PyLova
Cops Search Thousands of Flock Cameras for Reasons of ‘LMAO,’ ‘IDK,’ ‘Hehe,’ and ‘asdfg’
The EFF found cops writing “idiot,” “WEIRD KID,” “blah,” “leave me alone,” and button mashing in Flock’s ‘reason’ box.
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The EFF was able to do this analysis because of the way that Flock documents police use of the system. Each time a search is performed, a record of it is saved in the Flock system, which can be obtained by the public using government records requests. These audit logs show hundreds of thousands of searches of the system; after 404 Media and other news outlets used these types of logs to show police using the Flock system to look for undocumented immigrants on behalf of ICE, a woman in Texas who had an abortion, and protesters, cops were warned by government surveillance centers to be “as vague as permissible” about the reasons for their searches. Late last year, Flock changed its system; rather than having to type in a reason, Flock now has a drop-down list of prepopulated reasons, which the EFF called “a loss for transparency.”
The EFF contacted departments whose cops performed these “joke” searches, and found that many of them did not do anything about cops who button mashed or put jokes. Cops who wrote “hehe” and “idk” were “counseled,” they were told. A cop who wrote “idiot” got away with it because by the time the department learned about it, it had passed a 90-day time period in which the cop’s union contract allowed for internal investigations. Several other police departments said they would investigate the behavior. The Fishers Police Department in Indiana said that a detective who searched Flock for reasons of “blah” only did so “when he has issues with the technology,” or when “the technology is not moving fast enough for him.” A police department said it investigated a cop who wrote “driving around being weird” in the reason field but found it was for “legitimate public safety purposes.”
Easy solution:
Federal law that requires any sort of abuse of power by police is a felony and prevents them from ever working anything near law enforcement.
Get rid of the “bad apples” and ensure the remaining cops understand the balance of power.
That’s not a solution. We’ve had measures like that implemented for decades. It approaches the problem from an individual and up perspective.
The issue is not “bad apples”. All these measures do is force the obscurity of the issue. Right now we see an obvious abuse of power because of these obviously unserious reasons.
It’s a symptom not the problem. Would the police oppression change if the prompt got filled with an AI generated string of that sounded professional? No.
Individualized solutions that treat the problem as individual are treating symptoms; not the problem.
It’s the same reason ICE and the police aren’t going to be any better with body cameras. The problem was never the witnessing of the crimes. The problem has always been the protection of the institutions by those with economic and political power.
Audit trails mean nothing if nobody is looking at them.
Completely backwards….
If there’s no audit trail, no one can ever look at them.
If there’s an audit trail, then later someone can follow it. Even if no one is right now.
So often the time they’re most valuable, is when the people that need audited don’t think anyone will ever look.
This is a self reported list of cops that should be barred from ever working law enforcement across the country, that’s immensely valuable even five years from now.
For those who are slow like me: “asdfg” is the order of keys on the home row left to right. It doesn’t stand for anything.
This took me way too long to figure out.
Nahh it’s surely alaska state department of fish and game, the cops wouldn’t type in garbage!!!!1!
A cop who wrote “idiot” got away with it because by the time the department learned about it, it had passed a 90-day time period in which the cop’s union contract allowed for internal investigations.
Really gotta figure out how they negotiated that “you can’t fire me if you catch me 90 days late” clause.
It helps when you’re both sides of the negotiation.
ACAB. Flock is big brother
The reason box should require a warrant number. What the fuck.
A justification box isn’t useful if it isn’t getting regularly audited
Even if it was audited it’d be other pigs doing it
“We have audited ourselves and found no wrong doing.’
The fact that these even exist is bad enough, but the fact that they simply just allow such blatant abuses is unconscionable. Every one of these “reasons” need to be audited. Realistically, they should require a warrant.
Legally they should require a warrant.
If they don’t have good reasons it sounds like they are wasting time on the job
Odd how similar those reasons are to my git push messages..
They are your git push messages
Good thing I only use git for my dot files, I’m luckily only pissing future me off ;)
NixOS user?
Not yet, but I’ve definitely been thinking about it. But for now it’s mainly just a backup for my config files just in case.
I love how actual news stories sound like posts from the onion now.
It’s as much a joke to them as it is to the rest of us. The most flaccid form of oversight imaginable.
Coming to your neighborhood near you: “conflict resolution.”
I don’t get why this comes as such as big surprise. It’s human nature. I grew up watching funny home videos and CCTV videos etc. Cops have access to the system, I think most others would abuse it the same way.
It’s a gross invasion of privacy and Flock should be banned everywhere. it’s disgusting how it can easily be abused and should be avoided at all costs. Imagine what Joseph James DeAngelo would have done with access to Flock.
Catching a quick glimpse of a person that they deemed attractive could end up being high end stalking.
The bad very much outweighs any good that these cameras are alleged to help with. Fucking traffic violations?
Okay, maybe tracking a murderer etc. might be a good use of the system, but the ratio of that happening, and what they are being used for is ridiculous.
its not human nature, it’s a combination of capitalism plus good ol burger reich sadism.
I reject the notion that mass surveillance has any valid use whatsoever, even including tracking murderers. The mere existence of the system has chilling effects on the non-criminal citizenry that makes it absolutely categorically unacceptable regardless of what alleged benefits it tries to claim.
Ah yeah, I don’t agree with it either, but if pushed and playing devil’s advocate, I can see that it might help catch a murderer or rapist.
It still doesn’t outweigh the bad that it does though, imho.
I always respond with “so would putting a GPS tracker on all of us and tracking our every movement, officer.”
Well sure human nature exists but there’s also professionalism - unfortunately in many parts of the country these people take an intelligence test to screen out the high scorers.
Yes, they are trained, but it’s in their nature to abuse that system. That’s probably why many of them become cops. Computer repair people used to snoop through private photographs and videos (possibly still do).
It’s like dangling a carrot in front of them. But instead of punishing them for abusing the system, the system shouldn’t exist.
There literally should be penalties on local elected officials for every attempt at invading privacy on any scale, but on a scale that high, it’s crazy.
Tech are lobbying for it the world over, and at the moment they’re winning.
That’s already happened:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HIUpsUP3Lk
“Cop hunts down actress with ‘license plate cameras’ [read: Flock]”
Most people might, a lot of people appreciate a little gossip, drama. However, ones integrity must take over when in positions of power. What we are seeing is that the cops implicated here, and their protectors, are lacking integrity.
Exactly. If we’re going to have these systems at all, they should be retroactive-only and require a warrant to access at all. For example, if some masked person robs a bank and gets away, at that point police can go to a judge and ask for a warrant to access the camera records. They can then hopefully use the records to catch the thief. But there should be no way to access the camera feeds live, and all access should require a warrant. In fact, the police shouldn’t even have accounts to access the cameras. There should be an office within the court system, and that office should be the only people that can access the camera footage.
«asdfg» is going into my «professional resume» of excuses.
Shocked. Well not shocked. Surprised. Well not surprised. Mildly amused. Well. What an absurd time we live in.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtnmvOP703A — reminds me of this
Hehe
Any tool can be used for good or evil.
TIL cops are evil.
Today? Have you been under a rock?
I have to give them the benefit of the doubt. They were hired by the city.
I now have PROOF that I did not have before.
Maybe the city is evil too? I’ll start looking into that now.