People always want high trust societies. They are incredibly hard to create and incredibly easy to destroy.
However, once the cameras go up, you will never ever create one there. High trust requires, well, actual trust. You can’t build real trust in a panopticon just a sickly police state facsimile of it.
Society and progress moves at the speed of trust. Without it many uniquely human and beautiful things disappear.
My counter argument is that you only need 1% of the population to be bad apples in order to destroy a high trust society. Hell, even a single serial killer on the loose will make a lot of people too afraid to walk alone at night. One or two burglars can be responsible for 50% of the burglaries in a town. And so in and so forth.
The other problem you have is that a lot of crime tends to be financially rewarding, so if left unchecked it will tend to grow over time as the criminals get richer and expand their operations.
For all those reasons, you need surveillance to catch criminals and restore trust even if 99% of the population are good people.
The thing is I think if you give people the choice between a 0.001% chance of getting murdered on the street or a 100% chance of being surveilled 24/7 you will find that people will take their chances with the murderers
0.001% chance of being murdered is 1 in 100000 which is about the murder rate of the UK. That does not seem to stop the UK from wanting more surveillance.
The problem with murder rate is it doesn't matter what the actual numbers are. Just bombard people with bad news 24/7 and they will believe the sky is falling and murderous mobs are roaming the streets.
Reality shows otherwise. Take a look at Google and free-for-ads-and-surveillance everything. People are willing to make compromises on privacy for less important things than the change of them or their loved ones getting murdered, as mentioned as an example.
But back to Flock: public cameras are not 24/7 surveillance, as those don't surveil people at home.
ps: I'm not for a panopticon, enforcement needs to come with surveillance also, otherwise it will just be an anarcho-tyranny. So common in the developed world. And enforcement of law must also apply to companies, even (and especially) to vendors of the law-enforcement.
The main problem with these arguments, which are common and we also see in a lot of free-market discussions, is that they assume that every person has perfect knowledge all the time. Including knowledge of changes that might have just occurred.
That's... an extremely difficult claim to make, and one that people largely make for free, unchallenged. I'll challenge it: most people have absolutely no idea what's going on.
When you sign a terms of service, do you read it in full? When you get what feels like a weekly email saying the TOS has changed, do you read it in full? And, to be clear, you auto-consent when the terms of service changes, they don't pretend you have to read it.
This is by design. It's not a coincidence the TOS is extremely long, extremely vague, and constantly changing. And, it doesn't matter anyway. There are no competitors. Because guess what - they have the same TOS. And the TOS doesn't mean anything, anyway. Because the majority of the rights they explain they can exercise in the TOS, they never do. So you can't even use that as a baseline for "what is this company doing".
So not only are people not knowledgeable in practice, but they also face many barriers, by design, to being knowledgeable. And, one further, they actually CAN'T be knowledge even if they dedicate their entire lives to it, because the knowledge does not exist and is not available.
People do not "want" the surveillance state. Rather, they submit to it, under lies, omissions, and asymmetric power. This includes me and you.
aye, the average joe has no idea wtf data mining is, or how its risky for them
my educated, medical professional in-laws have some vague idea about it but love their instagram and lose chasing the related trends. they have no real, direct understanding as to how this could impact their privacy, or how marketing works, or how propaganda is similar to marketing, etc.
So the argument here is that people are too stupid to realize that they are being manipulated into being controlled, therefore it’s ok?
Sit someone down, a normal average person, and explain to them the actual implications and then do you think they will agree? Reality shows that when people actually understand what surveillance means they reject it wholeheartedly
No, they don't reject it. The realize they hate it, but make a compromise.. and use the free gmail, the ad ridden internet, etc., because they have no real alternatives. Rejecting surveillance capitalism is only realistic for the poorest and the richest. The average people must accept it.
Unfortunately evidence suggests that people want the opposite, or at least surveillance for everyone else. And not just over murder, over petty crime. Nextdoor is full of people who want to be a surveillance network of humans.
I think people are for surveillance under the presumption of it catching major criminals. But once it's introduced, they realize its main purpose isn't to nab murderers, but to punish them (the people who voted for it).
Surveillance everywhere means you can't park in a no parking zone for 3 minutes just to drop something off real quick. You'll get a ticket mailed to your door. You can't go 5 mph over the limit when nobody is around. You can't slow down at a stop sign without stopping for a full 10 seconds without risking being busted. You can't sneakily sample a grape before deciding whether they taste good enough to buy. You can't not tip a bad restaurant without them plastering your picture on the walls to embarrass you. You can't say a mean thing to an annoying person online in the heat of the moment. Half the people on earth cheat on their spouses while pretending they never would and anyone who does should be imprisoned, and soon they'll have their secret revealed and regret their words. You can't trip and fall in a goofy way without your video being a global meme for a whole month.
All these pop into people's heads and make them think "screw that" after at first thinking it's great.
I'm not sure we know what people want though. After terrorist attacks politicians seem to decide what people want, tell people what they want, but rarely, if ever, offer a referendum on the subject. And on this alone they also get bipartisian support because nobody dares look weak on terrorism, so there's no possible vote against it.
> My counter argument is that you only need 1% of the population to be bad apples in order to destroy a high trust society.
Counter-counter argument, it doesn’t actually matter what the proportion is, rather the perception of it. The likelihood of non-white collar crime affecting your life has dropped dramatically in all of our lifetimes. The chance of being affected by white collar crime has skyrocketed - who hasn’t been solicited for a class action lawsuit?
Which leads me to my hotter take: America isn’t turning into a low trust society because of crime and brown people (white replacement theory), it’s turning into a low trust society because of white collar crime, grifting, private equity takeovers, naked corruption, prosperity gospel, fuck-you got-mine, exurban development, oversized car culture, etc etc etc.
Edit: furthermore, it’s in these psychopathic fuckrats best interest that people believe that there is a “1% bad apple” phenomenon to justify their domestic security panopticon, and they would be laughing all the way to the bank that there are so many suckers who buy into their propaganda if they weren’t so high from huffing their own ketamine, cocaine, adderall, and HGH-laced farts that they believe their own bull shit.
It’s like blockchain but for racism, and it’s genius.
High-trust societies are based in transparency. Ironically you get high-trust by actually not trusting people. We can have surveillance and transparency at the same time... the point is that people actually need to be accountable.
It's the lack of accountability, especially on the meta-level where the people that need to be held accountable know that there is no accountability, that can make surveillance dangerous.
We need both police, and we need the police to have police, and at every level, there ought to be an antagonistic relationship.
Just deciding, fuck it, no transparency and no surveillance is just going to lead to organized crime and cronyism... and surprise, surprise, that's exactly what we're getting in America.
On-point surveillance by people would be a good start; I do not see why it needs to start with endless surveillance by machines run by a private company.
It is not about percentage of the population, but about whether the bad actor rise to the top.
> The other problem you have is that a lot of crime tends to be financially rewarding, so if left unchecked it will tend to grow over time as the criminals get richer and expand their operations.
It already happened. The president, Miller, Karp, Thiel, Zuckerberg, Musk, hell the company named Flock are all bad actors who got richer over time and expanded their operations.
I see no problem with every private citizen having a video camera that records everything around their home or business, and when a crime happens the police can solicit the recordings.
Also it is fine if such a private surveillance system alerts the police when a crime is in progress.
What I find completely unacceptable is to have such ubiquitous surveillance means that are networked and available to the police or other such institutions for real-time surveillance of whatever they choose. It is absolutely certain that whoever will have access to the centralized control will abuse of this power.
I have grown up in a country occupied by foreign invaders, who have installed in power a government of their choice, who have robbed and murdered whomever they wanted, and then for almost a half of century nobody could do anything against them, because everybody was under surveillance, so that no opposition could be organized.
Americans do not really understand how frustrating it is to live in this way and they fail to recognize how quickly their country becomes more and more similar to the former "communist" countries.
> However, once the cameras go up, you will never ever create one there.
This is directly refuted by Singapore, Japan, arguably the UK, and others. Singapore is very interesting to visit. Externally there's somewhat of a narrative of a harsh police state but when I visited I almost never saw a single police officer and they don't have particularly many police officers on a per capita basis (170/100k vs 440/100k in NYC). Most of the policing naturally happens by aid of the surveillance system and a very strong effort to take action to bring justice for any crime. As a result, everyone believes crime will be punished and so you end up with a very safe society. This expectation of crime being taken seriously actually _creates_ trust because you can have high faith that any criminal action someone may take will have consequences and therefore be deterred.
There's a glaring lie of omission when Singapore is cited as a "safe society" in a surveillance context without also mentioning that those same surveillance systems are used to aggressively suppress political dissent (https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/asia-and-the-pacific/sou...).
Super safe society, unless you happen to express disagreement with any part of it. Then, not so safe for you.
So I guess the question is, once America attains a sufficiently pervasive level of surveillance over its citizens, which people are you hoping will be in power forever?
Right, and the elephant in the room here: if you aggressively suppress dissent, then of course people will say they're happy and everything is good.
I'm sure North Koreans will tell you to your face that it's fantastic, they love it, it's the best government on Earth. So once the surveillance is powerful enough, truth ceases to exist.
There are two separate types of events with associated probabilities: 1) the probability of being harmed by criminals, and 2) the probability of being harmed by the government.
For most people in most places, police are ineffective and therefore the first is orders of magnitude more of a problem. For example in the Bay Area, car break-ins are incredibly common and police are incapable of solving it. This would be unthinkable in Singapore.
> unless you happen to express disagreement with any part of it
On the other hand, the government in Singapore is genuinely popular. A majority eligible of voters chose to re-elect the incumbent. For reference, only 32% of eligible American voters chose the current US president.
> There are two separate types of events with associated probabilities: 1) the probability of being harmed by criminals, and 2) the probability of being harmed by the government.
#1 is annoying but has many solutions. You can call the cops, you can defend yourself, you can sue in the courts.
#2 is the most terrifying one since there is absolutely nothing you can do.
Thus any society needs to do the utmost to prevent abuse #2 above all else.
I’m glad you only find crime “annoying”. Others find it oppressive. For example the murder rate in New York City (a similarly dense urban area) is around 35-50x the rate of Singapore. This means your chance of being murdered within the first two weeks of living in NYC is equivalent to a whole year in Singapore.
You don’t have to walk around wondering if you will get mugged or shot. You don’t worry that your car or apartment will be broken into. Crime solve rates are very high because police have fewer crimes to deal with.
#1 is more than annoying, and OP cited a problem with no solutions. In SF who are you going to sue when someone breaks your car window and steal your laptop?
It's crazy to think the amount anti-social / low trust behavior SF/NYC puts up with on a daily basis. It's some weird type of Stockholm syndrome.
> A majority eligible of voters chose to re-elect the incumbent.
I wish you could have seen the meme-able face I made when I read this.
Putin is similarly popular in Russia, China's government is also incredibly popular with its citizens, and Nicaragua's government is so popular with its people that they just decided not to have elections anymore! There is a remarkable correlation between authoritarian governments and popularity with their citizens, don't you think?
> For example in the Bay Area, car break-ins are incredibly common and police are incapable of solving it. This would be unthinkable in Singapore.
Invasive state surveillance and authoritarianism are not the only answers to crime, San Francisco is not the only city in the US, and crime rates in San Francisco have been overall flat or declining for the last few years (https://sfstandard.com/2026/01/02/san-francisco-2025-crime-s...). That's a false dichotomy, cherry-picking, and a false premise ... gotta be some kind of bingo card for this somewhere.
I suspect the true nature of this disagreement is that you feel more threatened by a free society than an authoritarian one. I wonder, how does someone reconcile the ideas of a free market and a non-free society?
Even in the recent past, all the countries dominated by the Soviet Union have gone for a half of century without problems, while a supermajority of their citizens actively hated their government, and by "hate" I mean like really wishing all of them dead.
This was made possible with traditional surveillance.
With the modern surveillance means and with drones and robots, there will no longer exist any way in which even a great supermajority could remove a government.
sorry but data and experience does not bear that out. Denending on which source you look at, the Uk is a "high trust" society.
Now, your assertion about surveillance, sounds true but kinda rings a bit false.
The places where there are less CCTV cameras tend to be rural areas, and let me tell you, they do not trust anyone they don't know (I used to live in rural england) why? because there is no chance that the police will help you, unless you're being threatened.
I don't think this is a refutation. You have narrowed the definition of an admittedly soft term like "high trust society" to be an expression of security or perceived security.
But more to the core of the definition of trust. Singapore isn't using trust, it uses control. Which in most contexts are opposed.
Surveillance isn't even important for the formation of a high trust society. On the contrary, with increased surveillance possibilities, formerly high trust societies seem to have degraded.
Most standards for “high trust society” are astonishingly low.
Respect for private property rights? A court system that’s broadly seen as following the law? Elections where the outcomes are not disputed? Officials not soliciting or accepting bribes from normal citizens? High trust society.
The UK certainly has its problems, but the tricks are often technically legal, and they’re nowhere near as bad as in third world countries.
A high trust society is not only a measure of the relationship between civil population and the state, but also the interpersonal relationships among citizens.
"You know how they deal with crime down there?" Crosby asked me.
"Nope."
"They just don't have any crime down there. 'Papa' Monzano's made crime so damn unattractive, nobody even thinks about it without getting sick. I heard you can lay a billfold in the middle of a sidewalk and you can come back a week later and it'll be right there, with everything still in it."
"Um."
"You know what the punishment is for stealing something?"
"Nope."
"The hook," he said. "No fines, no probation, no thirty days in jail. It's the hook. The hook for stealing, for murder, for arson, for treason, for rape, for being a peeping Tom. Break a law—any damn law at all—and it's the hook. Everybody can understand that, and San Lorenzo is the best-behaved country in the world."
"What is the hook?"
"They put up a gallows, see? Two posts and a cross beam. And then they take a great big kind of iron fishhook and they hang it down from the cross beam. Then they take somebody who's dumb enough to break the law, and they put the point of the hook in through one side of his belly and out the other and they let him go—and there he hangs, by God, one damn sorry law-breaker."
In Singapore, policing does not have the dystopian surveillance thing attached to it, because a large number of police are civilian conscripts.
It takes the edge off, when you know that your neighbor's 18 year old kid is working in the police force, rather than some mercenary force
On top of that, the majority of the military consists of civilian conscripts, which arguably holds more power if the system ever goes bad enough to degenerate into martial law
> In Singapore, policing does not have the dystopian surveillance thing attached to it, because a large number of police are civilian conscripts.
I would not have guessed in a million years that someone would argue that country's surveillance doesn't have a dystopian vibe because the country conscripts people into service.
fyi Finland has the same conscription rates, I don't see them being criticized for conscription?
Maybe they are too white, or maybe people who injected too much rugged individualism into their veins have rotted views of society
A system that has brought security and cohesion, and thus wealth, is accused of being dystopic
Conscripts policing their own society will almost certainly produce better outcomes than people attracted to power volunteering to do so instead.
Especially if that society is fairly homogenous. (I'm well aware that Singapore is a fusion of cultures, but it's nothing like an empire that can shuffle its conscripts around, so that they always end up policing and brutalizing an ethnic group that's different from theirs.
But it’s still a counter-example to “once cameras go up all trust is lost”. Clearly cameras are not the sole issue that makes trust achievable. As demonstrated by high-trust societies with cameras!
Read up a bit on it. You have numerous signs over the town that state explicitly canning in case of participating in any form of protest that government will consider violent. How that is defined is of course on... government. Read up on how they treat immigrants, its basically serfdom pyramid of massive exploitation on all levels of poor from neighboring countries - confirmed by colleagues living there long term.
Its great little bubble, but not of democracy, or freedom, far from it, rather some moebius-esque utopia of few elites above everybody else. They are also openly racist & xenophobic in their laws, ie in immigration they have to maintain exactly same racial/ethnic split as in the past, so people are granted citizenship on quotas of their ethnicity / skin color (so of course white people are not that welcome, just temporarily tolerated). If this is required to keep everybody in check and behaving nicely, I can easily skip that and raise my children away from such twisted panopticon.
You want an actual long term stable utmost free society for past 800 years and counting? Switzerland. People are nice and tolerant because they are nice and not from the fear of repressions on every step. 30% of residents are foreigners yet society doesn't boil in internal conflicts, I'd say by far the best managed immigration I ever saw. One has to experience it personally to understand the massive difference compared to most of the world. Tons of guns yet very little gun violence (compared to US non-existent). All aspects of society work at least as good or more often better than rest of Europe/world.
What they were saying is they prefer people to behave because they want to be good people which are part of a good society than to be good people simply as a byproduct of fear of jail.
Wanting to be a good person is different than being a good person. I said the former not the latter. The former is about intent behind actions and what you strive to be. The latter is about thinking people are born in boxes.
Because it is naive to think that the people with the power of absolute surveillance would ever permit “sousveillance”.
People already survey atrocities committed by regimes and reporting them does less and less every year.
Camera towers may benefit the populace in the short term, but eventually they will be used as a choke collar.
Think of every story, historical or fiction, where a rebellion or resistance struggled against entrenched power. Now imagine that with constant surveillance everywhere. The story gets really short: “then they were all rounded up”.
I am fine without a "high trust" society (which, apparently, cannot exist with people seeing each other in public), the society where people don't commit crime without any fear of the repercussions would be a great start.
Figures. If observation destroys this "high trust" of yours then it is only a matter of time till it's all gone. Someone forgot to turn off the action camera on the bike and rode with it in the car rack home - no high trust between the trail and his home. A spy satellite is repositioned and swipes over your town - no high trust there. Can't even imagine how many high trust communities fell to the Chinese spy balloon in 2023...
This discussion reminds me of a valuable and yet rarely discussed book by Bruce Schneier, Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive.
Sadly, many people just want to be highly trusted in society (whilst themselves fearing most of the rest of it). It's why we flirt with/fall face first into authoritarianism every few decades.
Authoritarian are not high trust. And people who call for authoritarian societies are not calling for high trust. They call for control and subjugation.
Whoever call for it usually thinks they are rich or influencial enough to never ever be affected. They really do believe in it right until they take a flight out of some office window.
One fascist guy who took part on the murder of a socialist MP when fascism had just gotten in power was jewish. Ended up being killed by nazis later on.
yes, better dead then red scare and Mccartyism that faded during nixon-regan into more capitalistic freedom when the USSR failed and there was opportunity around the world.
We created an extrajudicial prison outside of our borders to house "prisoners too dangerous for the normal court system", created an entirely new surveillance police force, and expanded FISA in response to 9/11.
So if that's not asking authoritarianism if they'd like to go out for drinks, we have very VERY different views on freedom.
Also, I really don't care about other "advanced democracies", we're talking about America and it's not really relevant to my points.
Disagree. High-trust can only exist in the absence of class disparity. You're not going to steal from your neighbor if your neighbor has exactly the same things as you do. You will if he's substantially richer. At the same time, you want to be as rich yourself as possible. Can't have both though.
Countries like Japan or Singapore aren't high-trust societies, they're high-enforcement societies. That's different. In my eyes, high-trust society is a society where law enforcement isn't needed because people self-police because they value the collective, not because of fear of punishment.
A friend of mine never locks his car because he trusts that nobody will steal it even though he knows that once the car is stolen, the chance of recovery is zero because the police simply ignore such reports. This is high-trust society.
The idea that surveillance undermines high trust societies seems insane to me. Widespread petty crime, lack of shared cultural norms and traditions, lacking of missing social reinforcement of expectations of a society - those are what prevent high trust societies from forming. I consider those things a much worse problem then Flock cameras.
>The idea that surveillance undermines high trust societies seems insane to me.
Only because, I'm betting, that you view street surveillance as something that binds others, but not yourself. I doubt you would make this argument for any other kind of surveillance.
If Microsoft were to record everything you did on your PC, would you consider Windows the "high trust" OS community vs Linux? Of if your employer began surveilling all your devices (including personal ones) to ensure you weren't stealing from the company, would you consider your company one of "high trust"?
I don't deny that surveillance can reduce crime, but the idea that surveillance undermines high trust societies is relatively straightforward
No, we had high trust societies before the shitty surveillance tech. There are quite a few effects that undermine it even and this tech is part of the reason why.
It is part of the problem, not part of a solution.
100% Agree. And I'll go further saying the highest trust societies I've lived in have been medium-size, rural/suburban. Everyone is in the social/economic class, similar traditions/backgrounds, similar church etc...
I don't think surveillance prevents crime. Not having so many poor people prevents crime.
Some people will always be antisocial due to tendencies and possibly mental illness, but having a society that is so rich and yet has so many poor people as the USA will of course create criminals. No amount of cameras will solve that.
I would agree with that, but we probably have different definitions of poor. Destitute? Absolutely. I don’t think anybody is shocked that starving people commit crimes to not die.
However, I have been in plenty of low income high trust areas. In some ways, those were even more high trust.
Economics play a role, but there is a moral and cultural fabric that gets built through repeated interactions overtime. Unfortunately, that fabric is very susceptible to damage.
Eg: there are plenty of towns where you wouldn’t have to lock your car or even your bike, but it only takes a couple thefts for the entire culture to change…
What we really need is to journalists and cybersecurity community to use these systems to track few hundred of politicians and publish the results. Just like some crooked cops already used it to stalk their exes.
We know how much some billionares hate their jets tracked even though they have small army of bodyguards and three letter agencies spending budget of small country protecting them.
Lets see how comfortable much less protected US politicians gonna be with a fact that everyone knows what time they leave their house by minute, what routes they take and where their cars gonna be.
Not just that but I would also be very skeptical that whatever free standing poles they're erecting are fully compliant with TIA/EIA 222H (or engineer stamp approved drawing for each unique installation location, which will vary with local climate of snow/ice and wind loading), which is the engineering standard for self supporting tubular steel monopoles that have antenna, camera, solar panel appurtenances attached to them.
In general, 222H and its predecessors govern engineering standards for:
a. Self supporting lattice/grid/angle steel type towers.
b. Guyed towers
c. Self supporting monopoles of all types (could even theoretically be antenna/solar/camera attachments as additional wind loading on a wood utility pole sunk into the ground, but more commonly, for steel monopoles)
If you're going to put steel monopoles in the public highway ROW they need to be compliant with both AASHTO standards and also the above.
They began strapping them to existing light poles here. I took a photo of one and it was gone a few days later. I didn't report it, it just vanished, which I noticed the next time I went for a walk. I want to know why they decided to put one up on my street, it feels like an intrusion.
Existing light poles are designed generally for very specific wind loading of only the lamp fixture on their ends, they're built to a very low cost spec to be cranked out in bulk. And to be a generally round or octagonal or whatever cross section that lets the wind flow around it in a worst-case 90 to 120 mph storm without any extra square or rectangular junk hanging off the side.
Adding appurtenances to one changes their wind loading and reliability. The engineers who signed off on some light pole designs might be unhappy to learn that multiple square feet of wind loading are being added after the fact.
The reason I know this is that in the telecom industry some (less experienced) people periodically try to use COTS light poles for some design that will hold just a few very small light duty sector antennas, or one or two 30cm size PTP microwave antennas in addition to the lamp fixture, as a "Hey I have this great idea to save some money" concept, and learn the hard way that the poles aren't rated or designed for it.
In particular 222g, 222h and such have a "reliability factor", which can be summed up as, in a worst case scenario if it completely falls over, within its fall radius, is it going to hit anything or kill anyone?
For example, a self-supporting steel monopole in the middle of a field, that if it falls over is going to hit some corn has a very low reliability factor. Even if it has been engineered to withstand the worst case 120 mph wind with extensive rime ice loading.
On the other hand, if you have a 40 or 50 ft steel pole that's within the highway right away and it might fall over into traffic moving at 70 mph, that's a whole other question.
222G and H and similar do not cover scenarios like being hit by a 5 ton or 10 ton truck, I am not familiar with, but presumably there are also engineering standards for designing poles within the highway right-of-way that have to be able to withstand a certain sort of hit by a vehicle. Or being protected by a certain engineering standard of bollard.
Police in America is so beyond cooked that the entire system needs to be rethought. It's just not working from any angle. It's expensive as all living fuck, with the majority of city budgets going to the police. It doesn't prevent crime. Traffic violations are still rampant, including speeding and reckless driving. And, worst of all, nobody likes it. People complain constantly and police basically just whine about how hard their job is.
Who is this for, really? Is this just a complex money-siphoning scheme to extract funds out of local governments?
This just sounds like the standard playbook for this crowd (by which wide brush I mean authoritarians and their enablers). They really hate being called on their lies, and their immediate response is to attack with whatever comes to hand (press release, xeet, the DoJ…depends on the person).
Re ICE having access to data: "Flock said that they did not, when they did, but that it was not their problem".
Just like it's "not their problem" that in a state where certain types of data sharing is not permitted. There's nothing they'll change in the agency's account to prevent it. They'll even offer training on it. Because it's "not their problem".
I respect ACLU but this article seems a fair bit biased. They're stretching the imagination quite a bit in some of their examples. Seems to me that someone has already made up their mind and are now looking for any example to support their narrative.
I'd love for them to build a case more impartially and drop the activist nature of the language they use.
I mean being activist is sort of the whole point of the ACLU? And besides it's not like this would be the first time stuff like this happens. You don't have to imagine it, just learn history.
They were by enough officials that collectively we have voted into power. Maybe we should think about who we're handing power to. They don't seem to have a solid grasp on things.
How come we allowed all these cronies to put camera and do surveillance. Any politician advocating this should have cameras in their home for safety reason.
Because clearly we are powerless. Someone should post that chart of how likely a law is to be passed vs. how much the people want it or not. It is basically a flat line. People's will have zero impact.
Every time someone repeats this, they are telling a self-fulfilling story. I got a law passed -- a state law, about ALPRs, establishing a list of restrictions on them. I didn't do it alone, I had a lot of really important help, including from ACLU of Oregon. There was a lot of opposition, and it ate months of my life, but it was worth it.
I never would have accomplished that if I spent more time reading comments on the internet about all the things we are powerless to do.
Seriously. I'm as left wing as you can go and I still think that voting is useful to influence the system while building a critical mass of people willing to break the wheel. Saying "we'll never get class solidarity" is the most annoying and pointless thing someone can say so you have to assume they're working to ensure it is the case.
The worst thing about this isn't that a company or CEO lied. It's that a private corporation that runs the largest mass surveillance system in the country habitually lies about what it does so local governments will adopt it and it can then secretly give that access to the government. What happens when the cameras get so good they can read lips? Or they add directional long-range mics to the cameras?
Everyone in the comments so hopeful, but here’s the reality - nothing will happen, they’ll get more money from more local governments signing up, and industry groups that have problems with protesters like forestry, and everyone will go about their day without anything changing moving onto the next rage bait.
when I was a kid, my mom used to say "think about something nice and pleasant if you cannot fall asleep". So sometimes I think about scenario in which some disgruntled IT manager in one of AWS data centers, knowing which CDN server belongs to Flock, unplugs one of their RAID drives and plug it to their own laptop and copies the whole database of all plates, coordinates, etc, and Flock didn't even find out because most soft raids won't report an issue, and if they do, then what is there to troubleshoot if everything got back to normal 2 hours later? And then post it all in form of a torrent, so everyone can download it and see who went where. Imagine politicians caught visiting strip clubs or their mistresses, patterns of cops going to places where bad guys hang out (to collect bribes), highway patrol going over speed limits without genuine emergency. Thinking about all this I fell asleep much easier...
Between Epstein, Panama Papers, and Madison Cawthorne Story Time, I don't think any of these things will end careers as long as voters can be convinced their team is the winning one. This is the post-fact era.
It always makes me so sad to see companies like this where the founders don't think twice about what they're building and just go straight for the cash grab! Can't we use technology for good and not to build a dystopian surveillance state?
This seems to me to be the inevitable outcome of a society that celebrates winners who claim their lies are merely "alternative facts"
This relevant post is flagged, but yes, I do think this is a symptom of America crossing the asshole threshold where it pays to outright lie and call your fact checkers insincere: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48837460
There's too much in this article to distill as "this". The city of Oshkosh cancelling their contact with Flock after one day is actually quite heartening.
You're right. By "this" I'm referring to a company selling to the government feeling like they will not face consequences for publicly lying to their buyers. I agree it's heartening to see the contract cancelled. I find the doubling down on the lies as both unsurprising and disheartening.
Even with all this said, surveillance like this is certainly going to be one of the best ways to catch criminals and reduce crime over the long term. I hope the misgivings that we have around Flock won't close the door to us ever using this type of technology, in some way, in the future.
I spent 3 years in Korea, and that's probably where I will go back to retire after I exit. Crime there is extremely low - partially because of the cameras, but mainly because they're on top of it. They're able to spend time on every criminal, which deters anyone from breaking the law.
Contrary to SF, where I've called the police and provided evidence for an open and shut case, and the cops shrugged their shoulders. Flock cameras won't fix that.
American police seem to be a uniquely bad combo of false positives and false negatives. Failing to go after actual crime while also capable of using disproportionate violence in incidents that don't warrant it.
I used to live in china, which is by all means the dystopian surveillance state that we're all afraid that this could lead to. Don't misinterpret this as an advocation for that type of living; but it's simply interesting to note that when you ask any chinese if they would like to go back to the world of 30 years ago in terms of surveillance, essentially 100% of them will say no; they like it the way things are and not having to be afraid of being victim to any crime. Yes yes, a bird born in a cage thinks flying is an illness. I realize the irony in bringing this up. Yet it's just hard to ignore when you see delivery drivers leaving packages outside of buildings on the street in the most insecure manner and not having a single soul daring to touch it if they are not the intended recipient.
At the same time, on HN we are not even having a conversation about what a sort of tradeoff between surveillance and safety. I live in Seattle, actually just had ~$400 in buckets of paint stolen off my porch just yesterday. Yes, buckets of paint. I had a break in 2 months ago, and that was one of many over the years. This is in U-District, a high crime, but also oddly affluent neighborhood. I absolutely detest the fact that criminals run around the city with impunity committing crime after crime. It makes everyone's life here just a bit more miserable—there are so many people that don't want to move to the city because of the crime; there are all these invisible costs we are paying because of it.
So to think that cameras are such a no-go just doesn't make sense to me. Certainly there are ways to do it ethically. I think south korea is a great example, as well as many european countries. Honestly, I think it's just bizarre that every time Flock gets brought up on HN we all flip the bird to the supposed surveillance state without even discussing the tradeoffs.
It's more complicated in China not just because of people want a more safer environment, but also because of the culture and the social formation built by history.
Chinese were taught to grow in honesty and integrity explicitly for thousand years and it's becoming common consensus when more and more people are educated. When the bar raises and the gov is not given more freedom to the people, it's just nature to let the surveillance cameras grow to each and every inch of the land.
Me personally would chose safety over privacy though.
In China the pact (true or not is irrelevant) is that the State has this power and enacts it for the benefit of everyone.
In the US surveillance doesn’t have the same role, it’s just another figment of extreme profit making.
Flock has no role in the social pact, it’s just a dystopian company profiting from the current situation.
This assumes the police even want to solve crimes. I'm not convinced they do. Everything I've seen points to them wanting to do the absolute bare minimum to not be disbanded, and that's it. Their primary goal is to get paid and go home. Well, solving crimes interferes with the "go home" part, so they don't. Normally, in a free market, you would fail if you can't do your primary purpose. Police have zero accountability to anyone, including the voter. They're systemically allowed to fail, and encouraged financially to fail.
Do you also want to install some surveillance software on your phone and laptop so it can watch what you do 100% of time?
You know in future it will really help to catch some criminals stealing copyrighted IP, watching some illegal types of porn or using some sanctioned Chinese LLM.
You will never find anyone who is against these cameras saying that they don’t reduce crime. Of course they do. The problem is what you give up to have that is far, far more valuable and we can point to the “Ben Franklin” quote here about those who would give up freedom for safety deserve neither.
The problem is the negative feedback between crime (and crime visibility through media), and the acceptance of surveillance in order to stop crime.
People really don't like public safety crime. Not only will they vote for surveillance, they will vote for public safety authoritarians like Bukele just to stop it.
They are thinking: What good is your abstract notion of freedom if I cannot leave my house at night, and I have to be hyper vigilant of violence?
I don't know the solutions to this. The media clearly plays a big role in this, but regulation of media and social media is its own can of worms.
One thing I am quite confident about is that actually stopping public safety crime without surveillance must be a priority, otherwise it's cart before horse.
Is it? In the UK we have a huge density of CCTV cameras and often you can barely get the police to write a crime report, let alone look at the CCTV. It doesn't really seem like the bottleneck.
People always want high trust societies. They are incredibly hard to create and incredibly easy to destroy.
However, once the cameras go up, you will never ever create one there. High trust requires, well, actual trust. You can’t build real trust in a panopticon just a sickly police state facsimile of it.
Society and progress moves at the speed of trust. Without it many uniquely human and beautiful things disappear.
My counter argument is that you only need 1% of the population to be bad apples in order to destroy a high trust society. Hell, even a single serial killer on the loose will make a lot of people too afraid to walk alone at night. One or two burglars can be responsible for 50% of the burglaries in a town. And so in and so forth.
The other problem you have is that a lot of crime tends to be financially rewarding, so if left unchecked it will tend to grow over time as the criminals get richer and expand their operations.
For all those reasons, you need surveillance to catch criminals and restore trust even if 99% of the population are good people.
The thing is I think if you give people the choice between a 0.001% chance of getting murdered on the street or a 100% chance of being surveilled 24/7 you will find that people will take their chances with the murderers
0.001% chance of being murdered is 1 in 100000 which is about the murder rate of the UK. That does not seem to stop the UK from wanting more surveillance.
The problem with murder rate is it doesn't matter what the actual numbers are. Just bombard people with bad news 24/7 and they will believe the sky is falling and murderous mobs are roaming the streets.
Reality shows otherwise. Take a look at Google and free-for-ads-and-surveillance everything. People are willing to make compromises on privacy for less important things than the change of them or their loved ones getting murdered, as mentioned as an example.
But back to Flock: public cameras are not 24/7 surveillance, as those don't surveil people at home.
ps: I'm not for a panopticon, enforcement needs to come with surveillance also, otherwise it will just be an anarcho-tyranny. So common in the developed world. And enforcement of law must also apply to companies, even (and especially) to vendors of the law-enforcement.
The main problem with these arguments, which are common and we also see in a lot of free-market discussions, is that they assume that every person has perfect knowledge all the time. Including knowledge of changes that might have just occurred.
That's... an extremely difficult claim to make, and one that people largely make for free, unchallenged. I'll challenge it: most people have absolutely no idea what's going on.
When you sign a terms of service, do you read it in full? When you get what feels like a weekly email saying the TOS has changed, do you read it in full? And, to be clear, you auto-consent when the terms of service changes, they don't pretend you have to read it.
This is by design. It's not a coincidence the TOS is extremely long, extremely vague, and constantly changing. And, it doesn't matter anyway. There are no competitors. Because guess what - they have the same TOS. And the TOS doesn't mean anything, anyway. Because the majority of the rights they explain they can exercise in the TOS, they never do. So you can't even use that as a baseline for "what is this company doing".
So not only are people not knowledgeable in practice, but they also face many barriers, by design, to being knowledgeable. And, one further, they actually CAN'T be knowledge even if they dedicate their entire lives to it, because the knowledge does not exist and is not available.
People do not "want" the surveillance state. Rather, they submit to it, under lies, omissions, and asymmetric power. This includes me and you.
People aren’t “making compromises” they are totally oblivious to the evil shit Google, Meta, etc is doing.
aye, the average joe has no idea wtf data mining is, or how its risky for them
my educated, medical professional in-laws have some vague idea about it but love their instagram and lose chasing the related trends. they have no real, direct understanding as to how this could impact their privacy, or how marketing works, or how propaganda is similar to marketing, etc.
So the argument here is that people are too stupid to realize that they are being manipulated into being controlled, therefore it’s ok?
Sit someone down, a normal average person, and explain to them the actual implications and then do you think they will agree? Reality shows that when people actually understand what surveillance means they reject it wholeheartedly
> Reality shows that when people actually understand what surveillance means they reject it wholeheartedly
They certainly say they do. Then back they go to Amazon, Facebook, Instagram et al.
No, they don't reject it. The realize they hate it, but make a compromise.. and use the free gmail, the ad ridden internet, etc., because they have no real alternatives. Rejecting surveillance capitalism is only realistic for the poorest and the richest. The average people must accept it.
And backlash its got is the real proof that people not protest against it only because they are not really aware of how bad it is.
Unfortunately evidence suggests that people want the opposite, or at least surveillance for everyone else. And not just over murder, over petty crime. Nextdoor is full of people who want to be a surveillance network of humans.
I think people are for surveillance under the presumption of it catching major criminals. But once it's introduced, they realize its main purpose isn't to nab murderers, but to punish them (the people who voted for it).
Surveillance everywhere means you can't park in a no parking zone for 3 minutes just to drop something off real quick. You'll get a ticket mailed to your door. You can't go 5 mph over the limit when nobody is around. You can't slow down at a stop sign without stopping for a full 10 seconds without risking being busted. You can't sneakily sample a grape before deciding whether they taste good enough to buy. You can't not tip a bad restaurant without them plastering your picture on the walls to embarrass you. You can't say a mean thing to an annoying person online in the heat of the moment. Half the people on earth cheat on their spouses while pretending they never would and anyone who does should be imprisoned, and soon they'll have their secret revealed and regret their words. You can't trip and fall in a goofy way without your video being a global meme for a whole month.
All these pop into people's heads and make them think "screw that" after at first thinking it's great.
You may do. And I may do.
But most people won't.
See how they react to terrorism, despite the fact they amount to almost nothing compared to any other cause of death.
People are NOT rational.
I'm not sure we know what people want though. After terrorist attacks politicians seem to decide what people want, tell people what they want, but rarely, if ever, offer a referendum on the subject. And on this alone they also get bipartisian support because nobody dares look weak on terrorism, so there's no possible vote against it.
> My counter argument is that you only need 1% of the population to be bad apples in order to destroy a high trust society.
Counter-counter argument, it doesn’t actually matter what the proportion is, rather the perception of it. The likelihood of non-white collar crime affecting your life has dropped dramatically in all of our lifetimes. The chance of being affected by white collar crime has skyrocketed - who hasn’t been solicited for a class action lawsuit?
Which leads me to my hotter take: America isn’t turning into a low trust society because of crime and brown people (white replacement theory), it’s turning into a low trust society because of white collar crime, grifting, private equity takeovers, naked corruption, prosperity gospel, fuck-you got-mine, exurban development, oversized car culture, etc etc etc.
Edit: furthermore, it’s in these psychopathic fuckrats best interest that people believe that there is a “1% bad apple” phenomenon to justify their domestic security panopticon, and they would be laughing all the way to the bank that there are so many suckers who buy into their propaganda if they weren’t so high from huffing their own ketamine, cocaine, adderall, and HGH-laced farts that they believe their own bull shit.
It’s like blockchain but for racism, and it’s genius.
"My counter argument is that you only need 1% of the population to be bad apples…"
"For all those reasons, you need surveillance to catch criminals and restore trust…"
We're making a huge assumption here that surveillance takes it down to less than 1%. You'd hate to be trading freedom for nothing at all.
High-trust societies are based in transparency. Ironically you get high-trust by actually not trusting people. We can have surveillance and transparency at the same time... the point is that people actually need to be accountable.
It's the lack of accountability, especially on the meta-level where the people that need to be held accountable know that there is no accountability, that can make surveillance dangerous.
We need both police, and we need the police to have police, and at every level, there ought to be an antagonistic relationship.
Just deciding, fuck it, no transparency and no surveillance is just going to lead to organized crime and cronyism... and surprise, surprise, that's exactly what we're getting in America.
On-point surveillance by people would be a good start; I do not see why it needs to start with endless surveillance by machines run by a private company.
It is not about percentage of the population, but about whether the bad actor rise to the top.
> The other problem you have is that a lot of crime tends to be financially rewarding, so if left unchecked it will tend to grow over time as the criminals get richer and expand their operations.
It already happened. The president, Miller, Karp, Thiel, Zuckerberg, Musk, hell the company named Flock are all bad actors who got richer over time and expanded their operations.
I see no problem with every private citizen having a video camera that records everything around their home or business, and when a crime happens the police can solicit the recordings.
Also it is fine if such a private surveillance system alerts the police when a crime is in progress.
What I find completely unacceptable is to have such ubiquitous surveillance means that are networked and available to the police or other such institutions for real-time surveillance of whatever they choose. It is absolutely certain that whoever will have access to the centralized control will abuse of this power.
I have grown up in a country occupied by foreign invaders, who have installed in power a government of their choice, who have robbed and murdered whomever they wanted, and then for almost a half of century nobody could do anything against them, because everybody was under surveillance, so that no opposition could be organized.
Americans do not really understand how frustrating it is to live in this way and they fail to recognize how quickly their country becomes more and more similar to the former "communist" countries.
> However, once the cameras go up, you will never ever create one there.
This is directly refuted by Singapore, Japan, arguably the UK, and others. Singapore is very interesting to visit. Externally there's somewhat of a narrative of a harsh police state but when I visited I almost never saw a single police officer and they don't have particularly many police officers on a per capita basis (170/100k vs 440/100k in NYC). Most of the policing naturally happens by aid of the surveillance system and a very strong effort to take action to bring justice for any crime. As a result, everyone believes crime will be punished and so you end up with a very safe society. This expectation of crime being taken seriously actually _creates_ trust because you can have high faith that any criminal action someone may take will have consequences and therefore be deterred.
There's a glaring lie of omission when Singapore is cited as a "safe society" in a surveillance context without also mentioning that those same surveillance systems are used to aggressively suppress political dissent (https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/asia-and-the-pacific/sou...).
Super safe society, unless you happen to express disagreement with any part of it. Then, not so safe for you.
So I guess the question is, once America attains a sufficiently pervasive level of surveillance over its citizens, which people are you hoping will be in power forever?
Right, and the elephant in the room here: if you aggressively suppress dissent, then of course people will say they're happy and everything is good.
I'm sure North Koreans will tell you to your face that it's fantastic, they love it, it's the best government on Earth. So once the surveillance is powerful enough, truth ceases to exist.
There are two separate types of events with associated probabilities: 1) the probability of being harmed by criminals, and 2) the probability of being harmed by the government.
For most people in most places, police are ineffective and therefore the first is orders of magnitude more of a problem. For example in the Bay Area, car break-ins are incredibly common and police are incapable of solving it. This would be unthinkable in Singapore.
> unless you happen to express disagreement with any part of it
On the other hand, the government in Singapore is genuinely popular. A majority eligible of voters chose to re-elect the incumbent. For reference, only 32% of eligible American voters chose the current US president.
> There are two separate types of events with associated probabilities: 1) the probability of being harmed by criminals, and 2) the probability of being harmed by the government.
#1 is annoying but has many solutions. You can call the cops, you can defend yourself, you can sue in the courts.
#2 is the most terrifying one since there is absolutely nothing you can do.
Thus any society needs to do the utmost to prevent abuse #2 above all else.
I’m glad you only find crime “annoying”. Others find it oppressive. For example the murder rate in New York City (a similarly dense urban area) is around 35-50x the rate of Singapore. This means your chance of being murdered within the first two weeks of living in NYC is equivalent to a whole year in Singapore.
You don’t have to walk around wondering if you will get mugged or shot. You don’t worry that your car or apartment will be broken into. Crime solve rates are very high because police have fewer crimes to deal with.
#1 is more than annoying, and OP cited a problem with no solutions. In SF who are you going to sue when someone breaks your car window and steal your laptop?
It's crazy to think the amount anti-social / low trust behavior SF/NYC puts up with on a daily basis. It's some weird type of Stockholm syndrome.
> A majority eligible of voters chose to re-elect the incumbent.
I wish you could have seen the meme-able face I made when I read this.
Putin is similarly popular in Russia, China's government is also incredibly popular with its citizens, and Nicaragua's government is so popular with its people that they just decided not to have elections anymore! There is a remarkable correlation between authoritarian governments and popularity with their citizens, don't you think?
> For example in the Bay Area, car break-ins are incredibly common and police are incapable of solving it. This would be unthinkable in Singapore.
Invasive state surveillance and authoritarianism are not the only answers to crime, San Francisco is not the only city in the US, and crime rates in San Francisco have been overall flat or declining for the last few years (https://sfstandard.com/2026/01/02/san-francisco-2025-crime-s...). That's a false dichotomy, cherry-picking, and a false premise ... gotta be some kind of bingo card for this somewhere.
I suspect the true nature of this disagreement is that you feel more threatened by a free society than an authoritarian one. I wonder, how does someone reconcile the ideas of a free market and a non-free society?
How meaningful is that in a society where political dissidence is suppressed?
It's somewhat meaningful. No society can go on for very long when a supermajority of it actively hates the government.
Even in the recent past, all the countries dominated by the Soviet Union have gone for a half of century without problems, while a supermajority of their citizens actively hated their government, and by "hate" I mean like really wishing all of them dead.
This was made possible with traditional surveillance.
With the modern surveillance means and with drones and robots, there will no longer exist any way in which even a great supermajority could remove a government.
Those countries were occupied by a foreign empire. You may recall what happened when they attempted regime change - the Soviets would roll in.
As soon as Gorbachev made it clear that he's not going to do that, all of the Warsaw pact states immediately overthrew their governments.
Thank you for providing an example that further supports my thesis. No government can survive very long when a supermajority of the country hates it.
> the government in Singapore is genuinely popular.
Easy to say when the opposition rots in prison.
Japan is not a surveillance society.
UK is not a high trust society. If anything the most trusting British people are likely found in places with the least surveillance.
> UK is not a high trust society.
sorry but data and experience does not bear that out. Denending on which source you look at, the Uk is a "high trust" society.
Now, your assertion about surveillance, sounds true but kinda rings a bit false.
The places where there are less CCTV cameras tend to be rural areas, and let me tell you, they do not trust anyone they don't know (I used to live in rural england) why? because there is no chance that the police will help you, unless you're being threatened.
So if I leave my bike unlocked in London city, it will not get stolen?
yes, more that likely it will
If you leave your bike unlocked in Amsterdam will it get stolen?
yes, and its a higher trust country than the uk
remember that trust and crime are not 100% correlated.
I don't think this is a refutation. You have narrowed the definition of an admittedly soft term like "high trust society" to be an expression of security or perceived security.
But more to the core of the definition of trust. Singapore isn't using trust, it uses control. Which in most contexts are opposed.
Surveillance isn't even important for the formation of a high trust society. On the contrary, with increased surveillance possibilities, formerly high trust societies seem to have degraded.
Saying the UK is a "high trust society" is definitely an interesting choice
Most standards for “high trust society” are astonishingly low.
Respect for private property rights? A court system that’s broadly seen as following the law? Elections where the outcomes are not disputed? Officials not soliciting or accepting bribes from normal citizens? High trust society.
The UK certainly has its problems, but the tricks are often technically legal, and they’re nowhere near as bad as in third world countries.
A high trust society is not only a measure of the relationship between civil population and the state, but also the interpersonal relationships among citizens.
That said, bribery is quite common in UK nowadays: https://www.surrey.ac.uk/news/millions-people-uk-are-being-d...
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/12/01/where-mos...
ITs not actually that surprising. Trust is different to cynicism though.
That sounds great! Maybe not so great for the occasional person sentenced to death for selling weed, but that's just the price of freedom.
"You know how they deal with crime down there?" Crosby asked me.
"Nope."
"They just don't have any crime down there. 'Papa' Monzano's made crime so damn unattractive, nobody even thinks about it without getting sick. I heard you can lay a billfold in the middle of a sidewalk and you can come back a week later and it'll be right there, with everything still in it."
"Um."
"You know what the punishment is for stealing something?"
"Nope."
"The hook," he said. "No fines, no probation, no thirty days in jail. It's the hook. The hook for stealing, for murder, for arson, for treason, for rape, for being a peeping Tom. Break a law—any damn law at all—and it's the hook. Everybody can understand that, and San Lorenzo is the best-behaved country in the world."
"What is the hook?"
"They put up a gallows, see? Two posts and a cross beam. And then they take a great big kind of iron fishhook and they hang it down from the cross beam. Then they take somebody who's dumb enough to break the law, and they put the point of the hook in through one side of his belly and out the other and they let him go—and there he hangs, by God, one damn sorry law-breaker."
Cat's Cradle
In Singapore, policing does not have the dystopian surveillance thing attached to it, because a large number of police are civilian conscripts. It takes the edge off, when you know that your neighbor's 18 year old kid is working in the police force, rather than some mercenary force
On top of that, the majority of the military consists of civilian conscripts, which arguably holds more power if the system ever goes bad enough to degenerate into martial law
> In Singapore, policing does not have the dystopian surveillance thing attached to it, because a large number of police are civilian conscripts.
I would not have guessed in a million years that someone would argue that country's surveillance doesn't have a dystopian vibe because the country conscripts people into service.
fyi Finland has the same conscription rates, I don't see them being criticized for conscription? Maybe they are too white, or maybe people who injected too much rugged individualism into their veins have rotted views of society
A system that has brought security and cohesion, and thus wealth, is accused of being dystopic
Conscripts policing their own society will almost certainly produce better outcomes than people attracted to power volunteering to do so instead.
Especially if that society is fairly homogenous. (I'm well aware that Singapore is a fusion of cultures, but it's nothing like an empire that can shuffle its conscripts around, so that they always end up policing and brutalizing an ethnic group that's different from theirs.
This is all true.
But it’s still a counter-example to “once cameras go up all trust is lost”. Clearly cameras are not the sole issue that makes trust achievable. As demonstrated by high-trust societies with cameras!
Read up a bit on it. You have numerous signs over the town that state explicitly canning in case of participating in any form of protest that government will consider violent. How that is defined is of course on... government. Read up on how they treat immigrants, its basically serfdom pyramid of massive exploitation on all levels of poor from neighboring countries - confirmed by colleagues living there long term.
Its great little bubble, but not of democracy, or freedom, far from it, rather some moebius-esque utopia of few elites above everybody else. They are also openly racist & xenophobic in their laws, ie in immigration they have to maintain exactly same racial/ethnic split as in the past, so people are granted citizenship on quotas of their ethnicity / skin color (so of course white people are not that welcome, just temporarily tolerated). If this is required to keep everybody in check and behaving nicely, I can easily skip that and raise my children away from such twisted panopticon.
You want an actual long term stable utmost free society for past 800 years and counting? Switzerland. People are nice and tolerant because they are nice and not from the fear of repressions on every step. 30% of residents are foreigners yet society doesn't boil in internal conflicts, I'd say by far the best managed immigration I ever saw. One has to experience it personally to understand the massive difference compared to most of the world. Tons of guns yet very little gun violence (compared to US non-existent). All aspects of society work at least as good or more often better than rest of Europe/world.
Those societies were created way before the level of survelliance modern AI pushes
What they were saying is they prefer people to behave because they want to be good people which are part of a good society than to be good people simply as a byproduct of fear of jail.
When did we start making good people? I thought we were still using the base model.
Wanting to be a good person is different than being a good person. I said the former not the latter. The former is about intent behind actions and what you strive to be. The latter is about thinking people are born in boxes.
Does making millions in profit from bitcoin while being a president or getting private jets from other countries count into that?
Why do you think David Brin's Transparent Society proposals can't work?
Because it is naive to think that the people with the power of absolute surveillance would ever permit “sousveillance”. People already survey atrocities committed by regimes and reporting them does less and less every year.
Camera towers may benefit the populace in the short term, but eventually they will be used as a choke collar.
Think of every story, historical or fiction, where a rebellion or resistance struggled against entrenched power. Now imagine that with constant surveillance everywhere. The story gets really short: “then they were all rounded up”.
I am fine without a "high trust" society (which, apparently, cannot exist with people seeing each other in public), the society where people don't commit crime without any fear of the repercussions would be a great start.
There are high trust communities all over America. Fewer every year.
Figures. If observation destroys this "high trust" of yours then it is only a matter of time till it's all gone. Someone forgot to turn off the action camera on the bike and rode with it in the car rack home - no high trust between the trail and his home. A spy satellite is repositioned and swipes over your town - no high trust there. Can't even imagine how many high trust communities fell to the Chinese spy balloon in 2023...
Oh yes you can … for “national interest”, for “against China” etc etc
This discussion reminds me of a valuable and yet rarely discussed book by Bruce Schneier, Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liars_and_Outliers
This looks very interesting, thank you for the recommendation.
Sadly, many people just want to be highly trusted in society (whilst themselves fearing most of the rest of it). It's why we flirt with/fall face first into authoritarianism every few decades.
Authoritarian are not high trust. And people who call for authoritarian societies are not calling for high trust. They call for control and subjugation.
Rules for thee, not for me.
Whoever call for it usually thinks they are rich or influencial enough to never ever be affected. They really do believe in it right until they take a flight out of some office window.
One fascist guy who took part on the murder of a socialist MP when fascism had just gotten in power was jewish. Ended up being killed by nazis later on.
Yep people really delude themselves.
> It's why we flirt with/fall face first into authoritarianism every few decades.
Did the US or any advanced democracy "flirt with/fall face first into authoritarianism" a few decades ago?
yes, better dead then red scare and Mccartyism that faded during nixon-regan into more capitalistic freedom when the USSR failed and there was opportunity around the world.
9/11 was an incredible shift in attitude.
We created an extrajudicial prison outside of our borders to house "prisoners too dangerous for the normal court system", created an entirely new surveillance police force, and expanded FISA in response to 9/11.
So if that's not asking authoritarianism if they'd like to go out for drinks, we have very VERY different views on freedom.
Also, I really don't care about other "advanced democracies", we're talking about America and it's not really relevant to my points.
I'm not talking about now. You said "every few decades" - when has it happened before?
I think "every few decades" normalizes what is a unique situation in US history.
> I really don't care about other "advanced democracies", we're talking about America
You probably need to specify that on HN; you could be writing from anywhere about anywhere.
>People always want high trust societies.
Disagree. High-trust can only exist in the absence of class disparity. You're not going to steal from your neighbor if your neighbor has exactly the same things as you do. You will if he's substantially richer. At the same time, you want to be as rich yourself as possible. Can't have both though.
Countries like Japan or Singapore aren't high-trust societies, they're high-enforcement societies. That's different. In my eyes, high-trust society is a society where law enforcement isn't needed because people self-police because they value the collective, not because of fear of punishment.
A friend of mine never locks his car because he trusts that nobody will steal it even though he knows that once the car is stolen, the chance of recovery is zero because the police simply ignore such reports. This is high-trust society.
The idea that surveillance undermines high trust societies seems insane to me. Widespread petty crime, lack of shared cultural norms and traditions, lacking of missing social reinforcement of expectations of a society - those are what prevent high trust societies from forming. I consider those things a much worse problem then Flock cameras.
>The idea that surveillance undermines high trust societies seems insane to me.
Only because, I'm betting, that you view street surveillance as something that binds others, but not yourself. I doubt you would make this argument for any other kind of surveillance.
If Microsoft were to record everything you did on your PC, would you consider Windows the "high trust" OS community vs Linux? Of if your employer began surveilling all your devices (including personal ones) to ensure you weren't stealing from the company, would you consider your company one of "high trust"?
I don't deny that surveillance can reduce crime, but the idea that surveillance undermines high trust societies is relatively straightforward
No, we had high trust societies before the shitty surveillance tech. There are quite a few effects that undermine it even and this tech is part of the reason why.
It is part of the problem, not part of a solution.
100% Agree. And I'll go further saying the highest trust societies I've lived in have been medium-size, rural/suburban. Everyone is in the social/economic class, similar traditions/backgrounds, similar church etc...
I don't think surveillance prevents crime. Not having so many poor people prevents crime.
Some people will always be antisocial due to tendencies and possibly mental illness, but having a society that is so rich and yet has so many poor people as the USA will of course create criminals. No amount of cameras will solve that.
I would agree with that, but we probably have different definitions of poor. Destitute? Absolutely. I don’t think anybody is shocked that starving people commit crimes to not die.
However, I have been in plenty of low income high trust areas. In some ways, those were even more high trust.
Economics play a role, but there is a moral and cultural fabric that gets built through repeated interactions overtime. Unfortunately, that fabric is very susceptible to damage.
Eg: there are plenty of towns where you wouldn’t have to lock your car or even your bike, but it only takes a couple thefts for the entire culture to change…
Not having so many rich people will go a lot farther in reducing crime, at this point.
There are plenty of poor immigrants who (shock) still come to the united states and do not commit crime.
Low income correlates, but not cause/effect. Giving cash to poor people in high crime areas doesn't solve crime rates.
What we really need is to journalists and cybersecurity community to use these systems to track few hundred of politicians and publish the results. Just like some crooked cops already used it to stalk their exes.
We know how much some billionares hate their jets tracked even though they have small army of bodyguards and three letter agencies spending budget of small country protecting them.
Lets see how comfortable much less protected US politicians gonna be with a fact that everyone knows what time they leave their house by minute, what routes they take and where their cars gonna be.
they (and others like them) also make zero effort to install poles complying with highway safety standards
This guy on instagram does a good job of highlighting this (and other unsafe roadside hazards).
https://www.instagram.com/theguardrailguy?igsh=ZXAxM2h2ZXFub...
From his bio, he lost his daughter to a guardrail crash and started exposing improperly installed guardrails.
For people who don't have instagram: https://imginn.com/theguardrailguy
TIL about imginn.com Thanks, that’s really helpful!
Not just that but I would also be very skeptical that whatever free standing poles they're erecting are fully compliant with TIA/EIA 222H (or engineer stamp approved drawing for each unique installation location, which will vary with local climate of snow/ice and wind loading), which is the engineering standard for self supporting tubular steel monopoles that have antenna, camera, solar panel appurtenances attached to them.
https://tiaonline.org/press-release/tia-announces-publicatio...
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=TIA+EIA+2...
In general, 222H and its predecessors govern engineering standards for:
a. Self supporting lattice/grid/angle steel type towers.
b. Guyed towers
c. Self supporting monopoles of all types (could even theoretically be antenna/solar/camera attachments as additional wind loading on a wood utility pole sunk into the ground, but more commonly, for steel monopoles)
If you're going to put steel monopoles in the public highway ROW they need to be compliant with both AASHTO standards and also the above.
They began strapping them to existing light poles here. I took a photo of one and it was gone a few days later. I didn't report it, it just vanished, which I noticed the next time I went for a walk. I want to know why they decided to put one up on my street, it feels like an intrusion.
Existing light poles are designed generally for very specific wind loading of only the lamp fixture on their ends, they're built to a very low cost spec to be cranked out in bulk. And to be a generally round or octagonal or whatever cross section that lets the wind flow around it in a worst-case 90 to 120 mph storm without any extra square or rectangular junk hanging off the side.
Adding appurtenances to one changes their wind loading and reliability. The engineers who signed off on some light pole designs might be unhappy to learn that multiple square feet of wind loading are being added after the fact.
The reason I know this is that in the telecom industry some (less experienced) people periodically try to use COTS light poles for some design that will hold just a few very small light duty sector antennas, or one or two 30cm size PTP microwave antennas in addition to the lamp fixture, as a "Hey I have this great idea to save some money" concept, and learn the hard way that the poles aren't rated or designed for it.
This is the kind of stuff that municipalities and counties absolutely hate. Reporting this stuff generally matters and will get taken care of.
When reporting, if the work of citing standards is done, it makes the report much more likely to go through and have action taken.
In particular 222g, 222h and such have a "reliability factor", which can be summed up as, in a worst case scenario if it completely falls over, within its fall radius, is it going to hit anything or kill anyone?
For example, a self-supporting steel monopole in the middle of a field, that if it falls over is going to hit some corn has a very low reliability factor. Even if it has been engineered to withstand the worst case 120 mph wind with extensive rime ice loading.
On the other hand, if you have a 40 or 50 ft steel pole that's within the highway right away and it might fall over into traffic moving at 70 mph, that's a whole other question.
222G and H and similar do not cover scenarios like being hit by a 5 ton or 10 ton truck, I am not familiar with, but presumably there are also engineering standards for designing poles within the highway right-of-way that have to be able to withstand a certain sort of hit by a vehicle. Or being protected by a certain engineering standard of bollard.
I doubt the surveillance state is going away any time soon.
Company directly lies to governing body of city. Is found out the next day. Loses contract. Attacks city online afterwards.
This isn’t about surveillance states, it’s about companies run by idiots.
Ironically, Flock might create enough backlash to trigger regulations against surveillance. They're certainly an example of what not to do.
While police just use fleets of drones. Hardly any backlash there.
Police in America is so beyond cooked that the entire system needs to be rethought. It's just not working from any angle. It's expensive as all living fuck, with the majority of city budgets going to the police. It doesn't prevent crime. Traffic violations are still rampant, including speeding and reckless driving. And, worst of all, nobody likes it. People complain constantly and police basically just whine about how hard their job is.
Who is this for, really? Is this just a complex money-siphoning scheme to extract funds out of local governments?
What if the surveillance state is also run by idiots?
This just sounds like the standard playbook for this crowd (by which wide brush I mean authoritarians and their enablers). They really hate being called on their lies, and their immediate response is to attack with whatever comes to hand (press release, xeet, the DoJ…depends on the person).
> this crowd
These companies are tech bros - they are selling to the authoritarians and they are increasingly their enablers, funders and biggest sycophants.
Why not both?
Re ICE having access to data: "Flock said that they did not, when they did, but that it was not their problem".
Just like it's "not their problem" that in a state where certain types of data sharing is not permitted. There's nothing they'll change in the agency's account to prevent it. They'll even offer training on it. Because it's "not their problem".
It wont go down willingly but its possible
For all the privacy and competence issues, if it helps cops solve crimes while sitting on their asses, it's going to win.
I respect ACLU but this article seems a fair bit biased. They're stretching the imagination quite a bit in some of their examples. Seems to me that someone has already made up their mind and are now looking for any example to support their narrative.
I'd love for them to build a case more impartially and drop the activist nature of the language they use.
I mean being activist is sort of the whole point of the ACLU? And besides it's not like this would be the first time stuff like this happens. You don't have to imagine it, just learn history.
Were they ever credible?
They were by enough officials that collectively we have voted into power. Maybe we should think about who we're handing power to. They don't seem to have a solid grasp on things.
That wasn’t credibility, it was cash money.
This is banana republic. Voting doesn't matter in banana republic, at the end monkeys are going to be elected.
I don't see why not. They're one of YCombinators most successful companies.
Lies are the norm for BigTech. BigLies. So why should it play any different?
How come we allowed all these cronies to put camera and do surveillance. Any politician advocating this should have cameras in their home for safety reason.
>How come we allowed all these cronies to put camera and do surveillance.
Because city counsel meetings are scheduled at awkward times for anyone employed to actually show up to. So only tech unaware old people show up
Coz we don't punish bad politicans enough
Because clearly we are powerless. Someone should post that chart of how likely a law is to be passed vs. how much the people want it or not. It is basically a flat line. People's will have zero impact.
Every time someone repeats this, they are telling a self-fulfilling story. I got a law passed -- a state law, about ALPRs, establishing a list of restrictions on them. I didn't do it alone, I had a lot of really important help, including from ACLU of Oregon. There was a lot of opposition, and it ate months of my life, but it was worth it.
I never would have accomplished that if I spent more time reading comments on the internet about all the things we are powerless to do.
If I was an abuser who wanted my victims to feel like they couldn't do anything, I'd try to convince them of some version what you just said.
Congrats! You decided to give up.
You're now advocating against your best interests and the best interests of everyone you love. Way to go, slugger!
Seriously. I'm as left wing as you can go and I still think that voting is useful to influence the system while building a critical mass of people willing to break the wheel. Saying "we'll never get class solidarity" is the most annoying and pointless thing someone can say so you have to assume they're working to ensure it is the case.
Repeatedly lying about working with ACLU is an interesting choice. I'm kind of tired of the culture of words don't mean anything.
Losing credibility means someone had it. I don't think anyone thinks Flock had any credibility. This was known from the beginning.
Flock had credibility?
The worst thing about this isn't that a company or CEO lied. It's that a private corporation that runs the largest mass surveillance system in the country habitually lies about what it does so local governments will adopt it and it can then secretly give that access to the government. What happens when the cameras get so good they can read lips? Or they add directional long-range mics to the cameras?
Everyone in the comments so hopeful, but here’s the reality - nothing will happen, they’ll get more money from more local governments signing up, and industry groups that have problems with protesters like forestry, and everyone will go about their day without anything changing moving onto the next rage bait.
when I was a kid, my mom used to say "think about something nice and pleasant if you cannot fall asleep". So sometimes I think about scenario in which some disgruntled IT manager in one of AWS data centers, knowing which CDN server belongs to Flock, unplugs one of their RAID drives and plug it to their own laptop and copies the whole database of all plates, coordinates, etc, and Flock didn't even find out because most soft raids won't report an issue, and if they do, then what is there to troubleshoot if everything got back to normal 2 hours later? And then post it all in form of a torrent, so everyone can download it and see who went where. Imagine politicians caught visiting strip clubs or their mistresses, patterns of cops going to places where bad guys hang out (to collect bribes), highway patrol going over speed limits without genuine emergency. Thinking about all this I fell asleep much easier...
Between Epstein, Panama Papers, and Madison Cawthorne Story Time, I don't think any of these things will end careers as long as voters can be convinced their team is the winning one. This is the post-fact era.
It always makes me so sad to see companies like this where the founders don't think twice about what they're building and just go straight for the cash grab! Can't we use technology for good and not to build a dystopian surveillance state?
Am I the only one picturing the Oshkosh mayor and Oshkosh city council as a group of toddlers in overalls?
This seems to me to be the inevitable outcome of a society that celebrates winners who claim their lies are merely "alternative facts"
This relevant post is flagged, but yes, I do think this is a symptom of America crossing the asshole threshold where it pays to outright lie and call your fact checkers insincere: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48837460
There's too much in this article to distill as "this". The city of Oshkosh cancelling their contact with Flock after one day is actually quite heartening.
You're right. By "this" I'm referring to a company selling to the government feeling like they will not face consequences for publicly lying to their buyers. I agree it's heartening to see the contract cancelled. I find the doubling down on the lies as both unsurprising and disheartening.
Even with all this said, surveillance like this is certainly going to be one of the best ways to catch criminals and reduce crime over the long term. I hope the misgivings that we have around Flock won't close the door to us ever using this type of technology, in some way, in the future.
I spent 3 years in Korea, and that's probably where I will go back to retire after I exit. Crime there is extremely low - partially because of the cameras, but mainly because they're on top of it. They're able to spend time on every criminal, which deters anyone from breaking the law.
Contrary to SF, where I've called the police and provided evidence for an open and shut case, and the cops shrugged their shoulders. Flock cameras won't fix that.
American police seem to be a uniquely bad combo of false positives and false negatives. Failing to go after actual crime while also capable of using disproportionate violence in incidents that don't warrant it.
I used to live in china, which is by all means the dystopian surveillance state that we're all afraid that this could lead to. Don't misinterpret this as an advocation for that type of living; but it's simply interesting to note that when you ask any chinese if they would like to go back to the world of 30 years ago in terms of surveillance, essentially 100% of them will say no; they like it the way things are and not having to be afraid of being victim to any crime. Yes yes, a bird born in a cage thinks flying is an illness. I realize the irony in bringing this up. Yet it's just hard to ignore when you see delivery drivers leaving packages outside of buildings on the street in the most insecure manner and not having a single soul daring to touch it if they are not the intended recipient.
At the same time, on HN we are not even having a conversation about what a sort of tradeoff between surveillance and safety. I live in Seattle, actually just had ~$400 in buckets of paint stolen off my porch just yesterday. Yes, buckets of paint. I had a break in 2 months ago, and that was one of many over the years. This is in U-District, a high crime, but also oddly affluent neighborhood. I absolutely detest the fact that criminals run around the city with impunity committing crime after crime. It makes everyone's life here just a bit more miserable—there are so many people that don't want to move to the city because of the crime; there are all these invisible costs we are paying because of it.
So to think that cameras are such a no-go just doesn't make sense to me. Certainly there are ways to do it ethically. I think south korea is a great example, as well as many european countries. Honestly, I think it's just bizarre that every time Flock gets brought up on HN we all flip the bird to the supposed surveillance state without even discussing the tradeoffs.
It's more complicated in China not just because of people want a more safer environment, but also because of the culture and the social formation built by history.
Chinese were taught to grow in honesty and integrity explicitly for thousand years and it's becoming common consensus when more and more people are educated. When the bar raises and the gov is not given more freedom to the people, it's just nature to let the surveillance cameras grow to each and every inch of the land.
Me personally would chose safety over privacy though.
In China the pact (true or not is irrelevant) is that the State has this power and enacts it for the benefit of everyone. In the US surveillance doesn’t have the same role, it’s just another figment of extreme profit making. Flock has no role in the social pact, it’s just a dystopian company profiting from the current situation.
This assumes the police even want to solve crimes. I'm not convinced they do. Everything I've seen points to them wanting to do the absolute bare minimum to not be disbanded, and that's it. Their primary goal is to get paid and go home. Well, solving crimes interferes with the "go home" part, so they don't. Normally, in a free market, you would fail if you can't do your primary purpose. Police have zero accountability to anyone, including the voter. They're systemically allowed to fail, and encouraged financially to fail.
No surprise then when they fail.
Do you also want to install some surveillance software on your phone and laptop so it can watch what you do 100% of time?
You know in future it will really help to catch some criminals stealing copyrighted IP, watching some illegal types of porn or using some sanctioned Chinese LLM.
You will never find anyone who is against these cameras saying that they don’t reduce crime. Of course they do. The problem is what you give up to have that is far, far more valuable and we can point to the “Ben Franklin” quote here about those who would give up freedom for safety deserve neither.
The problem is the negative feedback between crime (and crime visibility through media), and the acceptance of surveillance in order to stop crime.
People really don't like public safety crime. Not only will they vote for surveillance, they will vote for public safety authoritarians like Bukele just to stop it.
They are thinking: What good is your abstract notion of freedom if I cannot leave my house at night, and I have to be hyper vigilant of violence?
I don't know the solutions to this. The media clearly plays a big role in this, but regulation of media and social media is its own can of worms.
One thing I am quite confident about is that actually stopping public safety crime without surveillance must be a priority, otherwise it's cart before horse.
Is it? In the UK we have a huge density of CCTV cameras and often you can barely get the police to write a crime report, let alone look at the CCTV. It doesn't really seem like the bottleneck.
A society glued together with cameras rather than people, is shallow.
Catching a few criminals is not worth taking everyone's privacy by force.
> Catching a few criminals is not worth taking everyone's privacy by force
This drifts into truism with "few," "criminals," "everyone" and "by force" left so vaguely defined.