Flock Credibility Lost as It Repeatedly Lies to City Councils, Police, & Public

https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/tracking-alpr-cameras/flock-safety-credibility-lost-as-it-repeatedly-lies-to-city-councils-police-departments-and-public-across-the-country

by StatsAreFun • 2 days ago

467 153 2 days ago

aclu.org

spiderfarmer• 2 days ago

Were they ever credible?

Tostino• 2 days ago

They were by enough officials that collectively we have voted into power. Maybe we should think about who we're handing power to. They don't seem to have a solid grasp on things.

allthetime• 2 days ago

That wasn’t credibility, it was cash money.

Freedom2• 2 days ago

I don't see why not. They're one of YCombinators most successful companies.

t1234s• 2 days ago

I doubt the surveillance state is going away any time soon.

elictronic• 2 days ago

Company directly lies to governing body of city. Is found out the next day. Loses contract. Attacks city online afterwards.

This isn’t about surveillance states, it’s about companies run by idiots.

dhosek• 2 days ago

Why not both?

wmf• 2 days ago

Ironically, Flock might create enough backlash to trigger regulations against surveillance. They're certainly an example of what not to do.

wrs• 2 days ago

This just sounds like the standard playbook for this crowd (by which wide brush I mean authoritarians and their enablers). They really hate being called on their lies, and their immediate response is to attack with whatever comes to hand (press release, xeet, the DoJ…depends on the person).

FireBeyond• 2 days ago

Re ICE having access to data: "Flock said that they did not, when they did, but that it was not their problem".

Just like it's "not their problem" that in a state where certain types of data sharing is not permitted. There's nothing they'll change in the agency's account to prevent it. They'll even offer training on it. Because it's "not their problem".

stackghost• 2 days ago

What if the surveillance state is also run by idiots?

otterdude• 2 days ago

It wont go down willingly but its possible

tjwebbnorfolk• 2 days ago

For all the privacy and competence issues, if it helps cops solve crimes while sitting on their asses, it's going to win.

int0x29• 2 days ago

Repeatedly lying about working with ACLU is an interesting choice. I'm kind of tired of the culture of words don't mean anything.

graywh• 2 days ago

they (and others like them) also make zero effort to install poles complying with highway safety standards

sarchertech• 2 days ago

This guy on instagram does a good job of highlighting this (and other unsafe roadside hazards).

https://www.instagram.com/theguardrailguy?igsh=ZXAxM2h2ZXFub...

From his bio, he lost his daughter to a guardrail crash and started exposing improperly installed guardrails.

godelski• 2 days ago

For people who don't have instagram: https://imginn.com/theguardrailguy

walrus013• 2 days ago

Not just that but I would also be very skeptical that whatever free standing poles they're erecting are fully compliant with TIA/EIA 222H (or engineer stamp approved drawing for each unique installation location, which will vary with local climate of snow/ice and wind loading), which is the engineering standard for self supporting tubular steel monopoles that have antenna, camera, solar panel appurtenances attached to them.

https://tiaonline.org/press-release/tia-announces-publicatio...

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=TIA+EIA+2...

In general, 222H and its predecessors govern engineering standards for:

a. Self supporting lattice/grid/angle steel type towers.

b. Guyed towers

c. Self supporting monopoles of all types (could even theoretically be antenna/solar/camera attachments as additional wind loading on a wood utility pole sunk into the ground, but more commonly, for steel monopoles)

If you're going to put steel monopoles in the public highway ROW they need to be compliant with both AASHTO standards and also the above.

chneu2• 2 days ago

This is the kind of stuff that municipalities and counties absolutely hate. Reporting this stuff generally matters and will get taken care of.

When reporting, if the work of citing standards is done, it makes the report much more likely to go through and have action taken.

infinite_spin• 2 days ago

They began strapping them to existing light poles here. I took a photo of one and it was gone a few days later. I didn't report it, it just vanished, which I noticed the next time I went for a walk. I want to know why they decided to put one up on my street, it feels like an intrusion.

cute_boi• 2 days ago

How come we allowed all these cronies to put camera and do surveillance. Any politician advocating this should have cameras in their home for safety reason.

therein• 2 days ago

Because clearly we are powerless. Someone should post that chart of how likely a law is to be passed vs. how much the people want it or not. It is basically a flat line. People's will have zero impact.

thaumaturgy3• 2 days ago

Every time someone repeats this, they are telling a self-fulfilling story. I got a law passed -- a state law, about ALPRs, establishing a list of restrictions on them. I didn't do it alone, I had a lot of really important help, including from ACLU of Oregon. There was a lot of opposition, and it ate months of my life, but it was worth it.

I never would have accomplished that if I spent more time reading comments on the internet about all the things we are powerless to do.

chneu2• 2 days ago

If I was an abuser who wanted my victims to feel like they couldn't do anything, I'd try to convince them of some version what you just said.

Congrats! You decided to give up.

You're now advocating against your best interests and the best interests of everyone you love. Way to go, slugger!

smegger001• 2 days ago

How come we allowed all these cronies to put camera and do surveillance.

Because city counsel meetings are scheduled at awkward times for anyone employed to actually show up to. So only tech unaware old people show up

PunchyHamster2• 2 days ago

Coz we don't punish bad politicans enough

0xbadcafebee• 2 days ago

The worst thing about this isn't that a company or CEO lied. It's that a private corporation that runs the largest mass surveillance system in the country habitually lies about what it does so local governments will adopt it and it can then secretly give that access to the government. What happens when the cameras get so good they can read lips? Or they add directional long-range mics to the cameras?

wilbo2• 2 days ago

This seems to me to be the inevitable outcome of a society that celebrates winners who claim their lies are merely "alternative facts"

This relevant post is flagged, but yes, I do think this is a symptom of America crossing the asshole threshold where it pays to outright lie and call your fact checkers insincere: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48837460

dfxm12• 2 days ago

There's too much in this article to distill as "this". The city of Oshkosh cancelling their contact with Flock after one day is actually quite heartening.

wilbo2• 2 days ago

You're right. By "this" I'm referring to a company selling to the government feeling like they will not face consequences for publicly lying to their buyers. I agree it's heartening to see the contract cancelled. I find the doubling down on the lies as both unsurprising and disheartening.

joering2• 2 days ago

when I was a kid, my mom used to say "think about something nice and pleasant if you cannot fall asleep". So sometimes I think about scenario in which some disgruntled IT manager in one of AWS data centers, knowing which CDN server belongs to Flock, unplugs one of their RAID drives and plug it to their own laptop and copies the whole database of all plates, coordinates, etc, and Flock didn't even find out because most soft raids won't report an issue, and if they do, then what is there to troubleshoot if everything got back to normal 2 hours later? And then post it all in form of a torrent, so everyone can download it and see who went where. Imagine politicians caught visiting strip clubs or their mistresses, patterns of cops going to places where bad guys hang out (to collect bribes), highway patrol going over speed limits without genuine emergency. Thinking about all this I fell asleep much easier...

cosmicgadget• 1 day ago

Between Epstein, Panama Papers, and Madison Cawthorne Story Time, I don't think any of these things will end careers as long as voters can be convinced their team is the winning one. This is the post-fact era.

TurdF3rguson• 2 days ago

Am I the only one picturing the Oshkosh mayor and Oshkosh city council as a group of toddlers in overalls?

pclowes5• 2 days ago

People always want high trust societies. They are incredibly hard to create and incredibly easy to destroy.

However, once the cameras go up, you will never ever create one there. High trust requires, well, actual trust. You can’t build real trust in a panopticon just a sickly police state facsimile of it.

Society and progress moves at the speed of trust. Without it many uniquely human and beautiful things disappear.

moate3• 2 days ago

Sadly, many people just want to be highly trusted in society (whilst themselves fearing most of the rest of it). It's why we flirt with/fall face first into authoritarianism every few decades.

mmooss2• 2 days ago

It's why we flirt with/fall face first into authoritarianism every few decades.

Did the US or any advanced democracy "flirt with/fall face first into authoritarianism" a few decades ago?

watwut2• 2 days ago

Authoritarian are not high trust. And people who call for authoritarian societies are not calling for high trust. They call for control and subjugation.

DoneWithAllThat• 2 days ago

The idea that surveillance undermines high trust societies seems insane to me. Widespread petty crime, lack of shared cultural norms and traditions, lacking of missing social reinforcement of expectations of a society - those are what prevent high trust societies from forming. I consider those things a much worse problem then Flock cameras.

nemothekid• 2 days ago

The idea that surveillance undermines high trust societies seems insane to me.

Only because, I'm betting, that you view street surveillance as something that binds others, but not yourself. I doubt you would make this argument for any other kind of surveillance.

If Microsoft were to record everything you did on your PC, would you consider Windows the "high trust" OS community vs Linux? Of if your employer began surveilling all your devices (including personal ones) to ensure you weren't stealing from the company, would you consider your company one of "high trust"?

I don't deny that surveillance can reduce crime, but the idea that surveillance undermines high trust societies is relatively straightforward

raxxorraxor2• 2 days ago

No, we had high trust societies before the shitty surveillance tech. There are quite a few effects that undermine it even and this tech is part of the reason why.

It is part of the problem, not part of a solution.

LtWorf2• 2 days ago

I don't think surveillance prevents crime. Not having so many poor people prevents crime.

Some people will always be antisocial due to tendencies and possibly mental illness, but having a society that is so rich and yet has so many poor people as the USA will of course create criminals. No amount of cameras will solve that.

mlrtime5• 2 days ago

100% Agree. And I'll go further saying the highest trust societies I've lived in have been medium-size, rural/suburban. Everyone is in the social/economic class, similar traditions/backgrounds, similar church etc...

urams2• 2 days ago

However, once the cameras go up, you will never ever create one there.

This is directly refuted by Singapore, Japan, arguably the UK, and others. Singapore is very interesting to visit. Externally there's somewhat of a narrative of a harsh police state but when I visited I almost never saw a single police officer and they don't have particularly many police officers on a per capita basis (170/100k vs 440/100k in NYC). Most of the policing naturally happens by aid of the surveillance system and a very strong effort to take action to bring justice for any crime. As a result, everyone believes crime will be punished and so you end up with a very safe society. This expectation of crime being taken seriously actually _creates_ trust because you can have high faith that any criminal action someone may take will have consequences and therefore be deterred.

vasco2• 2 days ago

What they were saying is they prefer people to behave because they want to be good people which are part of a good society than to be good people simply as a byproduct of fear of jail.

PunchyHamster2• 2 days ago

Those societies were created way before the level of survelliance modern AI pushes

vuurmot2• 2 days ago

In Singapore, policing does not have the dystopian surveillance thing attached to it, because a large number of police are civilian conscripts. It takes the edge off, when you know that your neighbor's 18 year old kid is working in the police force, rather than some mercenary force

On top of that, the majority of the military consists of civilian conscripts, which arguably holds more power if the system ever goes bad enough to degenerate into martial law

kakacik• 2 days ago

Read up a bit on it. You have numerous signs over the town that state explicitly canning in case of participating in any form of protest that government will consider violent. How that is defined is of course on... government. Read up on how they treat immigrants, its basically serfdom pyramid of massive exploitation on all levels of poor from neighboring countries - confirmed by colleagues living there long term.

Its great little bubble, but not of democracy, or freedom, far from it, rather some moebius-esque utopia of few elites above everybody else. They are also openly racist & xenophobic in their laws, ie in immigration they have to maintain exactly same racial/ethnic split as in the past, so people are granted citizenship on quotas of their ethnicity / skin color (so of course white people are not that welcome, just temporarily tolerated). If this is required to keep everybody in check and behaving nicely, I can easily skip that and raise my children away from such twisted panopticon.

You want an actual long term stable utmost free society for past 800 years and counting? Switzerland. People are nice and tolerant because they are nice and not from the fear of repressions on every step. 30% of residents are foreigners yet society doesn't boil in internal conflicts, I'd say by far the best managed immigration I ever saw. One has to experience it personally to understand the massive difference compared to most of the world. Tons of guns yet very little gun violence (compared to US non-existent). All aspects of society work at least as good or more often better than rest of Europe/world.

thaumaturgy3• 2 days ago

There's a glaring lie of omission when Singapore is cited as a "safe society" in a surveillance context without also mentioning that those same surveillance systems are used to aggressively suppress political dissent (https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/asia-and-the-pacific/sou...).

Super safe society, unless you happen to express disagreement with any part of it. Then, not so safe for you.

So I guess the question is, once America attains a sufficiently pervasive level of surveillance over its citizens, which people are you hoping will be in power forever?

voidUpdate• 2 days ago

Saying the UK is a "high trust society" is definitely an interesting choice

raxxorraxor2• 2 days ago

I don't think this is a refutation. You have narrowed the definition of an admittedly soft term like "high trust society" to be an expression of security or perceived security.

But more to the core of the definition of trust. Singapore isn't using trust, it uses control. Which in most contexts are opposed.

Surveillance isn't even important for the formation of a high trust society. On the contrary, with increased surveillance possibilities, formerly high trust societies seem to have degraded.

cicko• 2 days ago

Does making millions in profit from bitcoin while being a president or getting private jets from other countries count into that?

akk0• 2 days ago

That sounds great! Maybe not so great for the occasional person sentenced to death for selling weed, but that's just the price of freedom.

pibaker2• 2 days ago

Japan is not a surveillance society.

UK is not a high trust society. If anything the most trusting British people are likely found in places with the least surveillance.

JKCalhoun2• 1 day ago

"You know how they deal with crime down there?" Crosby asked me.

"Nope."

"They just don't have any crime down there. 'Papa' Monzano's made crime so damn unattractive, nobody even thinks about it without getting sick. I heard you can lay a billfold in the middle of a sidewalk and you can come back a week later and it'll be right there, with everything still in it."

"Um."

"You know what the punishment is for stealing something?"

"Nope."

"The hook," he said. "No fines, no probation, no thirty days in jail. It's the hook. The hook for stealing, for murder, for arson, for treason, for rape, for being a peeping Tom. Break a law—any damn law at all—and it's the hook. Everybody can understand that, and San Lorenzo is the best-behaved country in the world."

"What is the hook?"

"They put up a gallows, see? Two posts and a cross beam. And then they take a great big kind of iron fishhook and they hang it down from the cross beam. Then they take somebody who's dumb enough to break the law, and they put the point of the hook in through one side of his belly and out the other and they let him go—and there he hangs, by God, one damn sorry law-breaker."

Cat's Cradle

tchalla• 2 days ago

Oh yes you can … for “national interest”, for “against China” etc etc

daymanstep• 2 days ago

My counter argument is that you only need 1% of the population to be bad apples in order to destroy a high trust society. Hell, even a single serial killer on the loose will make a lot of people too afraid to walk alone at night. One or two burglars can be responsible for 50% of the burglaries in a town. And so in and so forth.

The other problem you have is that a lot of crime tends to be financially rewarding, so if left unchecked it will tend to grow over time as the criminals get richer and expand their operations.

For all those reasons, you need surveillance to catch criminals and restore trust even if 99% of the population are good people.

wewtyflakes2• 2 days ago

On-point surveillance by people would be a good start; I do not see why it needs to start with endless surveillance by machines run by a private company.

SOLAR_FIELDS3• 2 days ago

The thing is I think if you give people the choice between a 0.001% chance of getting murdered on the street or a 100% chance of being surveilled 24/7 you will find that people will take their chances with the murderers

watwut2• 2 days ago

It is not about percentage of the population, but about whether the bad actor rise to the top.

The other problem you have is that a lot of crime tends to be financially rewarding, so if left unchecked it will tend to grow over time as the criminals get richer and expand their operations.

It already happened. The president, Miller, Karp, Thiel, Zuckerberg, Musk, hell the company named Flock are all bad actors who got richer over time and expanded their operations.

adrian_b2• 1 day ago

I see no problem with every private citizen having a video camera that records everything around their home or business, and when a crime happens the police can solicit the recordings.

Also it is fine if such a private surveillance system alerts the police when a crime is in progress.

What I find completely unacceptable is to have such ubiquitous surveillance means that are networked and available to the police or other such institutions for real-time surveillance of whatever they choose. It is absolutely certain that whoever will have access to the centralized control will abuse of this power.

I have grown up in a country occupied by foreign invaders, who have installed in power a government of their choice, who have robbed and murdered whomever they wanted, and then for almost a half of century nobody could do anything against them, because everybody was under surveillance, so that no opposition could be organized.

Americans do not really understand how frustrating it is to live in this way and they fail to recognize how quickly their country becomes more and more similar to the former "communist" countries.

datsci_est_2015• 1 day ago

My counter argument is that you only need 1% of the population to be bad apples in order to destroy a high trust society.

Counter-counter argument, it doesn’t actually matter what the proportion is, rather the perception of it. The likelihood of non-white collar crime affecting your life has dropped dramatically in all of our lifetimes. The chance of being affected by white collar crime has skyrocketed - who hasn’t been solicited for a class action lawsuit?

Which leads me to my hotter take: America isn’t turning into a low trust society because of crime and brown people (white replacement theory), it’s turning into a low trust society because of white collar crime, grifting, private equity takeovers, naked corruption, prosperity gospel, fuck-you got-mine, exurban development, oversized car culture, etc etc etc.

Edit: furthermore, it’s in these psychopathic fuckrats best interest that people believe that there is a “1% bad apple” phenomenon to justify their domestic security panopticon, and they would be laughing all the way to the bank that there are so many suckers who buy into their propaganda if they weren’t so high from huffing their own ketamine, cocaine, adderall, and HGH-laced farts that they believe their own bull shit.

It’s like blockchain but for racism, and it’s genius.

JKCalhoun2• 1 day ago

"My counter argument is that you only need 1% of the population to be bad apples…"

"For all those reasons, you need surveillance to catch criminals and restore trust…"

We're making a huge assumption here that surveillance takes it down to less than 1%. You'd hate to be trading freedom for nothing at all.

CurtMonash• 2 days ago

Why do you think David Brin's Transparent Society proposals can't work?

pclowes5• 1 day ago

Because it is naive to think that the people with the power of absolute surveillance would ever permit “sousveillance”. People already survey atrocities committed by regimes and reporting them does less and less every year.

Camera towers may benefit the populace in the short term, but eventually they will be used as a choke collar.

Think of every story, historical or fiction, where a rebellion or resistance struggled against entrenched power. Now imagine that with constant surveillance everywhere. The story gets really short: “then they were all rounded up”.

anal_reactor• 2 days ago

People always want high trust societies.

Disagree. High-trust can only exist in the absence of class disparity. You're not going to steal from your neighbor if your neighbor has exactly the same things as you do. You will if he's substantially richer. At the same time, you want to be as rich yourself as possible. Can't have both though.

Countries like Japan or Singapore aren't high-trust societies, they're high-enforcement societies. That's different. In my eyes, high-trust society is a society where law enforcement isn't needed because people self-police because they value the collective, not because of fear of punishment.

A friend of mine never locks his car because he trusts that nobody will steal it even though he knows that once the car is stolen, the chance of recovery is zero because the police simply ignore such reports. This is high-trust society.

47282847• 2 days ago

This discussion reminds me of a valuable and yet rarely discussed book by Bruce Schneier, Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive.

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

pclowes5• 1 day ago

This looks very interesting, thank you for the recommendation.

pandaman2• 1 day ago

I am fine without a "high trust" society (which, apparently, cannot exist with people seeing each other in public), the society where people don't commit crime without any fear of the repercussions would be a great start.

pclowes5• 1 day ago

There are high trust communities all over America. Fewer every year.

nikkwong5• 2 days ago

Even with all this said, surveillance like this is certainly going to be one of the best ways to catch criminals and reduce crime over the long term. I hope the misgivings that we have around Flock won't close the door to us ever using this type of technology, in some way, in the future.

nohell• 2 days ago

Catching a few criminals is not worth taking everyone's privacy by force.

JumpCrisscross• 2 days ago

Catching a few criminals is not worth taking everyone's privacy by force

This drifts into truism with "few," "criminals," "everyone" and "by force" left so vaguely defined.

OsrsNeedsf2P• 2 days ago

I spent 3 years in Korea, and that's probably where I will go back to retire after I exit. Crime there is extremely low - partially because of the cameras, but mainly because they're on top of it. They're able to spend time on every criminal, which deters anyone from breaking the law.

Contrary to SF, where I've called the police and provided evidence for an open and shut case, and the cops shrugged their shoulders. Flock cameras won't fix that.

nikkwong5• 2 days ago

I used to live in china, which is by all means the dystopian surveillance state that we're all afraid that this could lead to. Don't misinterpret this as an advocation for that type of living; but it's simply interesting to note that when you ask any chinese if they would like to go back to the world of 30 years ago in terms of surveillance, essentially 100% of them will say no; they like it the way things are and not having to be afraid of being victim to any crime. Yes yes, a bird born in a cage thinks flying is an illness. I realize the irony in bringing this up. Yet it's just hard to ignore when you see delivery drivers leaving packages outside of buildings on the street in the most insecure manner and not having a single soul daring to touch it if they are not the intended recipient.

At the same time, on HN we are not even having a conversation about what a sort of tradeoff between surveillance and safety. I live in Seattle, actually just had ~$400 in buckets of paint stolen off my porch just yesterday. Yes, buckets of paint. I had a break in 2 months ago, and that was one of many over the years. This is in U-District, a high crime, but also oddly affluent neighborhood. I absolutely detest the fact that criminals run around the city with impunity committing crime after crime. It makes everyone's life here just a bit more miserable—there are so many people that don't want to move to the city because of the crime; there are all these invisible costs we are paying because of it.

So to think that cameras are such a no-go just doesn't make sense to me. Certainly there are ways to do it ethically. I think south korea is a great example, as well as many european countries. Honestly, I think it's just bizarre that every time Flock gets brought up on HN we all flip the bird to the supposed surveillance state without even discussing the tradeoffs.

pjc503• 2 days ago

American police seem to be a uniquely bad combo of false positives and false negatives. Failing to go after actual crime while also capable of using disproportionate violence in incidents that don't warrant it.

wewtyflakes2• 2 days ago

A society glued together with cameras rather than people, is shallow.

SOLAR_FIELDS3• 2 days ago

You will never find anyone who is against these cameras saying that they don’t reduce crime. Of course they do. The problem is what you give up to have that is far, far more valuable and we can point to the “Ben Franklin” quote here about those who would give up freedom for safety deserve neither.

energy123• 2 days ago

The problem is the negative feedback between crime (and crime visibility through media), and the acceptance of surveillance in order to stop crime.

People really don't like public safety crime. Not only will they vote for surveillance, they will vote for public safety authoritarians like Bukele just to stop it.

They are thinking: What good is your abstract notion of freedom if I cannot leave my house at night, and I have to be hyper vigilant of violence?

I don't know the solutions to this. The media clearly plays a big role in this, but regulation of media and social media is its own can of worms.

One thing I am quite confident about is that actually stopping public safety crime without surveillance must be a priority, otherwise it's cart before horse.

SXX4• 2 days ago

Do you also want to install some surveillance software on your phone and laptop so it can watch what you do 100% of time?

You know in future it will really help to catch some criminals stealing copyrighted IP, watching some illegal types of porn or using some sanctioned Chinese LLM.

rcxdude• 2 days ago

Is it? In the UK we have a huge density of CCTV cameras and often you can barely get the police to write a crime report, let alone look at the CCTV. It doesn't really seem like the bottleneck.

preg_match4• 1 day ago

This assumes the police even want to solve crimes. I'm not convinced they do. Everything I've seen points to them wanting to do the absolute bare minimum to not be disbanded, and that's it. Their primary goal is to get paid and go home. Well, solving crimes interferes with the "go home" part, so they don't. Normally, in a free market, you would fail if you can't do your primary purpose. Police have zero accountability to anyone, including the voter. They're systemically allowed to fail, and encouraged financially to fail.

No surprise then when they fail.

nikkwong5• 1 day ago

I think this relies on anecdata rather than real data. Police obviously do solve crimes, if they didn't, the US would look a lot more like Haiti. They could be solving more, with better technology, but that doesn't seem like a discussion that we're willing to have on HN.

elAhmo• 2 days ago

Losing credibility means someone had it. I don't think anyone thinks Flock had any credibility. This was known from the beginning.

SXX4• 2 days ago

What we really need is to journalists and cybersecurity community to use these systems to track few hundred of politicians and publish the results. Just like some crooked cops already used it to stalk their exes.

We know how much some billionares hate their jets tracked even though they have small army of bodyguards and three letter agencies spending budget of small country protecting them.

Lets see how comfortable much less protected US politicians gonna be with a fact that everyone knows what time they leave their house by minute, what routes they take and where their cars gonna be.

abhinai• 2 days ago

I respect ACLU but this article seems a fair bit biased. They're stretching the imagination quite a bit in some of their examples. Seems to me that someone has already made up their mind and are now looking for any example to support their narrative.

I'd love for them to build a case more impartially and drop the activist nature of the language they use.

EraYaN• 2 days ago

I mean being activist is sort of the whole point of the ACLU? And besides it's not like this would be the first time stuff like this happens. You don't have to imagine it, just learn history.

alfiedotwtf• 2 days ago

Everyone in the comments so hopeful, but here’s the reality - nothing will happen, they’ll get more money from more local governments signing up, and industry groups that have problems with protesters like forestry, and everyone will go about their day without anything changing moving onto the next rage bait.

trolleski• 2 days ago

Lies are the norm for BigTech. BigLies. So why should it play any different?

thebiglebrewski• 1 day ago

It always makes me so sad to see companies like this where the founders don't think twice about what they're building and just go straight for the cash grab! Can't we use technology for good and not to build a dystopian surveillance state?

johnea• 1 day ago

Flock had credibility?

user00005• 1 day ago

Flock Safety building.

<https://www.openstreetmap.org/?#map=18/33.816682/-84.497494>

Flock Credibility Lost as It Repeatedly Lies to City Councils, Police, & Public

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