Yet another Hacker News

Police chief unplugs Flock cameras after company ignores contract cancellation

206 points entryleveljobsc 3 hours ago 53 comments

bluecollarworke 2 hours ago | parent

Gee, with vendors like this, who needs criminals?

analog31 2 hours ago | parent

At least the cameras make it easy to track the criminals down... to the location of the cameras.

xlayn 1 hour ago | parent

The police?

voakbasda 2 hours ago | parent

So if they no longer have a contract, how is it legal for Flock to continue to use the allocated resources? Why not hit them with theft of service for continuing to draw power and use public infrastructure?

They will never change their behavior when there are no consequences for their actions.

blooalien 2 hours ago | parent

> So if they no longer have a contract, how is it legal for Flock to continue to use the allocated resources?

They've even been caught putting them back up or re-enabling them in places where the contract has been canceled. How is that legal? I thought you had to be city-approved to install equipment like that. One would think that no contract = no approval?

Maybe they need to set up a "sting" operation at one of the disabled units and start makin' some arrests/fines for unapproved equipment installation/construction on public property? See if that changes some minds over at Flock about what they can and cannot get away with?

jazzypants 1 hour ago | parent

We're quickly moving into cyberpunk territory where corporations simply stop being accountable to governments.

anoojb 40 minutes ago | parent

At what point do citizens become more engaged in civics? Apparently cameras recording outside their door is an insufficient catalyst.

close04 34 minutes ago | parent

Ring cameras recording outside people’s doors are what catalyzed the installation of more surveillance. After all people can’t complain one camera but not another when they all have the claimed justification of safety and security.

Avicebron 2 minutes ago | parent

People need to see their lives improve materially within a reasonable period of time before they will trust politics again I would wager. I don't think people aren't voting due to apathy, they aren't voting because they don't trust the system.

RobotToaster 12 minutes ago | parent

I thought that happened decades ago.

conception 58 minutes ago | parent

Depends on where it is as many of their cameras are on private property.

The_Blade 57 minutes ago | parent

> They've even been caught putting them back up or re-enabling them in places where the contract has been canceled.

Where? I live in Denver, are there clandestine Flock folks running around in fake electrician outfits like a cheap imitation of the Town? we could use a little Situationist urban guerilla theater here, complete with the vacant commercial space repurposed for data centers

whimsicalism 42 minutes ago | parent

I suspect that Flock might even employ real electricians.

dcrazy 37 minutes ago | parent

From the article:

> Dayton, another city in Minnesota located just 10 miles north of Plymouth, has also paused its Flock program and disabled the two devices in the area. The Dayton police became aware that the company intended to replace these cameras and told Flock not to proceed with the work order. However, it moved forward with the replacement anyway despite being instructed otherwise.

porkshoe 1 hour ago | parent

American laws don't apply to billionaires or corporations.

unrented7977 1 hour ago | parent

Dunno why you're getting downvoted, it's the plain and simple reality of America today

petterroea 1 hour ago | parent

Similarly to how many don't want to tax the rich because their goal is to become rich themselves, many people in here, especially on the startup side, want to be the next Elon musk

blooalien 38 minutes ago | parent

That ship done sailed already. The ultra-mega-totally-too-rich are doing everything in their power to try to ensure that they're the last of their kind come hell or high-water...

theoreticalmal 1 hour ago | parent

Isn’t Bill Gates’ daughter in a tight legal spot for things she did? And didn’t that medical upstart lady get put in prison for several years?

aeve890 21 minutes ago | parent

Your argument is one and a half case in a ocean of nonstop billionaire bullshittery?

whatshisface 18 minutes ago | parent

Elizabeth Holmes and Sam Bankman-Fried were "successful" people but they defrauded wealthy investors who were way above their own pay grade.

Brian_K_White 10 minutes ago | parent

Holmes is only in jail for harming other billionaire's money, not for harming people with bad medical tests.

The billonaires suffered no laws, Holmes did, who was a nobody except for very briefly holding a few of others' billions.

kevin_thibedeau 1 hour ago | parent

They're just following the Uber business model. Consequences for thee, not for me.

idopmstuff 1 hour ago | parent

The article doesn't really tell us what the contract terms are, though. Just because the city voted to cancel the contract doesn't mean it ends immediately and Flock has to come remove all the cameras upon request. It's very likely the contract has a fixed term, and cancellation really just means they're not going to renew it at the end of the term. If that's the case, you can't charge them with crimes for using infrastructure that the contract permits them to use.

Still terrible that Flock isn't responding to them, and of course even if they intend to hold the city to the contract in terms of expecting to be paid for the full duration, they should still honor the request to shut off service.

SoftTalker 1 hour ago | parent

One week to respond to a letter delivered by US postal mail isn't really much time. Not that I support Flock or the concept of Flock-style public cameras, but I don't think you can judge them to be "not responding" that quickly.

Closi 55 minutes ago | parent

Yes, also it says that the account management team had been in contact within the week, just that they didn't have a 'legal/corporate' response within the week, which is also not an unreasonable length of time as those things can take a bit of time.

plussed_reader 51 minutes ago | parent

Maybe we find a company recording the public that is attentive to public relations? They sure had a quick response when the ceos' home was placed in Google maps.

Seems like their PR fire is self induced by sucking up to Money and whatever they qualify as investors?

whimsicalism 44 minutes ago | parent

The political grandstanding will continue at least through the end of midterm season and realistically we're just getting geared up for 2028.

Closi 1 hour ago | parent

> So if they no longer have a contract, how is it legal for Flock to continue to use the allocated resources? Why not hit them with theft of service for continuing to draw power and use public infrastructure?

Well we don't know what was in this contract was that they had with Flock in the first place, but usually a contract termination like this would have some requirement to give a reasonable notice to allow Flock to disconnect cameras etc, and a week probably isn't reasonable notice.

TheSisb2 21 minutes ago | parent

If I had to guess their processes for handling sudden contract changes differs and lags behind the processes behind installing them.

voxic11 12 minutes ago | parent

flock cameras aren't powered from the power grid, they have their own solar panels and batteries (which is what allows them to be deployed to quickly and widely) so I presume the article just meant unplugging those.

Papazsazsa 2 hours ago | parent

One of the most compelling aspects of American governance is the latitude local law enforcement has. They can be both an ally and enemy to freedom.

dmos62 2 hours ago | parent

Are they elected?

Loughla 1 hour ago | parent

Depends on the type of police. Sheriff's are, I know. But I'm pretty sure city chiefs and state chiefs are just appointed by other elected officials. So I guess one step removed?

jfengel 1 hour ago | parent

Some are. Usually on a campaign of "law and order", which makes Flock cameras an easy sell to their voting base. Because they let you keep an eye on the sort of people who are likely to be criminals. You know. Those people.

They themselves generally don't mind the invasion of privacy, at least not until it catches them specifically. In general they are much, much more afraid of the "crime wave" than of the police. (A crime wave which never seems to diminish, despite more and more policing and punishment. And which is contradicted by crime statistics.)

whimsicalism 47 minutes ago | parent

The absence of cameras necessitates much more a reliance on "those people" profiling style policing than their presence.

Do people feel the same way about speeding cameras?

I find the backlash against ALPRs wildly disproportionate. It earnestly saddens me that our political focus has flowed to these issues, datacenters, college sports rules, etc. while we remain incapable of confronting far more consequential structural problems, like an inability to tax and redistribute wealth.

Libcat99 1 minute ago | parent

The law and order people are nuts. On a local thread complaining about our township budget it was pointed out that we spend 45% of tax revenue on policing and that if we want real cuts, some has to come from there.

And a repeated response from a certain kind of person was "Well, if we're spending 45% on policing, we must need it right..."

thephyber 1 hour ago | parent

Generally the county Sheriff is elected, but the city police chief is usually appointed by civilian government.

thephyber 1 hour ago | parent

Your comment reminds me of a post I read on a popular police forum about J Edgar Hoover (the infamous Director of the FBI for half a century). He created a professionalized police / intelligence force, but he also abused the rights of many citizens and elected political officials with that force. Supposedly he even used it to blackmail some of the Congressmen who were legally obligated to oversee his department.

And the comments in that post were a Rorschach test of where the commenter fell on how "necessary" the abuses of the FBI were.

SoftTalker 1 hour ago | parent

Too bad the congressmen he blackmailed didn't know he was gay. At the time, that would have been powerful information.

thephyber 37 minutes ago | parent

It's important to understand that the FBI's power was very asymmetric.

J Edna Hoover could assign a team to gather kompromat on a person and to surveil them or harass them.

A Congressperson has no equivalent ability to threaten the Director of the FBI. At best, they could spread a rumor, but a rumor doesn't catch fire when journalists / editors had too high of ethics to repeat unverified rumors.

helterskelter2 42 minutes ago | parent

I mean, he did try to blackmail MLK into suicide. Even if it wasn't his personal doing, the letter was found in his confidential files.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI%E2%80%93King_letter

thephyber 31 minutes ago | parent

Right, but if you ask J Edgar Hoover supporters, MLK was an adulterer and a Socialist / Communist agitating the American populace (during a time when mass protests and riots were spreading like wildfire). The thing is, there is some truth in those claims.

Also, American society in the 1960s was not nearly as supportive of MLK Jr when he was alive as much as they are now that he was martyred. You and I are looking back and projecting our modern values on people who were still largely racist in a time when racism was both a de facto and de jure truth.

That is to say that lots of America would likely have supported the effect of the blackmail letter, if not the method itself. It was a different time. The frequent threat of the USSR, encroaching Communism, and the specter of nuclear war was suffocating and the "Law and Order" marketing of Nixon and J Edgar Hoover were appealing to many people, even if they suppressed the freedoms of many.

mindslight 43 minutes ago | parent

This right here. If we're going to oust this anti-American Flock and its less prominent "competitors", then we need the police to realize they're not a friend, but rather a foe. Extra work arresting motorists with frivolous warrants from neighboring towns, civil suits for violating rights where the police are left holding the bag, spending budget that could instead be spent on actual policing, defiant disobedience when they're asked to take the cameras down or make changes, making your city more likely to be a flashpoint for federal action, etc.

(In addition to state-level political action from this and other types of surveillance to preserve our freedom uniformly. The point is to make it so the police lobby is neutral or even on our side, rather than having to fight against them)

Surac 1 hour ago | parent

We need flock in every politics bedrooms

kirykl 1 hour ago | parent

The cameras seem vulnerable to a simple non-invasive opaque elastic-banded plastic shower cap

thephyber 1 hour ago | parent

I'm more interested in whether they are vulnerable to fake data being injected via a slide show of car images shown in front of the camera lens.

A picture of a known prison escapee driving the mayor's car should drive the point home after the police pull the mayor over and investigate.

1970-01-01 1 hour ago | parent

It is just that simple folks. Unplug it.

The_Blade 1 hour ago | parent

nonsense. here's your pillowcase, but you have to supply your own knobs

fHr 1 hour ago | parent

good

Closi 1 hour ago | parent

I think this is sensationalised - it looks like they only waited about a week after cancellation before they started unplugging them.

But I can't find any easy information on the contract they had with Flock, but it could well take a week for Flock to be able to respond properly after working out what to do with lawyers etc. The article says that the account management team had been in touch... so... I think this is just a PR piece for the police chief to look 'hard'.

thelastgallon 52 minutes ago | parent

I wonder if millions of people take it to small claims court… would it work?

varenc 27 minutes ago | parent

You have to show harm to have a case. If you were the victim of a wrongful stop, that's harm. But if your license plate was just recorded and nothing else, I'm skeptical that would give you standing in small claims court. Certainly there's other legal avenues against Flock though.