Apparently the government stores hundreds of dollars in the cameras as a reward for helping take them down!
didn’t you know flock cameras just do that
It’s called “Flock.” Obviously, they all flew away! But you can’t blame the PD for not knowing that; pigs don’t know much about flying.
Hey man, it was higher power as far as I’m concerned.
The Big Brown Beaver did it.
As i said in other posts: Winona did it.
Twas the spirit of paul bunyon
Flocks are known to take off and fly away on their own.
so ? where do they end up then. do the Flocks just go into space.
Well, if they can’t find them they’re probably migratory and flew north for the Summer.
They should search for the Flocks in Canada.
If the surveillance cameras can’t even catch the persons who removed all of their cameras, then they have proven to be worthless at catching real criminals, with their only proven worth is stalking police officers ex wives.
That’s just not true. Sometimes they haven’t even met the women they’re stalking.
People removing surveillance cameras taxpayers didn’t approve aren’t “criminals”. The proper term is heroes.
All Flock cameras do is identify cars. If you aren’t a car, they can’t see you. They aren’t just mindlessly recording everything like an ordinary camera, so police can’t look through the recordings to identify you.
There are face tracking flock cams out there too. Benn Jordan recorded part of his video essay on one that was open to the public on a walking path.
Found the flock employee.
That is simply not true. The first 60 seconds of this Benn Jordan & 404 Media video proves otherwise - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vU1-uiUlHTo.
He goes on to talk about flocks condor cameras, which specifically track people.
Me when I’m a liar who’s eternally loyal to peter theil:
I’m against Flock cameras. I didn’t expect to run into people on the anti side who are in denial about how the things work. Like, Flock truthers.
“they can’t see you if you’re not a car” is how they work?
I misunderstood. I didn’t realize that they also functioned as ordinary cameras.
That’s the whole point of their use of the “licence plate reader” euphemism. They are high definition, high refresh-rate cameras, and cloud-based as opposed to a CCTV system (would be OCTV I guess) that 100% can and do track people as has been shown by independent research
They won’t create a searchable database of faces, assuming they work as advertised. However, the footage is streamed to a server (sometimes publicly accessible) and available for manual review.
Edit: also BT/Wi-Fi MAC addresses of devices, whether on cars or not, are recorded, and can link drivers to their licence-plate-equipped cars even when they’re walking with the same phone or earpods
All the news stories I’ve seen talk about concerns over tracking movement. This is the first I’ve heard about people worried about the actual video.
Look up Benn Jordan’s videos on these things. They are NOT just license plate readers.
Correct but Flock’s own system, if their public statements can be trusted, doesn’t do facial recognition itself. The main use is tracking vehicles using license plates and all kinds of visual cues, and Bluetooth/Wi-Fi devices by their MAC address and properties, and linking this huge swath of data together. Still, faces are recorded as video that can be checked manually or processed by third-party tools, including “AI” facial-recognition ones. Therefore, if a pedestrian destroys all Flock cameras and has Bluetooth earpods on them, there will be an easy way to link the events, and then the police will check if their face is visible in surviving footage and check the country-wide database if the person ever used the earphones in a vehicle near the cameras.
Yes, the searchable DB is the big problem. But they work like regular IP cameras too: do you think police would buy them as much if they didn’t? Or did stream but blurred out anything that wasn’t a vehicle? If a crime happened recently near a Flock camera and they know when, they can absolutely use whatever it saw. Not to mention, third-party “AI” tools can be always used on raw footage from any camera for face recognition, event classification etc. so you’re not safe even as a pedestrian without the police having “probable cause”. And the camera going offline is probable cause*.
* Here, probable cause would ideally mean legally justifiable reasons to check the recording. However, in practice, it’s just any excuse for a police officer to justify spending time retrieving and watching the footage.
Lol
This is a known issue with flock systems, sometimes they just do that.
Some might say it’s a feature, not a bug
The weird thing is, if I ever see someone tearing down Flock cameras, actually no I didn’t.
Yeah it was really weird. I saw one just destroy itself.
The top fell off
It’s not very typical.
Chance in a million!
Agreed, a well known software bug is taking flock cameras down across the country. Hopefully they can fix it before it gets too out of hand.
Serious issue.
This is a city of ~25K people, so quite small. Several articles have pointed out that the city, not Flock, bears the costs of the vandalism, so in this instance the city counsel that enabled the city to enter into the contract with Flock to the detriment of its citizens have now burdened the city with a substantial budget item. If the cameras are replaced, you can bet that they will likely be torn down again. At some point there will be a reckoning with voters, and hopefully the idiots that enabled the surveillance state will be voted out.
Even if it’s the city that beats the cost, at some point they will decide it’s no longer worth the cost to replace them.
Probably still paying for them even if not there. Some stupid contract.
Yes, but not paying for new cameras to be installed, and the contracts will end.
My City Council made an agreement to install them early last year when they should have known better, but with all the recent backlash against them they’re pretty much guaranteed not to renew the contract. I’m hoping they decide to cover the cameras for the remainder of the contract, but I’m not sure if the contract allows that.
Maybe. But still incentivizes not renewing the contract. One can hope.
They don’t even have to be voted out if the voters persuade them to resign.
Lol. You know that last sentence is satire or you are an idiot.
Should we all just give up and never resist? Resistance can work.
Fuck off. Voting works when people do it.
We shouldn’t be waiting for elections to come around to get rid of fascist politicians.
The catch here is the question of democratic legitimacy: If people believe that governments derive their just power from the consent of the governed and that this consent should be established and communicated through the results of a popular vote, it’s gonna be hard to get them to support a replacement whose mandate doesn’t derive from such an election.
So you can take out the fascists, but that doesn’t mean that you can install non-fascists and have the relevant organs of government obey them.
It doesn’t really matter if they support it. As we’ve seen with the current administration, things can be forced through in spite of the will of the governed.
…because the people carrying out the orders obey the people giving them. My argument is that they do so because they believe that the people giving these orders have the right to give them (legitimacy).
If you installed an illegitimate (in the sense of “not democratically elected”, even if it had broad support anyway) government, people loyal to the democratic system rather than any particular faction may not be so cooperative.
No one working for the current administration is loyal to the democratic system. That went out the window as soon as Trump got in office and started pumping out executive orders.
You’re right but that’s not at all what I was saying or pushing back against so thanks I suppose.
Last election in the US the people voted for the fascist politician. Knowing he was a fascist politician. Some stayed at home knowing the fascist politician could win.
It might be that people just enjoy the fascism and the online echo chamber is not reflective of real life.
Amazing. How true is this? Anyone got a source?
Edit: ah, they only had 8 cameras. Still, that’s amazing.
Yeah, Winona isn’t that big. But also a couple of those cameras were in very public locations. Most were just next to a forest lined highway and those would have been easy. But two of them were like a block away from a quiet suburban neighborhood. Still not sure how they managed to get those without getting caught. I can’t imagine someone living nearby wouldn’t have noticed someone outside running a reciprocating saw in the middle of the night.
I can’t imagine someone living nearby wouldn’t have noticed someone outside running a reciprocating saw in the middle of the night.
That’s literally the whole point. If you saw something - no you didn’t.
I actually did see the perp, now, bear with me here, but it appeared to be a 3 story tall creature from the paleolithic era
IDK. I saw the perp and I thought they looked an awful lot like Ted Cruz.
I hope they earned about three fiddy from the copper that was in the cameras
How did they destroy the cameras without being seen by all the damn cameras?
If you wear all black, do not show any skin or indicating marks, and vary your gait with a consistent stumble, then the cameras are useless. Remember to park out of sight of any cameras.
Best thing would be to not use ur car but go by foot or bicycle, but then again, it’s the US, where u are literally trapped in ur home if u don’t have a car lol
It’s obviously a villain who can be in hundreds of places at once because he was also fishing with half the town.
I have to believe he’s a time traveler who hasn’t been born yet. He can’t be I’D because he hasn’t been given ID yet, and he can be in multiple places at once. Of course, if he were to appear beside me, I would have to buy him a drink in appreciation, too.
My theory…
Morph suits.
The flock flew away to the southern hemisphere for their yearly migration, I’m sure their babies will be back next year.
If a group of birds are called a flock.
Is a group of flocks called a bird?
They were on the other side of the country with me
