I'm in the PNW and they put Flock cameras up in my area recently. Nobody likes them (libs or cons), and we've seen some rather creative approaches to uh...disabling them. One person took a pipe cutter to the mount and spirited the whole unit away, another apparently fired a shotgun slug through it, somebody else looks like they used it to relieve their anger problems with a metal pipe.
Some guy I once met in a bar told me that he liked to mix a 1:1 solution of elmer's glue and water, put it into a spray bottle, set the nozzle to "stream", then squirt it all over the lens of a traffic camera near his house which he found offensive. His logic was that this made more sense than destroying the camera, because he could do it over and over and over: the company operating it would have to send someone out to clean the lens off each time, which would probably cost them more money than the camera was worth.
Is it good for society to disable traffic cameras? Here in Sweden, traffic camera is used exclusively to reduce traffic speed on roads where the maximum speed is too fast for installing traffic bumps, with an expected effect of reducing traffic speed by around 20-30%. They are generally only installed on 60-90km/h roads, around road maintenance/construction sites, and in tunnels. They active when the radar detects speeds of 5km above the maximum. (The reduction in speed happens regardless if the camera is functional or not, since it is primarily a psychological effect).
Sweden also have traffic monitors that monitor highways around cities, border exists and tunnels, and also license plate readers for toll roads and bridges (also often used for parking). Those two generally have a much higher privacy cost than traffic cameras.
When the cameras become a revenue stream for a city it is not a good thing.
Cameras have been installed to fine cars running red lights. The city then reduces the length of the yellow to catch more people and offset the high cost of the cameras. The shortened yellows cause increased crashes and fatalities.
Net-net the track record in the states is not great.
Here in Seattle the traffic cameras are not used to limit speed, but to monitor intersections for red-light violations. The glue-squirting fellow in my anecdote objected to the fact that the for-profit corporation which builds and operates these cameras gets a cut of the revenue from the citations they issue. He felt that it was one thing to enforce the law, and quite another thing to run a profitable business doing it.
That makes more sense. Traffic accidents should not be a profit center, and placing cameras where it makes the most money is unlikely to align with places where it has the biggest impact on reducing fatal accidents. The Vision Zero goal that Sweden has is often cited as a guiding rule for designing the road system, including the use of measures like road bumps and traffic cameras. Giving money from the fines to a for-profit corporation seems fairly obvious that it will create perverse incentives.
> Is it good for society to disable traffic cameras?
Its going to be unpopular but yes i think so. Traffic cameras, besides very few use cases, are completely useless (just like speed limits in general). Plus it's a huge temptation for local authorities to turn it into a cash cow and put it anywhere they please regardless of necessity. Italy is rife with those for example.
Speed cameras help really little with preventing accidents unless we're talking about 200 at 100. Put in cameras that detect tailgating/not maintaining enough distance relative to speed.
The Swedish traffic agency, in combination with the health department, openly publish accident data for every road. Accidents and their outcomes are public data and has been so for a long time. The location of traffic cameras is also public and so is the date when they got installed. Everything is open to the public, and gps applications are allowed to both have the data and warn drivers.
The accident rate from before to after the installation of a camera has an average reduction of around 25% in reducing deaths in traffic. If someone don't believe it they can download the public data themselves and redo the math.
Sweden also do not have traffic cameras on highways, most likely because they are ineffective in reducing deadly outcomes at those speeds. The chance of surviving a frontal collision at 100km/h is highly unlikely, so the cost of installation a camera is better spent on roads with lower maximum speeds where the reduction in average speed actually have an effect on outcomes.
> The accident rate from before to after the installation of a camera has an average reduction of around 25% in reducing deaths in traffic
Try to forbid movement in the area and you can reach 100% reduce in deaths.
Statistics and data doesn't tell you the whole picture and often skewed.
Most crimes in Sweden are committed by "refugees" by huge margin, but good luck doing something about it or let alone talk about it publicly. But hey, lets install another camera to have everyone to slow down and exacerbate traffic conditions further down.
Reducing speed by 20-30% at scale results in a very large loss of man-years of lives in the form of sitting in a car. Reduced earning capacity, lost time with their families, waking up earlier and risks to health associated with reduced sleep, less theoretical throughput of roadways, reduced money for education/food/childcare when they accidently go too fast for a moment and are fined, lack of discretion in issuing tickets for bona fide emergencies, people suddenly slowing down before camera causing accidents, etc.
The obvious win in places like the US is that being pulled over is one of the most dangerous thing that ever happens to the common person, as they are exposed to a psychopath with a gun who is trained that the most important thing is to optimize every interaction to maximize his chance of 'making it home to his family' and if a policeman shoots everything that moves (up to and including, falling acorns) because he 'fears for his life' he will largely get away with it. So it is a nice alternative to that.
Honestly, feels like the company is within their right to press charges here? Dude is disabling the equipment that they use to turn revenue, no?
Don't agree with the company, but I don't find a suit here ridiculous. If my job put up cameras, and my form of protest was to deface and disable them, I'd get fired. This isn't a job, it's government, but it's similar in my head. The people with the authority to do something did it.
I don't think this counts as property damage or vandalism because nothing is damaged or vandalized.
Part of putting shit in public is that it now has to interact with the public. If you want your stuff pristine, I would think you should not put it in public.
Maybe the law disagrees with me here, and it probably does because this country bends over backwards for companies, but that's how I see it.
I live in the Bay Area and went to my Nextdoor because I was thinking of seeing if there's much anti-Flock sentiment, and (not surprisingly for Nextdoor), most people seem to think anti-camera people are paranoid, or have something to hide, and wish they were installed in more places to solve the (non-existent) raging crime issues, or speeding, or god knows what.
I shouldn't have expected much more, though, to be fair. There's a reason I don't use nextdoor.
The funny thing is the people calling anti-Flock people "paranoid". Well, I don't believe in dash cams or ringing my house with surveillance cameras and peering at the footage all day and all night. I think _those_ are the paranoid ones. What happened to just living your life and not worrying about everything?
Which is better than Flock's "Transparency" Report. I live in WA, ex-Flock employee, and in my County, half of the agencies with Flock agreements are not on their Transparency portal.
And at the very least - why can't you search the Transparency Portal? You have to try each and every agency name. Let's try https://transparency.flocksafety.com/ ...
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<Code>NoSuchKey</Code>
<Message>The specified key does not exist.</Message>
<Key>index.html</Key>
<RequestId>[redacted]</RequestId>
<HostId>[redacted]</HostId>
</Error>
> And at the very least - why can't you search the Transparency Portal? You have to try each and every agency name.
Was it different in the past? It seems like it'd be beneficial to Flock and their customers to make obtaining this information as obtuse as possible, while maintaining the vaguest appearance of "transparency". If they could charge you $10 per search, they probably would.
As an aside - can I ask why you left Flock? I assumed that the people who would've wanted to work there would be fully invested into the idea. What changed your mind?
> As an aside - can I ask why you left Flock? I assumed that the people who would've wanted to work there would be fully invested into the idea. What changed your mind?
The Flock of my recruitment process would be a lot less problematic. There was discussion of the obvious, the surveillance "state". But everything was a high ground of ethics and legality, ideas were supposedly run through groups to discuss "not just whether we could, but whether we should", protecting individuals whose data was collected by Flock but had no safety or LE purpose, retention, sharing controls ...
... the reality was much more "mask off". "Eliminate all crime, using Flock". Very Airbnb'ish. "We know your jurisdiction doesn't allow you to share this data. It's not our job to enforce that on our platform; if you're sharing it, that's not our concern - you'll still have access to all the tools to do so." Sales worked with Agencies who weren't allowed to gather data themselves, weren't directly allowed to partner with Flock for cameras, were asked where they saw or believed they'd most want said cameras, and Flock would aggressively work with businesses, HOAs, other government entities in those areas, and get them onboard, and then go back to the Agency saying "Hey, guess what, we know you're not allowed to collect this, but these customers are, and you're able to share their data."
That didn't sit well with me - there was nothing actively illegal Flock were doing, but they were openly helping Agencies flout the spirit of laws constraining them while staying within the letter (in the above examples, HOAs and others would often get deeply subsidized, at least, installations, knowing that Flock would be able to get a bigger contract with an Agency that would otherwise have no over very limited means of working with them).
These things, coupled with Garrett's "vision" that, he emphasized repeatedly, was his literal vision, "Eliminate all crime with Flock", were too much (and I think lead to some of their even more troublesome initiatives now, like "Have AI look for potential suspicious vehicle movements, even without a reported incident, and have it alert officers to go investigate in realtime", with talk of that being extended to conversations and audio).
I live in a county where the county seat is <15k people (<40k in the entire county). There are two camera locations listed on deflock - four cameras total, since they face both directions. In the past month, I’ve discovered an additionally six locations (twelve cameras), all of which show signs of having been very recently installed.
I went to add them to Deflock, but their process requires an OSM account. I wasn’t able to do that on the side of the road, and haven’t gotten back to it yet.
About 40k new cameras each year from what I have seen.
If you find yourself with some time, there is now a DeFlock app that helps with mapping. It also includes locations where people suspect there might be a camera, though that is limited to about a third of the states so far.
I don't understand if flock deployment in Lowe/Home Depot is because margins are so low it is the only way to survive, or margins so high that they can afford such a program just to eek out a tiny bit more sales from the collected consumer info.
Either way it doesn't make sense to me why hardware stores are the biggest private use case.
Neither. It’s because Home Depot/Lowes loses billions of dollars a year due to theft, both organized and petty. Just like they have security cameras in the store, they have security cameras in the parking lot.
There are a lot of Flock supporters out there. In my neighborhood, homeowners can volunteer to put Flock cameras on their property, and a number of people are doing this.
It's like having a Ring doorbell and sharing the feed with the police, which is also pretty popular in some areas. If you trust your local police to ethically fight crime, why not help them out?
I feel worrying about security cameras is primordial mammal fear of being tracked and eaten. Like fear of vaccine poisoning, a vestige of long ago threats.
The wealthy live different than you and me. A friends friends wife works at the facebook head quarters. Zuckerberg has a armed security escort when he walks between buildings. They're traveling around San Francisco, New York, London the same way you or I would travel around Mogadishu.
The reality is these guys are scared of us. And that's behind inane airport security, militarization of police, the ICE raids.
Years and years ago read a heretic economist that comment that highly unequal societies spend huge amount of money on security. Enough it has negative effects on their economy. This is really not a good thing for the rest of us.
And yet they drive away in their GM/Ford/Nissan/Tesla/Any car/truck with its connected media unit and telemetry gathering infotainment systems and think “This is fine”.
Hey it's a start. Get people together who don't like Flock cameras and tell them about pulling the modem out of their vehicle and you'll get some bites.
Is local jamming or removing their antennas a viable strategy? Seems like it could be easier to just make them unable to phone home, rather than trying to surgically rip out the bundle of hardware and software responsible for it while leaving everything else intact.
Vehicles differ. Disconnecting the antenna is easiest in some. Removing a fuse is sufficient in some. Disconnecting the relevant module is not surgical in some. Some nag if the antenna is disconnected.
People are probably unaware of the telemetry on their vehicle.
But this is a good point, people get upset when government is perceived to screw them over and not upset enough when the private sector does it. In practice, the private sector screws over the public quite a bit.
Might be logical. The government can throw me in jail, steal my stuff (aka civil
forfeiture), or (as we found out recently) tear gas my kids all without any penalty. In some situations, the government decides they are allowed to kill you.
Companies at least risk significant consequences if they start tear gassing children. For the most part the worst they can do is screw you out of some money, which is not great, but obviously better than imprisonment and the like.
Because doing something evil and then lying about it isn't any better than doing something evil and being honest.
Everyone with even a quarter of a brain can recognize that the extreme data collection is a ticking time bomb. This WILL be leaked. This WILL be used to deny people's rights. This WILL lead to financial loss for people.
They have been collecting data since 2014, with some car manufacturers as early as 2010. Also, average age of vehicle isn’t a good metric when a lot of vehicles in the US are registered but never driven.
The statistics I linked were Average Age of Automobiles and Trucks in Operation in the United States. The title said in operation not registered. The sources suggested market research not registration records.
How many vehicles are registered but never driven? According to what source?
The statistics said the average age of light vehicles was 12.8 years. The average age of passenger cars was 14.5 years. And Consumer Reports said 32 of 44 brands offered some form of wireless data connection in 2018.[1] This implied 12 brands or more offered vehicles without wireless data connections.
"On Thursday, a Skagit County Superior Court judge ruled that pictures taken by Flock cameras in the cities of Sedro-Woolley and Stanwood qualify as public records, and therefore must be released as required by the state’s Public Records Act, court records show."
I do think that's an important distinction though; if I have a camera and record a public space, that's not an issue. If the government sets up a bunch of cameras, that's an issue, whether or not it's ICE, the FBI, or someone else using the cameras. I can't imagine the government will set up cameras and do non-scary things with it.
No need to imagine. There are several cases already of these buffoons in law enforcement doing scary things. The Institute for Justice (IJ) is one of the organizations taking these cases on and who also has suggestions for how to go about combating this stuff. I’m sure most here are also familiar with Louis Rossmann; he’s also been beating the drum on this stuff locally and in Colorado.
Same ones who probably will develop fast homomorphic encryption and distribute it to the entire world, completely oblivious to the eventual heat death of the universe.
We aren't at the point where it's unavoidable though. Even if we assume that its impossible to dodge random onstar/sirius bloatware crap that probably tracks you, you can definitely still buy a car that doesn't have a 5g wireless modem, 360-degree webcam coverage, mandatory automatic software updates, and ass-warming seats locked behind DRM that forces you to have an online account linked to your credit card.
Lot of new motorcycles don't. Although sadly many new ones now have bluetooth and smart phone connectivity which even if not used can be used as an identifier.
Not the right point to take away. The useful observation is that visibility is key to people understanding how their rights are being violated. Unfortunately this lesson is mostly useful to bad actors. If you're going to install surveillance cameras, don't make them look like surveillance cameras (unless they're part of a theft deterrent system).
This seems like an unsupported assumption. Lots of people like them. Anyone who wants policing to be effective and cares about crime / public safety would like them to have the best tools.
That seems like the general mantra that's currently being adapted to justify all sorts of power grabs and expansions of surveillance all over the world. "We would really rather not do this, honestly! But the crisis is just too pressing, and has been left unaddressed for too long. You all just couldn't behave, and now we're going to have to do it the painful way. This is just what is needed, it's the natural outcome."
But surely, it's not the entire world that's suddenly experiencing these waves of perceived crises, right? The statistics to justify tough-on-crime enforcement are useful for the proponents, but it's not the statistics that prompted them to act. They have their own reasons, and some marketable justifications just happened to be lying around. If they weren't there, they would find some other numbers or some other category of criminals that must be urgently pursued, anything to justify the power grabs. Reducing crime won't stop them.
makes sense… like NYPD has 11 billion dollar budget and NYC is the safest place on the planet Earth, we just need the same model in the entire USA and we good. Local/State taxes should be raised to something reasonable like 25-30% - it is public safety after all :)
It hasnt been ignored or denied. What's happening is some people's minds are detaching from reality, and it's our duty to snap them out of their delusion.
The reality, which might I remind everyone does not care about their opinion, is this: crime has been trending down for decades. Police budgets have been increasing for decades. Many police departments are over funded.
The fallacy here is that giving police access to more tools makes policing better.
It doesn't. Simply giving the police more stuff doesn't garuantee they will be more effective. They might be LESS effective, if they, say, have a culture of abusing their tools.
"On Thursday, a Skagit County Superior Court judge ruled that pictures taken by Flock cameras in the cities of Sedro-Woolley and Stanwood qualify as public records, and therefore must be released as required by the state’s Public Records Act, court records show."
This video by Tom Lehto talks more about that court case that illustrates citizens can legally do FOIA requests for traffic cameras (e.g. Flock): https://youtu.be/1vQn4MWBln0
The example of Seattle Police dashcam and body camera footage may be interesting. When those things were relatively new, ten years ago or so, someone started filing daily public records requests for footage from all 911 dispatches (among other things). They wanted to build their own database of the theoretically public footage. The SPD complained that the overhead of redacting all that footage would be impossible. Eventually the legislature clarified the status and tightened the request rules, so now you have to request footage for a specific incident, and you may have to pay a redaction fee. [0]
ten years ago or so, someone started filing daily public records requests for footage from all 911 dispatches (among other things).
I know someone who until very recently worked for a major city's police department. He said there were people who would request every video they could think of, and it was his team's job to scrub through the video and blur/block out faces of children and things like that.
He said his team was absolutely overwhelmed with requests from randos all over the country requesting things in bulk. Even if his team (~10 people, full-time) didn't take the extra step to redact some images, they simply couldn't keep up with it. Essentially, a FOIA DDOS.
The stress was too much, and he left for a different career.
(Before anyone asks if the PD imposed a fee for video, I don't know. It's possible the fee wasn't high enough, or maybe there's a state law regulating the fee. But I'm not sure it matters since there are plenty of cranks in the world with very deep pockets.)
It is a very major city. The vast majority of people on the planet have heard of it.
I can only speculate that it wants to put more cops on the street, instead of paying civilians to do paperwork.
The real world isn't like TV. Like everyone else, police departments have to work within a budget. People don't just magically appear from off-screen to do more work.
I think someone even tried automating the redactions then posting to YouTube.
It’s an interesting case that pits privacy against transparency.
I absolutely want the cops to wear bodycams and I’d prefer they can’t even turn them off. But they also need to protect the privacy of victims, suspects, and witnesses. So they can’t just live stream to the Internet either.
How much is the redaction fee? How much would it cost to just pay it for everything?
Florida is a "sunshine state" [0] when it comes to public records which is why it's legal:
- to have mugshots and arrest records posted online
- which in turn leads to "attractive felon" style websites where mugshots are rated.
I'm generally for more privacy while at the same time getting why people push for transparency. Either way you get downstream and often unintended consequences.
Redactions are necessary to protect innocent members of the public. Going through all the footage from every officer every single day to perform these redactions would require a huge amount of manpower. That may change with new technology, but until it can be automated reliably, the WA legislature got this right.
With shit like traffic cameras, I don't think redactions are necessary, although it would be nice if all license plates were automatically redacted and only accessible with a warrant. Turning the cameras off is an even better idea.
So cops need a warrant to even be present at a crime scene to ask the witness / victim what happened? Obviously not. And since not, why would they need a warrant to record their conversation with the witness / victim?
I think it would generally be a good thing for cops kicking down doors to have working body cameras; the state's monopoly on violence is easily abused, and should be carefully monitored.
But if the cops get the wrong address for their no-knock warrant, kick down my door, and find me jerking off in my bedroom - I would prefer the footage not be made public.
They the controls do exist, just not at the capacity required to do it for literally every single hour of footage recorded by body cameras. Hence why they do respond to requests for specific incidents but not blanket or bulk requests.
If they had to do this for all footage then the police department would likely respond by decreasing field officer counts to reduce footage, as well as shift resources away from law enforcement activities and towards redacting the massive volume of footage.
Are you saying that a child in the car with their DUI parent deserves to be on a YouTube bodycam channel because cops have to appear uncensored in the same video? I genuinely don't understand how you could mean anything else, and that makes me think I misunderstood. I sure hope I did.
NO, the fact that you are hitting scalability problems to do a whole bunch of redacting is a solid indicator that this is going too far on surveillance data.
The only indicator that it was done right, is that the redactions are happening in real time at the camera, only the list of license plates that have full warrant cleared authority for should be leaving the camera itself. (or full car description: color, make, model, scratches, time of day)
Otherwise there is a private company with a bunch of extra-legal tracking information they will monetize utterly illegally
The scaling problem of redacting video only applies to body cameras and I think they definitely aren't "going too far". Body cameras have greatly benefited society. The processes effectively restricting the rate at which you can file FOIA requests are entirely reasonable given the need to redact things to protect innocent people.
Someone should use AI to request such a large amount of data that it DDoSes the whole system. Unfortunately I feel like that would result in traffic camera data just being removed from FOIA rather than removed from use.
If I recall, the FOIA allows government agencies to charge you for the work of processing your request if you're requesting more than N pages or it takes more than a couple hours of work to fulfill the request. I'd be careful about a maliciously compliant response to such a thing. That said, we live in a boring world where they'd probably just respond by threatening you with a felony hacking prosecution for attempting to take down their system.
Washington State Public Records Act has no fee if you simply want to "inspect" the records (bodycams are the named exception); they can charge "actual" costs for storage, but presumably Flock stores the data, so... They cannot charge for salaries, etc.
You can make your own copy of records for free; if you want them to make copies, they can charge actual costs.
I don't think that would be legal... you'd have to get a judge to reverse the previous decision that established the cameras are public record. They would probably just turn them off instead.
What did they think would happen? Installing surveillance systems to monitor people is acceptable, as long as they're only used against the majority? I don't understand the logic here.
What kind of innane logic are you using here?! Yes, if the systems are installed for a reason approved by the public, and then they're used for a different reason, people don't like that.
That is rarely the case that they are “approved by the public” in anything even remotely close to a legitimate process. In cases like, was it Denver, where the city council voted against the approval of the $250,000 contract to surveil everyone’s movements, for the mayor to only immediately use his discretionary spending limit of up to $150,000 (or so) to approve a presumably smaller scope of surveillance.
In several other cities it has also led to all kinds of resistance by city councils and mayors in what can only be called an odd resistance against its own populace and constituents.
At least it seems that maybe something good will come of it when local people get more engaged and pay more attention and maybe even run for office against the corrupt narcissists of society that usually hold offices in local politics because people have not paid attention for a very long time.
Do you know your sheriff? Your city/county council members? The city manager? The mayor?
When you look at the deflock.me map and are astonished at how many cameras there are, you can thank people not paying attention in local politics and who their sheriff is, and you can thank the traitors at YC leadership who brought about this Orwellian system.
Flock is a bad actor and untrustworthy (misleading departments and officials about how data is shared/accessed, literally reinstalling cameras that cities have demanded to be taken down). Regardless of whether the local municipality wants surveillance or not, Flock is not a trustworthy company to buy it from.
Dear God I hate this particular breed of techbros. These people don't give a damn about democracy, about human rights or anything else other than their stab at entering the history books in a "positive" light...
> misleading departments and officials about how data is shared/accessed
Many times this isn't misleading, per se, but nudge nudge wink wink. "We trust you to follow your own data privacy policy. It's not our job to police how access to your data is configured." In Washington, for example, there is data that LE cannot collect, and LE cannot pay someone to collect directly for them to bypass that...
... but if someone just so happens to ALREADY be collecting it, they can pay to access it.
I think this is a case of, tools used to fight one type of crime are being used to fight another type of crime that disrupting the community. Kind of an unforeseen consequences situation.
This type of use and expansion of scope was totally foreseeable by anyone paying attention to history. It always starts as some targeted thing, then it becomes the path of least resistance for similar subsequent things as the barrier to entry is extremely low.
Exactly. Same goes for expansion of presidential powers. It’s all fun and games as long as your “good” team controls the executive, but there will come a time when bad guy takes over. A good system of government limits the impact any single bad player might have.
> It always starts as some targeted thing, then it becomes the path of least resistance for similar subsequent things as the barrier to entry is extremely low.
This new technology will improve existing procedures. How can you oppose it?
This new procedure will use existing technologies. How can you oppose it?
In my country you'd have to get a warrant. You'll get pretty much carte blanche for an Amber Alert but the judge isn't going to let you hunt down brown people.
But I guess if you elect judges pretty much all bets are off, no? Just find yourself a card carrying MAGA judge willing to sign off.
Some states elect state judges. Some states appoint state judges. Federal judges are appointed. Appointed judges in the US and other countries show the same problems as elected judges.
The appointed federal judges in the US are nominated by a political President, and confirmed by a simple majority in a two-party-system Senate, and serve for life. They have (unsurprisingly) become quite political, with either party appointing judges who'd be likely to judge in their favour.
This is not at all comparable to appointed judges in other countries, where politicians usually don't have any input on the appointment process. Usually they are chosen by the current judges at that level, or by an entity like a bar association.
After all, how can you have a Trias Politica if the three branches aren't independent?
Some governments reject separation of powers. Some countries have politicians select judges openly. Some countries' politicians worked around or subverted the systems intended to prevent politicians influencing judge selection.
Appointment is the most common method of selecting lower- and higher-court judges in common-law countries, and for supreme and constitutional courts in civil- and mixed-system countries. In most countries, this appointment is by the executive, but there are systems that assign the minister of justice and members of the judiciary a role in the appointment process.[1]
This is the most foreseeable consequence I can imagine. It’s up there with “When I throw this baseball where will it land?”. It shouldn’t even require conscious thought.
Specifically interesting is the section "State and local law enforcement agencies may not provide nonpublicly available personal information about an individual..." which puts police in a bind with Flock data: if the data is public, anyone can request it (including ICE) and they have to provide it to all comers. If they declare it not to be subject to public records request, then they also can't share it with ICE -- which is outside their control in practice, since Flock independently sells access to AI summaries of the data. In the face of this contradiction, turning the things off seems to be the only way to stay legal until the courts get done chewing on this.
The government does not enjoy constitutional rights. Constitutional rights ensure that the federal government cannot take certain actions against individuals.
It's pretty simple: People will tolerate surveillance technology if it promises to promote order and justice. People imagine them being instrumental in convicting murders, rapists, etc. ICE raids have been shown to be (I'm being generous here) sloppy and chaotic and seemingly targeting towards working people to grind towards a government-mandated quota - not the "bad guys" that plague our streets. Few are interested in a massive surveillance network to clamp down on what are essentially civil infraction of otherwise law-abiding and productive members of the community.
Who? I don't understand your logic either. I don't think anyone said this "is fine as long as it's used against the majority". Virtually every large city uses Flock. This is the norm.
They had never picked up a history book so they didn't realize that the systems they envisioned being used to stop the jackboot upon people they don't like would eventually be used to stomp people they do.
Back in a day, you did not have cameras yet, so one had to hire snitches. Luckily this is not the case anymore, as demonstrated by Chinese leading by an example:
Facts are no match for my ability to use short sighted emotion and motivated reasoning to convince myself it'll be different this time. /s
Kinda funny if you think about it, the snitches are cut from the same cloth as the people clamoring for more cameras, more jackboot. If anything they should be pissed about being cut out.
I agree with this. As a resident of a neighboring suburb to Redmond, I would have welcomed more automated cameras to cut down on street racing, package thefts, and car prowls. In fact I want all of the suburbs around me to implement this so that criminals can't just flee to another jurisdiction and escape justice.
> so that criminals can't just flee to another jurisdiction and escape justice.
I think it's a fair deal so long as you can't escape to Utah/Idaho/Colorado when you realize the dystopia you've created isn't the kind of place you want to raise a family.
Great idea: make it a crime to move away from Flock-laden neighborhoods once you put your name on a petition to have them installed. See how quickly they short-circuit.
Some generalized version would work great for to keep people from peddling all sorts of short sighted stuff. I have no idea how to do it. This sort of "must have skin in the game" criteria was what the founding fathers were trying to do with the property owning requirement (but that was so imperfect they started undermining it pretty much before the ink was dry).
Seattle is in such a tough spot. I lived there from 2001 to 2010 and left and then went back in 2018 or so and it looked like the homeless population had doubled, or tripled in the time since. And then I went back again after COVID and it was just sad. The entire downtown area is just homeless camps. There used to be a big beautiful Macy's department store on 4th Ave that's just all boarded up now. You can't browse around outside Westlake Center without being bombarded and accosted by aggressive panhandlers. Even the iconic Pike Place Market was overrun with druggies.
The entire city is so poorly run they just have no answers, and nobody can do anything about it. Pick something. Build more housing, do a basic income. Something, anything. But they can't. And their politics just let it keep getting worse and worse.
> The entire downtown area is just homeless camps.
This isn’t even remotely close to true.
> You can't browse around outside Westlake Center without being bombarded and accosted by aggressive panhandlers. Even the iconic Pike Place Market was overrun with druggies.
I live on Pike Street. There’s homeless, but it’s not “overrun” and for the year+half I’ve lived here I haven’t been “accosted by aggressive panhandlers”. These are areas with constant foot traffic.
Yes 3rd & Pike is bad, but it’s improved since then. Late at night it’s not the best—but it’s never been.
If this is truly your experience, I urge you to visit again. Seattle is a large and beautiful city with a lot to offer.
In general the homeless problem downtown has gotten better but a few hotspots are still bad, notably Chinatown/International District. I used to enjoy taking visitors there until about 5 years ago when a few Asians got their heads bashed in or shot around Chinatown and Belltown. It was a politically inconvenient time to highlight who exactly was attacking Asians, and the issue was swept under the rug. Now we just stay in Bellevue, which luckily seems to be getting all the new Asian small businesses.
I don't know why you're being downvoted. I've lived in the area for nearly 20 years and I agree that his description is far exaggerated. It was true in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic (when any eviction or forcible displacement of people was prohibited), but not since then. Today, the visibility of homeless encampments in Seattle is roughly the same as it was 20 years ago.
> The homeless encampment problem in Seattle today is roughly now back at the same level of problem we had 20 years ago.
See, this is wild to me. Seattle has a long-time notorious problem with Tent Cities and even now it's just completely normal. I remember The Jungle under I-5 at Beacon Hill was a big problem. I'm sure it still is.
"The Jungle" isn't at all the same now, and is mostly cleared out from its heyday in ca 2018.
The larger problem with "The Jungle" is that nobody can agree on what it means, and where it is. I used to live on Beacon Hill, and the way journalists used the phrase was all over the place. Incidents anywhere from the I-90/I-5 interchange to the camps under I-5 all the way south to Georgetown, to the camps up in the woods in the East Duwamish greenbelt were all called "The Jungle".
This sounds like the perspective of a beat-down Seattlite that thinks all the problems are just "normal". I lived there for a very long time, and have lived in several other major cities since then.
Seattle's problems are not "normal". And they should not be normalized by thinking this is just how it is. It is not that way in other places.
It sounds like your last visit was during the COVID-19 pandemic. Homeless encampment conditions in downtown Seattle and throughout the city have much improved since then. Today, visible homelessness is effectively the same as it was back in ~2005.
Deflecting is a fun game, but I won’t play it. I’m challenging your hyperbole here—on the other hand, you’re making assumptions about me.
Explain to me how “the entire downtown area is just homeless tents”. By all means bring some proof of Pike Place being “overrun with druggies”. Get real.
Walk from Pike Place Market, 1st and Pike, east up Pike St toward Capitol Hill. Count the number of homeless camps you see sitting on cardboard boxes in the middle of the sidewalks. All along Pike St, 3rd Ave, 4th Ave. And then count the number of SPD officers you see (ignoring the fanny-pack guys handing out naloxone). You'll get it.
I’m so glad you mention “going up Pike towards Capitol Hill” because I live right on the section where Cap Hill & First Hill starts.
My lived experience is that I could walk the length of Pike from Bellevue Ave towards the waterfront and see two-three tents at most. Homeless yes, but encampments? “Overrun”? “Tent city”?
It’s so easy to make hyperbolic statements and a pain to prove them wrong. I can see how you get away with spouting this nonsense—and people believe it.
Let me know if anyone wants a YouTube video or something, I’ll be glad to take a fun evening stroll and prove you wrong.
That street view was filmed taken two months ago, when it was still warm and nice out, so tent activity would've been at its peak.
I wish I had seen your post earlier because I literally walked that stretch of road earlier this evening -- a couple friends of mine from out of town are going to the Patti Smith show at the Paramount tonight and we had drinks nearby. No tents in sight though we did encounter someone walking around with a blanket wrapped around their head. But still, one probable homeless drug addict is hardly "overrun".
It's really not as you describe... I agree things were getting worse in ~2019 and then became way worse during the pandemic, but it's much different now.
In the interest of saving myself an hour of time uploading a video, I’ll attest that yes—that street view is as “average day on Pike” as it gets.
To be clear, there are homeless who walk around the area… and Capitol Hill isn’t exactly the nicest area these days. 3rd and Pike isn’t nice. But Seattle in 2025 isn’t real-life World War Z.
All the west coast port cities (SF, Portland, Tacoma, Seattle, Vancouver) imho have always had a similar s.hole vibe. For most of the last 40 years SF was the worst. But now Seattle has the top place. Clearly complex issue with many causes but also clearly someone in SF did something to improve the situation and someone in Seattle didn't do that thing.
Seattle was highly functional for a while. When the tech industry grew, the region attracted a huge population of people from
California and it destroyed the local and state politics. SF policies came to Seattle and in a worse way. SF has at least swung back a tiny bit but Seattle hasn’t, and it’s why there is rampant crime, trash, and encampments.
The problem here is that the law and order politicians world wide pretty consistently follow a pattern that starts by demanding surveillance tools to fight very serious crimes and those crimes only. Once they get that, they eventually start another campaign to allow use of the tools that they now have access to for less serious crimes. After a few cycles of this, you get a massive erosion of citizen rights.
>they eventually start another campaign to allow use of the tools that they now have access to for less serious crimes.
Don't forget the part where the useful idiots cheer because "I hate street racers and package thieves" or "I hate cults and drugs" depending on the decade
People aren’t useful idiots for wanting to avoid being victims of crime. They’re rational. Stop trivializing the big negative impact street racing and theft have on people.
Weird. There's an article right here showing them turning off the cameras when the line was crossed and now that data can't be used the way they don't want.
So clearly we're allowed more nuanced takes than you think.
"There's an article right here showing them turning off the cameras when the line was crossed and now that data can't be used the way they don't want."
Not exactly true. This happened after the arrests and won't affect those arrests. This also doesn't prevent ICE from installing and using Flock cameras on federal properties (like the post offices). I would also bet that they could still comb the existing data if they wanted to, hence the shutdown of the cameras on the fear that they can't keep the data safe.
The Redmond City Council made a recommendation to turn off the cameras on Nov 3rd, two days before the ICE arrests. There had been local concern aired the week prior about feds/ICE possibly accessing Flock camera data. I think it was on its way to being shut down but the ICE activity perhaps hastened it.
Are you proposing everyone make the optimal decision in advance, when outcomes are all speculative, and just be sure to get it right so there’s no need to learn and adapt to circumstances?
I would hope so because no we are obviously not turning back the clock to a time when cameras did not exist.
Most people kind of find surveillance cameras reassuring.
They're installing them in my mom's apartment complex after a vote.
Did they also vote on giving the federal government or any govermental authorities access to that footage? Did they ask if they want all the neighbors to be able to watch any of it? Did they ask if they would give it to cops to use against residents?
Because im willing to bet a lot of answers would change when they knew the answer to those questions.
what that wikipedia article doesn't mention is that Franklin continued to own people for almost his entire adult life, while paying lip service to abolition.
i can confidently say that i don't personally engage with any activities that constitute extreme deprivation of another individual's liberties while simultaneously advocating for those liberties, which is what i was specifically talking about. please, if you must, accuse me of something concrete.
"Those (the Penn family) who would give up essential Liberty (money & power), to purchase a little temporary Safety (a veto over a taxation dispute, trying to raise money from the Penn family), deserve neither Liberty (said money & power) nor Safety (the defense that said taxed money would've bought from the present French & Indian wars)"
It's kind of funny if you think about it. Franklin spent so many years arguing for liberty, low taxes and limited government that when he tried to argue in favor of taxation and federal power he unintentionally still argued in favor of the former.
A lot of our political discussions and systems these days are warped by a failure to understand the ways that state-versus-federal differences have changed over time.
Even today, it's not necessarily hypocritical for someone to argue that states should do more X while the federal government should do less X.
It doesn't, but at that point you're not referencing what a person meant, you're saying something they didn't intend with their words. You might as well make your point with your words, instead of misleadingly quoting someone else.
> Those (the Penn family) who would give up essential Liberty
No, you've got it half-backwards.
He's saying the democratic legislature shouldn't forever give up the citizens' collective Liberty to tax the ultra-mega-rich (Penns) in exchange for a one-time Security payment from those rich near-nobles.
You don't understand why they may want surveillance to curb or investigate violent crime, but not why they oppose surveillance used by the Gestapo to kidnap members of their community? Seriously?
It's like saying I'm hypocritical for loving to write with pencils but being offended when someone else stabs me with one.
> Bro, you said you liked pencils, make up your mind!
No. I'm calling them idiots for giving a bunch of 3rd graders piles of newspapers and matches and expecting the eventual end result to be anything other than a fire.
This shit was wholly foreseeable but they flew right into the sun, not too close to it, right the fuck into it, because they just couldn't stop lusting after the idea of sending the jackboot after someone for a crime that amounts to petty deviance (I'd like to say they were using it to go after petty thieves, but we all know they weren't doing that).
This is just victim blaming people for assuming they lived in a polite society with safeguards for their rights at a higher level.
People are allowed to leverage trust in society to make tradeoffs. Or should we ban all forms of delivery because it can be abused at the extremes of the system to mug the drivers? Should every single store have every product locked behind glass and armed guards to light up any shoplifters, lest it be their fault for being robbed?
You're acting like they should have known the President would take complete control of the government and all other branches should cede while a Gestapo was deployed against the populace. And even then, they would only be buying time. The fascists will install their own mass surveillance anyway whether you like it or not. They're fascists!
Maybe blame every Republican and Republican voter for installing a fascist government instead of a city that had the audacity to think they could leverage stability to make their lives a little better.
And, for what it's worth, I know folk here like to pretend "this is just to spy on you", but that's just your rhetoric. The city doesn't care about where you go. But this kind of data is used frequently rape and murder cases, as traffic cameras are often some of the best evidence available. And the analytics collecter can be useful for all sorts of civil engineering, policy, and architectural decisions.
Now do I agree with the mass surveillance? Do I think the motivations were entirely pure? No, not really. But do I think you're being a bit of a drama queen and blaming the wrong people? Absolutely.
> You're acting like they should have known the President would take complete control of the government and all other branches should cede while a Gestapo was deployed against the populace.
People should know Germany was a republic before the Nazis took control.
>This is just victim blaming people for assuming they lived in a polite society with safeguards for their rights at a higher level.
Karen (I actually have spicier thoughts about exactly who's at fault here but "Karen" will have to do) who provided the political will to set up the cameras is not the victim here.
Her hapless landscaper (or whatever) is the victim.
This was not unforeseeable. This was playing with fire. For years we build up the police state's capabilities and made it VERY cheap to run (with all these cameras and whatnot). Something like this was unenviable. If not the feds going whole hog on something that some states didn't agree with it would likely have been some states doing their own similar thing in some other policy area. Every government accountability group, every privacy group, they've been screeching for years. It's not like every warning wasn't sounded.
>The city doesn't care about where you go. But this kind of data is used frequently rape and murder cases, as traffic cameras are often some of the best evidence available.
This is a BS red herring. "serious" crime has been very solvable for years with cell location data, metadata, private security cameras, etc. But all that takes "work" (read: nontrivial amounts of money and labor the expenditure of which must be authorized and somewhat justifiable), a single unaccountable bureaucrat can't do all the heavy lifting of determining who to dispatch the boots on the ground to go after from the comfort of their desk
The entire purpose of the government having these systems like Flock is exactly what it's being used for. It's so that the .gov can still do jackboot things (like round up illegals, or whatever) without the oversight of Amazon, Verizon, etc, (companies with public images they care about) saying "hey man, this is too much, we don't like the look for our business" and pushing back. The only reason we're even hearing a peep is any strife here is because the local governments interests aren't aligned with the feds.
The city doesn't care where "I" go until I check the right (wrong) boxes and then they'll be waiting for the chance to harass me. The government didn't "care" until something flipped, and then the .gov was all over them. The same is true for you and everyone else.
And yes I'm being sloppy with with my wording and my reasoning, I could not be, but I don't really care to write to that high a standard.
"I don't respect facts I don't like" is not a very respectable point of view and makes me not want to engage at all.
> with cell location data, metadata, private security cameras, etc
I'm sure you'd argue that the government should have access to all of that data and it could never be used for "jackbooting"?
EDIT: Even if you did genuinely support all that, you're doing exactly what this city did! Making a subjective judgement call about where to put the proverbial line, but still giving the government the ability to use this data because you value its ability to benefit us / provide safety guarantees.
All that data can just as easily be stolen and abused by a fascist government.
> It's so that the .gov can still do jackboot things (like round up illegals, or whatever)
You are quite literally posting in the context of TFA about them turning them off explicitly because they did not intend them to be used for "jackboot things". FFS.
The police (local or federal) don't have integrations with private CCTV, historical location data, etc, etc. When they want that stuff they have to email someone, ask someone, have a reason, maybe even get a warrant, etc. Heck, even to snoop on someone's facebook they create a paper trail going through the law enforcement portal This is not a big deal for "real crime" but for stuff the public doesn't actually support serious enforcement of it's a big PITA, creates a risky paper trail they don't fully control, there's potential oversight, etc. All that constrains how far they can go without local public support.
Being able to just "go fishing" from your desk like you can with Flock (and to a lesser extent Ring), like the NSA can with all our emails and metadata, etc, etc, and all that other 1984 type dragnet stuff, is a categorical difference and nobody should have that power.
If stabbing people is so wrong, why don’t we lock up all the surgeons?
Of all the poor thinking and rhetorical skills out there, the one that drives me the craziest is this insistence that ignoring context is not just acceptable but essential.
So I definitely agree it's a positive development that these cameras are being taken down because they're absolutely orwellian, but I really don't understand why "the line" is being drawn at immigration enforcement? Were people really okay with this until the point where they found out that illegal immigrants can be tracked by the surveillance state too?
This isn't the "people" waking up and not being okay with this, it is one governmental power (the state) realizing that its own power to manage its citizens (the residents of WA) and its sovereignty is being threatened by another power (the fed) in a new way. The system the state previously used to enforce its own power over its constituents is now helping the competing power to have more power over those constituents outside of cooperation with the state power, so they are removing it. There is no sudden awakening of citizen consciousness here. Many of the actions emerging around ICE stuff are about states trying to combat overreaching federal power.
I'd like to say that the people who championed them realized that if fedcops can basically arrest their landscaper over what amounts to a civil infraction then it has implications for them. Unfortunately I don't think the people who championed the cameras in the first place have that kind of self awareness and what we're seeing is instead the typically silent majority saying "no, I akshually agree with the privacy people those are bad".
Fine then, people accused of nonviolent crimes. Where you split the legal hair doesn't really matter much because the facts of the situation are unchanged IMO. Failing to get government permission for something that's mostly fine isn't all that serious of a crime IMO.
I'm sympathetic to the realities of immigration enforcement but I'm not sympathetic to the "oh, they're bad people so it's fine to violate their rights a little" line of reasoning that most attempts to categorize this or that demographic as criminal, criminal adjacent or likely criminal tend to move in the direction of generally (i.e. not specific to the current immigration debate or enforcement thereof, we could be discussing the DEA in 2002 and the same thing would come up)
And in this country border agents pepper spray citizens and black bag elementary school teachers terrorizing your own children. What is this the shitty authoritarian olympics? I thought this was the land of the free and all I see is bootlickers.
Let me know when you go after the people employing the illegal immigrants instead of the immigrants themselves. Until then, the stance here is clearly not aimed at minimizing immigration. You're wasting at best while the hive continues to thrive with honey, protecting its queen.
I'd have no problems enforcing laws about illegal immigrants if they actually bothered to check and not just deport random brown people even if they're citizens.
Many of those people are seeking asylum, which is legal. It sounds like you're the one that fell for a fake invasion. But everyone in your family will get a raise once you terrorize the brown people enough, right?
> Stop acting like you're still ignorant about that.
We've asked you multiple times recently to not post in the flamewar style on HN. It's not what HN is for, and eventually we have to ban accounts that keep doing it.
Weird how we only see them rounding up farm and factory workers, or assaulting journalists in the street, etc. Listen, they have daily arrest quotas in the hundreds. You seriously think they can find this many "bad guys" daily, as Trump calls them? Of course not. They're all fucking fat cowards, unable to even run. They're only arresting whoever does not have a white enough skin to their eyes, and won't resist too much.
And whatever you think of illegal immigration, them arresting kids and deporting them without their parents to country they've never been to is actually evil. Do you understand this "hysteria" a little bit more, or do you actually like children suffering?
Wonder why people would take issue with the unqualified, armed, masked thugs abducting innocent people off the street and deporting them without recourse or due process. Must be all about Trump, surely.
The only thing defying logic here is the MAGA cult rationalizing away the brown shirts now patrolling the streets of America, they who are supposedly so attached to freedom.
>Wonder why people would take issue with the unqualified, armed, masked thugs abducting innocent people off the street and deporting them without recourse or due process.
Congress can whip up a law making immigration infractions more serious crimes (which comes with better process) and day it chooses.
ICE can send better qualified better trained agents any time it chooses.
They can likewise be more fastidious about who they choose to go after such that far fewer innocents are caught up in it.
You're missing the point of Trump's ICE. Scaring the opposition is their entire raison d'être. Abducting citizens randomly, wearing masks and using uncalled-for violence are their tools to achieve this.
However reasonable your propositions are, it's pointless considering them. This administration is completely uninterested in refocusing ICE on their original mission.
You're the one missing the point. Even if ICE were "acting like professionals" it would still not make it ok to have roving bands of fedcops. Heck, change their issue of enforcement from immigration and customs to something else and it's still not acceptable.
The government should not have this type of force projection power domestically without going through at least the states or picking the nuclear-ish option and using the national guard.
A little annoyed, this seems like is has nothing to do with the ICE arrests...
> The city suspended its Flock system because city officials could not guarantee they wouldn’t be forced to release data collected by those devices someday, she said.
Key part is "someday". Seems like the article is implying that flock may have shared this data with ICE which led to the arrests... but there is no proof supporting this...
> On Thursday, a Skagit County Superior Court judge ruled that pictures taken by Flock cameras in the cities of Sedro-Woolley and Stanwood qualify as public records, and therefore must be released as required by the state’s Public Records Act, court records show.
This is the more likely reason. What do folks here think about this ruling?
IMO it seems obvious that this should be public records/data, but would love to hear alternative positions to this.
I can't stand this type of "journalism"/sensationalism.
> Redmond’s Police Department was not among those listed in the report, and has never allowed external agencies to access their Flock data without requesting and receiving permission from the police chief first, according to an Oct. 24 statement by Lowe.
So because the arrests were near a Flock Camera the "journalist" is connecting the two? Even with the statements an information to the contrary?
This wouldn't be the first time Flock was used by ICE and would not be the first time Flock allowed ICE backdoor access against the wishes of the local government or police department in Washington. https://jsis.washington.edu/humanrights/2025/10/21/leaving-t...
So making the connection isn't a leap and seems like a pretty pragmatic action taken to reduce ICE's ability to surveil communities.
The journalists didn't make this connection, it was a topic of discussion at the city council meeting. And the result of that discussion was to suspend the cameras anyway, out of concern that ICE could end up with the the Flock data, even if they hadn't already. It would have been odd for the journalist to report on the outcome and leave out the event that prompted it.
I think we need to revise our understanding of expectation of privacy. The 'you have no expectation of privacy when you are outside' bit was formed before we had everything recording us and before face recognition could track us.
At the very least I think any kind of face recognition should require probable cause.
Its an interesting question indeed. You're saying there might be some expectation of privacy even in public?
The line here is a little different. I could point a camera out my window and record every license plate that drives by my house, and that would be allowed because its recording public activities, and the data I collect would be private—its mine from my camera.
The question here is if a public/government agency pays a private company to setup cameras in public, for the benefit of the public, then should that data collected by those cameras not also be public?
The courts seem to agree that it should be public, and I fail to see why it shouldn't be. Maybe I should read the opposition briefs on it.
If your neighbors were across the street and had their blinds open could you point your camera at their window and take pictures?
License plates were designed to be read and visible and they show that the vehicle is registered, but what about inside the vehicle? Do we have privacy in there?
What exactly does 'in public' mean? And why shouldn't someone have privacy from being recorded and their movements tracked even if they are in public?
None of these things are a given. The rights we have are because we decided they were important. There is no reason we can't revisit the question as situations change.
Might make sense to revisit the constitutionality of license plates, rather than try to attack public recording.
They're demanding you show your "papers" registration at all times without articulable suspicion you've committed a crime/infraction. The fourth amendment arguably protects us from the government requiring us to show us our papers at all times when we're travelling in the most common form of conveyance.
> The question here is if a public/government agency pays a private company to setup cameras in public, for the benefit of the public, then should that data collected by those cameras not also be public?
This is how NASA operates with the data/images collected from the tax payer funded operations it runs. There is a period of exclusivity allowed for some projects to allow the people to work with the data, but anybody can go down load high res imagery once it has been released.
Awesome, thank you for the input. I suspected NASA was operating this way, but I had no idea there was a period of exclusivity. In the case of NASA, the private companies are those like JPL and the sorts I guess?
I assume it is/was similar with other data collected, like weather data/radar, oceanic current/buoy data, etc?
I read about this regarding Hubble imagery, but pretty sure it applies to all missions funded by tax payers. The teams requesting time from the platforms are granted exclusive time to work out what they need so they can publish their papers for credit and what not.
One of the great things here is that most of the teams are so focused on their specific criteria in the data, they sort of lose the forest in the tree. Once that data has been released to the public, more and more interesting things are being found in the existing data rather than requiring new observations. It's space, so most things only need to be imaged once per sensor. It's not like setting up a trap camera hoping to see big foot the one time he strolls past. The universe changes on a much slower scale so the data is still relevant for much longer.
> Once that data has been released to the public, more and more interesting things are being found in the existing data rather than requiring new observations.
Really highlights the value of the data being public, which I feel is often overlooked now a days. Hard to tie KPIs to value that comes like this.
You're saying there might be some expectation of privacy even in public?
There should be. I like how this is handled in Japanese media, where there is such an expectation - people's faces are blurred unless they opt in, and publishing photos/video without redating people's identities is not just a social misstep but grounds for a lawsuit if it causes distress for the subject. You need a release for any commercial use of photography, and non-commercial publication (eg Instagram or your art blog) can still get you sued if it infringes on others' privacy.
P.S.: To put it another way, a major purpose law is to clarify and codify the expectations the people. Not just expectations of privacy, but expectations of when we have liberty to observe or record.
We expect that our faces might be captured on someone's vacation photos in public, surviving as an anonymous and unconsidered background detail, and that we can take our own photos like that without getting permission from everyone in the background.
In contrast, we don't (didn't?) expect all the photos to feed into a mega-panopticon that that does facial-recognition on all subjects and cross-references us over time and space while running algorithms looking for embarrassing, criminal, or blackmail-able events.
> You're saying there might be some expectation of privacy even in public?
Sure. The expectation is that your every move in public is not being recorded and stored on a central system that the government, and by extension various kinds of bad actors, can access.
In a society where the government's role is to defend its citizenry rather than participate in their exploitation, this would be an easy choice.
US governments (both federal and local) face some challenges here, because "defend its citizenry" is not really one of its main goals.
> I could point a camera out my window and record every license plate that drives by my house, and that would be allowed because its recording public activities, and the data I collect would be private—its mine from my camera.
Maybe you shouldn’t be allowed to do that. Permanent persistent recording of the public feels very different than taking a photo every once in a while, and I feel it’s an infringement of privacy even when a single person does it.
Feels more like stalking to me when the government does it. The intent is to intimidate and put the observed parties in imminent fear of imprisonment if they do something those in power do not like. Coupling this with intentionally following them around, with the specific goal of en masse systematic targeting of those in transit, albeit with stationary cameras strategically replaced, has a lot of parallels to criminal stalking.
If you put up cameras on all the intersections on the way of say an ex went to work, and started logging when they were coming and going, it's hard for me to believe a prosecutor wouldn't be able to file that under some stalking-adjacent statute. The fact that they're doing the same thing en masse doesn't make it more generalized, it's just a larger scale of high specificity.
I think it's less of a revision and more a return to a core meaning.
Privacy isn't a mechanic, it's a capability, and most reasonable people DO expect, implicitly, that that they can travel unremarked under most circumstances.
I think most people would agree that a government drone swarm specifically tasked to follow you everywhere in public (loitering outside buildings) would be an invasion of privacy. Especially when it is illegal not to be wearing some equivalent of license plates.
Maybe I need to write a news filter/browser extension that rewrites rage-bait articles to have titles and content based only on the meaningful content/facts, and less the speculation/insinuations.
From what I read, the pressure from activist groups on Redmond’s city leadership began before the Skagit County ruling. So it is probably unrelated. But I think it’s still a bad outcome for Redmond. Why wouldn’t you want law enforcement to be able to observe public spaces (which these cameras are monitoring) and identify or track suspects? We want our city services (like policing) to be efficient, right? We want criminals to be arrested and face consequences, right? We all want safe cities and neighborhoods, right?
I think the Skagit county ruling is likely to be appealed. There is a lot of information that governments can redact for a variety of reasons, despite FOIA or state/local transparency laws. It seems obvious that there’s a case for law enforcement to be able to access footage but to avoid handing over that kind of intelligence to the general public, where criminals could also abuse the same data. And I just don’t buy the argument that surveillance through cameras is automatically dystopian - we can pass laws that make it so that data is only accessible with a warrant or in a situation with immediate public risk. There are all sorts of powers the government has that we bring under control with the right laws - why would this be any different?
As for Redmond turning off its cameras - this is just fear-mongering about ICE. In reality, it’s just sanctuary city/state resistance to enforcing immigration laws. Redmond’s police department confirmed they’ve never shared this camera data with federal agencies, but that doesn’t stop activist types from making unhinged claims or exerting pressure. In reality, it’s activists of the same ideological bias as the soft on crime types that have caused crimes to go up dramatically in the Pacific Northwest in the last 20 years. They’re happy to see law enforcement hampered and the public put at risk - the ICE thing is just the new tactic to push it.
Your first paragraph doesn’t just beg the question, it outright harasses it.
…and identify or track suspects?
For starters, we’re all suspects when those cameras are running. Granted, AI-driven facial recognition is 100% accurate, so if you have nothing to hide…
> Redmond’s police department confirmed they’ve never shared this camera data with federal agencies
The problem with this is, that in the age of put-as-much-data-as-we-have-in-some-us-megacorp-managed-cloud this does not mean anything anymore. I may sound paranoid but it's just the truth. There is an abundance of general evidence for this, but even more, there is evidence that Flock data has been shared with parties in the US government who weren't "allowed" to access them.
Your sentence makes it sound like they have a document somewhere in their office that has not shared with anyone else. But that's wrong. They have a document on servers ran by a shady company (prob. AWS, Azure, Google), managed by another even shadier company (Flock). The police department has no idea who can see it, and who can't.
I can only speak for myself, but I do not have a problem with enforcement of immigration laws at all. What I do have a problem with is how it is enforced [1,2] and how the general surveillance is handled, especially by Flock [3,4] and the US Government [5], but, to be honest, in the whole US.
> Why wouldn’t you want law enforcement to be able to observe public spaces (which these cameras are monitoring) and identify or track suspects?
Yeah, why wouldn't I want that? Or Flock "helpfully" proactively flagging AI-generated "suspicious vehicle movements" to LE for investigation? What could wrong there?
> We all want safe cities and neighborhoods, right?
Was it hard not to end that paragraph with a "Won't somebody think of our children?"?
Couldn't they just not log the license plates and only look for license plates on the list like stolen cars, stolen plates, amber alert etc? Why do they a need a list of all cars that the camera saw?
They don't just log license, they log everything about the car, dents, location of dents, type of wheels, stickers, etc. If you swap a license plate they would be able to tell the car. One local case I read about, the culprits used their own car with a stolen plate. They were able to identify the car based on the car's "fingerprints" dents, style, color, antenna, scratches etc.
I know there's a massive hate for flock online but it solved a murder that happened in a park behind my house in less than 24 hours which was pretty cool.
The lesson learned is that people going to their immigration hearings to stay legal are getting nabbed, and going the legal way is a convoluted recipe for failure.
As soon as enforcement lets up an iota the lesson will be it is wiser to stay off paper and off the visa pathway and go underground. People who aren't arrested and don't present to CBP for entry and don't get a visa, as far as the government knows, don't exist.
The people going to their immigration hearings to "stay legal" were apprehended as illegal immigrants, invited to come up with an excuse as to why they should be allowed to stay in the country, and released. You'll literally see "apprehension date" on their paperwork. The "legal way" is to apply for that stuff, then enter the country.
It's annoying that people elide this. There is an ongoing attempt by the current administration to remove these very recently introduced practices that no one voted for. Or a show of an attempt, really, because they love illegal labor.
But it's weird that for the past decade that illegal immigrants who have been caught are released almost immediately into a dilatory multi-year process of hearings. It's also weird that even those that have not been apprehended are issued IDs, work permits, business and drivers licenses, get in-state tuition as state schools, and in some places get to vote for local elections. There was never a debate about this, and it would have never survived a debate.
It's important to note that none of the countries that they are coming from allow people to do this. You can't just walk into Mexico and be Mexican, or fly to Nigeria and be Nigerian. Any shock that they have is in how easy it is to just walk and fly into the US and stay indefinitely.
> it is wiser to stay off paper and off the visa pathway and go underground.
This is how it used to be. But "underground" is nothing like this; it isn't in-state tuition and business licenses and street protests. It's usually harder than just going back home. In the late 90s, net migration from Mexico was negative. The "wall" (that Hillary Clinton helped push, and had a hand in started modern left-bashing among Democratic administrations) was a bad idea because a lot of people just jumped the border for enough time to make a few dollars, then ran back. People would go back and forth half a dozen times. After the wall, getting across was so onerous that you had to stay.
Previously, if you were a Mexican who hit a bad financial patch, you ran to the US, worked like a dog, and ran back with enough cushion to get your life going again - if you failed again, you could just repeat the process. After the wall when you hit that same patch, you had to commit to trying to make a life in the US.
I think the inflection point was the desire to get cheap labor to repair New Orleans after the flood, but they didn't want to hire the black people who lived there, they wanted to get rid of them, to ship them out to FEMA trailers in neighboring states. That's exactly what they did.
To obtain asylum through the affirmative asylum process you must be physically present in the United States. You may apply for asylum regardless of how you arrived in the United States or your current immigration status.[1]
> The "legal way" is to apply for that stuff, then enter the country.
Which is next to impossible, particularly for immigrants who pick crops and process livestock. It’s annoying when people elide this.
> It's also weird that even those that have not been apprehended are issued IDs, work permits, business and drivers licenses, get in-state tuition as state schools, and in some places get to vote for local elections.
Or since those people pay taxes and are subject to governance, maybe it isn’t weird at all.
I don't think the drugs analog works. What this activity by ICE does though is put a chilling effect on "legal" immigration and tourism. Which will over time hurt supply chains, tourist destinations and jobs overall.
I agree with GP, but from the opposite perspective.
ICE doing a good job of removing illegal aliens ("acting like SS" in GP's parlance) will trigger the next democratic president to relax border enforcement. This is what happened with Biden. He let in 7.2 million migrants [1].
There's no way for Trump to deport 7.2 million people in 4 years. Pro-illegal immigration presidents are always at an advantage.
Trump's strict (and good) policies might trigger the next democratic president to just blanket pardon all illegal aliens, and the next republican president can't do anything about it.
> No matter what, the whole ICE acting like the SS thing will only result in more illegal migration in the long term, like a lot more.
How so? What mechanism do you see that goes from "ICE acting like the SS" to "a lot more illegal migration in the long term"? What's the cause and effect here?
Not saying you're wrong, necessarily, just... I don't see the causality at all.
My guess is he sees ICE hauling people out of even the courts when they were attempting to abide by the legal processes and will say f-it, why bother, its safer to not adhere. just my assumption of OP's intent.
Why fill out the right paperwork and actually attend your court dates and immigration hearings if there is a good chance that will result in your extraordinary rendition to some torture prison God-only-knows-where? Much safer to simply stay off the books.
Well ideally you're supposed to have a valid visa before you cross the border. I don't like the idea of the government promising people a path to amnesty and then going back on its word because there's a new administration in town but ultimately the people they're nabbing are in this situation because they already have invalid visas so I don't think it follows that this would discourage people from obtaining visas like they were supposed to have already done.
To obtain asylum through the affirmative asylum process you must be physically present in the United States. You may apply for asylum regardless of how you arrived in the United States or your current immigration status.[1]
What was the reaction to SS? or to stick to my DEA example, what was the result of the war on drugs? millions and millions dead because of drug related causes right? how do you think the nation will react to ICE's brutal and cruel, even illegal operations? many would consider them heroes, but the other side will consider them no different than the SS or gestapo, the only correction is to wind down immigration enforcement dramatically, increasing immigration.
Imagine a democrat administration simply reverting ICE to its pre-2025 state. the implication alone and the perception it gives will drive up illegal immigration. "america is open again".
Statistics are showing that the total immigrant population is down by over a million since the start of the year. If you have the ability to leave, why put up with this nonsense?
A large number of people, myself included, are now radicalized against the concept of immigration enforcement. I think everyone has a duty to make sure that ICE is as ineffective as possible and ICE agents are as miserable as possible. There's a lot of talk, for example, about how the asylum system is easily abusable; that's true, but now we will not be able to fix it because no immigration reform compromise that doesn't destroy ICE is acceptable.
My city, capital city, local PD (also in Washington state) put out this press release after ICE blocked up a busy intersection in peak hour chasing someone:
> [Department] was not notified of or involved in this enforcement action. By state law, city resolution, and department policy, [we do] not cooperate or coordinate with federal immigration enforcement.
> Voters don't want a streamlined and efficient immigration system that lawfully allows a lot of migrants
There was a really interesting open ended survey some years ago, in the leadup to the trump/clinton election but I can't find it now sorry.
When republicans voters were asked to describe their preferred immigration policies, they outline a stance significantly more permissive and flexible, and less burdensome, than the one we currently have. More liberal than the reality, in other words.
People don't know what the immigration policies are and so they can't know what they should be either. The anti-immigration sentiment is a stunning propaganda victory decades in the making, no more.
Is self-determination a human right? We certainly decided a lot of nations to the south of us didn't deserve that right. Look up the history of the banana republics some time.
Up until it conflicts with my country’s rights, yes. Not sure what you’re suggesting. Is mass migration to the United States the policy of, say, Mexico?
I'm suggesting that we spent a lot of effort overturning elected governments in South America because we didn't like who they voted for and what their policies were with regard to US fruit companies. US policy directly created instability, civil war, and a generally terrible situation that they are dealing with now. Do you know what a banana republic is?
Yeah, it's a nation. A nation of immigrants. Where did your great-great-great grandfather come from? Did he spontaneously erupt from this common ancestry and heritage that you speak of?
Hi, Jew here: I was with you until you started slandering dissenters as "rootless cosmopolitans"—a slur has cost my family dearly—from jobs and enrollments to several dozen of our very lives.
Yes, NO land is an "economic zone" while it is also a home. I feel this especially acutely having grown up in the San Francisco Bay Area where My friends and I struggle to compete for housing with the best and the brightest from the entire world over who, themselves, treat my home region less like a community and more like an understaffed amusement park.
Nevertheless, your blood quanta framing is utterly horrifying to me, someone whose family were murdered, lands stolen, and who has no country to go back to.
We are not by choice "rootless cosmopolitans", but by the very bigotry you espouse.
> Blood and soil (German: Blut und Boden, pronounced [ˈbluːt ʊnt ˈboːdn̩] ⓘ) is a nationalist phrase and concept of a racially defined national body ("Blood") united with a settlement area ("Soil"). Originating in the German völkisch movement, it was used extensively by Nazi Germany
Hence my antipathy, 20+ years ago, to the creation to a department of "Homeland" Security. Not that function of that entity itself was necessarily a bad idea, but that the concept of a "homeland" is fundamentally at odds with the USA's credal concept of civic belonging. Smuggling the blood and soil metaphor (further and officially) into the national consciousness has born disastrous fruits.
> will only result in more illegal migration in the long term
Why? Wouldn't it disincentivize illegal immigration by making it much more riskier?
Agreed that the legal immigration system needs an overhaul, these are a lot of people living in limbo, paying taxes and not causing crimes with very few rights.
The term no taxation without representation was the reason the USA got founded.
It's a temporary partisan solution, the other party will do the opposite, reducing enforcement and letting even more illegal migrants in, lest they be accused of being a xenophobe.
Not sure of that to be honest, I think that would be a loud minority.
Once democratic cities got a taste of the flood of people coming in that were sent by southern states, they realized how big the issue is and how much of a drag on resources it is.
That's not how it is in reality, southern states (not just them though) have been doing that with homeless people too, not just immigrants.
Republicans did jim crow in the 50s and 60s, we still talk about it today, and the positive blowback from that needs no explanation. Keep in mind that ICE is doing a lot more than cops did to protesters in the 60s, and it is targeting not just one group but several minority groups. not only that, it is all being live streamed, and it is affecting a lot of majority-group americans more directly. If ICE can avoid being disbanded it would be a great victory for them.
If I were exaggerating, I would be talking about tribunals and mass incarcerations of ICE agents, but I'm not.
No, it was Republicans (today) who used to be democrats in that era. parties are made up of people, it was the same people or their ideological inheritors. Many republicans today in congress (especially leadership) were of voting age in that era. a 20 year old in 1969 would be 75 today, younger than the current and former president.
Yes, they were. They are republicans now. You arguing in bad faith here, because you very well know the democrats back then are the republicans now. The party of democrats back then is not the party of the democrats now. the democratic party represented the same people republicans represent today. You're trying to make an falsely link the democratic party today with the party in the 60's, you know that link is incorrect, but since it helps you make a point, you're making it anyways. I call this: intellectual fraud.
Ideologically, they were republicans. In name only, they were Democrats.
This is not some 'haha gotcha!' type thing. Real argument with real human brains don't work that way. You can be technically right but if it's on some semantic bullshit nobody cares about, then you're wrong.
I can think of many uses for "surveillance state technology" that have nothing to do with immigration: It can be used against citizens and legal residents too.
But the sorts of ICE actions that are causing this controversy only have political support because the US immigration laws have been flouted for 30+ years. Regardless of what you or I think of it it’s the reality that lots of the electorate wants deportations and lots of them and that likely isn’t true in a world where the laws on the books were more strictly enforced in the past.
What political support? Is there evidence to back that claim? The most recent polls I've seen about this are Gallup's polls from July and they suggest that 62% of Americans disapprove of how Trump is handling immigration. This includes a majority of Dems and Independents. The trend is more and more people disapprove of Trump on this topic as time moves forward.
I don't have any data to back this up, but it is conceivable the people that want to deport en masse often understand that the perception of such policy is ugly, and simultaneously support it while not wanting to publicly broadcast it.
If I supported mass deportations, I would simply vote for it and never tell anyone so that I could get what I want without getting any of the flack from the associates of the people who are deported. There's not a lot to gain from telling others you want to harm a bunch of your neighbors, but there is a lot to gain if you can give them the boot and not being perceived as having anything to do with their misfortune.
I mean that is basically the entire basis of the shy Trump voter phenomenon. Even after 8 years of trying to correct for it it showed up last year enough to tip the election from one which the polls said was a dead heat in the Electoral College to a clear Trump and Republican popular vote victory.
You missed the point: they were referring to the sentiment that lead to Trump’s election. Many of those voters , I would guess, feel that the way Trump is doing it is cruel and chaotic.
This obviously doesn’t imply that those who voted for Trump on this basis want to go back to the open border Biden days.
They don't have majority political support. Even many Trump voters are against it. Also Trump has repeatedly violated immigration law, hell Trump tower wouldn't exist without the work of unauthorized Polish workers
No, there are many reasons people want deportations, but mainly people don't think others should get the benefits of being part of a country while flaunting its rules.
In short: "if you want to join our group, you should like our group and add to our group".
Stories like these are what turned people away:
- New York giving free debit cards to migrants to buy their ethnic food because they don't like free American food.
Hm, I’m not saying it is good for America, but it seems to me that there are plausible senses of “good for America” for which it is plausible that illegal immigration is “good for America” in those senses.
Now, I generally dislike laws being broken. If there’s a situation where breaking a law is the right thing to do, then typically that indicates some problem (perhaps with the law, perhaps with something else).
So, I would hope that if illegal immigration is or were acting as a good thing right now, that there is or would be a better long-term solution for whatever situation than “a long term pattern of illegal immigration”.
Oh, I somehow misinterpreted “In no way is” as “There is no way that”. Oops.
Ask JD Vance, who repeatedly said that people legally in this country are illegal immigrants - and those screaming the loudest about illegal immigration walk stridently behind his banner.
Implying democrats use of executive power is the problem in the current situation is laughable at best and genuinely bizarre given the current administration's actions across so many avenues.
Red herring. Political support is due to mass media narrative campaigns, in this day and age groundswell politics is simply infeasible with the power that narrative has in today's culture.
Hence the importance of controlling the narrative by spinning unchecked stories about immigrants eating cats, disproportionate rates of murder and crime, ignoring revenue from immigrants paying taxes, etc.
The fact that sufficient people will vote on immigration as an issue is orthogonal to the realities of laws and enforcement rates and entirely predicated upon perception of such issues.
Your comment was flagged by several members of the community who all have a solid track record for flagging things due to being in breach of the guidelines (rather than due to disagreement, spite etc). So I'm not out of step with community standards here.
> Leaving one sided statements up like the GP is not a discussion.
Other comments in the subthread have also been flagged and killed, and I may reply to them also. I replied to yours because I saw it before the others and because its's clearly a party-political, inflammatory comment, and you are a repeat offender when it comes to guidelines breaches. In just the past 18 months, dang or I have asked you five times now to improve your conduct on HN.
> It's a political discussion, either allow it fully or don't.
> Referencing the morals of the same justification for slavery is a valid point.
The validity of an argument is a separate matter to whether it is expressed in an inflammatory way. We want to be able to discuss difficult topics on HN, and that can only happen if people are going to respect the guidelines and make the effort to discuss things with sensitivity and curiosity, rather than combativeness.
If you are only able to discuss difficult political topics in a combative style, HN is not the right place for you to participate.
OK, I can accept that you didn't know, and that you don't intend to cross the line, but that just indicates you're not aware of what's expected here and you need to learn, and to make an ongoing effort to stay well inside the bounds.
A line like “Whether it's slaves or illegals, it's still wrong” will always be classed as an inflammatory statement on HN.
> I never attack a person directly
That style of rhetoric in the reply is hostile to the parent; we often don't know how hostile our words can seem to the person on the receiving end of them; they don't seem so bad when they're just thoughts in our own mind.
> even though I have witnessed it being done and others have done it to me.
You should flag things or report them to us at hn@ycombinator.com so we can investigate and act where needed.
on the books immigration law has been broken for decades. do you expect people across the border wait a decade to get their turn for an immigration interview only to be turned down, when they can just cross the border?
When laws become impractical, they create 11 million law breakers.
Hundreds of thousands to millions of people have come to the US legally each year for the last thirty years.[0] How is that impractical? In fact the share of immigrants in the US has increased significantly (by 3 times) in the last 50 years, and is above the level of the EU, and is at the highest level in the last 100 years in the US.[1][2] Even if legal immigration was set to zero, that shouldn't give people the right to come here illegally.
To be clear I am not making an argument that mass surveillance is needed to solve any problem.
US vs EU vs OECD: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SM.POP.TOTL.ZS?most_rec... - I'm pretty sure the values here include illegal immigration as well, so if you factor that in the US may be lower than the EU, but again still at historically very high levels.
The biggest illegal immigration source is the southern border. Yes, lots of people have immigrated, but they're a tiny fraction of those who wanted to immigrate. H-1B is a good example, it counts as immigration but it is really not, it is residency contingent on specific employment contracts. Those people with H-1B have no way to gain permanent residency without their employer sponsoring them, which would let them leave the company so employers don't tend to do that a lot.
The comparison with EU is not meaningful, especially since it isn't even a country. The population growth of the US and the world as a hole has also risen by more than that factor, even in the past two decades or so it has more than doubled.
>Yes, lots of people have immigrated, but they're a tiny fraction of those who wanted to immigrate
What point are you making here specifically? Are you saying the law is considered broken unless all or most people that want to come to the US can come? If so, the citizens (or at least the government) of the country are the ones that decide its laws, not people who want to immigrate to that country.
>H-1B is a good example, it counts as immigration but it is really not
The fist link I gave only includes green cards issued, it doesn't include H-1B visas to begin with. In any case, H-1B is not that significant a source of immigration, it seems to account for less than 1 million people in the US.[0] And it pays better than immigrating illegally in 99% of cases, most people would take that. Also by your own metric immigrating illegally isn't immigration either. I don't see what specific point you are making. Are you saying people come here illegally because they don't want to come via an H-1B visa, or are you just making a general point that immigration is not that high?
>The comparison with EU is not meaningful, especially since it isn't even a country
Then why does the worldbank include it? And why use OECD as a metric for anything if it isn't a country?
>population growth of the US and the world
The "highest in 100 years" statistic is in terms of percentage, so that shouldn't be relevant.
The entire point is that they legally in fact may not do so, and have only been doing so because of the lack of enforcement GP cites.
> When laws become impractical, they create 11 million law breakers.
We don't have nearly the same scale of problem in Canada. That probably has much more to do with only sharing an unsecured land border with a rich country.
> on the books immigration law has been broken for decades. do you expect people across the border wait a decade to get their turn for an immigration interview only to be turned down, when they can just cross the border?
No, I don't expect that at all. However the problem with your scenario isn't that they need to wait their turn, it's that they can "just cross the border". That fact that that has been allowed was an intentional policy decision.
It isn't. 2/3rds of illegal immigrants come to the US legally (and then overstay). Unless you make it illegal for non-citizens to visit the US, you can't stop most illegal immigration.
We can start with that 1/3rd. Then we remove as many economic incentives as possible to make overstaying visas that much less attractive to tackle the other 2/3rds.
It's weird to see people (perhaps not you specifically) who often support dramatic gun control measures to address a tiny percentage of crime among the first to trot out the old saw that only a relative fraction of illegal migrants got that way by an illegal border crossing. 1/3rd is a lot. 1/3rd is a great start.
Addressing that 1/3rd also would address the real edge cases (as in there are only a few of them) like terrorists and serial criminals.
employers hiring illegal migrants is also an option for them. those employers are not being targeted by ICE. It's the DEA arresting drug users but being buddies with drug lords all over again.
Employers are being targeted [0]. It also can be difficult to successfully prosecute, especially when one can maintain a clean separation between the labor and the enterprise (agriculture is like this with Farm Labor Contractors).
That said, I wish they would step up the prosecutions. It's critical to hammer away at economic incentives for illegal migration.
very rarely, you see even americans being abducted at their work place but the company owners are mostly left alone. If employing illegal immigrants was that risky, it would drop dramatically. This isn't about illegal immigration, it is about hatred and cruelty. Native born american citizens are rotting in prison without so much as seeing a judge or a lawyer, if you defend that, you are a traitor. If you can at least disavow that, I can consider that your argument is in good faith.
Your link shows the company was fined. what a joke. americans are rotting in prison and the company is fined? why the employers not in jail next to the illegal immigrants. Who was in a better position to obey the law? the wealthy employer who screwed over american workers by hiring illegal migrants, or the desperate migrant trying to earn an honest living?
I hope you reflect on your moral character before defending these people.
You seem very angry. Why don't you reread my post and reflect on the fact that we actually agree?
Hiring illegal labor can be difficult to prosecute, much like straw man gun purchases can be difficult to prosecute. In both cases I feel we should try much harder.
Removing the economic incentives for illegal migration is the only way to make a massive dent in it.
> do you expect people across the border wait a decade to get their turn for an immigration interview only to be turned down, when they can just cross the border?
Well yes, that's what following the law means. They can't complain about it, it's not their country, and they don't have a say on the rules.
In a similar vein by your logic, if you are in a hurry, why should you obey traffic laws when you can just run a red light or a stop sign right?
This is the problem with leaky analogies. The US immigration system is more like a train tunnel in a Wile-E Coyote cartoon that Roadrunner can run through but Wile-E slams into.
Hierarchy of needs. People want to follow the law, they need food,shelter, medicine,etc.. You can punish law breakers, but if you don't provide a way to lawfully do the thing, you're only breeding law breakers and nothing more.
A missing perspective here might be that even long term imprisonment isn't a deterrent for many migrants. The disparity in living conditions is just that steep.
There is a lawfully way to do the thing. The problem is that the lawfully way wants a very small set of people with specific skills. Canada does the same, most of their immigration are university graduates. The only reason Canada hasn't had an influx of immigration like the USA is because their southern border is the USA, not Mexico.
Most of the immigration to the USA is driven for economic reasons, not political asylum or persecution. There is no right to immigrate in the USA just because you want to, you have to convince the government somehow to let you in.
> even long term imprisonment isn't a deterrent for many migrants
But quick deportation is. Imagine doing the whole trek from south/central america to the USA just to be sent back the next day. That's what deterring a lot of people now, wasting months of travel and money just to have it be worthless seems to be very dissuasive.
A lot of the latest immigration woes would be solved if the Venezuelan government was taken down and some real democratic government stepped in.
> There is no right to immigrate in the USA just because you want to, you have to convince the government somehow to let you in.
Agreed. But it is only human to want to improve your living conditions. Illegal immigrants are not claiming their migration was lawful, no one is, so the argument about their right to migrate is meaningless. The law requires them to convince the government to let them in, but a law you cannot enforce is also meaningless. if your family was in poverty, would you care what the american government thought about you trying to cross the border and work to earn a living? I mean, I wouldn't blame them if they stole, I think you're not appreciating the adversity of poverty.
Let's say working after illegally migrating is equivalent to theft. It is hypocritical, and therefore invalid, to expect a person in poverty to obey the law of a land they're not even in simply out of the goodness of their hearts. Deporting them makes sense, punishing them does not, since every single american would do the same or worse if the situation was reversed. you cannot punish people for doing the same thing you yourself would do.
You solve the root causes, punish employers for hiring them, subsidize mexico's economic development,etc... but what's happening now is sociopaths being let loose on the american people.
> But quick deportation is. Imagine doing the whole trek from south/central america to the USA just to be sent back the next day. That's what deterring a lot of people now, wasting months of travel and money just to have it be worthless seems to be very dissuasive.
I think less people will migrate in the near term, until work arounds to avoid ICE are developed. People will still attempt this. Have you read about migration to euorope? a lot of them literally die on the trip, a good chunk just get scammed before they even reach the mediterranean. people will still risk all of this. for them, their former situation is equivalent to death. For some, it is worse, because it isn't them that is suffering, it is their parents,kids,etc.. so the risks are all worth it, even it costs them their lives.
> A lot of the latest immigration woes would be solved if the Venezuelan government was taken down and some real democratic government stepped in.
No, it would be solved if employers were targeted instead. a lot of modern woes would be solved by putting business owners in prison. It just isn't politically palatable. off the books employees don't pay income tax, you can nail the employers for tax fraud conspiracy among other charges. They're screwing over not just the government, but americans looking for work. they're artificially deflating wages by abusing illegal migrants. The worst they get is a fine. But concentration camps for the migrants is tolerable?
Justice should be blind and punish all criminals equally, stop romanticizing poverty and crime. If you commit a crime, go to jail, and if you are a non citizen, get deported. Victims of society mentality only creates more victims, as the victims of the crime are ignored.
> Have you read about migration to euorope
Yes, and people die trying to get to the USA anyway, that doesn’t mean the government shouldn’t enforce borders. African immigration is a worse situation as there are several civil wars ongoing, and its poorer than South America. European countries should also enforce borders.
For your last point, I mentioned latest surge, which is mostly from Venezuela, but I agree, they should enforce i9 registration for all employment and deal out harsh punishment.
How? As a migrant to the US I have generally found the rules quite reasonable, the UX of the websites is poorer than say the UK but the rules seem fine.
Excessive speeders in the absence of speed-limit enforcement just creates neighbors that don't mind their neighborhood being consumed by speed bumps/dips, I think there's an analogy here in residential areas. And if you have a lot of children in your neighborhood, there IS a 'xx-phobia' for speeders. But speed bumps and dips are an absolute nuisance and sometimes dangerous, so just having cameras identify and a system willing to punish speeders would absolutely be the preference.
"Data Show Trump Would’ve Released as Many Border Crossers as Biden" from the right-wing Cato Institute
> As I previously demonstrated, President Biden removed a higher percentage of border crossers in his first two years than Trump did during his last two years (51 percent versus 47 percent), despite Trump having to deal with many fewer total crossings (Table 1). Congress right now is in a bipartisan state of denial about these three central facts:
> 1) The reason people are being released is because of operational capacity to detain and deport them, not policy.
> 2) Biden has deported vastly greater numbers and a higher share of crossers, but it has not deterred people from crossing.
> 3) The logistics are such that once arrivals exceed the deportation machine’s capacity, people will find out and even more will come.
Yes, breaking asylum and due process laws will be a deterrent. The question was always how to deter immigration legally, which prior POTUSes thought they had to care about.
Re the funding increase:
People to put handcuffs on wasn’t the bottleneck, so no it doesn’t. Immigration courts are the bottleneck, and actually jamming more low-level or non-offenders into the system exacerbates that problem.
Which is not related to the closure of borders to asylum seekers nor the withholding of due process rights for people who are suspected of breaking immigration laws — neither of which is at the Executive’s discretion.
I'm pretty sure the executive has power over border policy, the INA is very broad and gives a lot of power to the executive, also it would be crazy if the executive can't decide on border policy, congress is too slow/deadlocked to do anything meaningful.
It’s not “iffy.” POTUS has absolutely no ability to curtail due process rights. It is a blatant violation of a right that undergirds every single other right in the Constitution. Without due process right, there are no property rights, no gun rights, no speech rights, no religious rights — all of them can be taken away by the state simply declaring that you have been found guilty of such an offense that those rights are stripped from you.
The solution to Congressional deadlock is called “electing new representatives.” The executive in fact does not have the ability to “shut off” asylum processing, no matter how dysfunctional Congress is. And even under the INA. Read INA § 1158(a)(1).
We could have a clause in the Constitution that says something like, “if Congress is deadlocked, POTUS can do whatever they want.” Alas we do not have such a clause, and so he cannot, even if you feel there is deadlock.
Illegal immigration can best be thought of as a slow-moving constitutional crisis. An increasingly large portion of the electorate wants decisive solutions to illegal immigration and will vote for the person who gives them that, regardless of the constitutionality.
It's not acceptable to post in this inflammatory style on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're here for curious conversation, not battle. It's also not acceptable on HN to scour through someone's past activity (whether on HN or elsewhere) in order to attack them, and that kind of belittling language is never OK here. Please take a moment to read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them in future.
It's strange to me that you chose to not cite the guidelines to elsewhere such as:
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle.
Are anti-immigrant sentiments acceptable if they are simply well-articulated?
And if not, then why do you feel it necessary to be more critical of the language I or lalaithion use for explicit dismissals of racists and xenophobes than the actual racism or xenophobia itself?
People continually try on this “gotcha” that we moderate more for tone than substance and that HN freely allows hateful rhetoric as long as it is smuggled in a Trojan Horse of “civility”.
This is of course a non-starter and nothing in the guidelines allows it. The first words in the “In Comments“ section of the guidelines are Be kind, and there is nothing “kind” about xenophobia or other hateful ideas, by definition.
But as longtime forum moderators we can't be so naïve as to succumb to an attempt to characterize any discussion about immigration laws and their enforcement as “anti-immigration” and ”hateful”. From what I can see this is discussion is not one of “pro” or “anti” immigration but about how laws should be interpreted and enforced, which is always something that should be able to be discussed in a spirit of curiosity. The guidelines cover this too:
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Nailer is a user who has crossed the line before and we've appealed to him multiple times to observe the guidelines, and will certainly do so again if and when it is warranted. In this case I don't see how he is the one who has crossed the line, but even if he was, that doesn't excuse you from doing so.
If you see guidelines-breaking comments on HN, just flag them or if they're especially egregious, email us (hn@ycombinator.com). If you escalate, then you become the one in the wrong, by making a bad situation even worse.
Its a data gathering system. it takes pictures of everything that goes past it so that IF something happens, cops can search back through the system to see if/when a suspect went past that sensor. This sort of thing should be turned off regardless. I don't want my movements recorded and tracked all the time in the off chance someone might do something later. This ICE situation is the perfect example of why these actively passive systems are a threat.
In my home county they've arrested car thieves and recovered vehicles due to real-time Flock hits. It is not simply for forensic purposes.
If it was a bad idea it shouldn't have been installed in the first place. Turning it off now because a few loud people assumed things that weren't true (ICE using the system) is idiotic.
It shouldn't have been installed in the first place, but in real life, sometimes people need a concrete example to realize something others figured out from principles.
The article said University of Washington researchers released a report Oct. 21 showing federal immigration agencies like ICE and Border Patrol had accessed the data of at least 18 Washington cities, often without their police departments’ knowing.
What they have, thankfully, is a concrete example of there being such a thing as an uncivil authority, not a concrete example of their mistake leading to irreparable harm.
Ok, and a real-time-only (as in it literally, physically has no onboard or networked storage and only generates data exactly when it hits a plate that's already flagged, or is false/doesn't match the car and the system to flag a plate requires a warrant) flock system would face vastly less opposition than the fishing-expedition-enabler that currently exists. Yet somehow that's never on the table.
Oh, sure everyone's against the cannibalism of orphans now from the comfort of their arm chair. But just wait until this implausible thing happens, that occurs to a small fraction of people ever. Then you'll all see.
Until the government decides someone you love needs to get disappeared, and then you want to provide no aid to them.
This technology swings both ways and as such is too dangerous to exist. We have plenty of other means to instantly and broadly raise awareness about abductions.
> So why is the city listening to hysterical idiots who assumed that ICE was accessing systems they weren't?
What have you heard or seen that gives you that impression?
According to the article “University of Washington researchers released a report Oct. 21 showing federal immigration agencies like ICE and Border Patrol had accessed the data of at least 18 Washington cities, often without their police departments’ knowing”
It seems plausible that the local government came to realize that unauthorized use of Flock data was happening elsewhere in the state and decided to act. These sort of privacy intrusions start off with the veneer of best intentions but when abuse is uncovered, people tend to get real.
I don't think anyone is going to expect you to listen to anything they have to say when you characterize people who you only just read about second hand as 'hysterical idiots'. It demonstrates that you are not interested in any other point of view.
It and other ALPR systems real-time alert on things like stolen cars. In my home county they have arrested and convicted criminals due to this. That is fighting crime, by definition.
If it was such a bad idea, they shouldn't have installed them in Redmond. Turning them off now because some people assumed things that weren't true is idiocy and sets a bad precedent.
Yeah, but. The side-effect of catching criminals and protecting the children is that they also provide a searchable database of everyone's historical travel habits.
It's my opinion that our historical ideas of expectation of privacy when in public spaces are incompatible with the current state of surveillance technology. Sure, everyone should expect that they might be recognized by an acquaintance when out in public, but I don't think it follows that our entire past history should be available at any time in the future.
The article said University of Washington researchers released a report Oct. 21 showing federal immigration agencies like ICE and Border Patrol had accessed the data of at least 18 Washington cities, often without their police departments’ knowing.
I'm in the PNW and they put Flock cameras up in my area recently. Nobody likes them (libs or cons), and we've seen some rather creative approaches to uh...disabling them. One person took a pipe cutter to the mount and spirited the whole unit away, another apparently fired a shotgun slug through it, somebody else looks like they used it to relieve their anger problems with a metal pipe.
Flock cameras, America's bipartisan issue?
Some guy I once met in a bar told me that he liked to mix a 1:1 solution of elmer's glue and water, put it into a spray bottle, set the nozzle to "stream", then squirt it all over the lens of a traffic camera near his house which he found offensive. His logic was that this made more sense than destroying the camera, because he could do it over and over and over: the company operating it would have to send someone out to clean the lens off each time, which would probably cost them more money than the camera was worth.
Not only this does good to society in the obvious way, but also creates jobs as someone needs to clean those.
Kudos to the guy, who single-handedly doing what almost all politicians miserably fail at.
Is it good for society to disable traffic cameras? Here in Sweden, traffic camera is used exclusively to reduce traffic speed on roads where the maximum speed is too fast for installing traffic bumps, with an expected effect of reducing traffic speed by around 20-30%. They are generally only installed on 60-90km/h roads, around road maintenance/construction sites, and in tunnels. They active when the radar detects speeds of 5km above the maximum. (The reduction in speed happens regardless if the camera is functional or not, since it is primarily a psychological effect).
Sweden also have traffic monitors that monitor highways around cities, border exists and tunnels, and also license plate readers for toll roads and bridges (also often used for parking). Those two generally have a much higher privacy cost than traffic cameras.
When the cameras become a revenue stream for a city it is not a good thing.
Cameras have been installed to fine cars running red lights. The city then reduces the length of the yellow to catch more people and offset the high cost of the cameras. The shortened yellows cause increased crashes and fatalities.
Net-net the track record in the states is not great.
One example https://www.koaa.com/news/news5-investigates/news-5-investig...
Here in Seattle the traffic cameras are not used to limit speed, but to monitor intersections for red-light violations. The glue-squirting fellow in my anecdote objected to the fact that the for-profit corporation which builds and operates these cameras gets a cut of the revenue from the citations they issue. He felt that it was one thing to enforce the law, and quite another thing to run a profitable business doing it.
That makes more sense. Traffic accidents should not be a profit center, and placing cameras where it makes the most money is unlikely to align with places where it has the biggest impact on reducing fatal accidents. The Vision Zero goal that Sweden has is often cited as a guiding rule for designing the road system, including the use of measures like road bumps and traffic cameras. Giving money from the fines to a for-profit corporation seems fairly obvious that it will create perverse incentives.
> Is it good for society to disable traffic cameras?
Its going to be unpopular but yes i think so. Traffic cameras, besides very few use cases, are completely useless (just like speed limits in general). Plus it's a huge temptation for local authorities to turn it into a cash cow and put it anywhere they please regardless of necessity. Italy is rife with those for example.
Speed cameras help really little with preventing accidents unless we're talking about 200 at 100. Put in cameras that detect tailgating/not maintaining enough distance relative to speed.
Now people can go faster while being safer.
The Swedish traffic agency, in combination with the health department, openly publish accident data for every road. Accidents and their outcomes are public data and has been so for a long time. The location of traffic cameras is also public and so is the date when they got installed. Everything is open to the public, and gps applications are allowed to both have the data and warn drivers.
The accident rate from before to after the installation of a camera has an average reduction of around 25% in reducing deaths in traffic. If someone don't believe it they can download the public data themselves and redo the math.
Sweden also do not have traffic cameras on highways, most likely because they are ineffective in reducing deadly outcomes at those speeds. The chance of surviving a frontal collision at 100km/h is highly unlikely, so the cost of installation a camera is better spent on roads with lower maximum speeds where the reduction in average speed actually have an effect on outcomes.
> The accident rate from before to after the installation of a camera has an average reduction of around 25% in reducing deaths in traffic
Try to forbid movement in the area and you can reach 100% reduce in deaths.
Statistics and data doesn't tell you the whole picture and often skewed.
Most crimes in Sweden are committed by "refugees" by huge margin, but good luck doing something about it or let alone talk about it publicly. But hey, lets install another camera to have everyone to slow down and exacerbate traffic conditions further down.
Reducing speed by 20-30% at scale results in a very large loss of man-years of lives in the form of sitting in a car. Reduced earning capacity, lost time with their families, waking up earlier and risks to health associated with reduced sleep, less theoretical throughput of roadways, reduced money for education/food/childcare when they accidently go too fast for a moment and are fined, lack of discretion in issuing tickets for bona fide emergencies, people suddenly slowing down before camera causing accidents, etc.
The obvious win in places like the US is that being pulled over is one of the most dangerous thing that ever happens to the common person, as they are exposed to a psychopath with a gun who is trained that the most important thing is to optimize every interaction to maximize his chance of 'making it home to his family' and if a policeman shoots everything that moves (up to and including, falling acorns) because he 'fears for his life' he will largely get away with it. So it is a nice alternative to that.
Its incredible how very reasonable thoughts and arguments are downvoted.
For those who downvote - lets just forbid movement to reach 100% reduce in movement related injuries, is that your strategy?
This is the best way to handle it because if the company presses charges they just look ridiculous.
Honestly, feels like the company is within their right to press charges here? Dude is disabling the equipment that they use to turn revenue, no?
Don't agree with the company, but I don't find a suit here ridiculous. If my job put up cameras, and my form of protest was to deface and disable them, I'd get fired. This isn't a job, it's government, but it's similar in my head. The people with the authority to do something did it.
I don't think this counts as property damage or vandalism because nothing is damaged or vandalized.
Part of putting shit in public is that it now has to interact with the public. If you want your stuff pristine, I would think you should not put it in public.
Maybe the law disagrees with me here, and it probably does because this country bends over backwards for companies, but that's how I see it.
This is America.
If you interfere with the business model of a large company, they'll eventually figure out something to criminally charge you with.
Felony contempt of business model, and all that.
>I don't think this counts as property damage or vandalism because nothing is damaged or vandalized.
Isn't this a form of graffiti?
I don't know, maybe? What's the cut off point for how long it takes to remove something?
Removing paint takes a long time. Removing glue doesn't take a long time. Removing a sticky note takes almost no time.
If I leave a sticky note on your car, is that graffiti? Is glue graffiti?
Obviously it's property damage. How would you like it if someone covered the windshield of your car with glue?
I wouldn't like it but that definitely doesn't make it property damage. Because my property isn't damaged.
It makes sense to me that criminals, like this guy you met in a bar, are opposed to Flock cameras.
There's also this spray-on-a-pole diy option https://www.themarginalian.org/index.php/2013/07/31/ai-weiwe...
I live in the Bay Area and went to my Nextdoor because I was thinking of seeing if there's much anti-Flock sentiment, and (not surprisingly for Nextdoor), most people seem to think anti-camera people are paranoid, or have something to hide, and wish they were installed in more places to solve the (non-existent) raging crime issues, or speeding, or god knows what.
I shouldn't have expected much more, though, to be fair. There's a reason I don't use nextdoor.
The funny thing is the people calling anti-Flock people "paranoid". Well, I don't believe in dash cams or ringing my house with surveillance cameras and peering at the footage all day and all night. I think _those_ are the paranoid ones. What happened to just living your life and not worrying about everything?
Is there a way to see where they are located? Or which cities are installing them? Hadn’t heard of them til this week
You can find them listed here. https://deflock.me/map#map=5/39.828300/-98.579500
Which is better than Flock's "Transparency" Report. I live in WA, ex-Flock employee, and in my County, half of the agencies with Flock agreements are not on their Transparency portal.
And at the very least - why can't you search the Transparency Portal? You have to try each and every agency name. Let's try https://transparency.flocksafety.com/ ...
<Error> <Code>NoSuchKey</Code> <Message>The specified key does not exist.</Message> <Key>index.html</Key> <RequestId>[redacted]</RequestId> <HostId>[redacted]</HostId> </Error>
Has been like that for a year plus, at least.
> And at the very least - why can't you search the Transparency Portal? You have to try each and every agency name.
Was it different in the past? It seems like it'd be beneficial to Flock and their customers to make obtaining this information as obtuse as possible, while maintaining the vaguest appearance of "transparency". If they could charge you $10 per search, they probably would.
As an aside - can I ask why you left Flock? I assumed that the people who would've wanted to work there would be fully invested into the idea. What changed your mind?
> As an aside - can I ask why you left Flock? I assumed that the people who would've wanted to work there would be fully invested into the idea. What changed your mind?
The Flock of my recruitment process would be a lot less problematic. There was discussion of the obvious, the surveillance "state". But everything was a high ground of ethics and legality, ideas were supposedly run through groups to discuss "not just whether we could, but whether we should", protecting individuals whose data was collected by Flock but had no safety or LE purpose, retention, sharing controls ...
... the reality was much more "mask off". "Eliminate all crime, using Flock". Very Airbnb'ish. "We know your jurisdiction doesn't allow you to share this data. It's not our job to enforce that on our platform; if you're sharing it, that's not our concern - you'll still have access to all the tools to do so." Sales worked with Agencies who weren't allowed to gather data themselves, weren't directly allowed to partner with Flock for cameras, were asked where they saw or believed they'd most want said cameras, and Flock would aggressively work with businesses, HOAs, other government entities in those areas, and get them onboard, and then go back to the Agency saying "Hey, guess what, we know you're not allowed to collect this, but these customers are, and you're able to share their data."
That didn't sit well with me - there was nothing actively illegal Flock were doing, but they were openly helping Agencies flout the spirit of laws constraining them while staying within the letter (in the above examples, HOAs and others would often get deeply subsidized, at least, installations, knowing that Flock would be able to get a bigger contract with an Agency that would otherwise have no over very limited means of working with them).
These things, coupled with Garrett's "vision" that, he emphasized repeatedly, was his literal vision, "Eliminate all crime with Flock", were too much (and I think lead to some of their even more troublesome initiatives now, like "Have AI look for potential suspicious vehicle movements, even without a reported incident, and have it alert officers to go investigate in realtime", with talk of that being extended to conversations and audio).
Flock model:
Evidence -> Crime -> Suspect
DoJ model:
Suspect -> Evidence -> Crime
Ideal model:
Crime -> Evidence -> Suspect
https://eyesonflock.com/ is the closest to an actual searchable version
They seem to be going up rapidly at the moment.
I live in a county where the county seat is <15k people (<40k in the entire county). There are two camera locations listed on deflock - four cameras total, since they face both directions. In the past month, I’ve discovered an additionally six locations (twelve cameras), all of which show signs of having been very recently installed.
I went to add them to Deflock, but their process requires an OSM account. I wasn’t able to do that on the side of the road, and haven’t gotten back to it yet.
About 40k new cameras each year from what I have seen.
If you find yourself with some time, there is now a DeFlock app that helps with mapping. It also includes locations where people suspect there might be a camera, though that is limited to about a third of the states so far.
I just downloaded it, and set up an OSM account. I’ve got a good mind to go drive all the major roads in my county tomorrow and mark every one I see.
Holy crap, there are almost 1000 in my part of my city.
The security cameras deployed in Lowe's and Home Depot parking lots are Flock. All the better to track your movements, citizen.
I don't understand if flock deployment in Lowe/Home Depot is because margins are so low it is the only way to survive, or margins so high that they can afford such a program just to eek out a tiny bit more sales from the collected consumer info.
Either way it doesn't make sense to me why hardware stores are the biggest private use case.
Neither. It’s because Home Depot/Lowes loses billions of dollars a year due to theft, both organized and petty. Just like they have security cameras in the store, they have security cameras in the parking lot.
I always assumed they were just a deterrent given the flashing blue lights and audio “this area is being monitored”, and less of an actual threat.
They have a very “citizen pick up that can” feel to them.
There are a lot of Flock supporters out there. In my neighborhood, homeowners can volunteer to put Flock cameras on their property, and a number of people are doing this.
It's like having a Ring doorbell and sharing the feed with the police, which is also pretty popular in some areas. If you trust your local police to ethically fight crime, why not help them out?
I feel these camera's is a symptom of how anxious the US overclass is.
I feel worrying about security cameras is primordial mammal fear of being tracked and eaten. Like fear of vaccine poisoning, a vestige of long ago threats.
The wealthy live different than you and me. A friends friends wife works at the facebook head quarters. Zuckerberg has a armed security escort when he walks between buildings. They're traveling around San Francisco, New York, London the same way you or I would travel around Mogadishu.
The reality is these guys are scared of us. And that's behind inane airport security, militarization of police, the ICE raids.
Years and years ago read a heretic economist that comment that highly unequal societies spend huge amount of money on security. Enough it has negative effects on their economy. This is really not a good thing for the rest of us.
And yet they drive away in their GM/Ford/Nissan/Tesla/Any car/truck with its connected media unit and telemetry gathering infotainment systems and think “This is fine”.
Hey it's a start. Get people together who don't like Flock cameras and tell them about pulling the modem out of their vehicle and you'll get some bites.
Except when it’s all tied into the ECU and you can’t remove it. Ugh…
You’re right. It’s a start. There’s also https://www.deflock.me
On some vehicles it’s easier than others. Unfortunately it’s a great idea to research before making a purchase decision.
Is local jamming or removing their antennas a viable strategy? Seems like it could be easier to just make them unable to phone home, rather than trying to surgically rip out the bundle of hardware and software responsible for it while leaving everything else intact.
Vehicles differ. Disconnecting the antenna is easiest in some. Removing a fuse is sufficient in some. Disconnecting the relevant module is not surgical in some. Some nag if the antenna is disconnected.
People are probably unaware of the telemetry on their vehicle.
But this is a good point, people get upset when government is perceived to screw them over and not upset enough when the private sector does it. In practice, the private sector screws over the public quite a bit.
Might be logical. The government can throw me in jail, steal my stuff (aka civil forfeiture), or (as we found out recently) tear gas my kids all without any penalty. In some situations, the government decides they are allowed to kill you.
Companies at least risk significant consequences if they start tear gassing children. For the most part the worst they can do is screw you out of some money, which is not great, but obviously better than imprisonment and the like.
If millions of people are being tracked by GM and haven’t noticed, how is it a problem?
If I wank in your soup and you don't notice, how is that a problem?
This is a weak argument. eg. If I come into your house at night and you don't notice, what's the problem?
Because doing something evil and then lying about it isn't any better than doing something evil and being honest.
Everyone with even a quarter of a brain can recognize that the extreme data collection is a ticking time bomb. This WILL be leaked. This WILL be used to deny people's rights. This WILL lead to financial loss for people.
It's only a matter of when.
Most cars or trucks used in the US are older than you seemed to assume.[1]
[1] https://www.bts.gov/content/average-age-automobiles-and-truc...
They have been collecting data since 2014, with some car manufacturers as early as 2010. Also, average age of vehicle isn’t a good metric when a lot of vehicles in the US are registered but never driven.
The statistics I linked were Average Age of Automobiles and Trucks in Operation in the United States. The title said in operation not registered. The sources suggested market research not registration records.
How many vehicles are registered but never driven? According to what source?
The statistics said the average age of light vehicles was 12.8 years. The average age of passenger cars was 14.5 years. And Consumer Reports said 32 of 44 brands offered some form of wireless data connection in 2018.[1] This implied 12 brands or more offered vehicles without wireless data connections.
[1] https://www.consumerreports.org/automotive-technology/who-ow...
Well Tesla cameras don't qualify as public record
"On Thursday, a Skagit County Superior Court judge ruled that pictures taken by Flock cameras in the cities of Sedro-Woolley and Stanwood qualify as public records, and therefore must be released as required by the state’s Public Records Act, court records show."
I do think that's an important distinction though; if I have a camera and record a public space, that's not an issue. If the government sets up a bunch of cameras, that's an issue, whether or not it's ICE, the FBI, or someone else using the cameras. I can't imagine the government will set up cameras and do non-scary things with it.
No need to imagine. There are several cases already of these buffoons in law enforcement doing scary things. The Institute for Justice (IJ) is one of the organizations taking these cases on and who also has suggestions for how to go about combating this stuff. I’m sure most here are also familiar with Louis Rossmann; he’s also been beating the drum on this stuff locally and in Colorado.
Same ones who probably will develop fast homomorphic encryption and distribute it to the entire world, completely oblivious to the eventual heat death of the universe.
For most people in the US a car is a daily necessity so it’s very difficult to avoid that telemetry gathering.
I have multiple cars and none of them are new enough to have that.
They'll have to track me the old-fashioned way, by my phone.
If they were made after 2016, they definitely are tracking you.
We aren't at the point where it's unavoidable though. Even if we assume that its impossible to dodge random onstar/sirius bloatware crap that probably tracks you, you can definitely still buy a car that doesn't have a 5g wireless modem, 360-degree webcam coverage, mandatory automatic software updates, and ass-warming seats locked behind DRM that forces you to have an online account linked to your credit card.
There is no new vehicle produced today that doesn’t track you. Not a single one.
Lot of new motorcycles don't. Although sadly many new ones now have bluetooth and smart phone connectivity which even if not used can be used as an identifier.
Put me on that jury.
"And yet, you live in a society. I am very smart."
Not the right point to take away. The useful observation is that visibility is key to people understanding how their rights are being violated. Unfortunately this lesson is mostly useful to bad actors. If you're going to install surveillance cameras, don't make them look like surveillance cameras (unless they're part of a theft deterrent system).
Everyone was fine with Flock as well until arrests started.
Once there will be a few high-profile cases around telemetry data being used, there will be much more outcry there.
> Nobody likes them
This seems like an unsupported assumption. Lots of people like them. Anyone who wants policing to be effective and cares about crime / public safety would like them to have the best tools.
> Anyone who wants policing to be effective and cares about crime / public safety would like them to have the best tools.
This depends on what the “cost” is for this “safety,” no?
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety"
> "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety"
Ben Franklin's Famous 'Liberty, Safety' Quote Lost Its Context In 21st Century [0]
(it was about the legislature being able to legislate [taxes])
[0] https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famou...
The public safety issue has been ignored and denied (and "defunded") to the point where measures like this now appear necessary.
That seems like the general mantra that's currently being adapted to justify all sorts of power grabs and expansions of surveillance all over the world. "We would really rather not do this, honestly! But the crisis is just too pressing, and has been left unaddressed for too long. You all just couldn't behave, and now we're going to have to do it the painful way. This is just what is needed, it's the natural outcome."
But surely, it's not the entire world that's suddenly experiencing these waves of perceived crises, right? The statistics to justify tough-on-crime enforcement are useful for the proponents, but it's not the statistics that prompted them to act. They have their own reasons, and some marketable justifications just happened to be lying around. If they weren't there, they would find some other numbers or some other category of criminals that must be urgently pursued, anything to justify the power grabs. Reducing crime won't stop them.
Of course, it's the same political class that allowed the crisis to become pressing.
you forgot to put "crisis" in quotes :)
makes sense… like NYPD has 11 billion dollar budget and NYC is the safest place on the planet Earth, we just need the same model in the entire USA and we good. Local/State taxes should be raised to something reasonable like 25-30% - it is public safety after all :)
It is a lie. Crime rates were going down. The problem is that right wingers scared of own shadow kept being afraid.
It hasnt been ignored or denied. What's happening is some people's minds are detaching from reality, and it's our duty to snap them out of their delusion.
The reality, which might I remind everyone does not care about their opinion, is this: crime has been trending down for decades. Police budgets have been increasing for decades. Many police departments are over funded.
no, they don’t
What can’t be done with Flock?
The fallacy here is that giving police access to more tools makes policing better.
It doesn't. Simply giving the police more stuff doesn't garuantee they will be more effective. They might be LESS effective, if they, say, have a culture of abusing their tools.
"On Thursday, a Skagit County Superior Court judge ruled that pictures taken by Flock cameras in the cities of Sedro-Woolley and Stanwood qualify as public records, and therefore must be released as required by the state’s Public Records Act, court records show."
This video by Tom Lehto talks more about that court case that illustrates citizens can legally do FOIA requests for traffic cameras (e.g. Flock): https://youtu.be/1vQn4MWBln0
The example of Seattle Police dashcam and body camera footage may be interesting. When those things were relatively new, ten years ago or so, someone started filing daily public records requests for footage from all 911 dispatches (among other things). They wanted to build their own database of the theoretically public footage. The SPD complained that the overhead of redacting all that footage would be impossible. Eventually the legislature clarified the status and tightened the request rules, so now you have to request footage for a specific incident, and you may have to pay a redaction fee. [0]
[0] https://mrsc.org/explore-topics/public-records/law-enforceme...
ten years ago or so, someone started filing daily public records requests for footage from all 911 dispatches (among other things).
I know someone who until very recently worked for a major city's police department. He said there were people who would request every video they could think of, and it was his team's job to scrub through the video and blur/block out faces of children and things like that.
He said his team was absolutely overwhelmed with requests from randos all over the country requesting things in bulk. Even if his team (~10 people, full-time) didn't take the extra step to redact some images, they simply couldn't keep up with it. Essentially, a FOIA DDOS.
The stress was too much, and he left for a different career.
(Before anyone asks if the PD imposed a fee for video, I don't know. It's possible the fee wasn't high enough, or maybe there's a state law regulating the fee. But I'm not sure it matters since there are plenty of cranks in the world with very deep pockets.)
If it's a major city, why isn't their FOIA team larger? Signed: A frequent requester.
It is a very major city. The vast majority of people on the planet have heard of it.
I can only speculate that it wants to put more cops on the street, instead of paying civilians to do paperwork.
The real world isn't like TV. Like everyone else, police departments have to work within a budget. People don't just magically appear from off-screen to do more work.
You are so, so close.
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I think someone even tried automating the redactions then posting to YouTube.
It’s an interesting case that pits privacy against transparency.
I absolutely want the cops to wear bodycams and I’d prefer they can’t even turn them off. But they also need to protect the privacy of victims, suspects, and witnesses. So they can’t just live stream to the Internet either.
How much is the redaction fee? How much would it cost to just pay it for everything?
As another data point/example:
Florida is a "sunshine state" [0] when it comes to public records which is why it's legal:
- to have mugshots and arrest records posted online
- which in turn leads to "attractive felon" style websites where mugshots are rated.
I'm generally for more privacy while at the same time getting why people push for transparency. Either way you get downstream and often unintended consequences.
0 - https://www.myfloridalegal.com/open-government/the-quotsunsh...
This is also the source of the Florida Man meme right? Florida's transparency makes it look like a state full of criminals.
Redactions are necessary to protect innocent members of the public. Going through all the footage from every officer every single day to perform these redactions would require a huge amount of manpower. That may change with new technology, but until it can be automated reliably, the WA legislature got this right.
With shit like traffic cameras, I don't think redactions are necessary, although it would be nice if all license plates were automatically redacted and only accessible with a warrant. Turning the cameras off is an even better idea.
I think the point is that if the footage is unsafe to release publicly, then it is also unsafe to give cops access without a warrant.
So cops need a warrant to even be present at a crime scene to ask the witness / victim what happened? Obviously not. And since not, why would they need a warrant to record their conversation with the witness / victim?
> Redactions are necessary to protect innocent members of the public
If these controls don't exist inside the organization, they shouldn't exist for the public either.
I think it would generally be a good thing for cops kicking down doors to have working body cameras; the state's monopoly on violence is easily abused, and should be carefully monitored.
But if the cops get the wrong address for their no-knock warrant, kick down my door, and find me jerking off in my bedroom - I would prefer the footage not be made public.
Your best defense against this obvious attempt to obstruct justice is "but my penis may be exposed"? Really?
This community really turned around its stance on transparency and openness in the blink of an eye. It's baffling.
They the controls do exist, just not at the capacity required to do it for literally every single hour of footage recorded by body cameras. Hence why they do respond to requests for specific incidents but not blanket or bulk requests.
If they had to do this for all footage then the police department would likely respond by decreasing field officer counts to reduce footage, as well as shift resources away from law enforcement activities and towards redacting the massive volume of footage.
Are you saying that a child in the car with their DUI parent deserves to be on a YouTube bodycam channel because cops have to appear uncensored in the same video? I genuinely don't understand how you could mean anything else, and that makes me think I misunderstood. I sure hope I did.
NO, the fact that you are hitting scalability problems to do a whole bunch of redacting is a solid indicator that this is going too far on surveillance data.
The only indicator that it was done right, is that the redactions are happening in real time at the camera, only the list of license plates that have full warrant cleared authority for should be leaving the camera itself. (or full car description: color, make, model, scratches, time of day) Otherwise there is a private company with a bunch of extra-legal tracking information they will monetize utterly illegally
The scaling problem of redacting video only applies to body cameras and I think they definitely aren't "going too far". Body cameras have greatly benefited society. The processes effectively restricting the rate at which you can file FOIA requests are entirely reasonable given the need to redact things to protect innocent people.
Someone should use AI to request such a large amount of data that it DDoSes the whole system. Unfortunately I feel like that would result in traffic camera data just being removed from FOIA rather than removed from use.
If I recall, the FOIA allows government agencies to charge you for the work of processing your request if you're requesting more than N pages or it takes more than a couple hours of work to fulfill the request. I'd be careful about a maliciously compliant response to such a thing. That said, we live in a boring world where they'd probably just respond by threatening you with a felony hacking prosecution for attempting to take down their system.
Washington State Public Records Act has no fee if you simply want to "inspect" the records (bodycams are the named exception); they can charge "actual" costs for storage, but presumably Flock stores the data, so... They cannot charge for salaries, etc.
You can make your own copy of records for free; if you want them to make copies, they can charge actual costs.
I don't think that would be legal... you'd have to get a judge to reverse the previous decision that established the cameras are public record. They would probably just turn them off instead.
What did they think would happen? Installing surveillance systems to monitor people is acceptable, as long as they're only used against the majority? I don't understand the logic here.
What kind of innane logic are you using here?! Yes, if the systems are installed for a reason approved by the public, and then they're used for a different reason, people don't like that.
Did you get to vote on whether Flock could operate in your area?
The police chiefs are usually the ones pushing the initiative. Have you ever voted for a police chief in your life?
That is rarely the case that they are “approved by the public” in anything even remotely close to a legitimate process. In cases like, was it Denver, where the city council voted against the approval of the $250,000 contract to surveil everyone’s movements, for the mayor to only immediately use his discretionary spending limit of up to $150,000 (or so) to approve a presumably smaller scope of surveillance.
In several other cities it has also led to all kinds of resistance by city councils and mayors in what can only be called an odd resistance against its own populace and constituents.
At least it seems that maybe something good will come of it when local people get more engaged and pay more attention and maybe even run for office against the corrupt narcissists of society that usually hold offices in local politics because people have not paid attention for a very long time.
Do you know your sheriff? Your city/county council members? The city manager? The mayor?
When you look at the deflock.me map and are astonished at how many cameras there are, you can thank people not paying attention in local politics and who their sheriff is, and you can thank the traitors at YC leadership who brought about this Orwellian system.
Flock is a bad actor and untrustworthy (misleading departments and officials about how data is shared/accessed, literally reinstalling cameras that cities have demanded to be taken down). Regardless of whether the local municipality wants surveillance or not, Flock is not a trustworthy company to buy it from.
> Regardless of whether the local municipality wants surveillance or not, Flock is not a trustworthy company to buy it from.
That's because the local authorities aren't the final customer. The final customer is the federal government, they want allllll the data.
And Garrett, the founder, has what even he calls a quite literal, not aspirational/visionary/metaphorical, aim that "We want to eliminate all crime."
Dear God I hate this particular breed of techbros. These people don't give a damn about democracy, about human rights or anything else other than their stab at entering the history books in a "positive" light...
The tech bros however get to have drugs, prostitutes and unethical medical experimentations!
> misleading departments and officials about how data is shared/accessed
Many times this isn't misleading, per se, but nudge nudge wink wink. "We trust you to follow your own data privacy policy. It's not our job to police how access to your data is configured." In Washington, for example, there is data that LE cannot collect, and LE cannot pay someone to collect directly for them to bypass that...
... but if someone just so happens to ALREADY be collecting it, they can pay to access it.
I think this is a case of, tools used to fight one type of crime are being used to fight another type of crime that disrupting the community. Kind of an unforeseen consequences situation.
"Kind of an unforeseen consequences situation."
This type of use and expansion of scope was totally foreseeable by anyone paying attention to history. It always starts as some targeted thing, then it becomes the path of least resistance for similar subsequent things as the barrier to entry is extremely low.
Exactly. Same goes for expansion of presidential powers. It’s all fun and games as long as your “good” team controls the executive, but there will come a time when bad guy takes over. A good system of government limits the impact any single bad player might have.
> It always starts as some targeted thing, then it becomes the path of least resistance for similar subsequent things as the barrier to entry is extremely low.
This new technology will improve existing procedures. How can you oppose it?
This new procedure will use existing technologies. How can you oppose it?
In my country you'd have to get a warrant. You'll get pretty much carte blanche for an Amber Alert but the judge isn't going to let you hunt down brown people.
But I guess if you elect judges pretty much all bets are off, no? Just find yourself a card carrying MAGA judge willing to sign off.
Some states elect state judges. Some states appoint state judges. Federal judges are appointed. Appointed judges in the US and other countries show the same problems as elected judges.
The appointed federal judges in the US are nominated by a political President, and confirmed by a simple majority in a two-party-system Senate, and serve for life. They have (unsurprisingly) become quite political, with either party appointing judges who'd be likely to judge in their favour.
This is not at all comparable to appointed judges in other countries, where politicians usually don't have any input on the appointment process. Usually they are chosen by the current judges at that level, or by an entity like a bar association.
After all, how can you have a Trias Politica if the three branches aren't independent?
Some governments reject separation of powers. Some countries have politicians select judges openly. Some countries' politicians worked around or subverted the systems intended to prevent politicians influencing judge selection.
Appointment is the most common method of selecting lower- and higher-court judges in common-law countries, and for supreme and constitutional courts in civil- and mixed-system countries. In most countries, this appointment is by the executive, but there are systems that assign the minister of justice and members of the judiciary a role in the appointment process.[1]
[1] https://judiciariesworldwide.fjc.gov/judicial-selection
I suppose it is quite impossible to design a system that cannot be abused. And a judge is at the end of the day a man or woman who is part of society.
If the public wants to make life miserable for a certain class it will be done. Democracy and the rule of law only exists by the will of the people.
> Usually they are chosen by the current judges at that level, or by an entity like a bar association.
So the judiciary is completely isolated from external accountability?
I do not see how this is a superior approach.
Kind of an unforeseen consequences situation.
According to the article, it was foreseen. But the people who brought it up were ignored.
> Kind of an unforeseen consequences situation.
This is the most foreseeable consequence I can imagine. It’s up there with “When I throw this baseball where will it land?”. It shouldn’t even require conscious thought.
You have to be covering your eyes, plugging your ears, and shutting down your brain to not be able to foresee these consequences.
They are being used to perform another kind of crime. Much of ICE behaviour this past year has been highly criminal.
Redmond is under no obligation to assist them.
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It's apparently against Washington state law for local law enforcement to assist immigration enforcement: https://app.leg.wa.gov/RCW/default.aspx?cite=10.93.160
Specifically interesting is the section "State and local law enforcement agencies may not provide nonpublicly available personal information about an individual..." which puts police in a bind with Flock data: if the data is public, anyone can request it (including ICE) and they have to provide it to all comers. If they declare it not to be subject to public records request, then they also can't share it with ICE -- which is outside their control in practice, since Flock independently sells access to AI summaries of the data. In the face of this contradiction, turning the things off seems to be the only way to stay legal until the courts get done chewing on this.
That law isn’t really enforceable since it would violate a local government’s first amendment rights.
The government does not enjoy constitutional rights. Constitutional rights ensure that the federal government cannot take certain actions against individuals.
It's pretty simple: People will tolerate surveillance technology if it promises to promote order and justice. People imagine them being instrumental in convicting murders, rapists, etc. ICE raids have been shown to be (I'm being generous here) sloppy and chaotic and seemingly targeting towards working people to grind towards a government-mandated quota - not the "bad guys" that plague our streets. Few are interested in a massive surveillance network to clamp down on what are essentially civil infraction of otherwise law-abiding and productive members of the community.
Who? I don't understand your logic either. I don't think anyone said this "is fine as long as it's used against the majority". Virtually every large city uses Flock. This is the norm.
They had never picked up a history book so they didn't realize that the systems they envisioned being used to stop the jackboot upon people they don't like would eventually be used to stomp people they do.
If you don't want to read a book, here is a Wikipedia article
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi
Back in a day, you did not have cameras yet, so one had to hire snitches. Luckily this is not the case anymore, as demonstrated by Chinese leading by an example:
https://t.co/Q1xOiQMmZT
Facts are no match for my ability to use short sighted emotion and motivated reasoning to convince myself it'll be different this time. /s
Kinda funny if you think about it, the snitches are cut from the same cloth as the people clamoring for more cameras, more jackboot. If anything they should be pissed about being cut out.
When history is racist, only racists will read history books.
you don't understand it or you don't agree with it?
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I agree with this. As a resident of a neighboring suburb to Redmond, I would have welcomed more automated cameras to cut down on street racing, package thefts, and car prowls. In fact I want all of the suburbs around me to implement this so that criminals can't just flee to another jurisdiction and escape justice.
> so that criminals can't just flee to another jurisdiction and escape justice.
I think it's a fair deal so long as you can't escape to Utah/Idaho/Colorado when you realize the dystopia you've created isn't the kind of place you want to raise a family.
Great idea: make it a crime to move away from Flock-laden neighborhoods once you put your name on a petition to have them installed. See how quickly they short-circuit.
Some generalized version would work great for to keep people from peddling all sorts of short sighted stuff. I have no idea how to do it. This sort of "must have skin in the game" criteria was what the founding fathers were trying to do with the property owning requirement (but that was so imperfect they started undermining it pretty much before the ink was dry).
Are you serious? The people most pushing for this are precisely the ones trying to raise a family.
Seattle is in such a tough spot. I lived there from 2001 to 2010 and left and then went back in 2018 or so and it looked like the homeless population had doubled, or tripled in the time since. And then I went back again after COVID and it was just sad. The entire downtown area is just homeless camps. There used to be a big beautiful Macy's department store on 4th Ave that's just all boarded up now. You can't browse around outside Westlake Center without being bombarded and accosted by aggressive panhandlers. Even the iconic Pike Place Market was overrun with druggies.
The entire city is so poorly run they just have no answers, and nobody can do anything about it. Pick something. Build more housing, do a basic income. Something, anything. But they can't. And their politics just let it keep getting worse and worse.
> The entire downtown area is just homeless camps.
This isn’t even remotely close to true.
> You can't browse around outside Westlake Center without being bombarded and accosted by aggressive panhandlers. Even the iconic Pike Place Market was overrun with druggies.
I live on Pike Street. There’s homeless, but it’s not “overrun” and for the year+half I’ve lived here I haven’t been “accosted by aggressive panhandlers”. These are areas with constant foot traffic.
Yes 3rd & Pike is bad, but it’s improved since then. Late at night it’s not the best—but it’s never been.
If this is truly your experience, I urge you to visit again. Seattle is a large and beautiful city with a lot to offer.
In general the homeless problem downtown has gotten better but a few hotspots are still bad, notably Chinatown/International District. I used to enjoy taking visitors there until about 5 years ago when a few Asians got their heads bashed in or shot around Chinatown and Belltown. It was a politically inconvenient time to highlight who exactly was attacking Asians, and the issue was swept under the rug. Now we just stay in Bellevue, which luckily seems to be getting all the new Asian small businesses.
I agree, Chinatown/ID took a turn for the worst unfortunately.
I don't know why you're being downvoted. I've lived in the area for nearly 20 years and I agree that his description is far exaggerated. It was true in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic (when any eviction or forcible displacement of people was prohibited), but not since then. Today, the visibility of homeless encampments in Seattle is roughly the same as it was 20 years ago.
> The homeless encampment problem in Seattle today is roughly now back at the same level of problem we had 20 years ago.
See, this is wild to me. Seattle has a long-time notorious problem with Tent Cities and even now it's just completely normal. I remember The Jungle under I-5 at Beacon Hill was a big problem. I'm sure it still is.
"The Jungle" isn't at all the same now, and is mostly cleared out from its heyday in ca 2018.
The larger problem with "The Jungle" is that nobody can agree on what it means, and where it is. I used to live on Beacon Hill, and the way journalists used the phrase was all over the place. Incidents anywhere from the I-90/I-5 interchange to the camps under I-5 all the way south to Georgetown, to the camps up in the woods in the East Duwamish greenbelt were all called "The Jungle".
This sounds like the perspective of a beat-down Seattlite that thinks all the problems are just "normal". I lived there for a very long time, and have lived in several other major cities since then.
Seattle's problems are not "normal". And they should not be normalized by thinking this is just how it is. It is not that way in other places.
> I lived there for a very long time
It sounds like your last visit was during the COVID-19 pandemic. Homeless encampment conditions in downtown Seattle and throughout the city have much improved since then. Today, visible homelessness is effectively the same as it was back in ~2005.
Deflecting is a fun game, but I won’t play it. I’m challenging your hyperbole here—on the other hand, you’re making assumptions about me.
Explain to me how “the entire downtown area is just homeless tents”. By all means bring some proof of Pike Place being “overrun with druggies”. Get real.
Walk from Pike Place Market, 1st and Pike, east up Pike St toward Capitol Hill. Count the number of homeless camps you see sitting on cardboard boxes in the middle of the sidewalks. All along Pike St, 3rd Ave, 4th Ave. And then count the number of SPD officers you see (ignoring the fanny-pack guys handing out naloxone). You'll get it.
I’m so glad you mention “going up Pike towards Capitol Hill” because I live right on the section where Cap Hill & First Hill starts.
My lived experience is that I could walk the length of Pike from Bellevue Ave towards the waterfront and see two-three tents at most. Homeless yes, but encampments? “Overrun”? “Tent city”?
It’s so easy to make hyperbolic statements and a pain to prove them wrong. I can see how you get away with spouting this nonsense—and people believe it.
Let me know if anyone wants a YouTube video or something, I’ll be glad to take a fun evening stroll and prove you wrong.
Start at Boren Ave and walk down Pike Street. Film it.
You don't even need to film it, it's on Google Maps Street View: https://maps.app.goo.gl/cdyFttFsQPhpBHR48
That street view was filmed taken two months ago, when it was still warm and nice out, so tent activity would've been at its peak.
I wish I had seen your post earlier because I literally walked that stretch of road earlier this evening -- a couple friends of mine from out of town are going to the Patti Smith show at the Paramount tonight and we had drinks nearby. No tents in sight though we did encounter someone walking around with a blanket wrapped around their head. But still, one probable homeless drug addict is hardly "overrun".
It's really not as you describe... I agree things were getting worse in ~2019 and then became way worse during the pandemic, but it's much different now.
Thanks for the link.
In the interest of saving myself an hour of time uploading a video, I’ll attest that yes—that street view is as “average day on Pike” as it gets.
To be clear, there are homeless who walk around the area… and Capitol Hill isn’t exactly the nicest area these days. 3rd and Pike isn’t nice. But Seattle in 2025 isn’t real-life World War Z.
Parent commenter should visit sometime.
A single druggie/hobo is unacceptable in a functional society. Just enforce trespassing laws.
All the west coast port cities (SF, Portland, Tacoma, Seattle, Vancouver) imho have always had a similar s.hole vibe. For most of the last 40 years SF was the worst. But now Seattle has the top place. Clearly complex issue with many causes but also clearly someone in SF did something to improve the situation and someone in Seattle didn't do that thing.
Seattle was highly functional for a while. When the tech industry grew, the region attracted a huge population of people from California and it destroyed the local and state politics. SF policies came to Seattle and in a worse way. SF has at least swung back a tiny bit but Seattle hasn’t, and it’s why there is rampant crime, trash, and encampments.
You don't understand the logic of "there are some crime problems we're willing to accept more intrusions to solve than other crime problems?"
Seems like something virtually everyone believes, and all that changes is where they draw the line of balance between intrusion and safety.
The problem here is that the law and order politicians world wide pretty consistently follow a pattern that starts by demanding surveillance tools to fight very serious crimes and those crimes only. Once they get that, they eventually start another campaign to allow use of the tools that they now have access to for less serious crimes. After a few cycles of this, you get a massive erosion of citizen rights.
This is called "Salamitaktik" in Germany.
For anyone else interested in reading more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salami_slicing_tactics
This new technology will improve existing procedures. How can you oppose it?
This new procedure will use existing technologies. How can you oppose it?
>they eventually start another campaign to allow use of the tools that they now have access to for less serious crimes.
Don't forget the part where the useful idiots cheer because "I hate street racers and package thieves" or "I hate cults and drugs" depending on the decade
People aren’t useful idiots for wanting to avoid being victims of crime. They’re rational. Stop trivializing the big negative impact street racing and theft have on people.
They are if they use it to rationalize giving government effectively arbitrary power over them for barely any decrease of crime that victimizes them.
Stop acting like they're using the dragnet in the interest of the citizenry. They're not.
The point is that there is no actual line. There's the premise which then collects the data.
Then the data can be used for other purposes--no line prevents this.
Weird. There's an article right here showing them turning off the cameras when the line was crossed and now that data can't be used the way they don't want.
So clearly we're allowed more nuanced takes than you think.
"There's an article right here showing them turning off the cameras when the line was crossed and now that data can't be used the way they don't want."
Not exactly true. This happened after the arrests and won't affect those arrests. This also doesn't prevent ICE from installing and using Flock cameras on federal properties (like the post offices). I would also bet that they could still comb the existing data if they wanted to, hence the shutdown of the cameras on the fear that they can't keep the data safe.
The Redmond City Council made a recommendation to turn off the cameras on Nov 3rd, two days before the ICE arrests. There had been local concern aired the week prior about feds/ICE possibly accessing Flock camera data. I think it was on its way to being shut down but the ICE activity perhaps hastened it.
https://www.nwprogressive.org/weblog/2025/11/a-preliminary-v...
All of which further confirms that there is in fact a line.
Reactivity isn’t proactively protecting what you belief. It’s reacting to public outcry for the original premise.
Are you proposing everyone make the optimal decision in advance, when outcomes are all speculative, and just be sure to get it right so there’s no need to learn and adapt to circumstances?
I propose we stop letting government do things that are revenue based and pretend they are “in our best interests”.
I would hope so because no we are obviously not turning back the clock to a time when cameras did not exist. Most people kind of find surveillance cameras reassuring.
They're installing them in my mom's apartment complex after a vote.
Did they also vote on giving the federal government or any govermental authorities access to that footage? Did they ask if they want all the neighbors to be able to watch any of it? Did they ask if they would give it to cops to use against residents?
Because im willing to bet a lot of answers would change when they knew the answer to those questions.
Really depends who owns the footage. I’m installing cameras on my house but the NVR is local-only.
"They did the thing and the public got mad so clearly they won't do it again"
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
i will never tire of the irony of a man who owned humans being lauded as a freedom fighter.
Benjamin Franklin became an abolitionist.[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin#Slavery
what that wikipedia article doesn't mention is that Franklin continued to own people for almost his entire adult life, while paying lip service to abolition.
Whatever you're doing at the moment, I'll bet somebody 200 years from now will condemn it.
It might not even take that long, at the rate we're progressing.
i can confidently say that i don't personally engage with any activities that constitute extreme deprivation of another individual's liberties while simultaneously advocating for those liberties, which is what i was specifically talking about. please, if you must, accuse me of something concrete.
And yet every society makes exactly this trade off.
There is no such thing as avoiding this trade off entirely.
"Those (the Penn family) who would give up essential Liberty (money & power), to purchase a little temporary Safety (a veto over a taxation dispute, trying to raise money from the Penn family), deserve neither Liberty (said money & power) nor Safety (the defense that said taxed money would've bought from the present French & Indian wars)"
The context of the original quote doesn't prevent others from finding it more generally applicable or well-put.
It's kind of funny if you think about it. Franklin spent so many years arguing for liberty, low taxes and limited government that when he tried to argue in favor of taxation and federal power he unintentionally still argued in favor of the former.
A lot of our political discussions and systems these days are warped by a failure to understand the ways that state-versus-federal differences have changed over time.
Even today, it's not necessarily hypocritical for someone to argue that states should do more X while the federal government should do less X.
It doesn't, but at that point you're not referencing what a person meant, you're saying something they didn't intend with their words. You might as well make your point with your words, instead of misleadingly quoting someone else.
> Those (the Penn family) who would give up essential Liberty
No, you've got it half-backwards.
He's saying the democratic legislature shouldn't forever give up the citizens' collective Liberty to tax the ultra-mega-rich (Penns) in exchange for a one-time Security payment from those rich near-nobles.
https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famou...
Ironically you're correct, and yet I'm still closer to the original meaning than the typical quotation.
You don't understand why they may want surveillance to curb or investigate violent crime, but not why they oppose surveillance used by the Gestapo to kidnap members of their community? Seriously?
It's like saying I'm hypocritical for loving to write with pencils but being offended when someone else stabs me with one.
> Bro, you said you liked pencils, make up your mind!
No. I'm calling them idiots for giving a bunch of 3rd graders piles of newspapers and matches and expecting the eventual end result to be anything other than a fire.
This shit was wholly foreseeable but they flew right into the sun, not too close to it, right the fuck into it, because they just couldn't stop lusting after the idea of sending the jackboot after someone for a crime that amounts to petty deviance (I'd like to say they were using it to go after petty thieves, but we all know they weren't doing that).
This is just victim blaming people for assuming they lived in a polite society with safeguards for their rights at a higher level.
People are allowed to leverage trust in society to make tradeoffs. Or should we ban all forms of delivery because it can be abused at the extremes of the system to mug the drivers? Should every single store have every product locked behind glass and armed guards to light up any shoplifters, lest it be their fault for being robbed?
You're acting like they should have known the President would take complete control of the government and all other branches should cede while a Gestapo was deployed against the populace. And even then, they would only be buying time. The fascists will install their own mass surveillance anyway whether you like it or not. They're fascists!
Maybe blame every Republican and Republican voter for installing a fascist government instead of a city that had the audacity to think they could leverage stability to make their lives a little better.
And, for what it's worth, I know folk here like to pretend "this is just to spy on you", but that's just your rhetoric. The city doesn't care about where you go. But this kind of data is used frequently rape and murder cases, as traffic cameras are often some of the best evidence available. And the analytics collecter can be useful for all sorts of civil engineering, policy, and architectural decisions.
Now do I agree with the mass surveillance? Do I think the motivations were entirely pure? No, not really. But do I think you're being a bit of a drama queen and blaming the wrong people? Absolutely.
> You're acting like they should have known the President would take complete control of the government and all other branches should cede while a Gestapo was deployed against the populace.
People should know Germany was a republic before the Nazis took control.
>This is just victim blaming people for assuming they lived in a polite society with safeguards for their rights at a higher level.
Karen (I actually have spicier thoughts about exactly who's at fault here but "Karen" will have to do) who provided the political will to set up the cameras is not the victim here.
Her hapless landscaper (or whatever) is the victim.
This was not unforeseeable. This was playing with fire. For years we build up the police state's capabilities and made it VERY cheap to run (with all these cameras and whatnot). Something like this was unenviable. If not the feds going whole hog on something that some states didn't agree with it would likely have been some states doing their own similar thing in some other policy area. Every government accountability group, every privacy group, they've been screeching for years. It's not like every warning wasn't sounded.
>The city doesn't care about where you go. But this kind of data is used frequently rape and murder cases, as traffic cameras are often some of the best evidence available.
This is a BS red herring. "serious" crime has been very solvable for years with cell location data, metadata, private security cameras, etc. But all that takes "work" (read: nontrivial amounts of money and labor the expenditure of which must be authorized and somewhat justifiable), a single unaccountable bureaucrat can't do all the heavy lifting of determining who to dispatch the boots on the ground to go after from the comfort of their desk
The entire purpose of the government having these systems like Flock is exactly what it's being used for. It's so that the .gov can still do jackboot things (like round up illegals, or whatever) without the oversight of Amazon, Verizon, etc, (companies with public images they care about) saying "hey man, this is too much, we don't like the look for our business" and pushing back. The only reason we're even hearing a peep is any strife here is because the local governments interests aren't aligned with the feds.
The city doesn't care where "I" go until I check the right (wrong) boxes and then they'll be waiting for the chance to harass me. The government didn't "care" until something flipped, and then the .gov was all over them. The same is true for you and everyone else.
And yes I'm being sloppy with with my wording and my reasoning, I could not be, but I don't really care to write to that high a standard.
> This is a BS red herring.
"I don't respect facts I don't like" is not a very respectable point of view and makes me not want to engage at all.
> with cell location data, metadata, private security cameras, etc
I'm sure you'd argue that the government should have access to all of that data and it could never be used for "jackbooting"?
EDIT: Even if you did genuinely support all that, you're doing exactly what this city did! Making a subjective judgement call about where to put the proverbial line, but still giving the government the ability to use this data because you value its ability to benefit us / provide safety guarantees.
All that data can just as easily be stolen and abused by a fascist government.
> It's so that the .gov can still do jackboot things (like round up illegals, or whatever)
You are quite literally posting in the context of TFA about them turning them off explicitly because they did not intend them to be used for "jackboot things". FFS.
I don't think you understand.
The police (local or federal) don't have integrations with private CCTV, historical location data, etc, etc. When they want that stuff they have to email someone, ask someone, have a reason, maybe even get a warrant, etc. Heck, even to snoop on someone's facebook they create a paper trail going through the law enforcement portal This is not a big deal for "real crime" but for stuff the public doesn't actually support serious enforcement of it's a big PITA, creates a risky paper trail they don't fully control, there's potential oversight, etc. All that constrains how far they can go without local public support.
Being able to just "go fishing" from your desk like you can with Flock (and to a lesser extent Ring), like the NSA can with all our emails and metadata, etc, etc, and all that other 1984 type dragnet stuff, is a categorical difference and nobody should have that power.
If stabbing people is so wrong, why don’t we lock up all the surgeons?
Of all the poor thinking and rhetorical skills out there, the one that drives me the craziest is this insistence that ignoring context is not just acceptable but essential.
So I definitely agree it's a positive development that these cameras are being taken down because they're absolutely orwellian, but I really don't understand why "the line" is being drawn at immigration enforcement? Were people really okay with this until the point where they found out that illegal immigrants can be tracked by the surveillance state too?
This isn't the "people" waking up and not being okay with this, it is one governmental power (the state) realizing that its own power to manage its citizens (the residents of WA) and its sovereignty is being threatened by another power (the fed) in a new way. The system the state previously used to enforce its own power over its constituents is now helping the competing power to have more power over those constituents outside of cooperation with the state power, so they are removing it. There is no sudden awakening of citizen consciousness here. Many of the actions emerging around ICE stuff are about states trying to combat overreaching federal power.
People were okay with it when they assumed, I think naively, that only guilty people had anything to hide.
Now that we've got someone willing to throw all rules and morals to the wayside in charge, they've understandably begun to reassess.
Sure wish Americans could understand the issues before they happen. Not after it's too late.
Stupidity is not exclusive to Americans. It's something that unites all of mankind.
I'd like to say that the people who championed them realized that if fedcops can basically arrest their landscaper over what amounts to a civil infraction then it has implications for them. Unfortunately I don't think the people who championed the cameras in the first place have that kind of self awareness and what we're seeing is instead the typically silent majority saying "no, I akshually agree with the privacy people those are bad".
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Fine then, people accused of nonviolent crimes. Where you split the legal hair doesn't really matter much because the facts of the situation are unchanged IMO. Failing to get government permission for something that's mostly fine isn't all that serious of a crime IMO.
I'm sympathetic to the realities of immigration enforcement but I'm not sympathetic to the "oh, they're bad people so it's fine to violate their rights a little" line of reasoning that most attempts to categorize this or that demographic as criminal, criminal adjacent or likely criminal tend to move in the direction of generally (i.e. not specific to the current immigration debate or enforcement thereof, we could be discussing the DEA in 2002 and the same thing would come up)
"iN sUM cOunTries"
And in this country border agents pepper spray citizens and black bag elementary school teachers terrorizing your own children. What is this the shitty authoritarian olympics? I thought this was the land of the free and all I see is bootlickers.
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Let me know when you go after the people employing the illegal immigrants instead of the immigrants themselves. Until then, the stance here is clearly not aimed at minimizing immigration. You're wasting at best while the hive continues to thrive with honey, protecting its queen.
I'd have no problems enforcing laws about illegal immigrants if they actually bothered to check and not just deport random brown people even if they're citizens.
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Deporting one person who is a US citizen or has legal status to be here is offensive and we shouldn’t tolerate it.
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Many of those people are seeking asylum, which is legal. It sounds like you're the one that fell for a fake invasion. But everyone in your family will get a raise once you terrorize the brown people enough, right?
Masked ICE thugs have been abducting citizens, and refusing their victims their due process. Stop acting like you're still ignorant about that.
> Stop acting like you're still ignorant about that.
We've asked you multiple times recently to not post in the flamewar style on HN. It's not what HN is for, and eventually we have to ban accounts that keep doing it.
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Please don't reply to a bad comment with another bad one.
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Nope. The percentage has flipped.
Hysteria over watching hard working immigrants getting grabbed by masked ICE thugs throwing tear gas at citizens?
Go * yourself and your fascist brain
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/26/immigrants-c...
Weird how we only see them rounding up farm and factory workers, or assaulting journalists in the street, etc. Listen, they have daily arrest quotas in the hundreds. You seriously think they can find this many "bad guys" daily, as Trump calls them? Of course not. They're all fucking fat cowards, unable to even run. They're only arresting whoever does not have a white enough skin to their eyes, and won't resist too much.
And whatever you think of illegal immigration, them arresting kids and deporting them without their parents to country they've never been to is actually evil. Do you understand this "hysteria" a little bit more, or do you actually like children suffering?
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Which is bad because a lot of them will be right back to insisting on more cameras, more data collection and more jackboot the second he's gone.
Wonder why people would take issue with the unqualified, armed, masked thugs abducting innocent people off the street and deporting them without recourse or due process. Must be all about Trump, surely.
The only thing defying logic here is the MAGA cult rationalizing away the brown shirts now patrolling the streets of America, they who are supposedly so attached to freedom.
>Wonder why people would take issue with the unqualified, armed, masked thugs abducting innocent people off the street and deporting them without recourse or due process.
Congress can whip up a law making immigration infractions more serious crimes (which comes with better process) and day it chooses.
ICE can send better qualified better trained agents any time it chooses.
They can likewise be more fastidious about who they choose to go after such that far fewer innocents are caught up in it.
Would that make it ok?
You're missing the point of Trump's ICE. Scaring the opposition is their entire raison d'être. Abducting citizens randomly, wearing masks and using uncalled-for violence are their tools to achieve this.
However reasonable your propositions are, it's pointless considering them. This administration is completely uninterested in refocusing ICE on their original mission.
You're the one missing the point. Even if ICE were "acting like professionals" it would still not make it ok to have roving bands of fedcops. Heck, change their issue of enforcement from immigration and customs to something else and it's still not acceptable.
The government should not have this type of force projection power domestically without going through at least the states or picking the nuclear-ish option and using the national guard.
I think we're saying the same thing? Brown shirts are bad, ICE is currently occupying the role of brown shirts, therefore ICE is bad, yes?
I am having a hard time distinguishing your points. I think you two are in agreement.
Clearly relevant regardless of opinion.
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety
A little annoyed, this seems like is has nothing to do with the ICE arrests...
> The city suspended its Flock system because city officials could not guarantee they wouldn’t be forced to release data collected by those devices someday, she said.
Key part is "someday". Seems like the article is implying that flock may have shared this data with ICE which led to the arrests... but there is no proof supporting this...
> On Thursday, a Skagit County Superior Court judge ruled that pictures taken by Flock cameras in the cities of Sedro-Woolley and Stanwood qualify as public records, and therefore must be released as required by the state’s Public Records Act, court records show.
This is the more likely reason. What do folks here think about this ruling?
IMO it seems obvious that this should be public records/data, but would love to hear alternative positions to this.
I can't stand this type of "journalism"/sensationalism.
> Redmond’s Police Department was not among those listed in the report, and has never allowed external agencies to access their Flock data without requesting and receiving permission from the police chief first, according to an Oct. 24 statement by Lowe.
So because the arrests were near a Flock Camera the "journalist" is connecting the two? Even with the statements an information to the contrary?
:(
This wouldn't be the first time Flock was used by ICE and would not be the first time Flock allowed ICE backdoor access against the wishes of the local government or police department in Washington. https://jsis.washington.edu/humanrights/2025/10/21/leaving-t...
So making the connection isn't a leap and seems like a pretty pragmatic action taken to reduce ICE's ability to surveil communities.
Very tinfoil hat of them.
The journalists didn't make this connection, it was a topic of discussion at the city council meeting. And the result of that discussion was to suspend the cameras anyway, out of concern that ICE could end up with the the Flock data, even if they hadn't already. It would have been odd for the journalist to report on the outcome and leave out the event that prompted it.
Yes. Because Flock literally cannot be trusted.
As an ex-Flock employee in my county alone, Flock's "Transparency Report" only lists -half- of the agencies using Flock.
I think we need to revise our understanding of expectation of privacy. The 'you have no expectation of privacy when you are outside' bit was formed before we had everything recording us and before face recognition could track us.
At the very least I think any kind of face recognition should require probable cause.
Its an interesting question indeed. You're saying there might be some expectation of privacy even in public?
The line here is a little different. I could point a camera out my window and record every license plate that drives by my house, and that would be allowed because its recording public activities, and the data I collect would be private—its mine from my camera.
The question here is if a public/government agency pays a private company to setup cameras in public, for the benefit of the public, then should that data collected by those cameras not also be public?
The courts seem to agree that it should be public, and I fail to see why it shouldn't be. Maybe I should read the opposition briefs on it.
If your neighbors were across the street and had their blinds open could you point your camera at their window and take pictures?
License plates were designed to be read and visible and they show that the vehicle is registered, but what about inside the vehicle? Do we have privacy in there?
What exactly does 'in public' mean? And why shouldn't someone have privacy from being recorded and their movements tracked even if they are in public?
None of these things are a given. The rights we have are because we decided they were important. There is no reason we can't revisit the question as situations change.
Might make sense to revisit the constitutionality of license plates, rather than try to attack public recording.
They're demanding you show your "papers" registration at all times without articulable suspicion you've committed a crime/infraction. The fourth amendment arguably protects us from the government requiring us to show us our papers at all times when we're travelling in the most common form of conveyance.
Abolishing license plates could be a solution if complicating identifying cars is what you want. It would do nothing about face recognition.
> The question here is if a public/government agency pays a private company to setup cameras in public, for the benefit of the public, then should that data collected by those cameras not also be public?
This is how NASA operates with the data/images collected from the tax payer funded operations it runs. There is a period of exclusivity allowed for some projects to allow the people to work with the data, but anybody can go down load high res imagery once it has been released.
Awesome, thank you for the input. I suspected NASA was operating this way, but I had no idea there was a period of exclusivity. In the case of NASA, the private companies are those like JPL and the sorts I guess?
I assume it is/was similar with other data collected, like weather data/radar, oceanic current/buoy data, etc?
I read about this regarding Hubble imagery, but pretty sure it applies to all missions funded by tax payers. The teams requesting time from the platforms are granted exclusive time to work out what they need so they can publish their papers for credit and what not.
One of the great things here is that most of the teams are so focused on their specific criteria in the data, they sort of lose the forest in the tree. Once that data has been released to the public, more and more interesting things are being found in the existing data rather than requiring new observations. It's space, so most things only need to be imaged once per sensor. It's not like setting up a trap camera hoping to see big foot the one time he strolls past. The universe changes on a much slower scale so the data is still relevant for much longer.
Fascinating thank you.
> Once that data has been released to the public, more and more interesting things are being found in the existing data rather than requiring new observations.
Really highlights the value of the data being public, which I feel is often overlooked now a days. Hard to tie KPIs to value that comes like this.
You're saying there might be some expectation of privacy even in public?
There should be. I like how this is handled in Japanese media, where there is such an expectation - people's faces are blurred unless they opt in, and publishing photos/video without redating people's identities is not just a social misstep but grounds for a lawsuit if it causes distress for the subject. You need a release for any commercial use of photography, and non-commercial publication (eg Instagram or your art blog) can still get you sued if it infringes on others' privacy.
https://www.japaneselawtranslation.go.jp/en/laws/view/4241/e...
Japan has set about harmonizing its privacy laws with the GPDR and similar for business purposes.
> You're saying there might be some expectation of privacy even in public?
Not parent poster, but yes!
What people expect are outcomes. The mechanics they know of for how data is/isn't available is merely how they reach their reasonable expectation.
I expect that almost nobody I meet in public is a Stasi informant.
P.S.: To put it another way, a major purpose law is to clarify and codify the expectations the people. Not just expectations of privacy, but expectations of when we have liberty to observe or record.
We expect that our faces might be captured on someone's vacation photos in public, surviving as an anonymous and unconsidered background detail, and that we can take our own photos like that without getting permission from everyone in the background.
In contrast, we don't (didn't?) expect all the photos to feed into a mega-panopticon that that does facial-recognition on all subjects and cross-references us over time and space while running algorithms looking for embarrassing, criminal, or blackmail-able events.
There is certainly some expectation of privacy in public. California at least has anti-paparazzi laws covering some of this.
> You're saying there might be some expectation of privacy even in public?
Sure. The expectation is that your every move in public is not being recorded and stored on a central system that the government, and by extension various kinds of bad actors, can access.
In a society where the government's role is to defend its citizenry rather than participate in their exploitation, this would be an easy choice.
US governments (both federal and local) face some challenges here, because "defend its citizenry" is not really one of its main goals.
> I could point a camera out my window and record every license plate that drives by my house, and that would be allowed because its recording public activities, and the data I collect would be private—its mine from my camera.
Maybe you shouldn’t be allowed to do that. Permanent persistent recording of the public feels very different than taking a photo every once in a while, and I feel it’s an infringement of privacy even when a single person does it.
Feels more like stalking to me when the government does it. The intent is to intimidate and put the observed parties in imminent fear of imprisonment if they do something those in power do not like. Coupling this with intentionally following them around, with the specific goal of en masse systematic targeting of those in transit, albeit with stationary cameras strategically replaced, has a lot of parallels to criminal stalking.
If you put up cameras on all the intersections on the way of say an ex went to work, and started logging when they were coming and going, it's hard for me to believe a prosecutor wouldn't be able to file that under some stalking-adjacent statute. The fact that they're doing the same thing en masse doesn't make it more generalized, it's just a larger scale of high specificity.
Feels way different when it's one rando doing it than when it's a government or BigCo with government integration doing it.
I think it's less of a revision and more a return to a core meaning.
Privacy isn't a mechanic, it's a capability, and most reasonable people DO expect, implicitly, that that they can travel unremarked under most circumstances.
I think most people would agree that a government drone swarm specifically tasked to follow you everywhere in public (loitering outside buildings) would be an invasion of privacy. Especially when it is illegal not to be wearing some equivalent of license plates.
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sigh I hope LLMs can save us from ourselves. :)
Maybe I need to write a news filter/browser extension that rewrites rage-bait articles to have titles and content based only on the meaningful content/facts, and less the speculation/insinuations.
I'd like that. Some sane, fact based news without all the hype and weasel words.
Paramilitaries kidnapping and assaulting my neighbors is not "rage bait." It's fascism.
From what I read, the pressure from activist groups on Redmond’s city leadership began before the Skagit County ruling. So it is probably unrelated. But I think it’s still a bad outcome for Redmond. Why wouldn’t you want law enforcement to be able to observe public spaces (which these cameras are monitoring) and identify or track suspects? We want our city services (like policing) to be efficient, right? We want criminals to be arrested and face consequences, right? We all want safe cities and neighborhoods, right?
I think the Skagit county ruling is likely to be appealed. There is a lot of information that governments can redact for a variety of reasons, despite FOIA or state/local transparency laws. It seems obvious that there’s a case for law enforcement to be able to access footage but to avoid handing over that kind of intelligence to the general public, where criminals could also abuse the same data. And I just don’t buy the argument that surveillance through cameras is automatically dystopian - we can pass laws that make it so that data is only accessible with a warrant or in a situation with immediate public risk. There are all sorts of powers the government has that we bring under control with the right laws - why would this be any different?
As for Redmond turning off its cameras - this is just fear-mongering about ICE. In reality, it’s just sanctuary city/state resistance to enforcing immigration laws. Redmond’s police department confirmed they’ve never shared this camera data with federal agencies, but that doesn’t stop activist types from making unhinged claims or exerting pressure. In reality, it’s activists of the same ideological bias as the soft on crime types that have caused crimes to go up dramatically in the Pacific Northwest in the last 20 years. They’re happy to see law enforcement hampered and the public put at risk - the ICE thing is just the new tactic to push it.
Your first paragraph doesn’t just beg the question, it outright harasses it.
…and identify or track suspects?
For starters, we’re all suspects when those cameras are running. Granted, AI-driven facial recognition is 100% accurate, so if you have nothing to hide…
> Redmond’s police department confirmed they’ve never shared this camera data with federal agencies
The problem with this is, that in the age of put-as-much-data-as-we-have-in-some-us-megacorp-managed-cloud this does not mean anything anymore. I may sound paranoid but it's just the truth. There is an abundance of general evidence for this, but even more, there is evidence that Flock data has been shared with parties in the US government who weren't "allowed" to access them.
Your sentence makes it sound like they have a document somewhere in their office that has not shared with anyone else. But that's wrong. They have a document on servers ran by a shady company (prob. AWS, Azure, Google), managed by another even shadier company (Flock). The police department has no idea who can see it, and who can't.
I can only speak for myself, but I do not have a problem with enforcement of immigration laws at all. What I do have a problem with is how it is enforced [1,2] and how the general surveillance is handled, especially by Flock [3,4] and the US Government [5], but, to be honest, in the whole US.
[1] https://www.hrw.org/report/2025/07/21/you-feel-like-your-lif...
[2] https://factually.co/fact-checks/justice/ice-power-abuse-cas...
[3] https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/flock-pushback
[4] https://www.forbes.com/sites/larsdaniel/2024/10/22/warrantle...
[5] https://www.aclunc.org/blog/mass-surveillance-trump-era
> Why wouldn’t you want law enforcement to be able to observe public spaces (which these cameras are monitoring) and identify or track suspects?
Yeah, why wouldn't I want that? Or Flock "helpfully" proactively flagging AI-generated "suspicious vehicle movements" to LE for investigation? What could wrong there?
> We all want safe cities and neighborhoods, right?
Was it hard not to end that paragraph with a "Won't somebody think of our children?"?
You sound like great fun at a party.
No they turned them off because it turns out those cameras are public records and all their citizens can make requests for ALL THAT DATA.
Couldn't they just not log the license plates and only look for license plates on the list like stolen cars, stolen plates, amber alert etc? Why do they a need a list of all cars that the camera saw?
They don't just log license, they log everything about the car, dents, location of dents, type of wheels, stickers, etc. If you swap a license plate they would be able to tell the car. One local case I read about, the culprits used their own car with a stolen plate. They were able to identify the car based on the car's "fingerprints" dents, style, color, antenna, scratches etc.
That’s some cool tech!
To run fishing expeditions.
We are all speed running our learning on how all of these systems can be used against us.
The UK has their "blade runners" - maybe the US needs them, too.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/ulez-cameras-van...
Redmond is such an excellent town.
I know there's a massive hate for flock online but it solved a murder that happened in a park behind my house in less than 24 hours which was pretty cool.
I have seen so many of these cameras by intersections recently! I wondered what they were.
NB: Title edited to add "WA" for clarity. I.e., this is the city of, not a toponym for another entity.
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> No matter what, the whole ICE acting like the SS thing will only result in more illegal migration in the long term, like a lot more.
I don't follow. Illegal immigration into the US is down right now. So, how did you arrive at that conclusion?
The lesson learned is that people going to their immigration hearings to stay legal are getting nabbed, and going the legal way is a convoluted recipe for failure.
As soon as enforcement lets up an iota the lesson will be it is wiser to stay off paper and off the visa pathway and go underground. People who aren't arrested and don't present to CBP for entry and don't get a visa, as far as the government knows, don't exist.
This is not "the legal way."
The people going to their immigration hearings to "stay legal" were apprehended as illegal immigrants, invited to come up with an excuse as to why they should be allowed to stay in the country, and released. You'll literally see "apprehension date" on their paperwork. The "legal way" is to apply for that stuff, then enter the country.
It's annoying that people elide this. There is an ongoing attempt by the current administration to remove these very recently introduced practices that no one voted for. Or a show of an attempt, really, because they love illegal labor.
But it's weird that for the past decade that illegal immigrants who have been caught are released almost immediately into a dilatory multi-year process of hearings. It's also weird that even those that have not been apprehended are issued IDs, work permits, business and drivers licenses, get in-state tuition as state schools, and in some places get to vote for local elections. There was never a debate about this, and it would have never survived a debate.
It's important to note that none of the countries that they are coming from allow people to do this. You can't just walk into Mexico and be Mexican, or fly to Nigeria and be Nigerian. Any shock that they have is in how easy it is to just walk and fly into the US and stay indefinitely.
> it is wiser to stay off paper and off the visa pathway and go underground.
This is how it used to be. But "underground" is nothing like this; it isn't in-state tuition and business licenses and street protests. It's usually harder than just going back home. In the late 90s, net migration from Mexico was negative. The "wall" (that Hillary Clinton helped push, and had a hand in started modern left-bashing among Democratic administrations) was a bad idea because a lot of people just jumped the border for enough time to make a few dollars, then ran back. People would go back and forth half a dozen times. After the wall, getting across was so onerous that you had to stay.
Previously, if you were a Mexican who hit a bad financial patch, you ran to the US, worked like a dog, and ran back with enough cushion to get your life going again - if you failed again, you could just repeat the process. After the wall when you hit that same patch, you had to commit to trying to make a life in the US.
I think the inflection point was the desire to get cheap labor to repair New Orleans after the flood, but they didn't want to hire the black people who lived there, they wanted to get rid of them, to ship them out to FEMA trailers in neighboring states. That's exactly what they did.
To obtain asylum through the affirmative asylum process you must be physically present in the United States. You may apply for asylum regardless of how you arrived in the United States or your current immigration status.[1]
[1] https://www.uscis.gov/humanitarian/refugees-and-asylum/asylu...
> The "legal way" is to apply for that stuff, then enter the country.
Which is next to impossible, particularly for immigrants who pick crops and process livestock. It’s annoying when people elide this.
> It's also weird that even those that have not been apprehended are issued IDs, work permits, business and drivers licenses, get in-state tuition as state schools, and in some places get to vote for local elections.
Or since those people pay taxes and are subject to governance, maybe it isn’t weird at all.
I don't think the drugs analog works. What this activity by ICE does though is put a chilling effect on "legal" immigration and tourism. Which will over time hurt supply chains, tourist destinations and jobs overall.
It's a pendulum, the next administration will react in the other direction, possibly very dramatically.
Because the blowback on ICE's current 'posture' is going to gut that agency.
I agree with GP, but from the opposite perspective.
ICE doing a good job of removing illegal aliens ("acting like SS" in GP's parlance) will trigger the next democratic president to relax border enforcement. This is what happened with Biden. He let in 7.2 million migrants [1].
There's no way for Trump to deport 7.2 million people in 4 years. Pro-illegal immigration presidents are always at an advantage.
Trump's strict (and good) policies might trigger the next democratic president to just blanket pardon all illegal aliens, and the next republican president can't do anything about it.
[1]: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/million-migrants-border-bi...
> No matter what, the whole ICE acting like the SS thing will only result in more illegal migration in the long term, like a lot more.
How so? What mechanism do you see that goes from "ICE acting like the SS" to "a lot more illegal migration in the long term"? What's the cause and effect here?
Not saying you're wrong, necessarily, just... I don't see the causality at all.
My guess is he sees ICE hauling people out of even the courts when they were attempting to abide by the legal processes and will say f-it, why bother, its safer to not adhere. just my assumption of OP's intent.
Why fill out the right paperwork and actually attend your court dates and immigration hearings if there is a good chance that will result in your extraordinary rendition to some torture prison God-only-knows-where? Much safer to simply stay off the books.
Well ideally you're supposed to have a valid visa before you cross the border. I don't like the idea of the government promising people a path to amnesty and then going back on its word because there's a new administration in town but ultimately the people they're nabbing are in this situation because they already have invalid visas so I don't think it follows that this would discourage people from obtaining visas like they were supposed to have already done.
To obtain asylum through the affirmative asylum process you must be physically present in the United States. You may apply for asylum regardless of how you arrived in the United States or your current immigration status.[1]
[1] https://www.uscis.gov/humanitarian/refugees-and-asylum/asylu...
What was the reaction to SS? or to stick to my DEA example, what was the result of the war on drugs? millions and millions dead because of drug related causes right? how do you think the nation will react to ICE's brutal and cruel, even illegal operations? many would consider them heroes, but the other side will consider them no different than the SS or gestapo, the only correction is to wind down immigration enforcement dramatically, increasing immigration.
Imagine a democrat administration simply reverting ICE to its pre-2025 state. the implication alone and the perception it gives will drive up illegal immigration. "america is open again".
Statistics are showing that the total immigrant population is down by over a million since the start of the year. If you have the ability to leave, why put up with this nonsense?
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/08/21/key-findi...
A large number of people, myself included, are now radicalized against the concept of immigration enforcement. I think everyone has a duty to make sure that ICE is as ineffective as possible and ICE agents are as miserable as possible. There's a lot of talk, for example, about how the asylum system is easily abusable; that's true, but now we will not be able to fix it because no immigration reform compromise that doesn't destroy ICE is acceptable.
My city, capital city, local PD (also in Washington state) put out this press release after ICE blocked up a busy intersection in peak hour chasing someone:
> [Department] was not notified of or involved in this enforcement action. By state law, city resolution, and department policy, [we do] not cooperate or coordinate with federal immigration enforcement.
> Voters don't want a streamlined and efficient immigration system that lawfully allows a lot of migrants
There was a really interesting open ended survey some years ago, in the leadup to the trump/clinton election but I can't find it now sorry.
When republicans voters were asked to describe their preferred immigration policies, they outline a stance significantly more permissive and flexible, and less burdensome, than the one we currently have. More liberal than the reality, in other words.
People don't know what the immigration policies are and so they can't know what they should be either. The anti-immigration sentiment is a stunning propaganda victory decades in the making, no more.
Yes, that's my experience when having to explain what getting a greencard entails, most people have no idea how the whole thing works.
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This is a non-sequitur response to the thread.
"Turns out that most people actually want a more liberal immigration system than we currently have when surveyed"
"That lines up with my experience describing the greencard process to others"
"Well immigration should not be easy"
Your personal opinions on immigration are not really relevant to the topic.
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Got it, so you're engaging completely in bad faith. Flagged and moving on.
Is self-determination a human right? We certainly decided a lot of nations to the south of us didn't deserve that right. Look up the history of the banana republics some time.
Up until it conflicts with my country’s rights, yes. Not sure what you’re suggesting. Is mass migration to the United States the policy of, say, Mexico?
I'm suggesting that we spent a lot of effort overturning elected governments in South America because we didn't like who they voted for and what their policies were with regard to US fruit companies. US policy directly created instability, civil war, and a generally terrible situation that they are dealing with now. Do you know what a banana republic is?
>with regard to US fruit companies
I suggest you take this up with these so called "fruit" companies.
The US Government was very much involved.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaragua_v._United_States
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_intervention_in_...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_PBFortune
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d%27%C3%A...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_Chilean_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1971_Bolivian_coup_d%27%C3%A9t...
You seem to just realize that countries deal with the rule of might, not words. Words are worthless unless you have the power to enforce them.
Very insightful.
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Yeah, it's a nation. A nation of immigrants. Where did your great-great-great grandfather come from? Did he spontaneously erupt from this common ancestry and heritage that you speak of?
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common ancestry and heritage? that's what you're going for as the defining american feature? really?
Hi, Jew here: I was with you until you started slandering dissenters as "rootless cosmopolitans"—a slur has cost my family dearly—from jobs and enrollments to several dozen of our very lives.
Yes, NO land is an "economic zone" while it is also a home. I feel this especially acutely having grown up in the San Francisco Bay Area where My friends and I struggle to compete for housing with the best and the brightest from the entire world over who, themselves, treat my home region less like a community and more like an understaffed amusement park.
Nevertheless, your blood quanta framing is utterly horrifying to me, someone whose family were murdered, lands stolen, and who has no country to go back to.
We are not by choice "rootless cosmopolitans", but by the very bigotry you espouse.
I have nothing against you, and was unaware of the historical usage of the phrase rootless cosmopolitan.
It's terrible that as you say your family has no country to go back to. I am fighting hard to ensure that doesn't happen to my family.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rootless_cosmopolitan
> The term is considered to be an antisemitic trope
> common ancestry or heritage
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_and_soil
> Blood and soil (German: Blut und Boden, pronounced [ˈbluːt ʊnt ˈboːdn̩] ⓘ) is a nationalist phrase and concept of a racially defined national body ("Blood") united with a settlement area ("Soil"). Originating in the German völkisch movement, it was used extensively by Nazi Germany
Hence my antipathy, 20+ years ago, to the creation to a department of "Homeland" Security. Not that function of that entity itself was necessarily a bad idea, but that the concept of a "homeland" is fundamentally at odds with the USA's credal concept of civic belonging. Smuggling the blood and soil metaphor (further and officially) into the national consciousness has born disastrous fruits.
> will only result in more illegal migration in the long term
Why? Wouldn't it disincentivize illegal immigration by making it much more riskier?
Agreed that the legal immigration system needs an overhaul, these are a lot of people living in limbo, paying taxes and not causing crimes with very few rights. The term no taxation without representation was the reason the USA got founded.
It's a temporary partisan solution, the other party will do the opposite, reducing enforcement and letting even more illegal migrants in, lest they be accused of being a xenophobe.
Not sure of that to be honest, I think that would be a loud minority.
Once democratic cities got a taste of the flood of people coming in that were sent by southern states, they realized how big the issue is and how much of a drag on resources it is.
That's not how it is in reality, southern states (not just them though) have been doing that with homeless people too, not just immigrants.
Republicans did jim crow in the 50s and 60s, we still talk about it today, and the positive blowback from that needs no explanation. Keep in mind that ICE is doing a lot more than cops did to protesters in the 60s, and it is targeting not just one group but several minority groups. not only that, it is all being live streamed, and it is affecting a lot of majority-group americans more directly. If ICE can avoid being disbanded it would be a great victory for them.
If I were exaggerating, I would be talking about tribunals and mass incarcerations of ICE agents, but I'm not.
Correction: it was actually southern Democrats that did Jim Crow. The Democratic party used to be quite different before the civil rights bill.
No, it was Republicans (today) who used to be democrats in that era. parties are made up of people, it was the same people or their ideological inheritors. Many republicans today in congress (especially leadership) were of voting age in that era. a 20 year old in 1969 would be 75 today, younger than the current and former president.
Were they Democrats at that time, or not?
Yes, they were. They are republicans now. You arguing in bad faith here, because you very well know the democrats back then are the republicans now. The party of democrats back then is not the party of the democrats now. the democratic party represented the same people republicans represent today. You're trying to make an falsely link the democratic party today with the party in the 60's, you know that link is incorrect, but since it helps you make a point, you're making it anyways. I call this: intellectual fraud.
> . You arguing in bad faith here,
I am arguing in bad faith for pointing out historical facts? What bizarro world are we in? Do we not care about facts any more?
> You're trying to make an falsely link the democratic party today with the party in the 60's
That you think I am trying to make the Democratic party look bad by saying this is your assumption.
Guess what, Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act which abolished Jim Crow and was a Democrat in the 60s.
This doesn't mean anything with regards to modern politics.
> I call this: intellectual fraud.
I call it US History.
By the way, I hope no one ever treats you even even a little bit like you are treating me.
All you had to do was make a point without saying something untrue. Try this:
> That's not how it is in reality, southern states (not just them though) have been doing that with homeless people too, not just immigrants.
> The south and what would be modern republicans did jim crow in the 50s and 60s, we still talk about it today, ...
Not that difficult, and you could have bypassed the whole lashing at out me for pointing out your error fiasco.
Fallacy: not relevant.
Ideologically, they were republicans. In name only, they were Democrats.
This is not some 'haha gotcha!' type thing. Real argument with real human brains don't work that way. You can be technically right but if it's on some semantic bullshit nobody cares about, then you're wrong.
It is a correction, not a gotcha. If you want to make a factual correction mean something more than it does then that is your bed to lie in, not mine.
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I can think of many uses for "surveillance state technology" that have nothing to do with immigration: It can be used against citizens and legal residents too.
I don’t buy that for a second. Governments always want more control, and this is just another way for them to get it.
But the sorts of ICE actions that are causing this controversy only have political support because the US immigration laws have been flouted for 30+ years. Regardless of what you or I think of it it’s the reality that lots of the electorate wants deportations and lots of them and that likely isn’t true in a world where the laws on the books were more strictly enforced in the past.
What political support? Is there evidence to back that claim? The most recent polls I've seen about this are Gallup's polls from July and they suggest that 62% of Americans disapprove of how Trump is handling immigration. This includes a majority of Dems and Independents. The trend is more and more people disapprove of Trump on this topic as time moves forward.
I don't have any data to back this up, but it is conceivable the people that want to deport en masse often understand that the perception of such policy is ugly, and simultaneously support it while not wanting to publicly broadcast it.
If I supported mass deportations, I would simply vote for it and never tell anyone so that I could get what I want without getting any of the flack from the associates of the people who are deported. There's not a lot to gain from telling others you want to harm a bunch of your neighbors, but there is a lot to gain if you can give them the boot and not being perceived as having anything to do with their misfortune.
I mean that is basically the entire basis of the shy Trump voter phenomenon. Even after 8 years of trying to correct for it it showed up last year enough to tip the election from one which the polls said was a dead heat in the Electoral College to a clear Trump and Republican popular vote victory.
You missed the point: they were referring to the sentiment that lead to Trump’s election. Many of those voters , I would guess, feel that the way Trump is doing it is cruel and chaotic.
This obviously doesn’t imply that those who voted for Trump on this basis want to go back to the open border Biden days.
They don't have majority political support. Even many Trump voters are against it. Also Trump has repeatedly violated immigration law, hell Trump tower wouldn't exist without the work of unauthorized Polish workers
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No, there are many reasons people want deportations, but mainly people don't think others should get the benefits of being part of a country while flaunting its rules.
In short: "if you want to join our group, you should like our group and add to our group".
Stories like these are what turned people away:
- New York giving free debit cards to migrants to buy their ethnic food because they don't like free American food.
- Free or subsidized housing for migrants.
- Migrants protesting with Mexican flags.
You're conflating illegal immigration with immigration.
In no way is illegal immigration "good for America".
Hm, I’m not saying it is good for America, but it seems to me that there are plausible senses of “good for America” for which it is plausible that illegal immigration is “good for America” in those senses.
Now, I generally dislike laws being broken. If there’s a situation where breaking a law is the right thing to do, then typically that indicates some problem (perhaps with the law, perhaps with something else).
So, I would hope that if illegal immigration is or were acting as a good thing right now, that there is or would be a better long-term solution for whatever situation than “a long term pattern of illegal immigration”.
Oh, I somehow misinterpreted “In no way is” as “There is no way that”. Oops.
The definition of illegal immigration changes to suit those in power, not those fleeing wars.
Nope. It's coded in our laws. It is a legal term.
Ask JD Vance, who repeatedly said that people legally in this country are illegal immigrants - and those screaming the loudest about illegal immigration walk stridently behind his banner.
I highly doubt he said that, you may want to provide a direct quote and source if you are going to throw that out there.
Illegal alien is a legal term and conflating legal and illegal immigration is disingenuous to the conversation.
You should probably just... google it? https://www.npr.org/2024/09/18/g-s1-23667/vance-haiti-migran...
This was widely reported at the time, thanks for playing.
Just as I suspected, spin.
They were specifically talking about Haitians and the TPS status.
He's saying they had no right to do that under the law.
It's the same mess they got us into with DACA.
So you have illegal aliens, protected under these very fragile and most likely unconstitutional EOs, when it's really not their authority.
I partly agree with your original statement "changes to suit those in power". Yes, that is the problem, when Democrats are in power.
It is the authority of CONGRESS. Vance is respecting that authority and saying he's ignoring the blatant disregard of it during the Biden admin.
I'm all for adjusting our immigration laws. But things like TPS and DACA just cause more problems.
Until then, enforce the current laws on the books.
Those other programs are revoked just as easily as they were added, because that's not how you do it.
Implying democrats use of executive power is the problem in the current situation is laughable at best and genuinely bizarre given the current administration's actions across so many avenues.
Red herring. Political support is due to mass media narrative campaigns, in this day and age groundswell politics is simply infeasible with the power that narrative has in today's culture.
Political support is due to people voting for it, and in the US system that is the arbiter of who will get to enact their policies.
This is true.
Hence the importance of controlling the narrative by spinning unchecked stories about immigrants eating cats, disproportionate rates of murder and crime, ignoring revenue from immigrants paying taxes, etc.
The fact that sufficient people will vote on immigration as an issue is orthogonal to the realities of laws and enforcement rates and entirely predicated upon perception of such issues.
But if they hadn't been flouted, the US would be a dirt farm specializing in the farming and production of dirt. Hacker news wouldn't even exist.
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Please avoid flamebait and ideological battle on HN. We're here for curious conversation.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I don't see in any way how my comment was flamebait.
It's a political discussion, either allow it fully or don't.
Leaving one sided statements up like the GP is not a discussion.
My response was a real retort to that belief that America wouldn't function without below minimal-wage exploitation of illegal aliens.
Referencing the morals of the same justification for slavery is a valid point.
Your comment was flagged by several members of the community who all have a solid track record for flagging things due to being in breach of the guidelines (rather than due to disagreement, spite etc). So I'm not out of step with community standards here.
> Leaving one sided statements up like the GP is not a discussion.
Other comments in the subthread have also been flagged and killed, and I may reply to them also. I replied to yours because I saw it before the others and because its's clearly a party-political, inflammatory comment, and you are a repeat offender when it comes to guidelines breaches. In just the past 18 months, dang or I have asked you five times now to improve your conduct on HN.
> It's a political discussion, either allow it fully or don't.
> Referencing the morals of the same justification for slavery is a valid point.
The validity of an argument is a separate matter to whether it is expressed in an inflammatory way. We want to be able to discuss difficult topics on HN, and that can only happen if people are going to respect the guidelines and make the effort to discuss things with sensitivity and curiosity, rather than combativeness.
If you are only able to discuss difficult political topics in a combative style, HN is not the right place for you to participate.
I really don't see how pointing out history or highlighting political positions of a party is combative, but okay.
I'm aware of my run ins with you and dang and regret hitting that threshold, but it's never intentional.
I never attack a person directly, even though I have witnessed it being done and others have done it to me.
OK, I can accept that you didn't know, and that you don't intend to cross the line, but that just indicates you're not aware of what's expected here and you need to learn, and to make an ongoing effort to stay well inside the bounds.
A line like “Whether it's slaves or illegals, it's still wrong” will always be classed as an inflammatory statement on HN.
> I never attack a person directly
That style of rhetoric in the reply is hostile to the parent; we often don't know how hostile our words can seem to the person on the receiving end of them; they don't seem so bad when they're just thoughts in our own mind.
> even though I have witnessed it being done and others have done it to me.
You should flag things or report them to us at hn@ycombinator.com so we can investigate and act where needed.
They'd find a need (or excuse) for it regardless of the state of our immigration system.
on the books immigration law has been broken for decades. do you expect people across the border wait a decade to get their turn for an immigration interview only to be turned down, when they can just cross the border?
When laws become impractical, they create 11 million law breakers.
Hundreds of thousands to millions of people have come to the US legally each year for the last thirty years.[0] How is that impractical? In fact the share of immigrants in the US has increased significantly (by 3 times) in the last 50 years, and is above the level of the EU, and is at the highest level in the last 100 years in the US.[1][2] Even if legal immigration was set to zero, that shouldn't give people the right to come here illegally.
To be clear I am not making an argument that mass surveillance is needed to solve any problem.
[0] https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/green-card-holders-a...
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2024... via https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/09/27/u-s-immig...
[2] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SM.POP.TOTL.ZS?most_rec...
US vs EU vs OECD: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SM.POP.TOTL.ZS?most_rec... - I'm pretty sure the values here include illegal immigration as well, so if you factor that in the US may be lower than the EU, but again still at historically very high levels.
The biggest illegal immigration source is the southern border. Yes, lots of people have immigrated, but they're a tiny fraction of those who wanted to immigrate. H-1B is a good example, it counts as immigration but it is really not, it is residency contingent on specific employment contracts. Those people with H-1B have no way to gain permanent residency without their employer sponsoring them, which would let them leave the company so employers don't tend to do that a lot.
The comparison with EU is not meaningful, especially since it isn't even a country. The population growth of the US and the world as a hole has also risen by more than that factor, even in the past two decades or so it has more than doubled.
>Yes, lots of people have immigrated, but they're a tiny fraction of those who wanted to immigrate
What point are you making here specifically? Are you saying the law is considered broken unless all or most people that want to come to the US can come? If so, the citizens (or at least the government) of the country are the ones that decide its laws, not people who want to immigrate to that country.
>H-1B is a good example, it counts as immigration but it is really not
The fist link I gave only includes green cards issued, it doesn't include H-1B visas to begin with. In any case, H-1B is not that significant a source of immigration, it seems to account for less than 1 million people in the US.[0] And it pays better than immigrating illegally in 99% of cases, most people would take that. Also by your own metric immigrating illegally isn't immigration either. I don't see what specific point you are making. Are you saying people come here illegally because they don't want to come via an H-1B visa, or are you just making a general point that immigration is not that high?
>The comparison with EU is not meaningful, especially since it isn't even a country
Then why does the worldbank include it? And why use OECD as a metric for anything if it isn't a country?
>population growth of the US and the world
The "highest in 100 years" statistic is in terms of percentage, so that shouldn't be relevant.
[0] https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/reports/U... "As of September 30, 2019, the H-1B authorized-to-work population is approximately 583,420."
> do you expect people across the border wait a decade to get their turn for an immigration interview only to be turned down
The backlog isn't a consequence of the law.
Is there a country that doesn't expect people to go through some kind of qualification process in order to immigrate legally? Here's what it looks like in Canada (where I live), for example: https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/se... It's actually quite complex, and depends on additional provincial legislation. And then there's citizenship on top of that: https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/se...
> when they can just cross the border?
The entire point is that they legally in fact may not do so, and have only been doing so because of the lack of enforcement GP cites.
> When laws become impractical, they create 11 million law breakers.
We don't have nearly the same scale of problem in Canada. That probably has much more to do with only sharing an unsecured land border with a rich country.
> on the books immigration law has been broken for decades. do you expect people across the border wait a decade to get their turn for an immigration interview only to be turned down, when they can just cross the border?
No, I don't expect that at all. However the problem with your scenario isn't that they need to wait their turn, it's that they can "just cross the border". That fact that that has been allowed was an intentional policy decision.
>when they can just cross the border
This is also a choice for the people in charge of the border. Enforcing a border is a solved problem for a rich, large-population nation.
It isn't. 2/3rds of illegal immigrants come to the US legally (and then overstay). Unless you make it illegal for non-citizens to visit the US, you can't stop most illegal immigration.
We can start with that 1/3rd. Then we remove as many economic incentives as possible to make overstaying visas that much less attractive to tackle the other 2/3rds.
It's weird to see people (perhaps not you specifically) who often support dramatic gun control measures to address a tiny percentage of crime among the first to trot out the old saw that only a relative fraction of illegal migrants got that way by an illegal border crossing. 1/3rd is a lot. 1/3rd is a great start.
Addressing that 1/3rd also would address the real edge cases (as in there are only a few of them) like terrorists and serial criminals.
Yes! Well stated. 33% of illegals would be a huge win, while also aiming at self deportations by targeting incentives.
employers hiring illegal migrants is also an option for them. those employers are not being targeted by ICE. It's the DEA arresting drug users but being buddies with drug lords all over again.
Employers are being targeted [0]. It also can be difficult to successfully prosecute, especially when one can maintain a clean separation between the labor and the enterprise (agriculture is like this with Farm Labor Contractors).
That said, I wish they would step up the prosecutions. It's critical to hammer away at economic incentives for illegal migration.
[0] https://www.cpr.org/2025/04/30/ice-fines-colorado-janitorial...
very rarely, you see even americans being abducted at their work place but the company owners are mostly left alone. If employing illegal immigrants was that risky, it would drop dramatically. This isn't about illegal immigration, it is about hatred and cruelty. Native born american citizens are rotting in prison without so much as seeing a judge or a lawyer, if you defend that, you are a traitor. If you can at least disavow that, I can consider that your argument is in good faith.
Your link shows the company was fined. what a joke. americans are rotting in prison and the company is fined? why the employers not in jail next to the illegal immigrants. Who was in a better position to obey the law? the wealthy employer who screwed over american workers by hiring illegal migrants, or the desperate migrant trying to earn an honest living?
I hope you reflect on your moral character before defending these people.
You seem very angry. Why don't you reread my post and reflect on the fact that we actually agree?
Hiring illegal labor can be difficult to prosecute, much like straw man gun purchases can be difficult to prosecute. In both cases I feel we should try much harder.
Removing the economic incentives for illegal migration is the only way to make a massive dent in it.
> do you expect people across the border wait a decade to get their turn for an immigration interview only to be turned down, when they can just cross the border?
Well yes, that's what following the law means. They can't complain about it, it's not their country, and they don't have a say on the rules.
In a similar vein by your logic, if you are in a hurry, why should you obey traffic laws when you can just run a red light or a stop sign right?
If the light never turned green you'd bet your butt that plenty of people would run the light.
Sure, then don't complain if you get into a crash and your insurance finds you at fault. Actions have consequences.
So, if a traffic light never changed from red to green, you would advise..? Or do you just mean “in that situation, be very careful not to crash”?
Call the cops and have them organize traffic, they have a literal traffic department.
This is the problem with leaky analogies. The US immigration system is more like a train tunnel in a Wile-E Coyote cartoon that Roadrunner can run through but Wile-E slams into.
Hierarchy of needs. People want to follow the law, they need food,shelter, medicine,etc.. You can punish law breakers, but if you don't provide a way to lawfully do the thing, you're only breeding law breakers and nothing more.
A missing perspective here might be that even long term imprisonment isn't a deterrent for many migrants. The disparity in living conditions is just that steep.
There is a lawfully way to do the thing. The problem is that the lawfully way wants a very small set of people with specific skills. Canada does the same, most of their immigration are university graduates. The only reason Canada hasn't had an influx of immigration like the USA is because their southern border is the USA, not Mexico.
Most of the immigration to the USA is driven for economic reasons, not political asylum or persecution. There is no right to immigrate in the USA just because you want to, you have to convince the government somehow to let you in.
> even long term imprisonment isn't a deterrent for many migrants
But quick deportation is. Imagine doing the whole trek from south/central america to the USA just to be sent back the next day. That's what deterring a lot of people now, wasting months of travel and money just to have it be worthless seems to be very dissuasive.
A lot of the latest immigration woes would be solved if the Venezuelan government was taken down and some real democratic government stepped in.
> There is no right to immigrate in the USA just because you want to, you have to convince the government somehow to let you in.
Agreed. But it is only human to want to improve your living conditions. Illegal immigrants are not claiming their migration was lawful, no one is, so the argument about their right to migrate is meaningless. The law requires them to convince the government to let them in, but a law you cannot enforce is also meaningless. if your family was in poverty, would you care what the american government thought about you trying to cross the border and work to earn a living? I mean, I wouldn't blame them if they stole, I think you're not appreciating the adversity of poverty.
Let's say working after illegally migrating is equivalent to theft. It is hypocritical, and therefore invalid, to expect a person in poverty to obey the law of a land they're not even in simply out of the goodness of their hearts. Deporting them makes sense, punishing them does not, since every single american would do the same or worse if the situation was reversed. you cannot punish people for doing the same thing you yourself would do.
You solve the root causes, punish employers for hiring them, subsidize mexico's economic development,etc... but what's happening now is sociopaths being let loose on the american people.
> But quick deportation is. Imagine doing the whole trek from south/central america to the USA just to be sent back the next day. That's what deterring a lot of people now, wasting months of travel and money just to have it be worthless seems to be very dissuasive.
I think less people will migrate in the near term, until work arounds to avoid ICE are developed. People will still attempt this. Have you read about migration to euorope? a lot of them literally die on the trip, a good chunk just get scammed before they even reach the mediterranean. people will still risk all of this. for them, their former situation is equivalent to death. For some, it is worse, because it isn't them that is suffering, it is their parents,kids,etc.. so the risks are all worth it, even it costs them their lives.
> A lot of the latest immigration woes would be solved if the Venezuelan government was taken down and some real democratic government stepped in.
No, it would be solved if employers were targeted instead. a lot of modern woes would be solved by putting business owners in prison. It just isn't politically palatable. off the books employees don't pay income tax, you can nail the employers for tax fraud conspiracy among other charges. They're screwing over not just the government, but americans looking for work. they're artificially deflating wages by abusing illegal migrants. The worst they get is a fine. But concentration camps for the migrants is tolerable?
> a law you cannot enforce is also meaningless.
Looks like now they are enforcing it hard.
> punishing them does not
Justice should be blind and punish all criminals equally, stop romanticizing poverty and crime. If you commit a crime, go to jail, and if you are a non citizen, get deported. Victims of society mentality only creates more victims, as the victims of the crime are ignored.
> Have you read about migration to euorope
Yes, and people die trying to get to the USA anyway, that doesn’t mean the government shouldn’t enforce borders. African immigration is a worse situation as there are several civil wars ongoing, and its poorer than South America. European countries should also enforce borders.
For your last point, I mentioned latest surge, which is mostly from Venezuela, but I agree, they should enforce i9 registration for all employment and deal out harsh punishment.
How? As a migrant to the US I have generally found the rules quite reasonable, the UX of the websites is poorer than say the UK but the rules seem fine.
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Excessive speeders in the absence of speed-limit enforcement just creates neighbors that don't mind their neighborhood being consumed by speed bumps/dips, I think there's an analogy here in residential areas. And if you have a lot of children in your neighborhood, there IS a 'xx-phobia' for speeders. But speed bumps and dips are an absolute nuisance and sometimes dangerous, so just having cameras identify and a system willing to punish speeders would absolutely be the preference.
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"Data Show Trump Would’ve Released as Many Border Crossers as Biden" from the right-wing Cato Institute
> As I previously demonstrated, President Biden removed a higher percentage of border crossers in his first two years than Trump did during his last two years (51 percent versus 47 percent), despite Trump having to deal with many fewer total crossings (Table 1). Congress right now is in a bipartisan state of denial about these three central facts:
> 1) The reason people are being released is because of operational capacity to detain and deport them, not policy.
> 2) Biden has deported vastly greater numbers and a higher share of crossers, but it has not deterred people from crossing.
> 3) The logistics are such that once arrivals exceed the deportation machine’s capacity, people will find out and even more will come.
Feel free to click through for data!
https://www.cato.org/blog/data-show-trump-wouldve-released-m...
> Biden has deported vastly greater numbers and a higher share of crossers, but it has not deterred people from crossing.
ICE and Trump seem to be enough deterrent now, considering how the land encounters have reduced.
> The logistics are such that once arrivals exceed the deportation machine’s capacity, people will find out and even more will come.
This explains the huge ice funding increase.
Yes, breaking asylum and due process laws will be a deterrent. The question was always how to deter immigration legally, which prior POTUSes thought they had to care about.
Re the funding increase:
People to put handcuffs on wasn’t the bottleneck, so no it doesn’t. Immigration courts are the bottleneck, and actually jamming more low-level or non-offenders into the system exacerbates that problem.
> Yes, breaking asylum and due process laws will be a deterrent.
Unfortunately, TPS is up to the executive branch, not congress, so changing the duration is up to the executive branch discretion.
Which is not related to the closure of borders to asylum seekers nor the withholding of due process rights for people who are suspected of breaking immigration laws — neither of which is at the Executive’s discretion.
> the closure of borders to asylum seekers
I'm pretty sure the executive has power over border policy, the INA is very broad and gives a lot of power to the executive, also it would be crazy if the executive can't decide on border policy, congress is too slow/deadlocked to do anything meaningful.
Second one yes it's iffy.
It’s not “iffy.” POTUS has absolutely no ability to curtail due process rights. It is a blatant violation of a right that undergirds every single other right in the Constitution. Without due process right, there are no property rights, no gun rights, no speech rights, no religious rights — all of them can be taken away by the state simply declaring that you have been found guilty of such an offense that those rights are stripped from you.
The solution to Congressional deadlock is called “electing new representatives.” The executive in fact does not have the ability to “shut off” asylum processing, no matter how dysfunctional Congress is. And even under the INA. Read INA § 1158(a)(1).
We could have a clause in the Constitution that says something like, “if Congress is deadlocked, POTUS can do whatever they want.” Alas we do not have such a clause, and so he cannot, even if you feel there is deadlock.
lol breaking asylum laws is bad but breaking immigration laws is fine.
“lol” no one said it’s fine to break immigration laws.
I’d suggest though that our government breaking laws is in fact worse than random individuals breaking laws.
That’s true for pretty obvious reasons, I’ll add.
>That’s true for pretty obvious reasons
Illegal immigration can best be thought of as a slow-moving constitutional crisis. An increasingly large portion of the electorate wants decisive solutions to illegal immigration and will vote for the person who gives them that, regardless of the constitutionality.
This argument can be raised by anyone seeking to undermine the Constitution as it relates to any pet cause they care most about.
“Wealth inequality is… therefore property rights don’t matter”
“Climate change is… therefore freedom of movement doesn’t matter”
“Foreign influence is… therefore freedom of speech doesn’t matter”
“School shootings are… therefore the second amendment doesn’t matter”
All the same seditious, un-American attitude.
We have a system for resolving these disputes! It’s all laid out in the Constitution.
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Because American citizens and documented immigrants never commit crimes? Nonsense.
> Nonsense
Please don't post sneering dismissals like this on HN. We're here for curious conversation, not battle.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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> your silly hypothetical too.
The stats for Southwest Land Border Encounters are available at https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/southwest-land-border-enc... and the HN guidelines are available at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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It's not acceptable to post in this inflammatory style on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're here for curious conversation, not battle. It's also not acceptable on HN to scour through someone's past activity (whether on HN or elsewhere) in order to attack them, and that kind of belittling language is never OK here. Please take a moment to read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them in future.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It's strange to me that you chose to not cite the guidelines to elsewhere such as:
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle.
Are anti-immigrant sentiments acceptable if they are simply well-articulated?
And if not, then why do you feel it necessary to be more critical of the language I or lalaithion use for explicit dismissals of racists and xenophobes than the actual racism or xenophobia itself?
People continually try on this “gotcha” that we moderate more for tone than substance and that HN freely allows hateful rhetoric as long as it is smuggled in a Trojan Horse of “civility”.
This is of course a non-starter and nothing in the guidelines allows it. The first words in the “In Comments“ section of the guidelines are Be kind, and there is nothing “kind” about xenophobia or other hateful ideas, by definition.
But as longtime forum moderators we can't be so naïve as to succumb to an attempt to characterize any discussion about immigration laws and their enforcement as “anti-immigration” and ”hateful”. From what I can see this is discussion is not one of “pro” or “anti” immigration but about how laws should be interpreted and enforced, which is always something that should be able to be discussed in a spirit of curiosity. The guidelines cover this too:
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Nailer is a user who has crossed the line before and we've appealed to him multiple times to observe the guidelines, and will certainly do so again if and when it is warranted. In this case I don't see how he is the one who has crossed the line, but even if he was, that doesn't excuse you from doing so.
If you see guidelines-breaking comments on HN, just flag them or if they're especially egregious, email us (hn@ycombinator.com). If you escalate, then you become the one in the wrong, by making a bad situation even worse.
Please don't post sneers like this on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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Its a data gathering system. it takes pictures of everything that goes past it so that IF something happens, cops can search back through the system to see if/when a suspect went past that sensor. This sort of thing should be turned off regardless. I don't want my movements recorded and tracked all the time in the off chance someone might do something later. This ICE situation is the perfect example of why these actively passive systems are a threat.
In my home county they've arrested car thieves and recovered vehicles due to real-time Flock hits. It is not simply for forensic purposes.
If it was a bad idea it shouldn't have been installed in the first place. Turning it off now because a few loud people assumed things that weren't true (ICE using the system) is idiotic.
It shouldn't have been installed in the first place, but in real life, sometimes people need a concrete example to realize something others figured out from principles.
There is no concrete example. Nothing actually happened. ICE didn't access the cameras. I feel like I'm the only one who read the article.
The article said University of Washington researchers released a report Oct. 21 showing federal immigration agencies like ICE and Border Patrol had accessed the data of at least 18 Washington cities, often without their police departments’ knowing.
What they have, thankfully, is a concrete example of there being such a thing as an uncivil authority, not a concrete example of their mistake leading to irreparable harm.
Ok, and a real-time-only (as in it literally, physically has no onboard or networked storage and only generates data exactly when it hits a plate that's already flagged, or is false/doesn't match the car and the system to flag a plate requires a warrant) flock system would face vastly less opposition than the fishing-expedition-enabler that currently exists. Yet somehow that's never on the table.
I’d start by being ticked off that my city was burning money deploying a cloud-connected mass surveillance apparatus.
Until someone you love gets abducted, and then you want them to be found right now.
Oh, sure everyone's against the cannibalism of orphans now from the comfort of their arm chair. But just wait until this implausible thing happens, that occurs to a small fraction of people ever. Then you'll all see.
Until the government decides someone you love needs to get disappeared, and then you want to provide no aid to them.
This technology swings both ways and as such is too dangerous to exist. We have plenty of other means to instantly and broadly raise awareness about abductions.
There's a reason we don't have people recently affected by a tragedy write policy regarding that tragedy, in their heightened emotional state.
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> So why is the city listening to hysterical idiots who assumed that ICE was accessing systems they weren't?
What have you heard or seen that gives you that impression?
According to the article “University of Washington researchers released a report Oct. 21 showing federal immigration agencies like ICE and Border Patrol had accessed the data of at least 18 Washington cities, often without their police departments’ knowing”
It seems plausible that the local government came to realize that unauthorized use of Flock data was happening elsewhere in the state and decided to act. These sort of privacy intrusions start off with the veneer of best intentions but when abuse is uncovered, people tend to get real.
I don't think anyone is going to expect you to listen to anything they have to say when you characterize people who you only just read about second hand as 'hysterical idiots'. It demonstrates that you are not interested in any other point of view.
There will always be a million "what-ifs" that can be used to justify the erosion of personal liberties and privacy.
Flock doesn't fight crime, it documents the travel of people without a reason.
It and other ALPR systems real-time alert on things like stolen cars. In my home county they have arrested and convicted criminals due to this. That is fighting crime, by definition.
If it was such a bad idea, they shouldn't have installed them in Redmond. Turning them off now because some people assumed things that weren't true is idiocy and sets a bad precedent.
Yeah, but. The side-effect of catching criminals and protecting the children is that they also provide a searchable database of everyone's historical travel habits.
It's my opinion that our historical ideas of expectation of privacy when in public spaces are incompatible with the current state of surveillance technology. Sure, everyone should expect that they might be recognized by an acquaintance when out in public, but I don't think it follows that our entire past history should be available at any time in the future.
If we made a mistake, we should fix it.
Sometimes it takes an actual bad outcome for people to realize that the potential problems weren’t theoretical.
But there wasn't an actual bad outcome. Did anyone read the article? It was all a coincidence.
The article said University of Washington researchers released a report Oct. 21 showing federal immigration agencies like ICE and Border Patrol had accessed the data of at least 18 Washington cities, often without their police departments’ knowing.
The bad outcome is now a much more real possibility than before, and very front and center.
And AI based "suspicious movements of vehicles".