The Government Is Monitoring Anti-Flock TikTok and Instagram Accounts

JJimmc414 about 2 hours ago 60 commentsRead Article on 404media.co

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Discussion (60 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

Cider9986•about 2 hours ago

I don't see anything so wrong with cutting them down. I see it similar to maintaining a local trail. Removing obstacles like fallen trees or brambles. These are pests that are unconstitutional.

It seems like a statement to the prosperity of the American ideals of freedom that they are being removed both by local activism and illegal means. Along with the general sentiment on social media. It's genuinely insane the power social media has on earth. It's attributed to the revolution in Nepal, major protests in India, and there were a bunch more in other countries[1].

We as humans have been brainwashed with the nothing to hide fallacy. It's good to see it dismantled once we see mass surveillance in practice.

[1] Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Kenya, Morocco, Madagascar, Peru, and Bulgaria from a Brave overview (can't say I researched any of these).

Prompt: other countries that had uprisings like the Nepal 2025 one

linkjuice4all•about 1 hour ago

Cutting them down isn’t the worst idea but it would be nice if we could just elect people that wouldn’t allow this in the first place. Knowing that won’t happen, the only chance reasonable people have to stop this is to turn these systems against the decision makers until they yield.

Some kind of Flock@home volunteer surveillance network that tracks politicians, records LEO interactions (including those involving masked unaccountable agents), and provides the only accountability that the public has left.

andai•5 minutes ago

Remember when someone set up a website tracking Elon Musk's private jet? iirc he politely asked him to take it offline.

willis936•about 1 hour ago

What do you mean "allow"? Police chiefs are not elected positions and they often find funding outside of the town's budget for these automated bill of rights violation machines.

Brian_K_White•about 1 hour ago

Does the police deptartment own the land where the cameras are installed?

conception•about 1 hour ago

Sparrowmap.com is an attempt

jMyles•42 minutes ago

> Cutting them down isn’t the worst idea but it would be nice if we could just elect people that wouldn’t allow this in the first place.

Is this really better though? First-party community maintenance is more direct, cheaper, and doesn't rely on fragile central authorities (granted, it _does_ rely on a difficult pattern of community discussion and collaboration to satisfy tribal consensus, etc).

I'm broadly OK with cameras being in public, but I have much more trust in direct action than I do in elected "officials".

On medium time-scales, it seems to me that a great solution will be to have community-maintained cameras kinda all over the commons, but such that the camera eye can be accessed publicly (ie, removing the information asymmetry which gives the undesirable actors (police, etc) greater view than the actual community participants).

ericmay•about 1 hour ago

I don't really care too much one way or the other about these cameras, and generally think it's probably bad to have more surveillance but could you help me understand what exactly is "unconstitutional" or even nefarious with these cameras provided they are bought and installed on property that is owned by the installer or an entity such as the government which presumably has legal justification for installing them?

I'm genuinely asking since I'm a bit out of touch with this latest controversy, but how are they any different than a dash cam, doorbell camera, or my alley camera, for example such that they deserve special consideration?

ThrustVectoring•about 1 hour ago

It's the database query, not the physical cameras. In the pre-digital age where privacy was considered in constitutional law, tracking people's and vehicle's movements was horrendously expensive - you'd need multiple detectives doing things by hand per person of interest. This meant that it was reserved for when the government already had pretty strong reason to believe in some sort of wrongdoing. Even with a personal, non-internet-connected doorbell camera, the police would need to identify what cameras exist for a location and contact the owners in order for the footage to do anything.

With automated license plate readers, they can simply collect everything with a reasonably affordable network of cameras, then query the database when they want to find a particular pattern of activity. The police have already detained people for frequent border-crossing between marijuana-legal and illegal states. This gets exacerbated by granularity and extensiveness - imagine an anti-choice state pointing cameras at every maternity care parking lot in the state and tracking who visits them for cross-referencing with visits to pro-choice states.

And with the existence of parallel construction, there's no reasonable way short of dismantling the ALPR system to avoid abuse against the citizenry.

ericmay•about 1 hour ago

Please correct my understanding if this is not the case... so the issue isn't the cameras themselves it's that you believe (and I am sympathetic toward) that they are easily searchable without a warrant and so it's something akin to a 4th Amendment violation? Less so to do with surveillance state which we might consider a separate issue? I mention that just because the surveillance state with just cameras could include consumer cameras, drones, highway traffic cams, the damn automated plate reader and tracking camera that gave me a $100+ ticket in London for driving through a congestion zone and... those bast.... and... (jk - well sort of it, I mean it is part of the group here)

I'm not sure I'm on board with the efficiency argument but those are always interesting ones.

snazz•about 1 hour ago

It’s an interpretation of the Fourth Amendment, which is loosely supported by Supreme Court precent in Carpenter and Jones. See my previous comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46359826

Edit: To be more clear, the issue courts have considered is warrantless searches of ALPR databases (and whether that evidence should be excluded), not whether it’s constitutional to put up cameras.

atmavatar•25 minutes ago

More recently, there's also United States v. Chatrie, which was a 6-3 decision that searching Google's location history data is covered by the Fourth Amendment

See: https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-applauds-important-...

See: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25-112_0am4.pdf

harimau777•about 1 hour ago

The constitution forbids unreasonable search and seizure. Tracking people's movements without specific reason the believe that they are a criminal has generally been regarded, at least by the public, as a classic example of government overreach.

MelonArmiger•42 minutes ago

SovCit/Libertarian types love treating "Constitutional" as a kind of magic spell. I wouldn't worry about it too much. They're more beard than people.

tiahura•34 minutes ago

They are not unconstitutional. There is no right to privacy in public. There's endless confusion online, but legally, public means "not private."

Brian_K_White•about 1 hour ago

I can only assume this question is disingenuous.

"What is so wrong with having your house burn down? It's just a chemical process that happens all the time."

ericmay•about 1 hour ago

That's a bad assumption and incorrect in this case. Instead of assuming you should just ask. I also did my best to communicate that I was genuinely interested in learning more about what was the crux of the issue.

K0balt•37 minutes ago

I don’t know, but it seems like a magnetron gun might be a decent way to turn these off.

altairprime•about 1 hour ago

One of the oddities in reporting about Flock is that no one’s considered who the silent customers are. Even Techdirt is focusing on municipal abuses and greed, calling out Flock for reactivating cameras for its own sake. But the real question should be: is Flock reactivating municipal cameras on behalf of non-municipal customers? So, when we find out here that the most likely non-municipal customer is also monitoring social media about Flock, it intensifies my suspicion that Flock exists as a liability shield for warrantless surveillance for the government — and that municipalities are just a front.

spl757•26 minutes ago

Dollars to donuts it isn't just tiktok and instragram. If it's on the internet and not end-to-end encrypted with the proper ciphers it's being monitored. Shit, the police and feds keep things they can't decipher hoping they can in the future.

My rule of thumb is that if it's technically possible, someone, somewhere is doing it.

andrewflnr•20 minutes ago

This is good to know, and we might even mostly be on the side of the lawbreakers here but, like, monitoring public coordinated attempts to break the law is squarely in the job description of law enforcement. Maybe if someone had done a better job of social media monitoring, we could have had a real response to Jan 6, 2021. (I know, I know, maybe not under the cheeto's authority specifically, but the point is that LEOs reading public messages is still something that happens in a government actually working for the people.)

blakeashleyjr•about 1 hour ago

A plague on our land. Hopefully the recent Chatrie v. United States decision gives courts the ammo they need to shut these down.

There is a big difference in a cop seeing you go by, checking a list, and coming after you than scanning every license plate, bumper sticker, etc. and putting in a database for every cop in the country.

GauntletWizard•about 1 hour ago

I don't even have a problem with every cop being equipped with an automatic ALPR... So long as the data is not retained. I do believe that we need better auditing and oversight in response to the availability, but it's not a great evil that an APB can be virtually guaranteed to catch a car... So long as we're using them carefully and judiciously, in response to immediate and recent threats or a clearly understood long tail. There's supposed to be a balance of power; it's not evil to give the police new powers, but it is evil to give politicians unanswered and unlimited tracking of the movements of anyone they so desire.

4d4m•25 minutes ago

Flock OS underpins many more cameras than are visible and added by Flock directly.

thataccount•about 1 hour ago

Should be obvious to the government places that notice all this info coming out that people do not LIKE these as a solution, and they should maybe, I dunno, start listening to the people?

whatever1•about 1 hour ago

Government is monitoring everyone.

tamimio•38 minutes ago

Glowies are panicking, summarize the situation.

danielrmay•about 2 hours ago

"I hope our names are touching on the watchlist"

bladeacidic•about 1 hour ago

Everyone posting here is now on a list somewhere. Hopefully you're deanonymized sufficiently. Better hope we don't get caught up in something!

actionfromafar•about 2 hours ago

And here of course.