Police scanned Flock cameras in a single town in Illinois more than 1,200 times to investigate cases of loitering.

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[–] 53 points 2 months ago (5 children)

Go outside, but only in a state-sanctioned way

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  • [–] 33 points 2 months ago (4 children)
  • [–] 48 points 2 months ago (3 children)

    Oh oh oh but I thought I was told these cameras are only simple license plate readers and do not track pedestrians or faces???

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  • [–] 43 points 2 months ago (4 children)

    Loitering is the dumbest illegal thing right up there with jay walking and criminalizing not having a home.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    Are you loitering if you’re walking the dog? What about if you’re smoking outside? What about if you’re sitting on a bench in a park?

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  • [–] 36 points 2 months ago (10 children)

    I remember when I was 14 or something and first looked up what "loitering" meant and I was like... In the US cops can harass you for just being somewhere? Not even private property, just existing on a sidewalk? Still doesn't make sense

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  • [–] 32 points 2 months ago (5 children)

    Mate, the laws are written so that if someone wealthy or powerful doesn't like what you're doing, it's illegal. And if what you're doing isn't illegal, they find something you're doing that is.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    Coral Gables has laws against carrying "burglar tools" - well, a credit card or even a state issued ID card can be used to open a locked door, so there's a handy "burglar tool" charge just as soon as the cop asks to see your ID.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 months ago

    When the cops in our town were ineffective at keeping the teenagers from loitering in the parking lot of the 24 hour drug store, the retiree busy-bodies got the city council to make the drugstore close at 9pm.

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    [–] 17 points 2 months ago

    Thank the gods that police can now use big tech to harass people instead of relying on their teensy little brains. I bet their metrics have improved significantly.

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  • [–] 15 points 2 months ago

    Reminder since it's coming up, October is International Mass Surveillance Appreciation Month! Don't forget to stock up on all the holiday essentials:

    • Sporting equipment (for baseball / cricket / street hockey games with the fam)
    • Spraypaint / spray foam / adhesive tape / stickers (for decorating all around your home)
    • Cable snips (for the traditional "cutting of the cord" opening ceremony)
    • Drywall stilts (for the slenderman dance)
    • High-coverage clothing and headwear (for the masquerade ball)

    Halloween is often a busy time for law enforcement so please be conscientious about when you observe IMSAM. But, as they say, better late than never!

    Hope you all have a safe and productive IMSAM. Remember, you don't have to celebrate all the time, but if everyone celebrates a little bit, the season can last all year 🖤🖤🖤

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  • [–] 14 points 2 months ago
    [–] 14 points 2 months ago

    Land of the free

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  • [–] 8 points 2 months ago
    • Pre-tech: "Keep it moving, punk."
    • Post-tech: "Keep it moving, punk."
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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago
    23 comments in c/aboringdystopia@lemmy.world view that post
    [–] 33 points 2 months ago (12 children)

    By next year there will be cities in which drones are dispatched to disperse any crowd of 5 or more people, anywhere the AI sees them.

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  • [–] 13 points 2 months ago (7 children)

    Completely unrelated:

    You can buy lasers on Temu that you should absolutely not point at a camera because it will burn it out almost immediately.

    Some are especially dangerous, because they include "spread caps" that make it a bunch of dots or a design meaning you could easily accidentally put out the cameras in Flock towers or drones with a passing flash.

    Because even if it's AI, it needs to see where it's flying.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (3 children)

    I would actually suggest against pointing a class 3 laser above the horizon. I have tried to figure out how far one would be at full illumination and I had no way of measuring over 2km. Any pilot can see one from like a 10 km radius of the beam.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago

    It 100% is dangerous.

    But...

    By next year there will be cities in which drones are dispatched to disperse any crowd of 5 or more people, anywhere the AI sees them.

    Acceptable levels of danger depends on the situation.

    Statistically speaking you're more likely to be shot if you own a gun. I'd still recommend Americans have at least a gun these days.

    That's not the same as saying go drive around busting caps like it's 2016 again. Just like pointing out the cheapness of those lasers and what they do to surveillance and drones isn't telling people to buy one today and a month later when it shows up use it like a searchlight on premier night.

    Things happen fast these days, if people are legitimately concerned about widespread use of government surveillance drones...

    $50 can buy some peace of mind.

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  • [–] 24 points 2 months ago

    Probably harassing homeless people :(

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  • [–] 15 points 2 months ago

    Yeah, they were already doing this with their own cameras.

    I got real tired of being told to stop "loitering" by a pre-recorded voice every time I came up the alley to pick up my McDonald's order, just because someone else hates homeless people so much that they're willing to alienate their own regular customers.

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  • [–] 29 points 2 months ago (3 children)

    I think the flipside to all this is that over time it will legitimately damage the police's ability to do actual investigative work if all they learn and put into practice is "consult Flock" for every trivial thing. If Flock is damaged or circumvented or comes up empty, what then?

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  • [–] 6 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    I heard flock hid a bitcoin in one of their cameras like Willy Wonka's golden ticket. If you find it you get to keep it.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 months ago

    I miss the old Internet, where people would just post pictures of cut down cameras in their neighborhood, rather than this twee "haha, they've all got winning lottery tickets, hehe, I hope someone else does this for me"

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  • [–] 4 points 2 months ago

    Did you all hear? There's as platinum in a flock camera as a catalytic converter.

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  • 7 comments in c/privacy@lemmy.ml view that post
    [–] 8 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    They're really grasping for anything to justify their existence to investors.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 months ago

    their investors are pushing for it because mexico proved that it was necessary for them to keep their control over us.

    they saw social media accidentally promoting the popularity of protests in mexico back 2017 resulting in mexicans breaking their political duopoly while leading to them electing a president that's hostile to the epstein class and it scared tf out of them -- it made the insurance rates shoot through the roof and now iran is leveraging this same tactic to bring the us empire to its knees.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    tennessee, florida, georgia . if you live in a crappy place.. you know it. move somewhere better.
    i see the concern. but takeaway could be percieved as: "cops using cameras as cameras".
    whats the issue?

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  • [–] 4 points 2 months ago*

    Yeah, I don't know what's going down, so, one of these days I suppose, I'll get pinched.

    I live in a medium-sized town with a dozen Flock cameras, which the police shrouded in garbage bags a couple of weeks ago (to defuse public outrage and ward off vandalism I suppose). Two days ago, the Common Council voted to break the Flock contract. The issue has been unsatisfactorily explained in the news. I mean — what did city government think would happen to the data? Surely they knew it would be kept for awhile and be searched. News makes it sound like they flipped when Flock tried to sell them a five-year traffic-pattern analysis.

    The story (above) shines a (feeble) light on what may have gone wrong. It appears that police have been taking license numbers of cars that have been parked in shady locations and running those numbers against cameras all over creation to see whether they get hits in other parts of the country. The last thing local authorities want is an out-of-town authority charging in and following a lead on a suspicious vehicle up to no good in around here. That's not what they bought the Flock cameras and put them up for. They were misled that the data would remain local for local use. I still don't get the angst, though.

    All I know is that I can't get a hamburger to go, drive to a city park, eat it, and take a half-hour nap without some plain-clothes cop or vigilante waking me to ask what I'm waiting for.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago

    Plano Illinois? What is up with that? Odd town to be running data requests for. You'll probably get some tweakers or something.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

    Just for reference we used to forcefully institutionalize the unwanted of our society and send them to medical facilities where they where medically tortured and experimented on. After world war two the more superior natzi doctors we absorbed through operation paper clip took this further and that's where we get all the Mk ultra lore.

    The laws where set up so if you where black you basicially couldnt be outside in public/loiter. It effected anyone who was disenfranchised/a vagrant but many of the laws stemmed from racism first. There where lots of little weird laws like you can't stand around outside without a dollar in your pocket. Essentially if you where not a white American home owning man with a job, and you where just outside, cops had some excuse to get you off the street and into jail or some institution. And to get thrown in a mental institution things like being homeless or a prostitute was considered being crazy. There where so many ways to jail you or put you in essentially what is natzi medical institutions that absolutely remove your rights. Everyone loved eugenics back then it was considered a science like medicine, and now we have people like RFK that want to bring that back.

    Its pretty much exactly how the prison complex works just back then they got the added bonus of experimenting on people for the sake of biological, and psychological war fare, and we had to do small stuff like teach a kid to studder and pyscologically torture them for their disability and make it worse. There where so many rapes at these places too. This is where most of our major medical/pharma companies really took off.

    Like I cannot express how we where doing essentially the same thing the natzis did in the concentration camps, because much like ai, if we didnt do it the bad guys would first. We need our evil companies to dominate the world. I'm not trying to lessen the inpact of the holocaust but trying to convey how there was a thin line between us and them, they just had more direct targeted racism, and much larger scale. Most of the world was like that, much like how today much of the world is turning very anti-imagrant and right wing authoritian. Japan, Australia, much of Europe/England, etc, its not just the united States build the wall types anymore, it feels like every nation is pushing this weird mindset at once at a time we are trying to force everyone to get I'D verified to use the heavily survalienced internet. And for what? In the states we have ICE buying out massive amounts of old prisons as if we are going to infinitely expand this operation. I don't know what for, or what other nations are doing but it really feels like we are escalating to something.

    Now we got RFK taking about rounding up vagrants, removing food stamps and medical care from people who don't have a job, which is extreamly hard to do when you don't have a house or car, and forcing them into labor camps. We have survalience state networks not just flock, and that's getting all processed through systems at or like palantir and its making logs of everyone, and the homeless and disenfranchised are the first to experience the full brunt of that force. We are essentially going back down the same route and setting up the same system.

    Fucking deep space nine predicted this would happen with the bell riots like two years ago or something in their timeline of the show.

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  • 5 comments in c/thepoliceproblem@lemmy.world view that post
    [–] 17 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    Probably to generate fear before Halloween

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  • curfew violations, loitering, and simply being homeless.

    None of those are crimes.

    We need to imprison anyone who votes for curfews. I can't think a more absurd concept than saying I can't go out on a walk on a public street.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago

    pritzky is quite silent on this, im betting he wants this.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago

    What do you know, cops being massive pieces of useless shit, that is so unexpected.

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  • 3 comments in c/technology@lemmy.ml view that post
    [–] 8 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    People are going to start getting arrested for breathing on a sunday

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  • 1 comment in c/pravda_news@news.abolish.capital view that post
    [–] 3 points 2 months ago

    They are arresting people for having the "potential" to commit a crime?

    I'm old now and I don't have much "potential" left in me. They should have arrested me when I had my MOST potential, just before I was circumcised. THAT's when it ALL started.

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