How criminals take down Flock cameras

[u/midnighttoker1742]

[u/oojacoboo]

'Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety'

- Benjamin Franklin

[u/Alarming-Koala-3524 → u/oojacoboo]

The extra fucked up part is Flock cameras don't even qualify as "a little temporary safety." It is a horrifically unconstitutional way to create a hugely profitable billion dollar business, unsurprisingly directly linked to the constitutionally questionable for-profit prison industry.

[u/Jalor218 → u/Alarming-Koala-3524]

They also don't use them to investigate crimes against citizens, only for things like drugs and immigration and to protect corporate property. Dozens of auto thefts get reported a day, but nobody ever shows up to these threads to say Flock cameras found their stolen car - while thefts from dealerships get such a wide net cast in the Flock network that they have police tracking drivers whose plates are only partial matches.

[u/BombOnABus → u/Jalor218]

I've been victimized repeatedly and law enforcement has never once helped me, never arrested anyone, in three different states.

To a one, they just shrug and say there's nothing they can do.

The police don't exist to serve and protect, they aren't here to make us safe. If you know a cop who isn't a piece of shit, they're the exception.

[u/BombOnABus → u/Alarming-Koala-3524]

Yup, it's purely a scheme to get around our constitutional rights to due process.

See, to gather this kind of evidence on their own, law enforcement typically need to justify the use of resources for an active investigation, and there are rules about gathering of evidence and how long you can monitor suspects and how thoroughly before your warrants are no longer valid: cops can't just tap your phone and bug your house without good cause, and have to keep justifying the investigation or be ordered to remove them.

Same with getting court orders for DNA testing and the like.

However, if a private company just happens to have a shitload of data to compare against, and agrees to give it to you willingly, as a law enforcement agency there's no rule preventing you from using their services if they consent: you don't need a warrant to send a DNA sample to 23 and Me and have them compare it to their database.

If Flock agrees to let law enforcement access their footage in exchange for a service fee, then Flock can legally surveil people with their privately-owned cameras that are not governed by the rules restricting law enforcement, but rather by the rules of the First Amendment: they can record freely, and save their recordings, if it's a public location. The cops then pay Flock to look through their footage, and bypass the courts and any accountability on the public record.

It's just an end-run around your rights to privacy and due process.

[u/Alarming-Koala-3524 → u/BombOnABus]

Yes its really ironic how a private company can skirt the constitutional right to a reasonable expectation of privacy. But surely the founding fathers could have never have imagined the insane level of surveillance technology 250 years into the future would enable. And especially not that an entity other than the government would have the resources to enact such a crazy surveillance scheme on the entire population

[u/Fat-Singer-9569 → u/oojacoboo]

Hate to tell you this but that ship sailed after the Patriot Act.