The Flock saga continues.
A handful of police departments that use Flock have unwittingly leaked details of millions of surveillance targets and a large number of active police investigations around the country because they have failed to redact license plates information in public records releases. Flock responded to this revelation by threatening a site that exposed it and by limiting the information the public can get via public records requests.
Completely unredacted Flock audit logs have been released to the public by numerous police departments and in some cases include details on millions Flock license plate searches made by thousands of police departments from around the country. The data has been turned into a searchable tool on a website called HaveIBeenFlocked.com, which says it has data on more than 2.3 million license plates and tens of millions of Flock searches.
The situation highlights one of the problems with taking a commercial surveillance product and turning it into a searchable, connected database of people’s movements and of the police activity of thousands of departments nationwide. It also highlights the risks associated with relying on each and every law enforcement customer to properly and fully redact identifiable information any time someone requests public records; in this case, single mistakes by individual police departments have exposed potentially sensitive information about surveillance targets and police investigations by other departments around the country.
Archive: http://archive.today/yXLPQ
I like to think if I was in a position to be working with data like that, that I could ‘accidentally’ forget to redact it one time and trigger a leak like this.
They publicly released that data at that point though through their own failures, fuck Flock for trying to suppress it.
Those surveillance capitalist fascists can go flock themselves
Those sanctimonious FUCKS can go take a long walk off a short pier. Justice will be aggrieved until they all hang publicly.
I’ve love to have private alpr’s in my neighborhood. We’ve had mailbox thefts and people driving around breaking into cars, even had car stolen. These guys are changing their plates regularly, but it would be super cool to at least get a neighborhood wide alert if someone who’s done done shit has rentered our neighborhood. I’m just not keen on giving that data to 3rd parties lock stock and barrel
would be super cool to at least get a neighborhood wide alert if someone who’s done done shit has rentered our neighborhood
So you could do what?
Violence i am guessing.
Our (prior) neighborhood had 3 miles of roads with one entrance, a 911 call could get a sheriff’s car response to block the entrance with a description of the vehicle (plate number, even).
Our current neighborhood, only 1/4 mile of road, so yeah, you’d have to shoot 'em.
That’s going to be unpopular to say around here, but the truth is that technology is largely amoral.
While the tech may be amoral, its still implemented and utilized by pricks whose goal is control.
The real conundrum is: once you have unique identifiers on vehicles - which pretty much all countries with cars have - where’s the line? Do you require people to visually read the plates and write them down on paper? Who is allowed to keep databases of the information? How do you prevent people from keeping their own private databases? How do you prevent someone from creating a dash-cam app that does GPS/time coded databasing of all plate numbers it observes while driving? If a neighborhood HOA wants to network all their dash (and fixed location) apr-cam information into a central database, when does it become too much to allow? And how do you possibly enforce overstepping of the limits?
Scenario: A HOA has fixed cam automatic plate reader information and video evidence that proves XM3 5D9 was out smashin’ mailboxes on Friday night. The HOA president is cruising downtown Saturday morning and finds XM3 5D9 parked on the street, using his dash mounted apr software, calls the cops (in a vain attempt) to have them come arrest the mailbox smashers who were recorded in close-up 4K high def night vision doing the deed from the window of their car. This feels close to the over-stepping limit, but what if there were no cameras or software involved and the same XM3 5D9 plate ID was used by the same people to make the same accusation of the same mailbox smashers, this time based on telephoto chemical film pictures?
This also ignores the fact that the person in the car the second time XM3 5D9 was spotted is not necessarily the same person in the car the first. So one could easily false accuse.
Oh, that’s what the photos / videos are for… but, sure, circumstantial evidence is super basis for harassment of the innocent.
Yup, and its important to communicate that or we risk losing our voice in the general public and look like Luddites
Just FYI, using the term luddite derogatorily may not be as cool as you think it is. They were essentially an instance of organized labor flexing their power and not really “against technological advancement” like the term gets bandied about.
I am aware, but i am using it in a colloquial sense. And you understood my point; which is exactly how the general public that needs to be swayed will interpret it.
You can and should make your point without denigrating labor movements.
Originally the Pedants were a group of trans atheist Linux users from Pedantia, so I won’t use it as a pejorative in this context.
Uhh okay? Language and its use changes. If you want to be effective in getting your point across you need to keep up. The choir in lemmy isn’t who needs to be persuaded.
Feel free to be technically correct, but I would like to see the idea take mass adoption instead.
The problem with surveillance tech is that even if it was initially implemented with the best intentions by good people that aren’t seeking to abuse it, it can change hands.
That is true
Enabling a surveillance state is not amoral.
Your phrasing seems to imply I said it was, but I never said that.
If you are in a discussion about the development and deployment of technology to facilitate a surveillance state, then saying “technology is neutral” is the least interesting thing you could possibly say on the subject.
In a completely abstract, disconnected-from-society-and-current-events sense it is correct to say technology is amoral. But we live in a world where surveillance technology is developed to make it easier for corporations and the state to invade the privacy of individuals. We live in a world where legal rights are being eroded by the use of this technology. We live in a world where this technology is profitable because it helps organizations violate individual rights. If you live in the US, as I do, then you live in a world where federal law enforcement agencies have become completely contemptuous of the law and are literally abducting innocent people off the street. They use the technology under discussion here to help them do that.
That a piece of tech might potentially be used for a not-immoral purpose is completely irrelevant to how it is actually being used in the real world.
to make it easier for corporations and the state to invade the privacy of individuals.
And that is what we need to focus our messaging on. The evil people and institutions enabling this as those are permanent. Tech comes and goes (and should not be anthropomized). Focusing on the tech just means in institution looks for another path. Focusing on the institution is to block the at the source.
“Technology is neutral” is a bromide engineers use to avoid thinking about how their work impacts people. If you are an engineer working for flock or a similar company, you are harming people. You are doing harm through the technology you help to develop.
The massive surveillance systems that currently exist were built by engineers who advanced technology for that purpose. The scale and totality of the resulting surveillance states are simply not possible without the tech. The closest alternatives are stasi-like systems that are nowhere near as vast or continuous. In the actual world the actual tech is immoral. Because it was created for immoral purposes and because it is used for immoral purposes.
You are doing harm through the technology you help to develop.
All technology has that potential. Some more than others. The issue is that institutions, like flock, exist solely for the evil applications.
The technology enables the surveillance state. Therefore the technology is not amoral.
Thw issue youll run into is effectiveness at that small scale, sonyoull be tempted to share data with other systems like that, and eventually you’ll end up creating a different flock.
Thw issue youll run into is effectiveness at that small scale, sonyoull be tempted to share data with other systems like that, and eventually you’ll end up creating a different flock.
I wonder if a segregated system design could address this. Similar in-system segregation like a TPM for the actual detection/matching part of the system separated from the command and control part.
As in, the camera and OCR operations would be in their own embedded system which could never receive code updates from the outside. Perhaps this is etched into the silicon SoC itself. Also on silicon would be a small NVRAM that could only hold requested license plate numbers (or a hash of them perhaps). This NVRAM would be WRITE ONLY. So it would never be able to be queried from outside the SOC. The raw camera feed would be wired to the SoC. The only input would be from an outside command and control system (still local to our SoC) that and administrator could send in new license plates numbers to search against. The output of the SoC would “Match found against License Plate X”. Even the time stamp would have to be applied by the outside command and control system.
This would have some natural barriers against dragnet surveillance abuse.
- It would never be possible to dump the license plates being searched for from the cameras themselves even by abusive admins. The only admin option would be to overwrite the list of what the camera is trying to match against.
- The NVRAM that contains the match list could be intentionally sized small to perhaps a few hundreds plate numbers so that an abusive admin couldn’t simply generate every possible license plate combination effectively turning this back into a blanket surveillance tool. The NVRAM limit could be implemented as an on-die fuse link so that upon deployment the size could be made as small as needed for the use case.
The idea and motive and intention is great. The (edit: eventual) outcome is always evil.
