied and incomplete for us to do any type of meaningful statistical analysis on them.”
Well then... let's eliminate any due process and fourth amendment protections, maybe requiring something sensible like "officer suspicion", or maybe just a program of "random" searches.. you know keep everybody on their toes. I also bet that real crimes (whatever that means) goes down...
Just because something works doesn't make it right. Personally, giving up what the law is suppose to protect (individual rights) in the name of the law is something I can only see as a fool's bargain.
has anything ever good come out of silicon valley or the wall street? one greedy capitalist after another and you wonder why the world has turn to a shithole! the inequality between the rich and the poor is reaching the level of ambani vs. mumbai slums.
Of course he's "thankful" for that, since in our "beautifully democratic and capitalistic" society, Flock can use their $658 million of VC funding [1] to wage lawfare against the have-nots with their armies of lobbyists and lawyers. [2]
1. https://websets.exa.ai/websets/directory/flock-safety-fundin...
2. https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/lobbyis...
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/felony-contempt-busine...
In an authoritarian regime, it's all competition, no co-operation. Whoever the big dog is gets to say what happens, right up until a bunch of the little dogs drag him down and then fight each other to replace him. If he's lucky and skillful he'll have worked this out and kept the little dogs at each other's throats so they don't gang up on him.
The whole operation of government becomes about "who's the boss?" and the boss gets to run the government to favour himself and his cronies, acquiring more power and wealth.
Any pause to consider the ordinary folks caught up in this is a weakness, that will be taken advantage of by the other wannabe bosses.
It's not a utopia for any of them because of the constant paranoia and fighting. Try to rest on your laurels and enjoy the spoils of what you got for a second, and boom; you get thrown out of a window.
"When the last tree has fallen
and the rivers are poisoned
you cannot eat money, on no."
-- Aurora, The Seed
In reality they are very much interested in facts, because they give them info who to oppress harder
The goal is not to accurately target people, the whole point is you don't care. The exercise of power is the point.
It doesn't matter who's door you kicked in: you were right to do it no matter what, and they were guilty no matter what.
I mildly disagree mostly because I can’t get hard evidence, but everything’s I’ve heard from faang workers is that they are basically run like nation states on a logistical level. Complete with their own forms of courts to handle interdepartmental disputes and PMCs that they like to keep very quiet about.
The US military is famously a logistics network that dabbles in shooting things, and companies like Amazon are already very very good at that.
Cards that only work because of the current system that they are hacking away at. Revolutions tend to eat their young, wannabe American oligarchs should check on how things turned out for the majority of post-soviet Russian oligarchs.
If you own everything, and you bomb the populace, you bomb your own stuff.
If everybody works for you, and you bomb the populace, you bomb your own serfs.
And those faceless individuals who are actually holding the weapons, and actually know how they work, and actually know, in a detailed, hands-on way, how to do coordinated violence with them? It turns out they're secretly members of the populace. You'd better make sure they think it's in their interest to keep using the weapons the way you want them to.
You can bomb people into oblivion but if you actually want to control them, most of the things that give superiority to a fixed group of rich are useless. Violence is still democratic if you're trying to get anything useful out of the people you seek to control. If you have 5 people and 3 of them are slaves with an AK-47 and a donkey, you have 0 slaves not 5 slaves.
Obviously the rich/powerful can't stay that way in a glass desert with no plebs to do their bidding, at least for now, so most of the technology the government and rich have are useless for subjecting a hostile populace.
Tech CEOs can easily outlive their usefulness once the machinery is built, and can easily find themselves labeled "terrorists" if they try to fight back with whatever feeble power they have.
Political factions, purges and patronage is what comes next, amd despite their inflated egos, they won't be the patrons.
Possessions that are "yours" are only yours insofar as you can either defend it or others recognize it as yours. Thus you end up with situations like "Barbeque" in Haiti owning the streets and much of the rich's land/assets are now magically in the hands of barbeque or his crew and whatever money that one thought they could use to resist that turned out to not be their money anymore. The "rich" thus still hold all the cards but who is rich and who isn't isn't the same as when it started.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_images_in_the_So...
> Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov (Russian: Николай Иванович Ежов, IPA: [nʲɪkɐˈlaj ɪˈvanəvʲɪtɕ (j)ɪˈʐof]; 1 May 1895 – 4 February 1940), also spelt Ezhov, was a Soviet secret police official under Joseph Stalin who was head of the NKVD from 1936 to 1938, at the height of the Great Purge. Yezhov organized mass arrests, torture, and executions during the Great Purge, but he fell out of favour with Stalin and was arrested, subsequently admitting in a confession to a range of anti-Soviet activity including "unfounded arrests" during the Purge. He was executed in 1940 along with others who were blamed for the Purge.
This guy was head of the secret police, didn’t help him out when he was purged aka murdered.
Which also tends to lean on a political set. But poor people will be deprived of their liberties be them left or right. For those useful to power it will take just a little bit longer to notice.
Given how much the typical Apple consumer skews left and has extreme brand loyalty, if Apple got tariffed simply because Tim failed to bow down, Apple would be in a stronger position to fight it than any other tech company. They could have stood up, but chose not to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melania_(film)#Release
it's always interesting to hear the silent part out loud. in this case, he's saying "I can get what I want because I can game the courts".
And really, why should they? We've learned now that there was actually a worldwide network of child rapists purchasing girls from other wealthy child traffickers in positions of power in seemingly every Western nation, and the consensus thus far is to do exactly nothing about it.
Laws are for the poors.
The rich aren't the only ones who can "flood the field".
File all the lawsuits, Flock. Let's get some discovery going. Who is the CEO cozied up with?
Probably not great for investor relations for him to be hyping up the democracy angle. They get a big chunk of their funding from Andreesen Horowitz.
Capitalism is great… when it has limits.
Why they supported the fascist:
https://a16z.com/podcast/trump-is-about-to-change-everything...
People today can become wealthy, and wealthy people can lose wealth, much much easily than nobility was created or revoked under feudalism.
There's objectively more social mobility. That's an improvement. Don't confuse "it's an improvement" with "it's an acceptable and desirable end state".
How many people in the US have been born into a lower to middle class family, and gone on to make more than $10 million in the last 30 years?
False, he is forcing Flock on EVERYONE
No one has permitted themselves to be surveilled. And no, under the radar agreements with local cops and govts do NOT constitute my permission to be surveilled. If they want to go in with fully informed referendums in each community, then I'd accept it. But that is not Flock's business model.
I might accept it for this specific case. But, in general, just because the majority wants to do something doesn't mean it's legitimate to force everyone to accept it.
> No one has permitted themselves to be surveilled
As much as I dislike Flock, this is bad logic. There's no such thing as opting out of surveillance in public spaces. Public spaces are defined by being public, in that everyone (even governments/corporations!) is free to observe everyone else in that same setting.
So in reality, everyone has permitted themselves to be surveilled, purely through the act of being in public.
This idea that there's some kind of difference between me watching you in public and Flock watching you in public is, quite frankly, bogus.
If this is what they thought was possible, why write the 4th Amendment?
Unreasonable search and overbearing government was one of the key issues of the American Revolution.
They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety - Ben Frank
Iirc he was a founder
Being okay with people watching me in public does not imply being okay with someone aggregating the information about my whereabouts 24/7 even though it's "the same" information.
Btw it's a fallacy similar to the one debunked in "what colour are your bits". The context matters, not just the abstract information.
Courts made a pretty reasonable set of tradeoffs around the 4th amendment for search warrant vs. subpoena, police officers observing you, etc.
During the 19th century.
Unfortunately, modern data processing completely undermines a lot of the rationale about how reasonable and intrusive various things are. Before, cops couldn't follow and surveil everyone; blanket subpoenas to get millions of peoples' information weren't possible because the information wasn't concentrated in one entity's hands and compliance would have been impossible; etc.
There are even weirder stuff than companies being considered a "moral person". For example if a person speeds way too much in France (say more than 50 kilometers/hour above the speed limit on the highway, e.g. 180 km/h // 111 mph instead of the 130 km/h // 80 mph)... Well then that person gets arrested. And his driving license is confiscated on the spot. But here's the absolute crazy thing: even if the car belong to someone else, to a company, to a rental company... Doesn't matter: the French state consider that the car itself was complicit in the act. So the car is seized too (for 8 days if it doesn't belong to the person who was driving it and potentially much more if it does belong to the person driving it).
Companies are persons and cars (I'm not even talking about self-driving cars) have rights and obligations. That's the world we live in.
>> No one has permitted themselves to be surveilled
> As much as I dislike Flock, this is bad logic. There's no such thing as opting out of surveillance in public spaces.
You're agreeing that he is forcing flock on people. Legality doesn't make it not-forced. Not needing consent is different from receiving consent.
Again, I'm pretty anti-Flock, but place the blame where it's due and use good logic to support that.
> This idea that there's some kind of difference between me watching you in public and Flock watching you in public is, quite frankly, bogus.
Might I interest you in the concepts of stalking and restraining orders?
I mean, it might be a viable way to push back against them.
If you followed me around all day taking photographs of my every move for no other reason than you felt like it, I would very likely have recourse via stalking and harassment laws.
There is no difference to me that some company does it via technology.
If I'm interesting enough to get a warrant for surveillance of my activities - fair game. Private investigators operate under a set of reasonable limits and must be licensed in most (all?) states for this reason as well.
It's quite obvious laws have simply not caught up with the state of modern technology that allows for the type of data collection and thus mass-surveillance that is now possible today. If you went back 50 years ago and asked anyone on the street if it was okay that every time they left the house their travel history would be recorded indefinitely they would talk to you about communist dystopias that could never happen here due to the 2nd amendment.
There is a difference, the company is doing it to everyone, technology enables new things to happen and laws don't cover it. Before it was impractical for police to assign everyone a personal stalker but tech has made it practical.
By default if something is new enough it has a pretty good chance of being legal because the law hasn't caught up or considered it in advance.
> There is no difference to me that some company does it via technology.
I feel like it's telling that no one has yet taken this logic to court. I think that means that while there may be no difference to you there is a difference according to the law. This gets at your later point.
Speaking of:
> If you went back 50 years ago and asked anyone on the street if it was okay that every time they left the house their travel history would be recorded indefinitely they would talk to you about communist dystopias that could never happen here due to the 2nd amendment.
I think you're doing a subtle motte-and-bailey here. As far as I'm aware, Flock has strict retention policies, numbering in the low single-digit months (Google says 30 days "by default"). There is no "recorded indefinitely" here, which significantly changes the characteristics of the argument here. This is roughly on par with CCTV systems, to the best of my knowledge.
I don't disagree that laws haven't caught up yet, but I also think a lot of the arguments against Flock are rife with hyperbolic arguments like this that do meaningfully misrepresent their model. I think this leads to bad solutioning, as a consequence.
I'd much rather have good solutions here than bad ones, because ALPRs and other "surveillance technologies" do drive improvements in crime clearance rates/outcomes, so they shouldn't be banned--just better controlled/audited/overseen
Read some cases of who's suffering now. Cops (or ICE) can choose a passing vehicle to run a ALPR search on, finding out what states it just passed through. When they consider it "suspicious", said driver gets stopped, searched, and even detained.
Look at how ALPR is being used and whose rights are being violated as a result. Hint: it's not criminals.
This is a really silly thing to say. It’s the “stop hitting yourself” of surveillance bullshit. Come on. Calling them “fixed cameras” so you can ignore the intent in the original comment is middle school shit.
You "come on". I expect reasonable discourse here, not blind acceptance of nonsense arguments just because you happen to agree with their conclusions or premises.
I made it clear at the start I'm not a fan of Flock.
I'm also not a fan of the hyperbolic nonsense people are trying to use to demonize them. It makes it too easy for them to respond in kind, and be right.
Don't give them that out.
The idea that me an individual observing you, and a large, well funded company allied with the US government observing you has no difference, quite frankly, leads me to conclude* you are arguing in bad faith.
You can make an ideological argument that is the case, but not one based on fact and reality.
*edited for spelling
The idea that there's not a scale difference is, quite frankly, bogus.
I don't disagree that quantity has a quality of it's own in some circumstances, but that's not an inherent property of "quantity".
Everyone doing it 24/7 via their cameras and running it through AI analysis and providing it to the cops for $$$ is not.
What if I recruit a few friends around my town to do the same, and we share data and findings? Is that also fine?
What if I pay a bunch of people I don't know to collect this data for me, but do all the analysis myself?
Where do you draw the line? Being able to concretely define a line here is something I've seen privacy proponents be utterly incapable of doing. Yet it's important to do so, because on one end of the spectrum is a set of protected liberties, and on the other is authoritarian dystopia. If you can't define some point at which freedom stops being freedom, you leave the door wide open to the kind of bullshit arguments we see any time "privacy in public" comes up: 100% feels, and 0% logic.
To paraphrase the quote, quantity has a quality of its own.
The central dogma of machine learning. Which Flock and its defenders know very well.
they could instead be limiting flock to private places.
> This idea that there's some kind of difference between me watching you in public and Flock watching you in public is, quite frankly, bogus.
if you followed me everywhere and took pictures of me everywhwre i went outside from my door in the morning to my door in the evening, id want to get a restraining order on you as a stalker. this is stalking
But again, this is not what Flock is doing.
By this same logic, traffic cameras and CCTV surveillance are "stalking", which doesn't seem accurate?
I’d like to give the benefit of the doubt, but it feels very sea-liony and intentionally disingenuous.
If you can't refrain from immediately strawmanning the argument, I would argue that you are the one with the "deeply unserious position".
Have a little more rigor, please.
https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/privacy/2026/02/flock-came... > A separate “statewide lookup” feature had also been active on 29 of the city’s 30 cameras since the initial installation, running for 17 straight months until Mountain View found and disabled it on January 5. Through that tool, more than 250 agencies that had never signed any data agreement with Mountain View ran an estimated 600,000 searches over a single year, according to local paper the Mountain View Voice, which first uncovered the issue after filing a public records request.
A different town (Staunton, VA) also turned of their Flock installs after their CEO sent out an email claming:
https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/flock-ceo-goes-... > The attacks aren't new. You've been dealing with this for forever, and we've been dealing with this since our founding, from the same activist groups who want to defund the police, weaken public safety, and normalize lawlessness. Now, they're producing YouTube videos with misleading headlines.
Santa Clara County (which includes MV) seems on the precipice of doing the same
Evanston, IL found them to be in violation of state privacy laws and disabled them in Sep.
In Eugene, OR the police tried to disable them in December but Flock turned them back on
Here is a map of upcoming city council meetings in the US where Flock surveillance will be discussed: https://alpr.watch/
In fact, if anyone knows of municipalities that have done so let me know. I'd like to spend tourist money in those places that I haven't been able to spend in authoritarian-leaning locales as a reward for valuing freedom over suffocation of the constitution for little to no benefit.
Hows that for taking no as an answer? My god, we are in big trouble if this is going to be a regular thing. IMHO we need to shut this country down.
[0]: https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/09/29/after-evanston-fir...
"...and then unfortunately there is terroristic organizations like DeFlock, whose primary motivation is chaos. They are closer to Antifa than they are anything else."
"We're not forcing Flock on anyone..."
It is a short 1:32 video, I encourage people to watch it for themselves.
I thought DeFlock was just publishing locations of cameras and lawfully convincing local governments to not use Flock, primarily through FOIA requests.
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/weakness-strongmen-step...
Some geniuses proudly, openly self describe as anti antifa. Guess what that double negation makes you?
Antifa is an adjective that people with no connection to one another self-apply. I'm antifa, and I imagine you are too, but it doesn't mean that we've ever met or coordinated with one another in any meaningful way.
The word "antifa" is basically meaningless altogether, since virtually every person since the end of WW2 claims to oppose fascism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifa_(United_States)
If a loose-knit ideology/movement called "Anti-Rapists" emerged that evolved into a cohort of various disconnected thugs who targeted homosexuals for violence, would being Anti-"Anti-Rapist" make you a supporter of rapists or rapist-adjacent supporter?
Obviously, in the scenario you describe, people will continue describe themselves as "anti-rapist" and everybody will understand that they mean that they are opposed to rape.
There is no "loose-knit ideology/movement" called "antifa" - there are groups like SDS and Don't Shoot PDX and a zillion others who describe themselves as "antifa", using it as an adjective. I'm aware of no person or organization who has attempted to proclaim that they are the one true antifa org.
Leading isolated cells by social media is the new techique to cause change/chaos (depending on your viewpoint).
Are some people who call themselves antifa secretly fascists? I'm sure they are. So?
So they just said "These people are anti-fascist and this is a bad thing"
Aren't authoritarians great.
A: "Hey guys, I think think this PATRIOT act thing is bad"
B: "Wait, you're saying patriots are bad? What are you, some sort of seditious non-patriot?"
If Antifa’s record speaks for itself, then you don’t need to play these kinds of word games. If some CEO spoke unflatteringly of The Red Cross or Habitat For Humanity, that would say more about them than anything, not because they have virtuous sounding names (though they admittedly do) but because they’ve established a specific track record of public service.
But I _do_ know that when someone tags someone as "antifa" they are making a political statement and aligning themselves with a certain group that perceives "antifa" a certain way. "See, I hate those damn' antifa terrorists, I'm in the same camp as you! Please help my company make money!"
If Flock's reputation spoke for itself, their CEO wouldn't have to play these kind of legal games.
"anti-anti-fascist" as in "anti [antifa the organization]" or "anti anti [facism the ideology]"? The two are getting intentionally being conflated, so people can make the rhetorical argument "Why are you against [antifa the organization]? You must be be against everyone who opposes [facism the ideology]"
> If some CEO spoke unflatteringly of The Red Cross or Habitat For Humanity,
Those are organizations. "Antifa" is a descriptive term that many people and organizations use, whether they have connections to one another or not. What is the comparison you are trying to draw here?
> If Antifa’s record speaks for itself, then you don’t need to play these kinds of word games.
You are using the possessive here, "Antifa's", in a way that seems grammatically incorrect to me.
"Antifa" is usually an adjective, but sometimes a known, like "vegan" or "blonde". Saying "if blonde's record speaks for itself", it seems like obviously broken English.
Usually you'd use this phraseology to describe a person or organization, "Joe's record", "Nabisco's record", etc.
What is the entity or entities whose record(s) you are trying to describe?
I'm deeply curious why you think someone would identify as an anti-fascist if they were not, in fact, anti-fascist. Do you think they just really like the flag logo or...?
that's literally what it means in theory and in practice
It may seem an obvious or insignificant point, but it is critical here. If they physically oppose fascism by following and filming ICE, I'm very much on board. If they oppose it by molotoving innocent local government buildings, I am against. If both of these actions are the concept of opposing fascism, what does it mean to be against that?
Antifa are belligerants. They undermine protests by having the maturity to die for a cause but not to live for one. One can be against that without being fascist.
So, I will say that far right, comservatives and fascists are against anti-fascism of any kind. Whether it is the boogeyman antifa or anything else. And there are a lot of people like that. Including in goverment.
They do take issue with anyone who openly opposes fascism.
> So they just said "These people are anti-violence and anti-hate and this is a bad thing"
(Frankly, our political situation is rife with insanity. I think the hotheads across the political spectrum need more nous and less thumos.)
[1] https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2026/02/antifa-safehouse...
You don't even need to use examples that westerners find polarizing because they want to minimize or maximize their badness for political reasons.
Africa is full of factions with grand names doing less than grand things that nobody here has any attachmennt to and do not cause complexities when comparing to.
"Despite the name, Antifa is not just 'anti-fascist' but is actually _________"
What goes in the blank?
And anyone from the OTHER group is the enemy. Stop thinking, you have arrived to the conclusion. Now, here are some news ... I mean, entertainment, to make you fear them more.
There is no antifa "organization". It is not centralized, there is no "leadership" or anyone in charge. It's more of a philosophy.
What gets me is how right wing protesters specifically eschew good opsec. "mask off rallys", visible tattoos etc. They love the police state and then look like idiots when that big police state they demanded rounds them up with absolute ease because they took selfies with their swastikas out during a protest.
So when people talk about antifa as if it was the left wing equivalent of Osama Bin Laden's terror network, it's a self report they're forming their views based on strawman style propaganda, not engaging with the reality of it.
That's not "commonly known", that's the spin you'll get from the right-wing in the US who just happen to have heavy fascist tendencies.
People who are "silenced" are not "googleable with 100s of examples."
It is like saying "the woke mob silenced a speaker", it doesn't mean anything. There isn't a 'woke organization' that is planning anything
But okay - I'm confused what sources you would accept? There are "Antifa" groups on social media that literally advocate for doing this, I've seen it first-hand.
It’s a huge diff between someone being ”silenced” for speaking their minds on bike paths versus being ”silenced” for indirectly or even directly promoting a new holocaust. And from your vague responses it is not clear.
>American Enterprise Institute, a prominent center-right think tank in Washington, D.C., that promotes free enterprise, limited government, and individual liberty through research and policy advocacy in areas like economics, foreign policy, and social studies
I too can get paid think tanks to publish hundreds of reports on how communists are taking over America... Doesn't mean communists are actually taking over America.
(Though I agree with you)
This is such an incredibly radicalized and detached from reality statement. It's genuinely scary that there are people who think this way.
You’re not “better” because you vote for political violence, my man, though I get that brings up conflicting feelings for you.
It’s actually weird how often people try to pretend that their shitty actions (vis-a-vis making sure Grok can create CSAM, or that Facebook can more effectively give teenage girls depression) are morally neutral because they’re second order effects. You’re still a pretty shitty human being if you directly enable it, even if you’re not the sole cause. Some of y’all need to stop sniffing your own farts (or Elon’s/Thiel’s/etc.) and learn that.
It doesn't seem like America ended up on the right side of the paradox of tolerance, so I'm curious how you think we could have avoided our current fascist leadership?
Surely you’re not using scare words you don’t understand. Right?
None of his views had anything to do with Naziism but failure to fall in line with all of the Left's current positions makes one "a Nazi" to them. And yes, much the same way as right-wing extremists like to paint all 'liberals' as "gun grabbing Marxists." The difference is you can find a lot more liberals who would happily glorify Marx than you can find Americans of any party who would glorify the Nazi regime or its acts.
In case it's unclear, I do not support Nazis either.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifa_(United_States)
My Polish-German godmother asked me, as a kid, "who would you hide."
I didn't get the question. And 6-year old me wasn't ready for Holocaust with grandma. But it comes back to me from time to time.
Who would you hide. Who would you stake your wealth and life on to keep from undeserved suffering. The stickers are good. But they only mean something if you're willing to fight for them. At least in America, I'm unconvinced most sticker-toters are willing to sacrifice anything. (It's what makes Minnesota and Texas different.)
Terrorist. Racist. Colonist. Fascist. Historically-rooted and precise terms that are collectively decohering in a self-amplifying and propagating way as everyone feels increasingly free to detach more and more words from their original meanings.
[0] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/umberto-eco-ur-fasci...
Didn't say that. I'm saying I've seen the term thrown around wildly to apply to all manner of things. Like the other terms.
The term is probably fundamentally fucked. If you asked Hitler if he's a Nazi, he'd say yes. If you asked Mussolini if he's a Fascist, he'd say yes. These were the words they used to describe themselves. The reason I'm describing the phenomenon versus blaming the folks using the terms broadly is because I don't think this is a personal failing by anyone as much as something that's linguistically happening.
So there's a kind of "anthropic principle" going on: We cannot "fix" the imperfection, because the circumstances demand it.
Valid. This is a real linguistic process. But it absolutely debases the original term. I’m not convinced we have to choose between empathy, on one hand, and accuracy, on the other hand.
George Orwell - What is Fascism? https://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/e...
INTERVIEWER: Surveillance is becoming more prevalent everywhere. There's an organization called Deflock that's become fairly well-known in activist circles. They take an aggressive approach—counting cameras and maintaining a Discord channel where they discuss potential activities to move against surveillance expansion and stop organizations like Flock. What's your perspective on this organization and their methods?
FLOCK CEO: I see two distinct groups of activists here. There are organizations like the ACLU and the EFF that take an above-board approach to fighting for their viewpoint. We're fortunate to live in a democratic, capitalistic country where we can fight through the courts. I have a lot of respect for those groups because they engage in reasonable debate while following the law.
FLOCK CEO: Unfortunately, there are also what I'd call terroristic organizations like Deflock, whose primary motivation appears to be chaos. They're closer to Antifa than anything else. That's disappointing because I don't want chaos - I value law and order and a society built on safety.
FLOCK CEO: For those groups, I think it's regrettable they haven't chosen a more constructive approach to achieve their goals. They do have the right to their views, but that's why we have a democratically elected process. We're not forcing Flock on anyone. Elected officials understand that communities and families want safety, and Flock is the best way to create safe communities.
INTERVIEWER: Deflock probably wouldn't agree with the "terroristic" label you've applied to them, but...
----
Yeah. "They have a right to their views" buuut also, they are terrorists, and implicitly therefore deserve to have their freedom taken away because of said views. So giving the public a map of flock cameras and organizing to advocate against these being used in our communities is terroristic, I suppose. There's one party here that should be in jail here. Seems like that ought to be the creeps that are filming everyone against their consent, but I guess that makes me a terrorist...
Aggressive? Any more passive and it would be nil!
so at the very beginning, the thing that threatens him the most is: simple ideas that sound objective and that make Gary Tan wary of putting $50m instead of $25m.
that said, very few things do that, bring "unseen crime" from N to 0. for example, legalization of something does that! he has found a very successful business nonetheless. it's more interesting to explore why. if he wanted to level constructive criticism at Deflock, i suppose we should wonder: how do they disrupt enterprise sales? flock is just, yet another failed IT project. it shouldn't be too hard. obviously, the best thing you can do is getting elected, and simply putting it in the law to not adopt the technology.
Well I think this is the issue. The value of Flock is not what it says on the tin, it's everything else. Solving petty crimes yeah sure, yadda yadda. Ever had your bike stolen and told a cop about it?
It's the tracking part. That's where the juice is. Well obviously it'd violate the 4th amendment to slap a GPS tracker on your car to see if you're going to [known antifa member's] house - we'd never do that, but gee, this private company just happens to have a database of everywhere every person's car has ever been ...
Pointing cameras at cameras? Terrorist organization
It's to make people like Garrett Langley feel protected from us.
Are they though? The odds of any kind of coordinated response that could seriously threaten the billionaires seem next-to-none. Flock seems to be a lot more offensive than defensive - it enables the targeting and mass surveillance in order to find and punish the 'right people', as well as mass tracking to create yet another datapoint to understand the way people move, think and coordinate. The defensive side is already covered through internet services, like social media. They don't have much to fear. I reckon that a powerful/rich enough person could kill a stranger on the street in plain view of a huge crowd and have absolutely nothing happen to them.
It is pretty informative, even in the dramatic context of the show, to see police interactions and the respect for / erosion of individual rights when you view the seasons before 9/11/2001 and after 9/11/2001.
And it's ironic because there are clearly "real terrorists" (i.e. 9/11 guys).
And that they're sharing their data with other non-local agencies (eg. ICE as it stands) without a warrant? That's outrageous, IMHO.
https://ij.org/issues/ijs-project-on-the-4th-amendment/
This Project includes work to fight technologies such as Flock's in the courts:
https://ij.org/issues/ijs-project-on-the-4th-amendment/licen...
I've always felt good contributing to IJ and the topic and takes in the posted video are precisely why I do so.
There are tens of millions of people pirating software and media and blocking ads. There are not enough prisons to hold them all so the law is not enforceable at that scale.
Likewise there have always been and will always be effective non violent forms of resistance with sufficient systems of coordination and communication, because the public is always larger in number than the oppressors.
LOL. Love that. You got to have a better attitude if you want to fight the system my friend.
https://alpr.watch/
Everything about his body language screams, "I'm doing something slimy and I know it, but here, listen to these words spoken authoritatively whilst I wave my hands around and forget about it."
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
That's how you know the DeFlock strategy is effective. They aren't playing the game that the CEO wants to play, they are playing the actual game. The actual game is minimizing the impact of cameras that are now everywhere.
Some individuals may take it upon themselves to vandalize the cameras, which can't be planned via conspiracy (that would be illegal), but those radical individuals can be "set up for success" through information. This strategy of creating an environment where effective vandalism is easy, is also part of the actual game.
I've also been on the receiving end of secret Federal subpoenas for private user information at a YC backed startup. They include gag orders and management does not question the orders - they simply comply. It happens more often than you think.
However you feel about the current administration, imagine this power in the hands of the other.
Flock isn't American in any sense of the word. We should work in our communities, through legal, procedural, and civil means to eliminate these terrible, terrible cameras. The cost is much worse than the benefits on offer.
- “law and order” is “good”, when _de facto_ most of constitution is not being applied for a year and laws or court orders are applied selectively. Not to say that “law and order” is vastly different depending on the size of your bank account;
- “terrorist” now is anything you don’t like, especially if it’s anti establishment. True freedom of speech is now apparently “violence” (and of course this dictatorial (adjacent) government would think that, as it’s biggest danger);
- “antifa” is apparently now a boogeyman, though I’d say he used it correctly as he is (apparently) fascist;
Also it is forced against people, how population can choose otherwise?
Would he be happy with this, or would he become a "terrorist" by objecting?
You can also do FOIA requests directly to departments, like this one: https://www.muckrock.com/foi/novato-296/flock-alprs-cameras-...
Good news is that even the images captured by the cameras is FOIA-able! https://www.404media.co/judge-rules-flock-surveillance-image...
He can shove his cameras deep in his ** as far as I'm concerned.
The "system" is not hapless or ignorant here. In fact, this company would not exist, if the "system" didn't have specific desires to effectively enslave the entire population.
Who wouldn't want to become a new age digital pharaoh? Wouldn't this be precisely the type of panopticon they would try to create?
When it benefits me.
This guy gives all villain vibes you see in futuristic movies, funny how he resembles a young version of “Fletcher” in minority report movie, a movie about mass surveillance to provide a “safer community” to all.
Flock btw isn’t just an ALPR, it is a car finger printing technology, I have seen some videos of police IDing cars with no plates and they knew the owner by using flock cams.
Flock's terrorism cameras must be destroyed
no: terror is strictly about civilians.
Flock is Fa---
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1839578/
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igKb2DhP7Ao
I've never heard about Deflock, but your tantrum motivated me to know it. And I like it!
But the best part are the implications: it is ok for Flock to spy people, it isn't ok for people to spy Flock.
Even if hypothetically speaking you could support volunteers to follow them around and film them, I would think the asymmetry of resources would practically make it impossible. It's not about privacy, it's about wealth. Take their wealth away and then they'll actually have to live the way they tell you to. They don't care because they don't live in the world they are creating, you do.
Telling illiberal authoritarians to go fuck themselves is reasonable. But power is still more important than insults.
It makes me wonder what his values are.
Anyway, assuming I've gotten the gist of it - I support De-flocking and de-surveillance'ing and will be happily to carry the label of an antifa terrorist all day long :-)
Source article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2025/09/03/ai-st...
Discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45119847
and at the same time:
Pump the Brakes on Your Police Department's Use of Flock Safety
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45128605
> 5 months ago? c'mon OP
Thankfully OP is posting about it again, because I missed it the first time. Thank you OP!
https://archive.is/7iNyQ - this is an excellent piece breaking down the many many flaws in that figure and quotes the 2 academics involved who later said highlighted the issues.
->"“This 'study' rings a cacophony of alarm bells: the closer you look at it, the more it looks like a marketing scheme than data science,” Dave Maass, director of investigations at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told me. “Nobody should be repeating the claims until the data can be verified and the conclusions replicated by independent data scientists without a direct tie to the company that stands to benefit."
>The researcher, Johnny Nhan of Texas Christian University, said that he has pivoted future research on Flock because he found “the information that is collected by the police departments are too varied and incomplete for us to do any type of meaningful statistical analysis on them.”
Have to ask for a citation there. Also, what are "real crimes"? Also, aren't these cameras? How are they tackling these 700k suspects?
Just because something works doesn't make it right. Personally, giving up what the law is suppose to protect (individual rights) in the name of the law is something I can only see as a fool's bargain.