25 cameras destroyed over the course of a year, and more than half were destroyed by a single person. This doesn't appear to be a widespread concern the headline makes it out to be.
No, it doesn't. You are right. For comparison: main area of Harrisburg (Pennsylvania) as a quick random lookup alone lists 630 Flock cams + 220 Alpr cams.
I feel that part of the insight is that many people reading this story may want it to be true as stated. All the upvotes and it's propagation in networks may lossily lay this claim (of course debatable)
The beauty of surveillance is that it mutes the ability to cover the distance between desire and action. Which is another way to state "it has a chilling effect"
As I understand, part of any story being shared is that its propagation is part of the story, in a McLuhan medium-is-the-message sense.
The idea that this is an important trend story is infinity times more fun to talk about than the corrective that this isn't really a thing at all, which means online forums will sharply bias towards the notion that this is important.
This whole thread is pretty powerful evidence for that proposition: it's sprawling commentary on what pretty clearly seems to be LLM slop writing. You could build a novel operating system and get flagged off the front page for having a README with Claude tells in it, but that preference is obviously contingent.
I've warmed to LLM-generated/assisted writing in general but this kind of stuff is just lazy and is basically "I got Claude to say something I agree with and then made it pretty".
This is virtually impossible to build. Not just because all current "AI detector" systems are fake or outright scams with accuracy comparable to a coin-flip on frontier model output, but because even if someone did build a reliable detector and released it to the public, it could be used for adversarial training and it would become worthless pretty fast.
Did not strike me as AI-written. But it's useless to try to distinguish. There is only good writing and shite writing. (With things like "accuracy" and "verifiability" and even "awareness of adjacent context" included in my definition of "good.") The article is reasonably good and your comment I'm afraid is fairly shite.
I disagree. There is more content out there than I can read in many lifetimes, so I have to be selective. LLM generated text (like any text) can be well put together on the surface level but require deeper consideration to see the flaws, and of course this takes more effort than the writing did.
A human-written piece indicates someone believes in it enough to put in enough effort to write it up nicely, so it works as a heuristic of underlying quality.
Unless there's evidence that all of it was fact-checked, it's a waste of time to look harder. You can get any output you like, it doesn't mean it's correct.
The contents are very sloppy and seem to be pushing a particular narrative. Title: “Americans“ are smashing flock cameras. Reality: after 30 seconds of reading the summary at the top the data says 25 cameras were destroyed, although 13 of them were by a single person. So right off the bat the click bait title in the whole thesis of the article doesn’t have much basis. The article seems to be trying to paint this as some overarching trend of “Americans” all across the country, but it seems much more like small localized attacks probably all related to some small social media group. Now the bigger question of what this company flock is and the implications of what they’re trying to do is much more interesting but the article doesn’t really go there
It’s interesting this AI-generated article references “Reddit threads” being “full of support” two or three times, yet I can’t find Reddit threads in the references.
I wonder if we are seeing what may be the result of a Reddit bot campaign to sway generative output.
Eventually toll cameras and a consortium of private businesses will have this tech and then game over. Better to use this energy and legislate the behavior you want. Never let the enemy decide the terms.
People are able to do both. There are plenty of grassroots efforts across the country to end cities’ contracts with Flock. Unfortunately, just as many counties have been unresponsive about stopping data center construction, many cities have been unresponsive about ending contracts with Flock. I don’t condone illegal property damage, but civil disobedience on a large scale both in the US and around the world have often been the only effective mechanism for change.
Civil disobedience and non-violent (towards people) destruction of invasive technology is the only outlet left for most people, I would argue. The money and power is so incredibly lopsided that 'traditional' routes of impacting City, county, or state/national practices are closed to most of us.
This is just my thought with nothing to back it up, but I believe it's valid. I also believe we'll see widespread actions of this type within the next decade.
That's why planes should be flown using direct democracy. Passengers (correctly) feel like they have little power over the maneuvers planes make and affect them moment to moment.
Representational democracy is far superior. Decisions need to be weighed against both their popularity and their effect with input from experts and other affected parties.
I wonder how many Flock decision makers will take personal offense to their little installations being damaged
Can imagine hydraflock scenario. Like some people close bathrooms permanently after bad vandalism on one occasion, maybe a city council person orders that extra cameras be installed so every camera can be recorded by a second camera.
No it won't. (Source: got legislation for this, pretty good bead on who the stakeholders are).
This is all Internet logic. It's fun to talk about destroying cameras as a vector for public policy, ergo, by the First Law of Message Boards, that must be a viable strategy. Reader, it is not. Nobody's going to blink at these costs, but residents who supported or were on the fence about the cameras are now negatively polarized against doing anything about them.
The cringe-ier thing here is the clear message being sent by many commentators, incl. the author of this post, that nobody's ever thought of breaking surveillance cameras before. Y'all, this is literally a meme.
The irony is destruction of private property will only justify the very surveillance one is trying to avoid. Would you agree ring cameras should be destroyed too? The police can use their footage. In practice they are similar to flock.
Kinda like saying "Throwing the British's tea into Boston harbor will only make us subject to harsher terms."
The reality is the vast majority of social progress in the last millenium was achieved with force and threat of force. I find this weird revisionist "violence is never the answer" trope recited as a fact that needs no justification to be incredibly weird and unreliable.
Had France not been willing to subsidize an insurgent campaign to distract the British, it's incredibly likely those Acts would've remained in place for some time.
People who rush to using violence as an answer frequently do not consider the outcome if they've misjudged their opponents' capacity for it.
> Kinda like saying "Throwing the British's tea into Boston harbor will only make us subject to harsher terms."
I mean, that it... quite literally did?
Yeah, you can externalize enforcement of sanctions against you to drag other people into a conflict with you, but I wouldn't suggest getting caught making that argument.
It's like the "watering the tree of patriotism with the blood of centrists" or whatever the fuck it was. You probably wouldn't want to hang out with the groups of people most likely to deploy these arguments.
By the way -- Where do you stand on throwing tea into the harbor? And where do you stand on the legitimacy of publicly discussing throwing tea into the harbor?
They are in favor of public vandalism such as that which was committed by the Boston Tea Party whereas you appear to be suggesting that you are vehemently against it.
I think its better to lodge displeasure by placing sticky notes instead of destroying. It decreases camera usefulness and I’m not quite sure it’s a crime.
It's not violence, it's vandalism. Quite diffrrent.
But why smash'em when you have the right to bear arms? I'd do target practice instead. Improve your shootong dkills while getting rid of surveillance. Win-win.
That justification is a red herring. The goal is the surveillance, and safety is just an interchangeable excuse. It should be obvious when they'll do things like increasing surveillance to "protect the children" and at the same time avoid other measures that would be far more effective at keeping children safe. The real irony is when it turns out they themselves were the biggest danger for children all along.
I'm not destroying anything, and based on the article it looks like they're handing out decent sentences to the people destroying the cameras. Surely no judge would appreciate someone running onto a taxpaying home owner's front porch and destroying their doorbell.
That being said, Ring cameras creep me out and I feel they have a powerful anti-social effect.
What's going on here is that out of 100,000 constituents, three know that Gary's Carpets is licensing the city reservoir as a PFOAs dump, and combined they have $1,000 of advertising reach if in-kind contribution is counted. Meanwhile, Gary's Carpets has a $60k advertising budget annually, donates to all five churches, subcontracts influence operations with bot farms, and attends weekly meetings of the grand lupus lodge.
How long will it take the three of them to talk with leadership of those churches? Are they allowed to bring up off topic concerns at PTA meetings where they can tell parents to be aware of the bot farms? Did they already knock on some neighbors’ doors?
All of this is really hard and really time-consuming. The alternative is for those three people to start smashing cameras and we know they won’t finish with their freedom. The uphill battle is the one we must fight.
Why not? They can retroactively be used like flock. Amazon could partner with them tomorrow. The police already can and have asked Amazon to footage and correlated it to find people.
Illegally breaking Flock cameras makes you look like a conspiracy nut or radical to the average Joe and make them sceptical of any privacy movements by association.
this is apparantly a reaction to failure of the legistative process to recognize the will of the people.
the behaviour most people seem to want is to have a polis driven by the will of the people at large, rather than a small cadre, of -for lackof a better word, liars.
The author wants them smashed. The point of the article is to attempt to normalize and provide justification for the behavior, so that more people feel OK doing it.
I'm not going to suggest anyone break the law since I don't think it's worth risking jail time for this, and I'm certainly too much of a coward to do it myself, but it's also hard for me to condemn this.
ICE sort of feels like a militia with infinite funding and basically no oversight. This was already kind of true even before the latest presidential administration, but it has been ramped up to 11 in the last 1.5 years. I don't love the idea of a president effectively having his own "secret police" and people fighting back does seem kind of appropriate to me.
Russia greatly benefits from political instability and turmoil in America and encouraging stuff like this is their modus operandi. I say this as somebody who very much dislikes the idea of Flock.
Just curious, but what's the basis for this claim? I've heard it a lot. But I feel like this in itself is a political statement more than one rooted in sound facts.
Flock cameras appeal to weak communist attitudes, where there is a desire for a "good" authoritarian government that tracks everyone... for "their own good".
Parts of Oakland are not walkable because you’ll get mugged.
Surveillance is a good deterrent of criminal activity.
On my old house, I used to keep a very visible camera, even after it went offline, to deter break ins.
For those in favor of destroying cameras. What is a better solution?
Bringing up the highest-crime city as an example is using a well-known outlier tp prove a point. Is that valid in this context? I think Flock cameras are being used not just in high-crime areas, but in many places. One would have to determine that surveillance helped with crime in these areas to make that point valid. And more importantly, one has to ask, why it's NOT being used to deter more crime in high-crime areas, and being used in areas where there's no crime.
The point is, where's the documented proof that they are helping. What we know is that people are still reporting crime in places where Flock cameras were present. Does that negate the effect? No, but it's just as valid as the point you brought. Which is to say, little to not all.
It's rational to oppose Flock cameras in particular, while admitting that secure publicly accountable camera use for police purposes may have a legitimate place. YouTuber Benn Jordan did a pretty decent break down of how Flock is not that.
I'm curious, what's the profit in muggings these days? Almost nobody I know still carries cash. The mugger could probably get a phone, but more and more are useless to anyone but the owner. Same with credit cards, easily canceled and fraud detection is better than ever so not very useful.
How about addressing the root causes of crime (i.e. poverty) instead of suppressing the symptoms by pushing crime out of politically powerful areas into politically marginalized areas?
I'm not a fan of vandalism and luckily I'm living in a country where I have the law on my side when demanding that public space is not surveilled indiscriminately, but I totally understand the urge to simply take a stick to a camera that records my every movement.
Obviously there is no single cause for any social dynamic (hence my "i.e.") but there is wide scientific consensus that poverty (especially when combined with inequality) contributes greatly to crime, bot directly (people steal if it is the only way to get something to eat) and indirectly (poor people are much more likely to live in the social conditions that correlate with incidence of crime).
I see your point, you could be born to a wealthy deadbeat father and end up chasing a life of crime because you haven't seen anything better modeled for you.
It seems to me that poverty is more likely than anything else to cause those factors though.
I can think of dozens. But this is the solution that allows the state to close the noose on freedom and democracy, and that's the one that you are defending with false choice argumentation.
not sure why people are bothering with destruction, just drive around and shut them down wirelessly.
some newer models require a button to be pressed for them to start the AP, but still leaves them vulnerable to attacks with a long stick and doesn't draw any attention while hundreds of cameras suddenly stop working, making the city government think they're unreliable.
yah, but that's just not a good way to 'send a message'.
a good 'message' would be convincing the government and cities that these are useless and that they don't work as well as create more administrative costs than just hiring more police officers or raising education levels.
Ben Jordan has some great videos on Flock in general, would highly recommend if your not aware of this beyond knowing they're some form of security camera
Counter point - I live in a major-ish city in which our police force isn't as strong as the surrounding suburbs so I don't mind a few extra eyes on the streets. My kids like to explore the neighborhood and I like a little extra peace of mind.
I am interested to hear why the cameras give you peace of mind? I'd be curious to know what situation you imagine where these cameras help protect you or your family from any harm.
People generally underestimate the amount of damage to morale and civic pride the lack lack of police enforcement causes. People see people speeding and driving recklessly, vandalism, littering, and violent crime with impunity.
If you won't form an argument illustrating how X is like Y, then try to resist simply stating that they are alike. It creates a wasteful, distracting fork in the conversation. Rhetorical analogies are lazy and almost always very shaky.
Jeffrey S. Sovern, 41, of Suffolk, Virginia, didn’t hide what he did. He set up a GoFundMe for his legal defense. He linked to deflock.org, an anti-surveillance activist site. He wrote a statement:
“I appreciate everyone’s right to privacy, enshrined in the fourth amendment.”
And:
“I appreciate a quiet life and am not looking forward to this process, but I will take the silver lining that this can be a catalyst in a bigger movement to roll-back intrusive surveillance.”
I've always said we should build an open-source flock that makes all data available for free to anyone, in a ploy to get proper regulations passed. But they'd probably just make it illegal to track police/government cars then break down your door and arrest you for tracking unmarked ICE agent vehicles
Take the Helium crypto scheme of antennas on roofs, but replace antennas with networked cameras, and instead of a scam it’s a protest.
If a few people set them up, took pictures, recorded some of their friends’ license plates with the cameras… then prime time to make a marketing website for the roof cameras that is as scary as possible. It would include the real footage of the license plates, some story about how you get paid for bounties like facial recognition of a husband and the partner he’s suspected to be cheating with… and that you’re not allowed to hire the camera network for stalking (“wink“).
Claim to pay bonuses for cameras mounted in the highest traffic/value locations, with illusions to corporate espionage and stuff.
Good. I generally believe in following the law within limits, and a surveillance state is outside of those limits. I don't care about the "good" these cameras provide, because they're neglecting the very real dangers of living in a surveillance state.
Better yet, dismantle them without harm and send them back with no return address. Reduces what you can be charged with, prevents Flock from getting insurance benefits, and is all the more frustrating for them to deal with.
> I found this on the side of the road and thought you might want it back.
I think my choice of the word "dismantle" has caused some confusion. "Cleanly dismount, and ship back whole" is what I meant. If nothing is destroyed, they can't charge your with destruction. If the item is returned, it is not stolen. There surely will be some lesser things one could be charged with here, but I doubt they would be worth the effort and expense of a lawsuit, and unlikely to sway a jury to convict.
Frustrating them is not the goal per-se, but it feels good, and may make them consider that market as not worth the cost of maintaining a presence there.
I'd like to see some software that can be used to connect and hack them (which has been already proven possible), erase any data, then fill their memory with tons and tons of out of place images. Take real traffic images, flip them in different orientations to slow down future training, throw in nonsense, etc. Leaving them in place and making them unreliable is a better solution - they can always put up another camera.
A Little Brother solution: they want data, give them so much bad data the rest of their data becomes worthless. But it only works on a mass scale.
Most pedestrian deaths aren't from speeding. They occur on high traffic roads where the posted limits are beyond what will most certainly be lethal (45mph+). And growing vehicle mass pushes lower speeds into the lethal range, anyway. (Someone's Yukon is going to kill pedestrians at much lower speeds than a Civic.)
Alcohol is involved nearly half the time as well...but the driver is intoxicated only 18% of the time. Usually it's drunk pedestrians stumbling into the road.
Pedestrian fatalities are largely not a vehicle speed issue so much as a street design issue. Cities should be planned so nobody is ever walking near higher speed arterial roads, with crosswalks at controlled intersections, foot bridges over long/wide streets, and separated sidewalks. Then areas that need lower speeds (residential areas, downtown areas with street parking) should use narrower designs.
In contrast, the city I live in is primarily built around a handful of four lane streets that all of the businesses are along, with no crossings for miles and places where sidewalks randomly disappear. So you'll see pedestrians standing in the middle of a lane, waiting for a gap to run across the next two lanes. It's wildly dangerous, but the problem has nothing to do with people exceeding the speed limit...and even lowering it would achieve nothing.
I get where you're coming from here- I also don't see justice as an inherent good. If somebody kills somebody else, the death penalty will only increase the number of victims by one. It does nothing to undo the crime. Karma isn't real.
But you have to think about second order effects. The knowledge that you may be punished afterwards serves as a disincentive for doing the wrong thing now. It may be preferable to convince everyone that they would be punished without actually doing the punishment, but it's not possible. Apart from the death penalty, punishments also can directly teach an individual not to commit the crime again.
Right, I just responded to that claim. Do you have any thoughts on the disincentivizing effects of punishment?
Or, if not, we can be more specific. Imprisonment means that an individual is separated from society, making it much harder for them to commit crimes. Most crime is done by young men, and time spent in prison contributes to age. Issuing a 10-year sentence means directly reducing the number of crimes that occur. Is that not beneficial to society?
Or if a CFO embezzles $10M, should society be indifferent to whether taxpayers make the company whole or for CFO does it?
Many a local government is known to trap people with no good reason. Place a speed limit sign somewhere it's hard to spot from the road and the road does not indicate a speed limit by e.g. reducing lanes, place a few strategic cops and loot everyone who doesn't have a navigation system with speed hints.
Bonus, use the opportunity for some nice civil forfeiture scams.
They aren’t a tiny evil. It’s safetyism, and safetyism gets regularly abused to violate our rights. See age verification laws or online censorship for other examples. By promoting safety they get a way to conduct surveillance. And flock isn’t the only company in the surveillance game. How long before cameras and ALPRs for speeding end up being used by ICE to unconstitutionally round up people?
Regarding road safety: Many roads have artificially low speed limits to either generate revenue or appease anti car activists. But the benefit of cars, getting us quickly to our destinations, is very clear. Vehicle deaths are very rare, and getting to places quickly matters. I see this a lot on highways especially, where a low speed limit like 55-60 should really be 80.
We should be designing for faster, not slower, roads. Safety is always improving due to cars having all kinds of driver assistance features now anyways, but we also could just make roads support the speeds people want to drive at. And then the value of surveillance cameras for safety will also go away.
This website and article promote the destruction of property. If you disagree with something, you can engage civily, encourage people to vote with you, run for elections. Violence is not the answer.
Hi. The mayor of Denver pushed through flock cameras despite them being unpopular and not even getting enough votes to buy them. He got them to change the price enough that he didn't need the votes to get them installed.
How do you have a civil society when the people in power cheat?
It sounds like he worked within the legal constraints of the system he was elected to work within.
This kind of discretionary spending authority can used for things that are good, bad, or indifferent. When it gets used to cut through the red tape and buy a new swingset for a neighborhood park, then that's good; nobody complains about that. (Except someone would surely complain about that, but come on man.)
And when it gets used to install government tracking systems, that's bad.
> How do you have a civil society when the people in power cheat?
The problem isn't that the mayor can spend some money. Rather, the problem here is that government tracking systems are completely legal to buy.
The laws need adjusted so that government tracking systems are completely illegal, instead.
"Yeah, good luck getting the government to do that!"
The people of Colorado are free to initiate their own legislation and constitutional amendments and then vote them into force.
Destroying a camera isn't violence. It's destruction of property, sure. But property isn't inherently good and sometimes it degrades society.
If some goober installs massive floodlights that blast into windows of some houses, I think everyone would support a kid with a slingshot busting a few bulbs. If some guy is blasting music from a speaker at 3 AM every single day, I don't think anyone will complain about a cable being cut. If cameras are installed that sell data to companies like Palantir, companies that say they want to kill you and they're going to kill you and it's just a matter of time until they kill you, destroying those cameras is the non-violent option.
On voting harder, see the lead incident mentioned: "This happened weeks after the city council voted to keep the cameras despite overwhelming public opposition." I also advocate patiently working through the process, but people are not blind to the trends: the democratic process is failing as government increasingly sidelines voters and the richest have the levers of power.
"Violence" is a word normally used when the victim is sentient, but I'll go along with it:
Violence against inanimate objects is morally neutral. Violence against instruments of violence is self-defense. Violence against oppression is how the USA was founded.
A corporation has unfair political advantages including a deep purse, an unlimited lifespan, and more recently all the rights of personhood. The only advantage the people have is their numbers, and yeah numbers of votes would be great, I agree, but when votes are ignored, or never solicited in the first place, it often comes down to numbers of pitchforks, as it were.
Everything I've read and learned in my 50 or so years on this planet leads me to believe that the times injustice can be corrected purely by civil engagement and voting are massively outweighed by the times that they can't. So depending on how bad the thing is - people make choices.
I don't see anything on the site or article that promote the destruction of property. It's an aggregation of public information regarding the history of vandalism towards a specific target.
The website largely documents the current state of privacy and provides resources for (digital) services that help maintain privacy. This is an encouraging civil engagement which educates and empowers the audience.
Without having thought about it for more than about 10 seconds: I guess I associate violence with something more personal: an actual person or living thing, or personal property. I guess "corporate property" is where it gets more into the grey zone for me.
But I see your point. Destroying a thing (even corporate) is a pretty extreme reaction that I can only see making sense after having exhausted all other "peaceable" avenues.
People that see these things as detrimental to society though are likely pretty motivated.
25 cameras destroyed over the course of a year, and more than half were destroyed by a single person. This doesn't appear to be a widespread concern the headline makes it out to be.
No, it doesn't. You are right. For comparison: main area of Harrisburg (Pennsylvania) as a quick random lookup alone lists 630 Flock cams + 220 Alpr cams.
I feel that part of the insight is that many people reading this story may want it to be true as stated. All the upvotes and it's propagation in networks may lossily lay this claim (of course debatable)
The beauty of surveillance is that it mutes the ability to cover the distance between desire and action. Which is another way to state "it has a chilling effect"
As I understand, part of any story being shared is that its propagation is part of the story, in a McLuhan medium-is-the-message sense.
The idea that this is an important trend story is infinity times more fun to talk about than the corrective that this isn't really a thing at all, which means online forums will sharply bias towards the notion that this is important.
This whole thread is pretty powerful evidence for that proposition: it's sprawling commentary on what pretty clearly seems to be LLM slop writing. You could build a novel operating system and get flagged off the front page for having a README with Claude tells in it, but that preference is obviously contingent.
I think the concern is widespread, but most people aren't ready to challenge the government which can have severe consequences to your life.
I've warmed to LLM-generated/assisted writing in general but this kind of stuff is just lazy and is basically "I got Claude to say something I agree with and then made it pretty".
A browser plugin that scores webpage content based on how likely it is to have been AI-generated would be quite useful.
Browser vendors can't build this.
> A browser plugin that scores webpage content based on how likely it is to have been AI-generated would be quite useful.
I am strongly against this, because you cannot accurately detect it. People start to get blamed even more when they actually did not use the AI.
This is virtually impossible to build. Not just because all current "AI detector" systems are fake or outright scams with accuracy comparable to a coin-flip on frontier model output, but because even if someone did build a reliable detector and released it to the public, it could be used for adversarial training and it would become worthless pretty fast.
Everyone has failed to build this. They can only sell that they have built it.
Check out Pangram
generate a story where there is not much of a story. What is unfortunate is this has gotten upvoted and is now part of the noise.
Did not strike me as AI-written. But it's useless to try to distinguish. There is only good writing and shite writing. (With things like "accuracy" and "verifiability" and even "awareness of adjacent context" included in my definition of "good.") The article is reasonably good and your comment I'm afraid is fairly shite.
I disagree. There is more content out there than I can read in many lifetimes, so I have to be selective. LLM generated text (like any text) can be well put together on the surface level but require deeper consideration to see the flaws, and of course this takes more effort than the writing did.
A human-written piece indicates someone believes in it enough to put in enough effort to write it up nicely, so it works as a heuristic of underlying quality.
How is this relevant to the article?
The article was written with a premise into a prompt for Claude, which then wrote the whole thing.
What do you think about the contents?
Unless there's evidence that all of it was fact-checked, it's a waste of time to look harder. You can get any output you like, it doesn't mean it's correct.
The contents are very sloppy and seem to be pushing a particular narrative. Title: “Americans“ are smashing flock cameras. Reality: after 30 seconds of reading the summary at the top the data says 25 cameras were destroyed, although 13 of them were by a single person. So right off the bat the click bait title in the whole thesis of the article doesn’t have much basis. The article seems to be trying to paint this as some overarching trend of “Americans” all across the country, but it seems much more like small localized attacks probably all related to some small social media group. Now the bigger question of what this company flock is and the implications of what they’re trying to do is much more interesting but the article doesn’t really go there
It’s poorly written and untrustworthy. I’d rather it not exist.
I think I could prompt Claude to make me an opposite article telling me Americans love flock cameras
Why does that even matter? It's inauthentic, don't waste your time.
It’s interesting this AI-generated article references “Reddit threads” being “full of support” two or three times, yet I can’t find Reddit threads in the references.
I wonder if we are seeing what may be the result of a Reddit bot campaign to sway generative output.
Eventually toll cameras and a consortium of private businesses will have this tech and then game over. Better to use this energy and legislate the behavior you want. Never let the enemy decide the terms.
People are able to do both. There are plenty of grassroots efforts across the country to end cities’ contracts with Flock. Unfortunately, just as many counties have been unresponsive about stopping data center construction, many cities have been unresponsive about ending contracts with Flock. I don’t condone illegal property damage, but civil disobedience on a large scale both in the US and around the world have often been the only effective mechanism for change.
Civil disobedience and non-violent (towards people) destruction of invasive technology is the only outlet left for most people, I would argue. The money and power is so incredibly lopsided that 'traditional' routes of impacting City, county, or state/national practices are closed to most of us.
This is just my thought with nothing to back it up, but I believe it's valid. I also believe we'll see widespread actions of this type within the next decade.
[delayed]
Smashing cameras is enjoyable whereas building movement for legislation is laborious.
It will be easier to negotiate for legislation as well if the economic risk of installation increases because of vandalism.
And that's why we need more direct democracy. People (correctly) feel like they have very little power over laws which affect them day to day.
If someone represents me, then logically I should have the right to vote directly instead of him, or remove him at any point.
That's why planes should be flown using direct democracy. Passengers (correctly) feel like they have little power over the maneuvers planes make and affect them moment to moment.
Representational democracy is far superior. Decisions need to be weighed against both their popularity and their effect with input from experts and other affected parties.
I wonder how many Flock decision makers will take personal offense to their little installations being damaged
Can imagine hydraflock scenario. Like some people close bathrooms permanently after bad vandalism on one occasion, maybe a city council person orders that extra cameras be installed so every camera can be recorded by a second camera.
No it won't. (Source: got legislation for this, pretty good bead on who the stakeholders are).
This is all Internet logic. It's fun to talk about destroying cameras as a vector for public policy, ergo, by the First Law of Message Boards, that must be a viable strategy. Reader, it is not. Nobody's going to blink at these costs, but residents who supported or were on the fence about the cameras are now negatively polarized against doing anything about them.
The cringe-ier thing here is the clear message being sent by many commentators, incl. the author of this post, that nobody's ever thought of breaking surveillance cameras before. Y'all, this is literally a meme.
What if we just zip tie bags over them while working on legislation?
Just break the cameras. Nobody cares (I mean, local police will care, in that they will arrest you if they can, but that's about the extent of it.)
Yes, local police would be my concern in this situation
The Judge, the Justice System, and a potential prison sentence should factor into your concern in this situation.
There seems to be enough energy for both?
The irony is destruction of private property will only justify the very surveillance one is trying to avoid. Would you agree ring cameras should be destroyed too? The police can use their footage. In practice they are similar to flock.
Kinda like saying "Throwing the British's tea into Boston harbor will only make us subject to harsher terms."
The reality is the vast majority of social progress in the last millenium was achieved with force and threat of force. I find this weird revisionist "violence is never the answer" trope recited as a fact that needs no justification to be incredibly weird and unreliable.
That's...exactly what happened with the Boston Tea Party: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intolerable_Acts
Had France not been willing to subsidize an insurgent campaign to distract the British, it's incredibly likely those Acts would've remained in place for some time.
People who rush to using violence as an answer frequently do not consider the outcome if they've misjudged their opponents' capacity for it.
I'd say, "you can't commit violence against a camera" but now everything is violence if it costs someone money.
> Kinda like saying "Throwing the British's tea into Boston harbor will only make us subject to harsher terms."
I mean, that it... quite literally did?
Yeah, you can externalize enforcement of sanctions against you to drag other people into a conflict with you, but I wouldn't suggest getting caught making that argument.
You could use this Boston Tea Party logic for virtually any violent action no matter how dumb or counterproductive.
To be fair to the loyalists, a lot of people were making this point at the time. Tally ho, gents.
It's like the "watering the tree of patriotism with the blood of centrists" or whatever the fuck it was. You probably wouldn't want to hang out with the groups of people most likely to deploy these arguments.
Violence is only the answer if you're willing to cost a few thousands (sometimes millions) of lives.
That’s an instant debate winner if we can’t differentiate between breaking cameras and mass death.
Yes, breaking cameras never results in positive changes. Mass death sometimes does.
I wouldnt call property crime violence.
So what are you advocating for?
For throwing the tea into the harbor.
By the way -- Where do you stand on throwing tea into the harbor? And where do you stand on the legitimacy of publicly discussing throwing tea into the harbor?
Why speak in riddles? Do you want people to destroy the cameras or not?
What riddle? I'm not a native English speaker, and it's pretty clear even to me what he's saying.
It's not complicated.
They are in favor of public vandalism such as that which was committed by the Boston Tea Party whereas you appear to be suggesting that you are vehemently against it.
What a load of shit. You're essentially goading someone to fedpost and holding their argument hostage if they don't.
I think its better to lodge displeasure by placing sticky notes instead of destroying. It decreases camera usefulness and I’m not quite sure it’s a crime.
I feel like you're trying to bait people into saying something that violates the site guidelines.
Property destruction is not the same crime as battery/assault/etc.
Let’s not call breaking a camera “violence”.
It's not violence, it's vandalism. Quite diffrrent.
But why smash'em when you have the right to bear arms? I'd do target practice instead. Improve your shootong dkills while getting rid of surveillance. Win-win.
Extra charge for using a gun. Slingshot maybe? Or as I said before, just put a bag over the camera. Is that even illegal?
That justification is a red herring. The goal is the surveillance, and safety is just an interchangeable excuse. It should be obvious when they'll do things like increasing surveillance to "protect the children" and at the same time avoid other measures that would be far more effective at keeping children safe. The real irony is when it turns out they themselves were the biggest danger for children all along.
I'm not destroying anything, and based on the article it looks like they're handing out decent sentences to the people destroying the cameras. Surely no judge would appreciate someone running onto a taxpaying home owner's front porch and destroying their doorbell.
That being said, Ring cameras creep me out and I feel they have a powerful anti-social effect.
Exactly, let your local politicians know the only way they can get your vote is by rejecting Flock.
What's going on here is that out of 100,000 constituents, three know that Gary's Carpets is licensing the city reservoir as a PFOAs dump, and combined they have $1,000 of advertising reach if in-kind contribution is counted. Meanwhile, Gary's Carpets has a $60k advertising budget annually, donates to all five churches, subcontracts influence operations with bot farms, and attends weekly meetings of the grand lupus lodge.
Great, sad-in-its-truths comment.
How long will it take the three of them to talk with leadership of those churches? Are they allowed to bring up off topic concerns at PTA meetings where they can tell parents to be aware of the bot farms? Did they already knock on some neighbors’ doors?
All of this is really hard and really time-consuming. The alternative is for those three people to start smashing cameras and we know they won’t finish with their freedom. The uphill battle is the one we must fight.
an irony may come from the increase, of crime rate where these are installed rather than reduction.
Similar but nowhere close to a substitute
Why not? They can retroactively be used like flock. Amazon could partner with them tomorrow. The police already can and have asked Amazon to footage and correlated it to find people.
Illegally breaking Flock cameras makes you look like a conspiracy nut or radical to the average Joe and make them sceptical of any privacy movements by association.
I would disagree. I feel like typical Americans value freedom and privacy rights very highly.
Flock is a private business. As are at least some toll roads.
Flock already licenses their data to anyone who pays, right?
this is apparantly a reaction to failure of the legistative process to recognize the will of the people.
the behaviour most people seem to want is to have a polis driven by the will of the people at large, rather than a small cadre, of -for lackof a better word, liars.
Do you think the same people smashing the cameras have the skills to legislate? Or even to organize and lead a movement?
They are very different skill sets.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Adams
Not saying NONE of them have both skill sets, but I many don't
"At least 25 cameras have been destroyed". Sounds like a mere drop in the bucket.
The author wants them smashed. The point of the article is to attempt to normalize and provide justification for the behavior, so that more people feel OK doing it.
I'm not going to suggest anyone break the law since I don't think it's worth risking jail time for this, and I'm certainly too much of a coward to do it myself, but it's also hard for me to condemn this.
ICE sort of feels like a militia with infinite funding and basically no oversight. This was already kind of true even before the latest presidential administration, but it has been ramped up to 11 in the last 1.5 years. I don't love the idea of a president effectively having his own "secret police" and people fighting back does seem kind of appropriate to me.
It is against the law, but I would wager it is morally coherent to smash them.
From TFA:
> Reddit threads show near-universal support.
If your barometer for actual support is Reddit sentiment, I've got news for you...
“This thing thats easy to measure agrees with me.”
Shows lack of critical thinking and rigor.
9 out if 10 paid astroturfers and bot accounts agree with me!
Trying to imagine who would be paying for bots to support killing flock cameras. Who would profit from that? Seems more likely to go the other way.
Russia greatly benefits from political instability and turmoil in America and encouraging stuff like this is their modus operandi. I say this as somebody who very much dislikes the idea of Flock.
Just curious, but what's the basis for this claim? I've heard it a lot. But I feel like this in itself is a political statement more than one rooted in sound facts.
Flock?
If flock is paying people to support destroying flock cameras, sign me up!
reddit has been running a reverse eugenics program for over a decade. at this point, 9 out of 10 are genuine retards.
Hacker News, on the other hand, is populated exclusively by the most elite and intelligent anonymous forum posters on the English-speaking internet.
Good.
Flock cameras appeal to weak communist attitudes, where there is a desire for a "good" authoritarian government that tracks everyone... for "their own good".
I suspect you have no idea what the word communist actually means.
*fascist
those groups have a lot in common, when you look at historical implementation.
Both create an unaccountable set of elites who control the populace.
“You can contribute to this article by _adding to the list_”
Parts of Oakland are not walkable because you’ll get mugged.
Surveillance is a good deterrent of criminal activity. On my old house, I used to keep a very visible camera, even after it went offline, to deter break ins.
For those in favor of destroying cameras. What is a better solution?
Bringing up the highest-crime city as an example is using a well-known outlier tp prove a point. Is that valid in this context? I think Flock cameras are being used not just in high-crime areas, but in many places. One would have to determine that surveillance helped with crime in these areas to make that point valid. And more importantly, one has to ask, why it's NOT being used to deter more crime in high-crime areas, and being used in areas where there's no crime.
The point is, where's the documented proof that they are helping. What we know is that people are still reporting crime in places where Flock cameras were present. Does that negate the effect? No, but it's just as valid as the point you brought. Which is to say, little to not all.
I am bringing up a City I’ve lived in, problems I’ve endured, and solutions I’ve seen work.
By my parents house in Vallejo there is one of these cameras near a 7/11. They can finally walk there.
It's rational to oppose Flock cameras in particular, while admitting that secure publicly accountable camera use for police purposes may have a legitimate place. YouTuber Benn Jordan did a pretty decent break down of how Flock is not that.
https://youtu.be/Pp9MwZkHiMQ?si=9CwwNcxbqOjB4DXm
I'm curious, what's the profit in muggings these days? Almost nobody I know still carries cash. The mugger could probably get a phone, but more and more are useless to anyone but the owner. Same with credit cards, easily canceled and fraud detection is better than ever so not very useful.
You can recycle the parts in an phone for prolly at least 20-100.
Plus apple watch, airpods, etc.
I’m think the average pedestrian carries more cash equivalents than at any time in history.
How about addressing the root causes of crime (i.e. poverty) instead of suppressing the symptoms by pushing crime out of politically powerful areas into politically marginalized areas?
I'm not a fan of vandalism and luckily I'm living in a country where I have the law on my side when demanding that public space is not surveilled indiscriminately, but I totally understand the urge to simply take a stick to a camera that records my every movement.
Poverty alleviation is not a silver bullet (or anywhere close) for crime reduction, as nice as it would be if that were true.
Seems like it would help a lot, even if it wouldn't solve the issue.
I think we should forge ahead on trying reduce poverty, and I suspect that doing so would correlate with reductions in crime.
Poverty is not the root cause of crime
Obviously there is no single cause for any social dynamic (hence my "i.e.") but there is wide scientific consensus that poverty (especially when combined with inequality) contributes greatly to crime, bot directly (people steal if it is the only way to get something to eat) and indirectly (poor people are much more likely to live in the social conditions that correlate with incidence of crime).
What is?
Lack of family structure and good role models for young people.
I see your point, you could be born to a wealthy deadbeat father and end up chasing a life of crime because you haven't seen anything better modeled for you.
It seems to me that poverty is more likely than anything else to cause those factors though.
A social safety net
"What is a better solution"
I can think of dozens. But this is the solution that allows the state to close the noose on freedom and democracy, and that's the one that you are defending with false choice argumentation.
The goverment doesn't do the things it claims to do - what is a better solution?
How we should do a double negation in HTML terms? Nor //s nor /s/s fits the bill.
Less social inequality. Where I live there are no cameras and I don't even lock my doors when I take my dog on a walk.
Tell me the area. And, we can break down the factors.
not sure why people are bothering with destruction, just drive around and shut them down wirelessly.
some newer models require a button to be pressed for them to start the AP, but still leaves them vulnerable to attacks with a long stick and doesn't draw any attention while hundreds of cameras suddenly stop working, making the city government think they're unreliable.
Pending clarification, I suspect "just" is doing a lot of work!
> not sure why people are bothering with destruction, just drive around and shut them down wirelessly.
The article suggests that some of the cameras are smashed and left in highly visible places to "send a message".
yah, but that's just not a good way to 'send a message'.
a good 'message' would be convincing the government and cities that these are useless and that they don't work as well as create more administrative costs than just hiring more police officers or raising education levels.
Ben Jordan has some great videos on Flock in general, would highly recommend if your not aware of this beyond knowing they're some form of security camera
Counter point - I live in a major-ish city in which our police force isn't as strong as the surrounding suburbs so I don't mind a few extra eyes on the streets. My kids like to explore the neighborhood and I like a little extra peace of mind.
Police having unlimited access to spy and creep on my children would give me the opposite of peace of mind.
I am interested to hear why the cameras give you peace of mind? I'd be curious to know what situation you imagine where these cameras help protect you or your family from any harm.
I can reply to the [dead] comment, but cameras don't deter the bad drivers where I live.
Also, cameras can't pull over a bad driver.
Also, I highly doube a car in a camera's frame long enough, that the camera could even detect if there is bad driving going on.
People generally underestimate the amount of damage to morale and civic pride the lack lack of police enforcement causes. People see people speeding and driving recklessly, vandalism, littering, and violent crime with impunity.
you should get some body cams for your kids, you will get a more pertinent view.
Flock cameras and the surveillance state generally speaking make me feel like a slave.
What about registration plates? Do they make you feeling like a slave?
If you won't form an argument illustrating how X is like Y, then try to resist simply stating that they are alike. It creates a wasteful, distracting fork in the conversation. Rhetorical analogies are lazy and almost always very shaky.
Not particularly, what about you?
Let’s add Meta Glassholes to the list
Jeffrey S. Sovern, 41, of Suffolk, Virginia, didn’t hide what he did. He set up a GoFundMe for his legal defense. He linked to deflock.org, an anti-surveillance activist site. He wrote a statement: “I appreciate everyone’s right to privacy, enshrined in the fourth amendment.” And: “I appreciate a quiet life and am not looking forward to this process, but I will take the silver lining that this can be a catalyst in a bigger movement to roll-back intrusive surveillance.”
This is what patriotism really looks like.
I heard someone making the point that these go up but then do not deter street degradation. So basically just targeting regular people.
Good
What kind of Americans?
American Americans of course.
I've always said we should build an open-source flock that makes all data available for free to anyone, in a ploy to get proper regulations passed. But they'd probably just make it illegal to track police/government cars then break down your door and arrest you for tracking unmarked ICE agent vehicles
Take the Helium crypto scheme of antennas on roofs, but replace antennas with networked cameras, and instead of a scam it’s a protest.
If a few people set them up, took pictures, recorded some of their friends’ license plates with the cameras… then prime time to make a marketing website for the roof cameras that is as scary as possible. It would include the real footage of the license plates, some story about how you get paid for bounties like facial recognition of a husband and the partner he’s suspected to be cheating with… and that you’re not allowed to hire the camera network for stalking (“wink“).
Claim to pay bonuses for cameras mounted in the highest traffic/value locations, with illusions to corporate espionage and stuff.
I'm of the same mind since you probably can't close that Pandora's box.
As soon as citizens of Minneapolis though start tracking the movements of ICE vehicles though, then something will have to be done about it…
AirTag but for dashcams would be cool. The trick is to make a popular product without being a company that's going to gatekeep that data.
Just sharing my regular reminder that Flock is a YC company.
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety
This organization that built itself on top of the “hacker ethos” is now happy to profit from building the surveillance state
were they not always this way?
They at least pretended not to be. In hindsight, it looks a lot more like a blatant lie...
Great! Now oppose the vehicle kill switch that just got passed by the people that “represent” you
Good. I generally believe in following the law within limits, and a surveillance state is outside of those limits. I don't care about the "good" these cameras provide, because they're neglecting the very real dangers of living in a surveillance state.
Awful AI slop. Title should be some people vandalized something that I can co-op for my political agenda.
Good
Disgusting, and it's quietly happening worldwide.
In Italy two different agencies are buying spying tools they cannot even legally use.
Laws don't matter.
Why smash them when you can harvest them. I’m sure they have components that can be sold.
Better yet, dismantle them without harm and send them back with no return address. Reduces what you can be charged with, prevents Flock from getting insurance benefits, and is all the more frustrating for them to deal with.
> I found this on the side of the road and thought you might want it back.
> Better yet, dismantle them without harm and send them back with no return address.
This definitely takes more effort than smashing them does.
> Reduces what you can be charged with,
Does it? How? There's not even a return address to show that a person sent the parts back to Flock instead of just disappearing it.
> prevents Flock from getting insurance benefits
How? The camera doesn't repair itself. It still takes money to turn a pile of camera parts into a working camera on some street corner somewhere.
> and is all the more frustrating for them to deal with.
Is it? Is corporate frustration the goal? (Is corporate frustration even possible?)
I think my choice of the word "dismantle" has caused some confusion. "Cleanly dismount, and ship back whole" is what I meant. If nothing is destroyed, they can't charge your with destruction. If the item is returned, it is not stolen. There surely will be some lesser things one could be charged with here, but I doubt they would be worth the effort and expense of a lawsuit, and unlikely to sway a jury to convict.
Frustrating them is not the goal per-se, but it feels good, and may make them consider that market as not worth the cost of maintaining a presence there.
When I take your things, I have quite clearly stolen from you. That's theft.
When I take your things and then mail them back to you, I have still stolen from you. That's still theft.
It's the taking part that constitutes theft.
---
If I instead just smash your things in-situ, then that can be a different crime like vandalism.
> If the item is returned, it is not stolen.
This isn't how the law works at all. You can absolutely still be charged with theft even if you return the item.
I'd like to see some software that can be used to connect and hack them (which has been already proven possible), erase any data, then fill their memory with tons and tons of out of place images. Take real traffic images, flip them in different orientations to slow down future training, throw in nonsense, etc. Leaving them in place and making them unreliable is a better solution - they can always put up another camera.
A Little Brother solution: they want data, give them so much bad data the rest of their data becomes worthless. But it only works on a mass scale.
Speed cameras and other surveillance state Trojan horses next please. Not just flock.
Speed cameras? I dont know, as long as people kill people with their vehicles, speed cameras are a tiny evil.
Most pedestrian deaths aren't from speeding. They occur on high traffic roads where the posted limits are beyond what will most certainly be lethal (45mph+). And growing vehicle mass pushes lower speeds into the lethal range, anyway. (Someone's Yukon is going to kill pedestrians at much lower speeds than a Civic.)
Alcohol is involved nearly half the time as well...but the driver is intoxicated only 18% of the time. Usually it's drunk pedestrians stumbling into the road.
https://www.cdc.gov/pedestrian-bike-safety/about/pedestrian-...
Pedestrian fatalities are largely not a vehicle speed issue so much as a street design issue. Cities should be planned so nobody is ever walking near higher speed arterial roads, with crosswalks at controlled intersections, foot bridges over long/wide streets, and separated sidewalks. Then areas that need lower speeds (residential areas, downtown areas with street parking) should use narrower designs.
In contrast, the city I live in is primarily built around a handful of four lane streets that all of the businesses are along, with no crossings for miles and places where sidewalks randomly disappear. So you'll see pedestrians standing in the middle of a lane, waiting for a gap to run across the next two lanes. It's wildly dangerous, but the problem has nothing to do with people exceeding the speed limit...and even lowering it would achieve nothing.
Speed cameras or not, what you described will always happen. I would prefer no evil instead of a tiny evil however.
Likely yea, but with them at least some idiots too stupid to drive get some degree of punishment.
In return for everyone giving up privacy.
I need a lot bigger of a return if I am going to give up privacy.
I don't think punishment benefits society in any way whatsoever.
I get where you're coming from here- I also don't see justice as an inherent good. If somebody kills somebody else, the death penalty will only increase the number of victims by one. It does nothing to undo the crime. Karma isn't real.
But you have to think about second order effects. The knowledge that you may be punished afterwards serves as a disincentive for doing the wrong thing now. It may be preferable to convince everyone that they would be punished without actually doing the punishment, but it's not possible. Apart from the death penalty, punishments also can directly teach an individual not to commit the crime again.
Justice is distinct from punishment. Someone who is wronged should be made whole, but I don't think society benefits from violating the violator.
Right, I just responded to that claim. Do you have any thoughts on the disincentivizing effects of punishment?
Or, if not, we can be more specific. Imprisonment means that an individual is separated from society, making it much harder for them to commit crimes. Most crime is done by young men, and time spent in prison contributes to age. Issuing a 10-year sentence means directly reducing the number of crimes that occur. Is that not beneficial to society?
Or if a CFO embezzles $10M, should society be indifferent to whether taxpayers make the company whole or for CFO does it?
It's the balance society needs for crime. If punishment doesn't benefit society what do we have to do with criminals in your opinion?
Many a local government is known to trap people with no good reason. Place a speed limit sign somewhere it's hard to spot from the road and the road does not indicate a speed limit by e.g. reducing lanes, place a few strategic cops and loot everyone who doesn't have a navigation system with speed hints.
Bonus, use the opportunity for some nice civil forfeiture scams.
They aren’t a tiny evil. It’s safetyism, and safetyism gets regularly abused to violate our rights. See age verification laws or online censorship for other examples. By promoting safety they get a way to conduct surveillance. And flock isn’t the only company in the surveillance game. How long before cameras and ALPRs for speeding end up being used by ICE to unconstitutionally round up people?
Regarding road safety: Many roads have artificially low speed limits to either generate revenue or appease anti car activists. But the benefit of cars, getting us quickly to our destinations, is very clear. Vehicle deaths are very rare, and getting to places quickly matters. I see this a lot on highways especially, where a low speed limit like 55-60 should really be 80.
We should be designing for faster, not slower, roads. Safety is always improving due to cars having all kinds of driver assistance features now anyways, but we also could just make roads support the speeds people want to drive at. And then the value of surveillance cameras for safety will also go away.
>Vehicle deaths are very rare, and getting to places quickly matters.
People not having any sort of empathy on HN shouldn't surprise me not gonna lie.
This website and article promote the destruction of property. If you disagree with something, you can engage civily, encourage people to vote with you, run for elections. Violence is not the answer.
Hi. The mayor of Denver pushed through flock cameras despite them being unpopular and not even getting enough votes to buy them. He got them to change the price enough that he didn't need the votes to get them installed.
How do you have a civil society when the people in power cheat?
It sounds like he worked within the legal constraints of the system he was elected to work within.
This kind of discretionary spending authority can used for things that are good, bad, or indifferent. When it gets used to cut through the red tape and buy a new swingset for a neighborhood park, then that's good; nobody complains about that. (Except someone would surely complain about that, but come on man.)
And when it gets used to install government tracking systems, that's bad.
> How do you have a civil society when the people in power cheat?
The problem isn't that the mayor can spend some money. Rather, the problem here is that government tracking systems are completely legal to buy.
The laws need adjusted so that government tracking systems are completely illegal, instead.
"Yeah, good luck getting the government to do that!"
The people of Colorado are free to initiate their own legislation and constitutional amendments and then vote them into force.
"But that will never work!"
It can work, and it has worked. As just one example, the people did this rather famously, and with good effect, back in 2012 when they legalized recreational weed: https://ballotpedia.org/Colorado_Amendment_64,_Regulation_of...
The flock contract was cancelled. It was then replaced with an axon contract that probably isn't much better.
https://www.denver7.com/news/local-news/denver-city-council-...
Simple. You don't.
Destroying a camera isn't violence. It's destruction of property, sure. But property isn't inherently good and sometimes it degrades society.
If some goober installs massive floodlights that blast into windows of some houses, I think everyone would support a kid with a slingshot busting a few bulbs. If some guy is blasting music from a speaker at 3 AM every single day, I don't think anyone will complain about a cable being cut. If cameras are installed that sell data to companies like Palantir, companies that say they want to kill you and they're going to kill you and it's just a matter of time until they kill you, destroying those cameras is the non-violent option.
> Violence is not the answer.
Okay, but what about destruction of property?
On voting harder, see the lead incident mentioned: "This happened weeks after the city council voted to keep the cameras despite overwhelming public opposition." I also advocate patiently working through the process, but people are not blind to the trends: the democratic process is failing as government increasingly sidelines voters and the richest have the levers of power.
"Violence" is a word normally used when the victim is sentient, but I'll go along with it:
Violence against inanimate objects is morally neutral. Violence against instruments of violence is self-defense. Violence against oppression is how the USA was founded.
A corporation has unfair political advantages including a deep purse, an unlimited lifespan, and more recently all the rights of personhood. The only advantage the people have is their numbers, and yeah numbers of votes would be great, I agree, but when votes are ignored, or never solicited in the first place, it often comes down to numbers of pitchforks, as it were.
Everything I've read and learned in my 50 or so years on this planet leads me to believe that the times injustice can be corrected purely by civil engagement and voting are massively outweighed by the times that they can't. So depending on how bad the thing is - people make choices.
I don't see anything on the site or article that promote the destruction of property. It's an aggregation of public information regarding the history of vandalism towards a specific target.
The website largely documents the current state of privacy and provides resources for (digital) services that help maintain privacy. This is an encouraging civil engagement which educates and empowers the audience.
might want to check a history book, you may be surprised what the answer usually was.
Regardless, I do agree with the commentor. Effective or not, violence, to me, is always the wrong answer.
Calling the "destruction of property" violence though—I might take issue with that.
I assume this comment means you strongly oppose every part of the American Revolution?
LOL are you allowed to support revolution on Hacker News?
I don't think the VCs would be very happy about it.
Under what circumstances might "destruction of property" legitimately be classified as violence in your view?
Without having thought about it for more than about 10 seconds: I guess I associate violence with something more personal: an actual person or living thing, or personal property. I guess "corporate property" is where it gets more into the grey zone for me.
But I see your point. Destroying a thing (even corporate) is a pretty extreme reaction that I can only see making sense after having exhausted all other "peaceable" avenues.
People that see these things as detrimental to society though are likely pretty motivated.
What is the civil way of installing mass surveillance?