Who’d have thought that warrant-less mass surveillance that treats every citizen like a potential criminal would eventually hit a tipping point where people began to fight back against it?
I watched a video last night. Some guy was banned from a casino. All they had was a blurry surveillance camera photo of him.
The AI tagged some other guy as him. Cops came and arrested him. Said the man’s ID must be fake, or he used a fake ID last time because there’s no way their high-fallutin AI could be wrong! It was >99% certain!
The whole point of warrantless mass surveillance where you collect a person’s entire life history from birth to death is to be able to go back through that history at any point they become an inconvenient person, whether because they are protesting or are a whistleblower or anything else that endangers the existing power structures. They can and will use your history to fabricate a “reasonable” narrative to turn you into whatever type of criminal they claim you are.
This is exactly why they’re pushing the “antifa is an organized terrorist organization” so hard.
What’s funny is someone at flock is likely seeing this as a business opportunity. “With flock+ we will detect downed cameras and send a technician out to replace them instantly. Subscribe now!”
Meanwhile, municipalities are less than thrilled about defending throwing money at something literally no taxpayer wants.
This problem might solve itself really. Let the buisness majors sell the hangman their own nooses.
Sadly some people do want flock cameras because they think it’s worth it to have a better chance of catching criminals even if our personal liberties get taken away. It’s the age old freedom vs safety discussion.
The thing is though you could have both, at least to a degree. You could have much more transparent policing, the cameras could do processing purely locally and based on publicly accessible lists with listed reasons for why the given plates are captured, you could make it so that the only ones who do get the data are actually thr police and not thr company selling the cameras, etc.
But that’s not in the interest of Flock, or even really the powers that be. The surveillance machine needs feeding, doesn’t matter for what cost.
Who’d have thought that warrant-less mass surveillance that treats every citizen like a potential criminal would eventually hit a tipping point where people began to fight back against it?
Along with it incorrectly labeling people as a criminal so cops harass innocent families
I watched a video last night. Some guy was banned from a casino. All they had was a blurry surveillance camera photo of him.
The AI tagged some other guy as him. Cops came and arrested him. Said the man’s ID must be fake, or he used a fake ID last time because there’s no way their high-fallutin AI could be wrong! It was >99% certain!
That’s a feature, not a bug.
The whole point of warrantless mass surveillance where you collect a person’s entire life history from birth to death is to be able to go back through that history at any point they become an inconvenient person, whether because they are protesting or are a whistleblower or anything else that endangers the existing power structures. They can and will use your history to fabricate a “reasonable” narrative to turn you into whatever type of criminal they claim you are.
This is exactly why they’re pushing the “antifa is an organized terrorist organization” so hard.
What’s funny is someone at flock is likely seeing this as a business opportunity. “With flock+ we will detect downed cameras and send a technician out to replace them instantly. Subscribe now!”
Meanwhile, municipalities are less than thrilled about defending throwing money at something literally no taxpayer wants.
This problem might solve itself really. Let the buisness majors sell the hangman their own nooses.
Sadly some people do want flock cameras because they think it’s worth it to have a better chance of catching criminals even if our personal liberties get taken away. It’s the age old freedom vs safety discussion.
The thing is though you could have both, at least to a degree. You could have much more transparent policing, the cameras could do processing purely locally and based on publicly accessible lists with listed reasons for why the given plates are captured, you could make it so that the only ones who do get the data are actually thr police and not thr company selling the cameras, etc.
But that’s not in the interest of Flock, or even really the powers that be. The surveillance machine needs feeding, doesn’t matter for what cost.
Those who sacrifice liberty for safety deserve neither