thephyber

The Flock search system is supposedly limited so the city/police employee has to choose the permissions (eg. Which other jurisdictions will search results show up for).

If a city wants to exempt ICE, they can. However, if the city has a rogue officer who accesses the Flock search, they can forward the results to their ICE/DHS boyfriend (the claims of a recent firing and lawsuit).

I suspected that Flock cameras also notified repossesses, but a quick Google search suggests that police contracts don't, but that private property Flock installs (like shopping malls) do/can.

Maybe it's a shitty "you didn't actually cancel until you called us and sat through our upsell speeches for hours" kinda dark pattern.

I'm hoping that they are inundated with thousands of jurisdictions trying to back out these days so they are legit out of bandwidth to deal with cancellations in real time.

If nothing else, this is a good example of why the contract terms for government vendors MUST be public records and NDAs of private companies on public officials for the purposes of sales should not be legally enforceable.

The first thing the city should do when cancelling is lock down the data so no jurisdictions have access to the data. Even if the cameras are still powered on and connected, any ongoing searches should not return any results from that jurisdiction.

Yeah.

The NYPD has their own terrorism and counterintelligence divisions. They are pretty much an FBI governed at a city level (minus all of the cool forensics science).

I wouldn't put it beyond NYPD (in theory) except IIRC the NYPD actually drives him around in their SUVs and he has an NYPD team that does his personal security.

I live in a county where the Sheriff was investigated by her deputies for requiring bribes from Apple HQ's head of security (to approve armed security guard's right to CCW). The didn't actually charge her (the Sheriff), but it was kryptonite against her running for re-election, so there was a bit of justice.

You won't be able to out-cynic me, but even I recognize that there are ways to break through injustice. The deeper you fall into cynicism, the more people you turn off from seeking justice.

I will, however, completely agree that the time of Nixon's presidency is remarkably similar to Trump's terms.

Im enjoying watching HBO's The WhiteHouse Plumbers and CNN's Ticky Dick. There are soooo many references thick rhyme with Trump's rhetoric, actions, and policies.

Yes and no.

We did change the laws and provide more de jure rights since the 1960s.

I think there's lots of conflation of the more traditional definition of "racism" with the contemporary definition, which is not a direct correlation to the older one. The older one was a descriptor of the attributes of an individual's beliefs whereas the contemporary is a descriptor of the societal system / incentives.

Companies with deep pockets aren't throwing advertising dollars at Nick Fuentes or Kanye West when they are deep in their racist mania arc. It is no longer socially acceptable to be associated with what used to be common, the societal norm, and legally enforced.

We have come a long way, but we still have a long way to go.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The "processed foods" fears are misguided.

According to the NOVA classification method, baking bread or churning butter is sufficient to turn a food into "processed".

Generally laypeople are fearful of "ultra-processed foods" which use industrial distillation, stabilization, additives from petrochemical derivatives, synthetic sugars, etc.

My complaint is that some of these "processing" techniques are likely orders of magnitude more harmful than others, so we shouldn't blindly treat them all as equal.

At least the War on Seaweed is more real than the War on Christmas.

> Just say what they're actually going to do about it.

People don't have infinite attention. That's why headlines and slogans carry so well, even when they are lossy/misleading to the reality.