It's surprising to me this is news. Governments buy and install this equipment and it flags license plates and anyone thought that wouldn't be used for things like immigration control? I'm not saying it's right, just that it's shocking people wouldn't realize that.
It's really not. These systems are bought and paid for predominantly by local governments. Most of whom don't spend any resources on immigration enforcement. Some of which have policies prohibiting such co-operation.
there are at least weekly threads on hn about why people dont want to live in a mass-surveillance state with an astronomical potential for abuse (and plenty of evidence of abuse already: see the flock employees watching kids gymnastics recently)
pretending that it is only "pro illegal immigration" people that are against what happened here is misguided at best, or purposefully manipulative and bad faith
No I get that. My impression is that the angle here is specifically not against Orwellian mass surveillance, but „the evil fascists at ICE use it too“ which I find hypocritical.
Because if public video surveillance was only used for legitimate purposes, worked well and made everyone‘s life better as a consequence there wouldn’t be as much opposition to it. In practice this is not always the case.
If every new proposed law to combat „child abuse“ was well intentioned and actually worked, there wouldn’t be much opposition either. But since they are mostly an underhanded tactic to censor the internet, there is.
So to use this legitimate actually useful example of fighting illegal immigration leaves a very bitter taste.
The misuse of "child welfare" as a wedge for illegal legislation heavily predates the common use of the Internet. I remember Tipper Gore with music, Joe Lieberman with video games. I remember the "Satanic panics" of the 80s, which led my parents to forbid me from Dungeons & Dragons, because it was "evil" and "Satanic".
Spying on people is a violation of plenty of amendments. Illegal immigration is a misdemeanor not a felony. Stop treating the law as a binary illegal or not. It just leads to brain dead interpretations of the law. There is plenty of “illegal” things people do every day and yet we don’t install public dragnet cameras to stop it. Illegal immigration hasn’t shown any real harm to people that regular citizens don’t also take part in. Immigration has just been used to rile you up because you can scream “illegal illegal illegal” a bunch of times without reading the 14th amendment and understand that you can’t have a country of rights if you don’t extend those rights to non-citizens within your borders.
> Illegal immigration is a misdemeanor not a felony.
My understanding is that entering without getting inspected is misdemeanor (or felony in some cases), but that's often not the case. Usually people just overstay and that's civil case. And because it's treated as a civil matter a lot constitutional protections do not apply (to clarify: some still do).
> Shaughnessy v. United States ex rel. Mezei, 345 U.S. 206, 212 (1953); see also Mathews v. Diaz, 426 U.S. 67, 77 (1976) ("There are literally millions of aliens within the jurisdiction of the United States. The Fifth Amendment, as well as the Fourteenth Amendment, protects every one of these persons from deprivation of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.");
Show me where it says sending them to their home country is depriving them of life, liberty, or property.
If I'm overseas and overstayed my visa and broke, it's a huge favor if the authorities there pay my airfare to come home -- not a human rights violation.
You have a brain dead interpretation of the law it seems. You may be interested in the US Constitution Amendments 4-14 should give you quite a few answers to your confusion on how we treat people here. Your interpretation of the laws would make you an illegal for misinterpreting the laws. Let’s deport you.
You and others here have so much to say about these legal details, but you haven't explained where it establishes a right for people with no legal status here to just show up and move in, even commit crimes, and not be sent home.
I'm not saying people should be harmed. I'm saying they should be fingerprinted (to track repeat offenders) and sent home.
IMHO part of why things have gotten so toxic, stuff like ICE etc. is that one side of the debate has staked out the position that coming here illegally should be met with zero consequences whatsoever - not even being gently walked back across the border with a stern but toothless warning! And any response other than complete acceptance of this form of immigration is a crime against humanity, racist, evil, fascist.
And most of the Democrats who hold those opinions live in large cities in the North with manageable amounts of such migration, not the rural border areas where the impact is most felt. So, with this going on for 30 years or so and not being taken seriously by Washington, it's in turn radicalized the other side of the debate, such that they are more likely to support measures we should all view as probably too extreme, like armed ICE agents being sent out on exploratory missions.
I've said for years that the correct way to do it would be to pick up an undocumented immigrant, and give them the option right then and there to begin the legal process of immigration, in return if they accept then they will not be deported.
Strangely I've never seen that idea pick up ground (and it's a basic idea, there's no way I'm the only one to have ever come up with it).
So assuming you drive, when a police car gets really inappropriately close behind you for a couple minutes and then backs off, then they are probably using their eyes to look at your license plate and having someone run that or texting while driving to do that on the computer in the car. I don’t think there is a fundamental difference between this process and using a camera other than a camera doesn’t expect you to give it a pension.
The cops actions are vetted and have responsible party attached. The camera is used to bypass responsibility of bad actors entirely. Infact the camera is used to enable bad actors instead of catching bad actors. Huge difference in my opinion but okay just shrug your shoulders and claim there’s no difference.
And, crucially, cops are expensive, so the percentage of drivers they can do this to is low.
Whereas a stationary camera can scan the license plates of ~100% of cars that go past it and save that data for later fishing expeditions. And is cheap enough that we can (and have) blanketed roads with them.
> Illegal immigration hasn’t shown any real harm to people that regular citizens don’t also take part in
Eliminating competition comes with the territory of survival.
> you can’t have a country of rights if you don’t extend those rights to non-citizens within your borders.
Sophistry. "Rights" asserted by contractual violation are invalid. If you pirate Windows you don't get to sue Microsoft when WGA denies you access. Expectation otherwise is an assertion of dominance by the weaker party.
You don't have a country at all if you don't enforce borders, which become meaningless in practice once you extend ingroup rights to outgroups. But you know this, hence your phrasing.
Lol you’re a troll account and looking at your comment history reveals how pathetic and non-serious you are. Most likely non-American.
The borders are enforced quit making up lies. In United States of America we still extend due process because that allows us to punish actual criminals. Instead you want to label everyone and deport them to a safe distance but do not want to actually punish anyone with the law or determine innocence. You have no respect for any law, and just use your own ideas of how things should work. So what is the point of the laws and punishment system if we can’t use it? When you just deport someone without due process you’re letting the “illegal” off the hook without consequences. But you know this, hence your phrasing.
It's likely on the backend that this is "completely lawful" and was used for "lawful purposes" as deemed by the current US administration. There's probably even subpoenas on the backend.
Flock is required to comply with "lawful" requests and seems happy to do so.
This is largely the same for all major cloud camera operators. See also: Verkada and their facial recognition. These things are installed all over the place in public areas. And you think their facial recognition is compartmentalized to their specific tenant?
In the case of Illinois, this is not lawful, I'm not sure about the laws in Ohio, but if a village in Illinois buys a Flock camera and that data is accessible to ICE, than they have violated Illinois law. So they either need Flock to provide assurances that ICE cannot use the data, otherwise they have to remove the cameras entirely.
Sure but the end result of that is simply that local agencies could not legally use this technology, not that they can just ignore local laws because the federal government wants them to. The federal government can maybe force Flock to turn over data, but local governments then cannot use Flock in accordance with Illinois law. In the case of Illinois, this is indeed causing some local governments to reconsider their Flock contracts.
The local governments are in compliance with state law until the feds use it for immigration enforcement. Then the supremacy clause takes over and more or less nullifies it. As long as it isn’t the local agency using it for enforcement, then they are in the clear.
I think that Flock contracts are getting cancelled due to unpopularity, not because of compliance worries. Can you point to any actual cases where enforcement of the state law led to a termination of service?
Ohio dot news doesn't sound credible. Nothing on the About page. https://www.ohio.news/about/. One email contact for statenewsdesk.com, the only indication about who might run this website. WHOIS entirely redacted. I'll assume it's a foreign influence operation until they put some names and faces out there.
If I understand correctly, a police query to Flock makes inferences from the set of all municipality/HOA/BigBogStore flock cameras. Or at least the ginormous subset who haven't opted out of the default settings that make Flock appealing to police in the first place.
If your imagined competitor doesn't offer that feature, then how is it a competitor?
If your competitor does offer it, then why would it even matter whether ICE gets access to inferences derived from the cloud vs. some federation of local storage devices?
Any security camera product can do this, Flock is winning on having an integrated cloud solution with an all in once price that integrates with a lot of other law enforcement tools.
You can put a camera on a pole with a cell router and enable the LPR plugin in your recording software pretty darn cheap. But you probably can't do that with a single subscription apart from Flock.
> Any security camera product can do this, Flock is winning on having an integrated cloud solution
Flock provides a fire-and-forget service. The city contracts Flock, and then the cameras are put up and managed. I'm asking if anyone else does this without Flock's baggage.
Randomly inserting “allegedly” where it doesn't belong isn't a requirement for news organizations, its sloppiness. Inserting it appropriately may be a requirement or at least a reasonable effort to avoid overstepping the facts (and avoid liability for things like defamation where overstepping would harm reputations), but this is not that. The source they are attributing the claim to did not say that the data was allegedly used, they said that the data was IN FACT used. Either of these headlines would be reasonable and accurate given the facts in the body:
“Authorities say Flock cameras' data used for immigration enforcement”
or
“Flock cameras' data allegedly used for immigration enforcement”
It's surprising to me this is news. Governments buy and install this equipment and it flags license plates and anyone thought that wouldn't be used for things like immigration control? I'm not saying it's right, just that it's shocking people wouldn't realize that.
No one is surprised, but the news is that Flock’s agreement with these pd’s said this was not happening and it’s now been shown it has.
> it's shocking people wouldn't realize that
It's really not. These systems are bought and paid for predominantly by local governments. Most of whom don't spend any resources on immigration enforcement. Some of which have policies prohibiting such co-operation.
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[flagged]
there are at least weekly threads on hn about why people dont want to live in a mass-surveillance state with an astronomical potential for abuse (and plenty of evidence of abuse already: see the flock employees watching kids gymnastics recently)
pretending that it is only "pro illegal immigration" people that are against what happened here is misguided at best, or purposefully manipulative and bad faith
No I get that. My impression is that the angle here is specifically not against Orwellian mass surveillance, but „the evil fascists at ICE use it too“ which I find hypocritical.
Why is that hypocritical?
Because if public video surveillance was only used for legitimate purposes, worked well and made everyone‘s life better as a consequence there wouldn’t be as much opposition to it. In practice this is not always the case.
If every new proposed law to combat „child abuse“ was well intentioned and actually worked, there wouldn’t be much opposition either. But since they are mostly an underhanded tactic to censor the internet, there is.
So to use this legitimate actually useful example of fighting illegal immigration leaves a very bitter taste.
The misuse of "child welfare" as a wedge for illegal legislation heavily predates the common use of the Internet. I remember Tipper Gore with music, Joe Lieberman with video games. I remember the "Satanic panics" of the 80s, which led my parents to forbid me from Dungeons & Dragons, because it was "evil" and "Satanic".
Spying on people is a violation of plenty of amendments. Illegal immigration is a misdemeanor not a felony. Stop treating the law as a binary illegal or not. It just leads to brain dead interpretations of the law. There is plenty of “illegal” things people do every day and yet we don’t install public dragnet cameras to stop it. Illegal immigration hasn’t shown any real harm to people that regular citizens don’t also take part in. Immigration has just been used to rile you up because you can scream “illegal illegal illegal” a bunch of times without reading the 14th amendment and understand that you can’t have a country of rights if you don’t extend those rights to non-citizens within your borders.
> Illegal immigration is a misdemeanor not a felony.
My understanding is that entering without getting inspected is misdemeanor (or felony in some cases), but that's often not the case. Usually people just overstay and that's civil case. And because it's treated as a civil matter a lot constitutional protections do not apply (to clarify: some still do).
Viz: any public comment session on any proposal to add speed cameras to any American city.
[flagged]
> non-citizens don’t have any particular rights beyond the Geneva Convention
That's just untrue.
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S8-C18-8...
> Shaughnessy v. United States ex rel. Mezei, 345 U.S. 206, 212 (1953); see also Mathews v. Diaz, 426 U.S. 67, 77 (1976) ("There are literally millions of aliens within the jurisdiction of the United States. The Fifth Amendment, as well as the Fourteenth Amendment, protects every one of these persons from deprivation of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.");
Show me where it says sending them to their home country is depriving them of life, liberty, or property.
If I'm overseas and overstayed my visa and broke, it's a huge favor if the authorities there pay my airfare to come home -- not a human rights violation.
>A “misdemeanor”? I don’t really care what you define it as,
the user 'righthand' didnt define it that way...
its how the government defined it in 8 U.S.C. § 1325
>Also non-citizens don’t have any particular rights beyond the Geneva Convention.
this is also wrong. the constitutions protections generally extend to all people in the US
You have a brain dead interpretation of the law it seems. You may be interested in the US Constitution Amendments 4-14 should give you quite a few answers to your confusion on how we treat people here. Your interpretation of the laws would make you an illegal for misinterpreting the laws. Let’s deport you.
You and others here have so much to say about these legal details, but you haven't explained where it establishes a right for people with no legal status here to just show up and move in, even commit crimes, and not be sent home.
I'm not saying people should be harmed. I'm saying they should be fingerprinted (to track repeat offenders) and sent home.
IMHO part of why things have gotten so toxic, stuff like ICE etc. is that one side of the debate has staked out the position that coming here illegally should be met with zero consequences whatsoever - not even being gently walked back across the border with a stern but toothless warning! And any response other than complete acceptance of this form of immigration is a crime against humanity, racist, evil, fascist.
And most of the Democrats who hold those opinions live in large cities in the North with manageable amounts of such migration, not the rural border areas where the impact is most felt. So, with this going on for 30 years or so and not being taken seriously by Washington, it's in turn radicalized the other side of the debate, such that they are more likely to support measures we should all view as probably too extreme, like armed ICE agents being sent out on exploratory missions.
I've said for years that the correct way to do it would be to pick up an undocumented immigrant, and give them the option right then and there to begin the legal process of immigration, in return if they accept then they will not be deported.
Strangely I've never seen that idea pick up ground (and it's a basic idea, there's no way I'm the only one to have ever come up with it).
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it is far from correct... its actually, like, the opposite of correct.
None of this is true, see my other comment.
No it’s not correct. Please leave.
So assuming you drive, when a police car gets really inappropriately close behind you for a couple minutes and then backs off, then they are probably using their eyes to look at your license plate and having someone run that or texting while driving to do that on the computer in the car. I don’t think there is a fundamental difference between this process and using a camera other than a camera doesn’t expect you to give it a pension.
The cops actions are vetted and have responsible party attached. The camera is used to bypass responsibility of bad actors entirely. Infact the camera is used to enable bad actors instead of catching bad actors. Huge difference in my opinion but okay just shrug your shoulders and claim there’s no difference.
And, crucially, cops are expensive, so the percentage of drivers they can do this to is low.
Whereas a stationary camera can scan the license plates of ~100% of cars that go past it and save that data for later fishing expeditions. And is cheap enough that we can (and have) blanketed roads with them.
> Illegal immigration hasn’t shown any real harm to people that regular citizens don’t also take part in
Eliminating competition comes with the territory of survival.
> you can’t have a country of rights if you don’t extend those rights to non-citizens within your borders.
Sophistry. "Rights" asserted by contractual violation are invalid. If you pirate Windows you don't get to sue Microsoft when WGA denies you access. Expectation otherwise is an assertion of dominance by the weaker party.
You don't have a country at all if you don't enforce borders, which become meaningless in practice once you extend ingroup rights to outgroups. But you know this, hence your phrasing.
Lol you’re a troll account and looking at your comment history reveals how pathetic and non-serious you are. Most likely non-American.
The borders are enforced quit making up lies. In United States of America we still extend due process because that allows us to punish actual criminals. Instead you want to label everyone and deport them to a safe distance but do not want to actually punish anyone with the law or determine innocence. You have no respect for any law, and just use your own ideas of how things should work. So what is the point of the laws and punishment system if we can’t use it? When you just deport someone without due process you’re letting the “illegal” off the hook without consequences. But you know this, hence your phrasing.
It's likely on the backend that this is "completely lawful" and was used for "lawful purposes" as deemed by the current US administration. There's probably even subpoenas on the backend.
Flock is required to comply with "lawful" requests and seems happy to do so.
This is largely the same for all major cloud camera operators. See also: Verkada and their facial recognition. These things are installed all over the place in public areas. And you think their facial recognition is compartmentalized to their specific tenant?
In the case of Illinois, this is not lawful, I'm not sure about the laws in Ohio, but if a village in Illinois buys a Flock camera and that data is accessible to ICE, than they have violated Illinois law. So they either need Flock to provide assurances that ICE cannot use the data, otherwise they have to remove the cameras entirely.
I suspect that the supremacy clause makes this a grey area.
Simplified: you can make something illegal locally, but federal law will almost always win out.
Sure but the end result of that is simply that local agencies could not legally use this technology, not that they can just ignore local laws because the federal government wants them to. The federal government can maybe force Flock to turn over data, but local governments then cannot use Flock in accordance with Illinois law. In the case of Illinois, this is indeed causing some local governments to reconsider their Flock contracts.
Well, not quite.
The local governments are in compliance with state law until the feds use it for immigration enforcement. Then the supremacy clause takes over and more or less nullifies it. As long as it isn’t the local agency using it for enforcement, then they are in the clear.
I think that Flock contracts are getting cancelled due to unpopularity, not because of compliance worries. Can you point to any actual cases where enforcement of the state law led to a termination of service?
That probably just means it's illegal for local governments to use cloud based cameras in Illinois
> probably just means it's illegal for local governments to use cloud based cameras in Illinois
Probably not. A state can regulate how its own resources are used. It can't block a federal warrant.
> It can't block a federal warrant.
Exactly. If they all submit to federal warrants, and the state has a law effectively against that, then it becomes illegal to use the cameras.
It can't stop a warrant but it can make it illegal to gather and retain data in a way that can be later retrieved by a warrant.
Ohio dot news doesn't sound credible. Nothing on the About page. https://www.ohio.news/about/. One email contact for statenewsdesk.com, the only indication about who might run this website. WHOIS entirely redacted. I'll assume it's a foreign influence operation until they put some names and faces out there.
If only people assigned such strict scrutiny to AI blogslop "news." From a 30 second google search shows plenty of other similar results:
https://www.courierpress.com/story/news/local/2025/07/22/eva...
https://www.wyso.org/news/2026-05-01/dayton-suspends-automat...
https://www.daytondailynews.com/local/dayton-suspends-licens...
This should not be flagged. @dang
ohio.news is not credible.
Ok? So change the URL to any number of credible sites that are reporting this same information:
https://www.daytondailynews.com/local/dayton-suspends-licens...
I think it's fairly obvious why this got so aggressively flagged.
Does Flock have a competitor who can undercut it on price and provide entirely local data storage and management (or a zero-knowledge cloud)?
If I understand correctly, a police query to Flock makes inferences from the set of all municipality/HOA/BigBogStore flock cameras. Or at least the ginormous subset who haven't opted out of the default settings that make Flock appealing to police in the first place.
If your imagined competitor doesn't offer that feature, then how is it a competitor?
If your competitor does offer it, then why would it even matter whether ICE gets access to inferences derived from the cloud vs. some federation of local storage devices?
Any security camera product can do this, Flock is winning on having an integrated cloud solution with an all in once price that integrates with a lot of other law enforcement tools.
You can put a camera on a pole with a cell router and enable the LPR plugin in your recording software pretty darn cheap. But you probably can't do that with a single subscription apart from Flock.
> Any security camera product can do this, Flock is winning on having an integrated cloud solution
Flock provides a fire-and-forget service. The city contracts Flock, and then the cameras are put up and managed. I'm asking if anyone else does this without Flock's baggage.
Allegedly?
Flagged? It's genuinely market relevant that Flock is used so frequently for crime.
[dead]
Source: https://www.daytondailynews.com/local/dayton-suspends-flock-...
Other coverage:
Dayton mayor demands accountability after plate-reader data breach
https://www.wdtn.com/news/mayor-commissioner-demand-alpr-dat...
[flagged]
Yeah that's how news organizations have to frame things
No, its not.
Randomly inserting “allegedly” where it doesn't belong isn't a requirement for news organizations, its sloppiness. Inserting it appropriately may be a requirement or at least a reasonable effort to avoid overstepping the facts (and avoid liability for things like defamation where overstepping would harm reputations), but this is not that. The source they are attributing the claim to did not say that the data was allegedly used, they said that the data was IN FACT used. Either of these headlines would be reasonable and accurate given the facts in the body:
“Authorities say Flock cameras' data used for immigration enforcement”
or
“Flock cameras' data allegedly used for immigration enforcement”
The actual headline is, OTOH, just plain wrong.
Thank Hulk Hogan for that.
who funded his lawsuit as a part of a lawfare campaign again?
Good.