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Discussion (70 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
We are already very aware that the police overreact and make plenty of mistakes. The obvious here being that even if this was the exact plate criminals can very easily, and do, swap plates - so you shouldn't just aggressively be knocking down vehicles because of the standard screwed in license plate that is displayed on the back. When was the last time you checked your license plate and made sure it was still yours? Would you even know it is yours? It has happened to me.
This is the deeper problem. See BLM, and then the backlash against that to create a much less accountable federal paramilitary/carabinieri force, ICE, resulting in the Minnesota conflict and several people getting killed.
And what lies underneath all that? Dirty Harry and a whole stack of subsequent propaganda. There's a very powerful story that the world is full of criminals and any form of police accountability (such as double checking information before acting, or taking a safety focused approach to stops which may include not doing them) is getting in the way of "fighting crime".
HN is firmly against Flock, but there are lots of people, Republicans and Democrats, who are going around demanding more surveillance to fight crime.
(The UK "ring of steel" and high presence of surveillance cameras and ANPR do not seem to have nearly this much level of problems. Here the controversy over stops is mostly good old manual racial discrimination for "driving while black")
I am anti-Flock to the point that my friends and family roll their eyes when the topic comes up, but saying that because the image recognition software did not achieve 100% accuracy it can't be used under any circumstances is just silly.
I agree Flock shouldn't be used (I'd love to see the company bankrupt, the investors lose their money, and the founders imprisoned), but the accuracy of their software has nothing to do with why.
To be fair to Flock, from what was said in this conversation they were told to be on the lookout of a partial plate of 34DTM. Meaning, there could be some additional characters that were not originally caught. So 34DTM10 and 1034DTM could potentially both be matches. It doesn't seem to me like Flock mistranslated the plate.
https://maps.deflock.org/
There's a lot more than just Flock, Flock is just one of thousands of terrible companies creating mass spying on innocent people. And there's also other ALPR companies like Axon and Motorola.
Flock may be worse than those because of the AI features and large databases, but other companies making surveillance tech are not avoiding the AI features because of moral reasons.
- cop messed up, added an incomplete license plate number (34DTM) into the NCIC database.
- Flock cameras found his fancy car, a $155k Range Rover, which had a license plate like 34DTM10, and flagged it.
- cops didn't bother checking the police report before they went in and surrounded him.
thoughts:
- as much as I dislike Flock, it seems like it wasn't at fault here. this was a scene straight of Brazil, and Flock was the typewriter. it was an accelerant, not the cause.
- police are shockingly incompetent. the individual officers, the departments, the bureaucratic systems, they're bad at their jobs. probably because they're insulated from consequences - these are people who can shoot the wrong person by accident, and at worst they get fired (QI.)
- none of this would have made the news if it wasn't a $155k Range Rover being driven by a reporter. how many people in beat-up Carollas have faced this same situation?
Why is their tech not tested on every plate format that is currently used? That should be table stakes. Why did it not flag the match for review because the "34" and "DTM" had an unusual amount of space between them (not matching expected spacing of NJ plates)? The truth is that they are probably just using some free ML models off of hugging face and selling it as a magic black box that finds criminals to police.
34DTM != 34DTM10
Seeing this in an engineering-centric community disappoints me. It's hard to say for certain without seeing the system but I think it's extremely likely they are at fault. Things that come to mind:
- If the incomplete plate really was "34DTM" - why does the system allow that to be added? Either you should use actual wildcards to indicate you are searching for a partial or you should be blocked from adding an incomplete plate.
- This likely is not the first time his car was seen by the system. Why did they not require the person entering the partial match to clear / assess all of the cars that were known already?
- Alternatively, if it had never been seen before, why was that info not highlighted?
- If "flagging" the same for partial and full matches - that seems like a substantial design oversight.
There are so many things Flock could have done to prevent this kind of inevitable user error.
People can be relied upon to make mistakes. Any system that does not account for this fact and allows mistakes to "accelerate" is fundamentally flawed and requires redesign.
Cops regularly made the exact same kind of mistake even when using their own eyeballs.
The police have no actionable method of abuse if you take Flock cameras away. They wouldn’t be acting on flagged random license plates if you took away the dragnet and surveillance system that’s randomly flagging people.
This is 100% fault of Flock.
Nearly the exact same thing could have happened with traditional non-surveillance ALPR systems, or with manual plate running by officers in cars.
This is 100% the fault of Flock.
I've heard stories of rental car companies being very aggressive in reporting a car stolen. It sounds like Flock is having to do a lot of work to handle reports made by rental car companies specifically. This leaves me wondering how aggressive rental companies are in reporting back to the department they made the stolen report notifying the car had been found. I'm guessing not very.
These rental companies need to be held responsible for their lackadaisical use of stolen car reports. It is not the police's responsibility for what is essentially a contract dispute. If I allow someone to borrow my car, the police will not consider this a stolen car situation even if they said they would bring it back the next day. This is no different than a car not being returned to the rental company, so why are the police willing to be involved?
https://www.npr.org/2022/12/06/1140998674/hertz-false-accusa...
Surely we could just get a pair of eyeballs on everything flagged and if it's not 100% crystal clear what's going on, then it gets flagged for a senior pair of eyes to look at?
I'm against the Minority Report kind of stuff but a system (AI Flock cameras in this case) flags up <thing>, surely it should then go into a queue for humans to look at! Flock can add in a certainty score and the human must verify!
It could still increase efficiency this way.
Agreed. We've had a lot of this - tech companies begging for tech regulation. Without the regulation it seems we'll always get these competitive races to the bottom of what's possible within the confines of the laws that do exist as less and less scrupulous companies enter the fray.
Like, you know you can just stop doing bad things, right? You shouldn't need a government telling you that maybe you shouldn't do bad things. Its as if he's saying he has no free will or executive action being the CEO of Flock, he has no way of having the company not be evil until the government gives him a rulebook.
This is pure bullshit, an accountability dodge. Executives don't have to accept the job. Executives don't have to stay in the job when they find out they have to compromise their ethics. These are not people who are forced to steal bread to eat, they're highly compensated elites who have been given everything by society and they choose to do evil in exchange for the high compensation.
Capital doesn't force management to do a single thing they don't wish in their hearts to do.
For AI the argument is: if we regulate ownership back to the creators then China will eat our lunch. This is a morally bankrupt position pretty much by definition.
The thing is, bank robbers and murders aren't the ones going on podcasts suggesting "gosh you know maybe I wouldn't be doing these things if there was some kind of regulation preventing me from robbing banks and stabbing people"
Its like a gun store owner acting all sad about how he sold a gun to an obviously deranged person who ended up murdering some people. You know you could have just not sold him the gun, right?
Some states also compound the problem by issuing a license plate number multiple times. So long before Flock getting someone else's speed camera tickets in the mail was already a problem.
*As long as it doesn't prevent us from getting rich.
Flock, and anybody who funds them are the real domestic terrorists. Anybody who destroys these devices are patriots in my book.
And if I ever serve for jury duty over a case like that, they didn't do it.
While saying they're making the world a better place in the process. At least Wall Street sharks tend to be honest about their motivations and lack of giving a shit about you.
Now you're bending facts. You can decide they are not guilty of a crime, but you can't make them have not done it.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnBPhelCdWE
I'm not sure how accurate that show is, but the use of video surveillance and LPR data to solve crimes certainly seemed plausible. And it made me realize, unfortunately, these Flock cameras aren't going anywhere. People want crimes to get solved, especially homicides.
https://www.netflix.com/title/82158926
Ah so the guy who’s responsible for giving access to whoever and refusing to take down cameras when city/state governments regulate them, is saying: it’s the fault that the states didn’t regulate the technology?
Fuck Flock and their fork tongued CEO. Regulations have been passed. People should be tearing these cameras down if Flock isn’t going to follow the law either.
These camera's don't make me feel safer given the rising fascism associated with surveillance. If they are taking it seriously, the false positives would also include the racism in policing and the inequality in criminal courts. However, they're not serious about it, and for them, this is just a public relations issue.
If America wasn't actively mobilizing their own gestapo (ICE) then my opinions would be more muted. I think that wealth inequality and oppression of a state's own citizens leads to the erosions of society. A modern interpretation of Benjamin Franklin's quote is apt, "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
>Garrett:[...] To individuals that are promoting breaking the law, I just find that confusing. We’re a company that, by and large, by design from our founding, was that people shouldn’t break the law. I don’t know why that’s controversial, that I don’t agree with breaking the law. [...]
So do you hate gays Mr Garrett? Or "race mixing"? Because it wasn't that long ago that mixed-race sexual relations or homosexual relations were illegal in at least parts of the USA. See history about anti-miscegenation laws [0]. The 14th Amendment was adopted in 1868, but it would be 99 YEARS before the SCOTUS would rule that such laws were unconstitutional. And it wouldn't be for another 36 years after that until a ruling (Lawrence v. Texas, 2003) that anti-sodomy laws [1] criminalizing "unnatural or immoral" sexual acts (and used heavily for discrimination and punishment of LGBT) were unconstitutional (and on grounds that, along with marriage equality, the current SCOTUS could certainly reverse).
Completely thoughtless appeals to "the law" demonstrate wild levels of ignorance and insular thinking, even ignoring the undoubted hypocrisy and bullshit given Flock's many little... incidents... just in the last few years (ex: "City Learns Flock Accessed Cameras in Children's Gymnastics Room as a Sales Demo" [2], "Flock Credibility Lost as It Repeatedly Lies to City Councils, Police, & Public" [3], "Flock and Cyble Inc. Weaponize "Cybercrime" Takedowns to Silence Critics" [4], "Flock-Powered Police Chiefs Stalking Women" [5], etc etc etc). I suppose it's possible this guy is just incredibly bubbled vs also being a lying psychopath and/or being fully onboard with the boot stomping on prole faces forever, but it's awful either way.
----
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-miscegenation_laws_in_the...
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodomy_laws_in_the_United_Stat...
2: https://www.404media.co/city-learns-flock-accessed-cameras-i...
3: https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/tracking-alpr-c...
4: https://footnote4a.org/news/cyble-downtime
5: https://ipvm.com/reports/police-chiefs-track
This was such a weak interview, I recognize this is a car podcast and Joel's not an investigative journalist but the lack of pushback was so disappointing.
[1] https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety
[2] https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/flock-safety-secures-major-...