from AcidiclyBasicGlitch@sh.itjust.works to technology@lemmy.world on 09 Sep 22:14
https://sh.itjust.works/post/45730933
cross-posted from: sh.itjust.works/post/45730883
With more than 80,000 AI-powered cameras across the U.S., Flock Safety has become one of cops’ go-to surveillance tools and a $7.5 billion business. Now CEO Garrett Langley has both police tech giant Axon and Chinese drone maker DJI in his sights on the way to his noble (if Sisyphean) goal: Preventing all crime in the U.S.
In a windowless room inside Atlanta’s Dunwoody police department, Lieutenant Tim Fecht hits a button and an insectile DJI drone rises silently from the station rooftop. It already has its coordinates: a local mall where a 911 call has alerted the cops to a male shoplifter. From high above the complex, Fecht zooms in on a man checking his phone, then examines a group of people waiting for a train. They’re all hundreds of yards away, but crystal clear on the room-dominating display inside the department’s crime center, a classroom-sized space with walls covered in monitors flashing real- time crime data—surveillance and license plate reader camera feeds, gunshot detection reports, digital maps showing the location of cop cars across the city. As more 911 calls come in, AI transcribes them on another screen. Fecht can access any of it with a few clicks.
Twenty minutes down the road from Dunwoody, in an office where Flock Safety’s cameras and gunshot detectors are arrayed like museum pieces, 38-year-old CEO and cofounder Garrett Langley presides over the $300 million (estimated 2024 sales) company responsible for it all. Since its founding in 2017, Flock, which was valued at $7.5 billion in its most recent funding round, has quietly built a network of more than 80,000 cameras pointed at highways, thoroughfares and parking lots across the U.S. They record not just the license plate numbers of the cars that pass them, but their make and distinctive features—broken windows, dings, bumper stickers. Langley estimates its cameras help solve 1 million crimes a year. Soon they’ll help solve even more. In August, Flock’s cameras will take to the skies mounted on its own “made in America” drones. Produced at a factory the company opened earlier this year near its Atlanta offices, they’ll add a new dimension to Flock’s business and aim to challenge Chinese drone giant DJI’s dominance.
Langley offers a prediction: In less than 10 years, Flock’s cameras, airborne and fixed, will eradicate almost all crime in the U.S. (He acknowledges that programs to boost youth employment and cut recidivism will help.) It sounds like a pipe dream from another AI-can-solve- everything tech bro, but Langley, in the face of a wave of opposition from privacy advocates and Flock’s archrival, the $2.1 billion (2024 revenue) police tech giant Axon Enterprise, is a true believer. He’s convinced that America can and should be a place where everyone feels safe. And once it’s draped in a vast net of U.S.-made Flock surveillance tech, it will be.
threaded - newest
glances at white house
might wana start with that… 👀
34x convicted but not sentenced criminal in there.
Chinese drones, hardware, software will make America great again👍
tut tut, it’s “assembled in america” drones, they put the battery in
there’s a lot of mid-century French theorists spinning in their graves right now
Can you elaborate please ? This sounds interesting
many mid-20th century French thinkers like Foucault, Debord, Deleuze and Baudrillard spent a lot of time writing about surveillance and technology. Lots of this stuff has turned out to be extremely prescient. (Ellul is another example, but as a Christian Anarchist his critiques of what he called the Technical Society, are a bit of an outlier from the other guys above who, despite a plurality of ideas and perspectives, were all coming from a pretty similar place wrt their philosophical backgrounds)
A pretty easy to digest example is Deleuze’s “Postscript on Societies of Control”, which is like 5 pages long and available for free online, written ca 1990 that is pretty spooky in how accurately it predicted the current state of affairs.
The real king here is Baudrillard but his writing isn’t always the most accessible
I’m reading Ellul right now and loving it. His predictions were pretty freaky accurate. Especially since he wasn’t really a traditional philosopher. I think he had a background in sociology, but he was a law professor, and his writing almost seems to be him writing out well educated vibes.
He also joined the French resistance against Nazis during world war ii and was firmly opposed to the idea of separating Christianity from the socialist aspects of Jesus. Just all around bad ass. I couldn’t imagine a better foil for the jackass Nazis trying to run shit now.
I kinda feel like most people should be reading the the Technological Society right now bc of how accurate his predictions were.
The focus on efficiency as a means to an end that just keeps on digging new holes to fill old ones.
Becoming so focused on achieving efficiency and then losing a piece of our humanity in the process.
He has a belief about prison camps being inevitable in a society where efficiency is the ultimate goal. But most importantly he makes it a point to emphasize that this isn’t inevitable if enough people are warned in advance and revolt against it.
his book on propaganda, The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, is also well worth a read.
I think his ideas on concentration camps/prison camps slot in nicely with Deleuze’s ideas about Control Societies and the ways that technology is being used to extend the Foucaultian ideas of discrete enclosures to never-ending enclosures in all aspects of life.
And, if you like Ellul, you should definitely check out Ivan Illich’s work. He’s another social critic coming from a heterodox Christian perspective (Catholic in this case). His ideas can seem a bit unintuitive at and even off-putting to modern sensibilities at times (especially his idea of Life as Idol and his critique of modern medicine in general) but he’s another guy with a lot going on that has been pretty accurate in his prognosticating of contemporary society.
Oh, have you read the revelation of John the Theologian? It’s becoming a reality.
Thank you very much :) I’ll take look!
Does that include the content theft used to train the AI models?
Of course not
It did in the Alpha stages, but when they turned it on, it destroyed itself.
Flock? Or other models? Cuz I don’t think they’re training license plate OCR via scraping Reddit posts.
“All crime in America” should cover content theft by any other model creator.
No, of course you’re kidding, this is their plan to displace people in order to have more obedient slaves who will not have the opportunity to be independent.
And if/when it eliminates all crime it will just lobby to make more things illegal.
Either that or it will secretly fund gang activity or drug smuggling or something so that it can “catch the bad guys” and secure more lucrative government contracts
If you think you want to live in a place where all crime has been eliminated, you are just wrong. You do not want to live in such a place.
That’s the thing, no crime but nobody feels safe ever again.
To live in such a place is to be a slave where even your thoughts will be predicted.
This is just an ad for obvious bullshit. Forbes may as well be running articles about how ozempic is done because of this one weird trick a local veteran discovered.
There’s just not much coverage (probably intentionally) but I wanted to post about it bc the only other recent story I could find was this one and didn’t know if it would be deleted for not being a typical news source
business-standard.com/…/ai-surveillance-flock-saf…
This company has illegally installed their cameras in more than one town, then tried to sell the local police force on them.
They have lawyers on staff that they use to coach local politicians on how to hold the votes to establish contracts with them in ways that aren’t technically illegal, but ensure that no community opposition has a way to have their voices heard.
You can find a lot of these sprts of stories by searching online. In local subreddits, ones dedicated to talking about flock, and local news.
Benn Jordan has a good 40 minute video giving an overview of these systems, how they work, what they track, and why they are a problem. He highlights some cases where families were held at gunpoint by police due to failures of these systems. He also experiments with defeating the AI that reads plates.
Louis Rossman is currently leading a campaign against their installation where he lives in Austin, Texas right now. Has a number of videos on it.
Overview before the Austin City Council vote: youtu.be/4RM09nKczVs
Call for people to show up at the Austin City Council session to discuss the potential contract with Flock, and showing how difficult it is to find this sort of stuff and be involved with your local government: youtu.be/g4vL1ERdZ9Y
Call to action 2: youtu.be/hDOmYqlwxD4
Austin City Council reschedules the vote (in a questionably illegal fashion) with less than 24 hours notice when they realize they kicked the hornet’s nest: youtu.be/iscDYp6dtl8
Minor followup during the wait for the revised time, at two of the three parks with 90% of reported car break ins these cameras are meant to deter: youtu.be/2QbtDWrlPpc
Great resources! I’d like to add the ALPR Map of Flock Cameras, DeFlock.
Just looking around my place, it looks like a lot are operated by businesses that cover every way in or out of the parking lot, and the local PD covers entrance and exit ramps from highways. So essentially you have to watch where you shop and never use an interstate to avoid these things. Basically so difficult most people can’t be bothered.
Of course there is always sniping them…
A well aimed laser should be able to fuck the camera up.
Or a drone with a can of black spray paint.
Whoever figures out how to make this shit worthless is going to be given king like status very quickly
BTW have you heard of this new tx law targeting “jugging?”
It sounds like a made up excuse to pull people over for trying to fool plate readers sh.itjust.works/comment/20899084
We already know the answer
www.wired.com/2007/12/burning-british/
While the laws are probably fucked in their ability to be applied, jugging is a pretty common thing in texas. A town of about 70,000 had about 3 of them a week, when I was following police reports. It was a pretty common pattern, too (one atm at the back end of a parking lot for a walmart that had a bank between the parking lot and the street, then the victim drove to another store like fast food or any of the strip malls up and down that street, and then the car’s window was broken and the money removed from the atm taken if it was still in an easily grabbed envelope), so this was despite the police caring enough to scope out the particular atm where it would happen.
But what are the chances the law goes into effect on the 1st on and the 5th they make all of these arrests. And also every single arrest seems to be somebody who is using multiple license plates.
You need 2 crime items to be arrested. So like one guy had multiple license plates and a screw driver in his car. One guy had a medical mask and an extra license plate…?
Also, yeah there really isn’t much out there about this surveillance AI company that just kind of appeared out of nowhere ~2017.
Kinda like this other one that appeared out of nowhere ~2015
I wanted to share this article but wasn’t sure if it would be allowed bc it’s not a typical source business-standard.com/…/ai-surveillance-flock-saf…
They were coming up all over the place when I was looking for a new job ~3 years ago. Everything about them skeeved me out and I had to keep ignoring their postings.
Do you remember any names/locations?
Sorry, I meant Flock specifically was doing a lot of recruiting.
I’ll just commit my crimes at home, with the cameras taped up.
At this point, why not? This whole fucking country is ruled by a bunch of corrupt shit heads wrapped up in their own pyramid scheme of money and power.
Andreesen Horowitz is the VC company funding this shit. Marc Andreesen is also invested in that whites only colony those fuckers are building in TN.
I would really prefer for the government to just not collapse and this country to devolve into individual city states. However, I’m guessing as soon as that happens there will be an interesting (but short lived) war between the tech oligarchs who seize complete control of all territory and resources using this shit, and the traditionalists who somehow didn’t see it coming.
Excellent motivation to get out of the US as quickly as possible to poor countries or better yet, to the forest.
This won’t save you, these bastards can use silent drones disguised as mosquitoes and other insects, and you won’t even notice when they come for you.
You say that as if screen doors don’t exist. Or bug zappers, for that matter 😂
Well, they will be controlled by artificial intelligence, and if they stay in your house for even a few seconds, it will report everything about you, but such drones do not live long, a few hours at most, although I’m not sure.
How in the hell can it know everything about me in a few seconds, it can’t even get recipes right 😂
This is just a warning.
Sounds like an AI-driven delusion. Paranoia of the highest degree.
Why even warn us when there’s no way to prepare? Why not just throw in the possibility of AI becoming self-aware, if you’re gonna go all sci-fi on us? SKYNET THAT SHIT!
why wait. pre-crime
Funny story… Flock is already pitching that.
Surveillance Company Flock Now Using AI to Report Us to Police if it Thinks Our Movement Patterns Are “Suspicious”
Every Flock employee is guilty of pre-crime
It is a moral duty of every citizen to change the course of their bodily entropy toward a maximum in the name of justice
This company needs to get shut down. Invasive. Illegal. Immoral. They are ushering in a police state and anti privacy world, and of course profiting from it.
You can piss on us, but don’t tell us it’s rain.
You know what prevents crime? Better standard of living and overall living conditions. But sure let’s go robocop surveillance state instead. Can’t mess with the profits.
I want to see the camera that will stop white-collar crime.
That’s kind of the point. Only target crime by poor brown people as they can’t afford lawyers.
Try putting a surveillance system in a corporate boardroom and see how that goes over.
Just kill everyone and get it over with ffs. Can’t have crime if there’s no people.
No, they need slaves. So to speak, cheap, obedient labor or just fertilizer.
His is name fucking Langley ?
Like, have these people heard of subtlety ?
No, of course, it’s just another attempt at hypernormalization, they want us to know they’re the CIA’s SpaceX…
Won’t someone rid me of these meddlesome spooks ?
The Thought Police will come for you, comrade, or rather, they will fly in.
Just leaving this here in case anyone needs it
So they’re gunna use AI to find ways to better fund public education and harm reduction programs to keep people out of prisons while eliminating the pretext for hyper-militarized policing forces? Right?
…Right?
How to stop crime in America in one easy step: lose all laws. Runnerup solution: hold wealthy accountable to existing laws and remove loopholes for the elite, allowing wealth inequality to balance and improve access to education and basic human needs. One to me seems more practical, but I’d bet that many see both as equally horrible solutions.
The main thing in an investigation is not to stumble upon yourself…
Well, to be honest, we are facing a terrible future where we will not be able to buy anything without a slave mark or with poor loyalty.
Before we try to manage the entire population at large, let’s just eliminate crime in prisons and jails. That’s a controlled environment, but it’s rife with crime. If we can’t fix a controlled environment, how can we possibly fix an open environment?
But there is no crimes in prisons, criminals aren’t people so crimes can’t be committed against them
Any system is imperfect, that means some people in prison must be innocent, that means crimes are being inflicted against innocent people.
Hoo boy, suggesting the regime might get some things wrong? That’s a paddlin’
They don’t want to fix it, they want power intended to help fix it, similar to what prison guards have, outside of prisons.
“Without having to wurry…”
I’ll believe it when they catch a McDonald’s manager shorting his employees’ wages.
No they don’t.
They think saying they do will make them rich.
Are they going to place cameras in the white house? Because that would be a start.
Is this
damage controlpropaganda after the popular Benn Jordan video?Make trains run by the clock, eh?
Even better. State programs of giving people bullshit jobs earning their gratitude, loyalty and readiness to join, say, some paramilitary force?
A knife can be used both for cutting bread and for cutting off heads. And they are.
A gun can be used both for stopping a very bad person and for stopping a very good person. And they are.
And a surveillance net of drones (that can also carry weapons) can be used both for reducing crime and reducing dissent. And it will be.
There are moments when I’m glad I live in a backwards (relatively to the US) country.
Soooo, we’re like neighbors then? Lol
Oh look, it’s the main villain in a Cyberpunk novel.
Yeah, I’ve seen this movie already: www.imdb.com/title/tt11542920/
adding to the list: SHIA LABEOUF
They’re going to build a society in which all basic needs such as access to food, water, education, housing, and health care are provided to all people making the need for most crime unnecessary???
That would actually be cheaper than what they’re trying to do.
since there have been laws, there have been criminals
Since there has been people, there have been people trying to steal stuff from other people.
And pretty soon many of those laws are going to exist only to benefit corporations on the rich and to harm everyone else.
The people in power are going to continue making laws that pushback against the fabric of society.
I mean look at Nazi Germany. It was legal to imprison Jews and it was illegal to protect them. The law is not moral and it’s only going to get worse.
🎶 It’s beginning to look a lot like a dystopia
Everywhere you go
There’s drones flying around
Recording all the sounds
And reporting on your every move
Liberty is just the cost I have to pay for muh safety! /s
Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose. /s
Americans when you talk about gun control: NOOO mah freedom, I need it to protect myself from the government.
Americans when you tell them a private company is going to monitor and track every citizen, basically making a dystopian police state: I have nothing to hide so it’s fine.
I feel Europe is basically the other way around, less guns, but more privacy.
Don’t be so sure about the privacy part. Sure Europe so far seems to have had a privacy first policy, but that’s about to change in the coming days fightchatcontrol.eu
Yeah we (Europeans) should also constantly keep fighting for our privacy and freedom. Thanks for sharing the link I’m glad the Netherlands is against it.
I was going to say have you looked at the shit the U.K. is doing lately, but sometimes I forget they voted their way into authoritarianism
I will say though, I’m very surprised there have been so many local governments within Europe that seem to be allowing this kind of shit.
www.dw.com/en/…/a-73497117
Yeah this is where the EU has a problem, because our intelligence agencies don’t really have great alternatives. For police we can probably just go without palantir
But we went a long time without intelligence agencies having access to a giant data platform that provides every piece of data available for every single citizen at the push of a button.
Kinda seems like we don’t really need that for any reason other than to keep humanity on a short leash. Like if you need to look at my medical history, maybe you should have to take the time to go through a subpoena and other channels instead of just clicking a link below all my traffic tickets.
eu is trying to turn into surveillance state too. There is some group that is CONSTANTLY pushing this chat control law, that would make encryption illegal, if i have understood it correctly. They have been held back for now, but they can just keep trying until they succeed.
Pffft. I would argue that the EU is about to get way worse then the US for privacy. Additionally, the UK is basically a branch of North Korea now, and Australia is basically China with less yellow people (and not even by much).
But in my Banana Republic, we have about 2,000 cameras, only around 30 work, and most of those are covered by branches because the cities don’t give a flying fuck about landscaping.
This world just keep getting funnier by the minute.
Oh yeah, I can’t wait to become a digital slave…
Anyone have any intel on how well these cameras hold up against buckshot?
I’m just as curious about the drones. Do they have a ‘stop-and-hover’ mode if you jam them temporarily, or do they set down? As to the cameras, well… it’s a nice fantasy that you’d get away with it, but unless there’s a civil war going on, you’re going to be caught shooting buckshot at them. That’s what they’re truly trying to build, and they’ve gotten there if they can monitor your car from nearly at your home until you leave it (the car), track you walking to wherever you commit the crime and back to your car, then track you as you drive away until you get nearly home.
Oh I agree that you won’t be able to fire your shotgun in a large urban area, but if you’re someplace less densely populated I can imagine being able to drive up from behind in the middle of the night…
It’s too bad there isn’t an easier way to deal with this problem, especially in the instances where the cameras are being installed without consent.
Akin to having foreign adversaries set up a spy network within our borders, and instead of being punished for it, many law enforcement agencies are choosing to buy the subscription plan!
I looked at the map of known cameras in my area, and I think I could take many of them out. Especially if a drone with spray paint is available. The issue is that those are the known ones, and there are plenty of cameras or license plate readers that aren’t from flock. I know for a fact that when my neighbor went missing in 2020/2021, they tried to find him using license plate readers, and those weren’t flocks, I’d bet. Plus you have just the regular surveillance cameras that a lot of businesses have, and we now know that police can put in work when it’s a big money person’s interests on the line, like with the uhc ceo and, in this case palantir’s deep pockets.
It’s too bad there isn’t a way to use something like a flipper zero to compromise the cameras and simply disable them, or insert malicious video files into their network…
that picture looks like a master race advertisement.
Before reading anything else, I’m going all in on this only mentioning violent or public crimes and ignoring financial or corporate crimes
Cameras + Drones + AI. Yup, nothing to solve the real crimes.
Financial and corporate mistakes are not crimes! How dare you, these are decent people, shame on you!
HA
I gotta admit, that is a great idea!
The finale for liberty in the U.S. is going to be like the last episode of Seinfeld. “What’s the deal with due process these days?”
media.tenor.com/…/poof-breaking-bad.gif
The only way you could actually come close to eliminating all crime would be if you eliminated poverty. But that would make the rich less rich, so not gonna happen.
Or if you just kept everyone in a closely monitored prison so that only people above the law could commit crimes without fear of consequences.
Like in China there isn’t really much of an issue with petty theft anymore bc people are afraid of getting caught, but corruption is through the fucking roof. Just not a crime you would be punished for bc it requires a position of power to commit it in the first place
Yup, just like how wage theft is an order of magnitude or two bigger problem than petty theft and shoplifting, but they just ignore it or even worse legalize / normalize it.
I’d like to focus the existance on J. Epstein, D. Trump and the concept of wage theft to illustrate my point of poverty and crime not being inherently related.
Eliminating poverty will help reduce some crimes- those of need- but those of greed or malice will be unimpeded.
If money was no object there would be a lot less poor people selling their kids to human traffickers
Thats why I said “come close” - there are plenty of crimes committed by the ultra wealthy.
However, those aren’t the kind of crimes this kind of mass surveillance is targeting either. They are trying to get rid of petty crime, gang violence, theft… stuff like that. And those kinds of crimes would almost dissapear entirely if you eliminated poverty.
Rich people murder each other too
Haven’t there been countless sci-fi movies and novels warning us about the many ways this approach can go horribly wrong?
Yeah but obviously that can’t happen here. That’s why we don’t like schools teaching any kind of history other than 'Merican. And even then, there seems to be a lot of fuzzy details.
I would put less credit to SciFi movies and more interest in cities that have gone all in on CCTV cameras as crime prevention. They rarely work, as folks desperate enough to commit regular street crime simply aren’t deterred. Combine that with the Candy Crush style of modern policing, particularly in dense areas like the NYC Subway or London city center, where the (relatively infrequent) crimes can happen within spitting distance of an officer and they’ll just stand around doing nothing in response.
What these enormous surveillance technology budgets mostly do is soak up money from paranoid business owners and politicians looking for a kickback. They’re a great source of patronage and a regular font of policing propaganda. And that’s really what they’re selling - security theater.
Just like with the TSA or the modern iteration of Mall Cops, they function more as a CYA move that lets you become seen as “doing something” (while fattening the wallets of a few insiders) in case of an unpredictable eventually. Now you can claim “We did everything we could” and “We’re going to find this person and really get’m!” So long as you keep the right people on your side, that’s normally enough to satisfy.
Combine that with the reality that identifying people from surveillance footage can easily be defeated be employing advanced counter technologies such as “generic black/grey hoodie”
I’m convinced the people creating these surveillance companies want to harm society on purpose. I think they are well aware of what they are trying to do
I think it’s much simpler than that. I think he just wants to make money and sees an opportunity to enrich himself. These people don’t have a sense of morality, only a “fuck you, got mine” basic American individualism
yeah, it could be that simple
uk has cameras on every street corner and there's still crime.
Maybe those cameras should have gins attached to them so they work better to reduce crime. 😒
Yes but this is a “predictive policing algorithm” designed to incarcerate people before they’ve even committed a crime.
This feels like fanfiction where one of the hardy boys goes to the extreme to solve crimes by creating a dystopian future.
The Hardy boys don’t even realize they’re being backed by the CIA. Ugh I don’t even want to make a joke bc I can see this being a propaganda movie that gets made in the next year
“They want to build a prison” “They want to build a prison” “Another prison system” “Another prison system” “For you and me to live in”
Sounds like a flock of shit to me.
https://deflock.me/
By eliminating all free people, yes you can technically do that.
No people, no crimes. Should I be concerned?
Are you people?
I’m not legally allowed to say yes.
Flock routinely buys leaked personal data off the darkweb. They also have a highly insecure network and a ton of false positives. They need to banned and their CEO jailed with all his assets confiscated and/or frozen.
I wonder how they intend to tackle white collar crime.
No such thing, clearly
I can think of a few ways to do that too
If CCTV camera feed didn’t stop all crime, AI won’t be able to stop it either. Crime is inevitable and people will do it, regardless of whether they’re on camera or not, or whether they’re being monitored.
They don’t “think” that. That’s just the excuse to a totalitarian regime within a police state.
Ah yes… Pre-crime… Just like all those utopian sci-fi novels.
Starting with the rich?
We need to start badgering our local politicians to remove this shit. This is one area where local action could feasibly make a big difference. If a few towns start becoming “flock dark zones” then the network, and value prop of the company, as a whole loses efficacy.
Also, I suspect there would be bipartisan support for this among the people.