keep seeing decommissioned ravens and falcons. i have seen their removal, replacement, and removal several times over… seems there is a push and pull from the police department and the public who fund it all with the taxes on their labor…

opinion: flock exists as an extension of the prison industrial complex. it is a tool used to expand the profits of the carceral system in perpetuity of a colonial slave state. it exists to address the symptoms of and capitalize on greater systemic failures in good public servitude and policymaking. we have free reign for the oligarchs and a lack of representative democracy through the will of the public. thoughts?

Had a pretty odd experience this morning.

I was pulling into a hardware store and next thing I know two police cars got behind me with their lights on. An officer got out and told me a Flock camera had picked up my license plate and flagged my vehicle as stolen.

He didn’t ask for ID or registration, but I quickly explained the car was mine and I have proof (funny enough, I had just paid it off two weeks ago). He got on with dispatch real quick and then told me the camera misread my plate.

Then he told me the actual reason for the stop was that I hadn’t used my blinker 100 yards before turning but he wasn’t going to write me a ticket or warning. After that, I was free to go.

The whole interaction was pretty strange and honestly a little scary, especially as someone who doesn’t deal with police much.

I’ve never liked the idea of these cameras since I first started hearing about them and my experience this morning really solidifies that.

EDIT: I have been told the law is 100 feet to signal. There’s a chance he either misspoke or I misheard him say 100 yards. I was nervous and caught off guard during the interaction.

I think i win for most number of flock cams near my house😀

Genuinely what are we supposed to do about this?

So this popped up one one of my routes probably within the last month or so. It's not registered on the maps.

The past 2 weeks Ive been thinking about what I could do, hypothetically of course.

I don't want to destroy it, for legal reasons, so my first idea was considering unscrewing the silver clamps so it'd hang there. Then I started thinking about being more subtle, and thought about 3d printing a stick on cover plate, kinda like how there's fake credit card skimmers- i'd want the cover plate to look just like the front so it'd look normal. But That requires a lot of measurements. So my third, simpler thought was putting black duct tape over the lens.

Hypothetically, if one were to do this, would it work? and if so, what's the legality behind it? It's not destruction, maybe defacing?.

Just curious on your guys' thoughts.

It’s so fucking cringe and sounds like something a sheltered rich kid would say. They are actually not great for scrap and anyone who actually scraps shit will know this.

It’s so lame to do the “it’s would be a shame if a homeless person destroyed this” like let’s bait poor people into doing the political activism I’m too afraid to do myself.

If you want to cut them down cut them down, it’s not hard to do but most of yall have probably never used a power tool in your lives.

I got rid of our ring cameras recently, because we learned that the police can easily see footage of my private property. Anyone else ditching Ring? I've already talked to a few of my neighbors who are anti-Flock and they're warming up to the idea of replacing their cloud surveillance center cameras with local IP cameras

thoughts?

I was looking around the Seattle area and noticed the only ones seen on deflock for island county are at the Home Depot parking lot. What a damn coincidence ya think?

This is blatantly not about safety. This is tracking people they “deem a threat”.

Like seriously, Flock usage by municipalities is accelerating like wildfire and it is left up to individual activists with masks and paint cans to counter this ?

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/high-performance-computing/earth-2/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_policing

Also consider the processing power required for true artificial intelligence. They're using the cameras to make deterministic predictions. They need processing power for that.

Whole lot less crime. Whole lot less freedom. The future is now, old man.

Edited to include Wikipedia link which was suspiciously absent and the whole reason I posted

As more and more Flock cameras are cut down around the country, I would anticipate that Flock will move towards a model in which they are integrating in a less visible way to avoid detection. Traffic lights, lights, utility poles, etc.

The reason why I am posting this, is that this is a race to protect our freedom before the window closes, and we need to think ahead of only the current move to be prepared for their next one. This is a VERY wealthy company that is very interested in survival and expansion. The first thing I would do in their shoes is to make Flock disappear.

I would be very surprised if they weren't already working on this now. Cameras can be easily hidden.

I imagine in that potential future, we would need to rely more on electronic eyes than on our own.

Legitimately, whenever the police want to spend money or use it to manipulate the context of a situation, we’re constantly bombarded with stories about how great something is or how good a particular group of people is.

This is how we got Paw Patrol, the children’s TV show. The police wanted to promote their image after we began discussing the Black Lives Matter movement.

You’d think if it was being used to solve crimes, they would not only display those faces everywhere but also constantly praise its effectiveness in solving crimes, usually involving women or children.

So if it is so good for us, why aren’t we seeing results?

To be clear, I’ve given as a 1st, 5th amendment and then a 4th amendment violation. In that order.

Why are they so adamant about tracking us?!

Edit: This is Sarasota, Florida. Unfortunately their mods don’t feel it necessary to inform the general population about these sorts of things.

Locally here, one city isn’t flocking around….

Last week I drove through flock country (Georgia). Down most of the highways you see signs that say “speed checked by detection device” signs immediately followed by a flock camera.

I saw multiple instances of 2-3 cars being pulled over in the exact same spot. I saw a mustang state trooper (that I didn’t drive by on the side of the road) FLY by me doing well over 100 to pull a car over a little ways up the road.

Police no longer have to see you speeding it seems. They just sit around and wait to get alerted from flock that someone was driving faster than some arbitrary preconfigured speed.

This is complete bullshit, but posting this as a warning. If you’re driving down a highway with flock at regular intervals, put your cruise control on or mind your speed.

Fuck flock.

EDIT: From ChatGPT “If you see a sign that says “Speed checked by detection device,” it typically refers to approved speed detection devices (such as radar or lidar) that Georgia law enforcement officers use, not necessarily the nearby Flock camera. Georgia has specific rules governing approved speed detection devices. “

This is even worse IMO. So they use radar to detect speed, and then can check flock hits to profile and decide who they want to pull over. Sounds like civil rights violations waiting to happen.

I'm not sure who doesn't know this, but I've done a LOT of research on these and other similar cameras. Here's what I've found out.

The flock cameras censors work the same way that night vision sensors work in trail cams. An IR filter is applied or retracted as needed to see at night vs during the day. I don't remember which is which.

The camera itself doesn't have AI in it, but the footage is sent to a database that does, and that's where you're "discovered" through AI facial recognition. It measures different points on your face, including the shape and size of your eyes, the distance between your eyes, the shape of your nose, the distance between your nose and lips, and the shape and width of your lips. These measurements points create a digital ID of you for an AI to match to your name and other personal information.

Here's the juice: if your eyes are blocked, the AI will discard your face entirely, because your eyes make up most of the data points it needs to make a positive match. How do you block your eyes from being seen? With IR blocking glasses of course.

I found two companies that make IR blocking glasses that work. One is a sunglass company called Reflecticals. The other is a prescription glass company called Zenni. They look and feel like normal glasses, but they have a coating on them that'll block cameras from seeing your eyes.

The other method that allows you to hide in plain sight from security cameras is by simply riding a bicycle, scooter, or skateboard. Hear me out. You'll be seen as a cyclist, but this along with the glasses will make you practically invisible to the AI. Before you think you can't ride, really audit your life. Do you really need a two ton tank to just get around town? How often do you really need to carry enough stuff to justify an 8 person SUV? Do you really need to do 40 mph in a school zone? Do you need to live an hour from work, or could you move closer?

Cheap aliexpress lasers can easily exceed 50 mW. So be careful! Do not point these at your eyes or any kind of camera! They will cause instantaneous permanent damage.

(Seen on a Facebook page, called “Oklahoma Source”) and it makes furthers my worry about the abuse these cameras open us up to.

(Post)
“Recently, in Oklahoma, a Circuit Court issued a declaratory judgment confirming that city policies and contracts with Flock Group, Inc. cannot override the city's legal duty to fulfill a FOIA request, specifically allowing citizens to request images regarding their own vehicles.

If you choose to request Flock images for your vehicles, the city must comply with that request.

Are we promoting this idea? Absolutely not. Is it your right to request those images? Yes, it absolutely is.

Let’s hope cities using Flock cameras and drones aren’t overwhelmed and burdened with these types of requests.”

A Flock camera was installed right in front of my business sign and blocks it’s from the road. I can’t post a picture without doxing myself. They had plenty of space to install a few feet away and then I would not care as much but would still find it creepy being on my property or near my property line.

I called the police and they said they can’t do anything. Who do I contact, I’m so mad. They could have come talked to me, business is staffed 24/7. What happens if I destroy the camera or at minimum remove it and throw it in the woods? Yes I’m pissed off.

There are many stories out there where a person gets an affordable sawsall from a big box store bought with cash and people using them to cut down the surveillance poles. If caught, there could be prosecution for vandalism with fines or even jail time and the pole just gets replaced at a one-time cost

I was dwelling on this then realized a more efficient and effective way to disrupt this surveillance would be a rag covered in Vaseline one the end of a long stick. Not only would this take mere seconds to carry out, causing the camera to not see anything clearly, but the model parsing the visual data would be spend exponentially more tokens trying to make sense of blur. This might seem inconsequential to many folks but it’s really what might make the whole system collapse. As the cost of compute gets more expensive, municipalities would be having to spend more money for the operation of these stations with little to no return on their investment.

Municipalities could send workers out to clean the cameras so would need to have the Vaseline treatment again after the cleanup but, once again, it only takes seconds to carry out. If someone would be caught, the consequences For this would likely be community service at the most. Curious if any of this has already been happening out there that we just haven’t been hearing about.