Privacy, encryption vs. Surveillance state

[pmbug]

Above the embedded tweet is a quote box with a link at the bottom that says "Click to expand.." . Click that and you can read the entire text.

 

[SilverStacker]

I dont trust Gubmint. Never really did. Wear a blue uniform and they get to screw you for free. Thats what people dont understand, they think the Police get away with shit but thats only the clouted few. The rest of us ? The unwashed masses ? We catch it right up the wazoo when the Gubmint feels heat. Stick it up our azz'z and it makes everyone feel good again and Gubmint can get back to stealing from us.

 

[Joe King]

Joe, bug quoted the ENTIRE text above the graphic.
bf

Ok. Just seemed like the sentence continued.

I'm not an X member and they it difficult for people who just want to read or watch a vid on there.

 

[Joe King]

Above the embedded tweet is a quote box with a link at the bottom that says "Click to expand.." . Click that and you can read the entire text.

I can't do that because I am not an X member. They used to let people read all of someone's posts, but no more.

 

[pmbug]

Joe, my post contains a QUOTE in this forum's quote tags

like this text

positioned above the X embed. Do you not see it?

edit:

 

[Joe King]

Joe, my post contains a QUOTE in this forum's quote tagspositioned above the X embed. Do you not see it?

edit:
View attachment 20782

I do now.

When I first read your post I did not expand the quote. I read past it as I just thought you were quoting another post in the thread I didn't pay attention enough to see that it wasn't. My bad.

Thx.

 

[searcher]

Related

ICE Illegally Scooped Up Medicaid Data, Then Shared It With Palantir

The Trump administration’s continual trend towards maximum awfulness means that every report seems to be “I’ve got bad news and I’ve got worse news.” What was already …

www.techdirt.com

ICE Collected Nearly 1 Million People’s DNA Last Year—Including Young Children

Internal documents show ICE's DNA collection has skyrocketed in the second Trump administration. Now hundreds of thousands of people never convicted of a crime are in an FBI criminal database forever.

www.wired.com

 

[pmbug]

...
Privacy and legal experts say Flock’s tools already raise serious constitutional concerns by giving police broad, often warrantless access to a vast record of people’s movement. But the prompts WIRED examined go further, turning a tool for finding a known vehicle into one that casts suspicion on drivers based on where and how often they drive, regardless of whether they are wanted for a crime.

Flock built its business on a simple transaction: A camera photographs a passing car, converts the plate to text, and checks it against a list of vehicles police are looking for. (Cars that are not on the list are recorded and otherwise ignored.) OS Investigate’s preloaded prompts describe an inversion of that arrangement. An officer no longer needs a plate, a name, or a crime to begin: They supply a place, a stretch of time, and a pattern of behavior, and the system is designed to hand back the people who fit.
...
Chad Marlow, an attorney who runs the ACLU’s “Get The Flock Out” campaign, says that is where the danger lies. “The difference between a police officer saying, ‘Do you see any criminal patterns’ or ‘Find me criminal patterns’ is going to produce two different things,” he says. “And I think the fact that they don’t seem to have any limitations on the prompts enables the police to almost lead the AI in what it does.”

Marlow says his worry is the officer who asks an AI which people it considers most likely to be committing crimes. “It’s going to develop not a legal standard of criminal suspicion, but whatever that AI standard is.”
...

More:

Flock Has a Powerful New AI Tool for Police. We Got Its Code

Flock’s surveillance cameras have already sparked outrage. WIRED reconstructed its next-generation AI system, already in use by some police, to confirm it goes much further than tracking license plates.

www.wired.com

h/t:

Look at the code WIRED pulled from Flock’s own servers. Flock built an AI tool called OS Investigate.

It accesses "commercial databases that contain Social Security numbers, dates of birth, phone numbers, email addresses, relatives and associates." It also accesses "police case files, 911 dispatch logs, and commercial identity records." The prompts can generate dossiers ("workups") on people based purely on driving patterns, without a crime, a plate, or a name. It Can identify drivers, track patterns, find "witnesses," generate suspicion based on behavior without a target. Code was found publicly on Flock's website.

Flock is performing automated, suspicionless background checks (pulling SSNs, DOBs, relatives) using commercial databases on citizens who have committed no crime, have no warrant, and are not named in any case file. The trigger is purely an AI algorithm flagging their driving pattern.

NO officer initiates the search for the suspect, Flock's AI essentially acting as the investigator, but doing so through commercial data brokers. Flock pulls consumer reports without a permissible purpose.

Why did Flock build OS Investigate? Because selling LPR cameras is a hardware game with limits. Selling an "AI investigator" is a high-margin SaaS play. To justify the valuation ($1B+), they need to monopolize the investigative workflow. To do that, they fused LPR data (which they hold) with police records (CJI) and commercial data (SSNs).

Why are they doing this? Because Flock’s hardware is a commodity. The cameras are just metal on a pole. The real valuation the nearly $1 billion in venture capital is in their proprietary datasets. To justify that valuation, they have to build a total surveillance map of America that links physical movement to full digital and financial identities. They cannot legally buy that data on the open market because of the FCRA. So they built an AI to force the police to pull it for them. Flock gets the fused data, the police get the dossier, and Flock gets to declare the new AI-generated identity maps as "Flock Property" under their contracts.

Flock is using the police as a legal shield to run unauthorized mass identity resolution queries for their own proprietary training and profit. The "perpetual license" terms gives Flock ownership of these AI-generated dossiers. They are building a national private surveillance database of SSNs linked to movement patterns, bypassing the FCRA by routing the queries through police terminals.

Now look at their new August 2026 "Trust" updates. They announced a reduction in data retention to 7 days, but they created an exception called "Evidence Mode" where searched data is preserved instead of aging out.

Here is the trap. If they actually deleted data in 7 days, their AI prompts which ask for people "arrested more than twice in two years" would not function.

The AI needs a multi-year historical window to track patterns. "Evidence Mode" is the backdoor they built to force all searched data into permanent retention so their AI can keep running. The 7-day retention is theater for the city councils. The permanent retention is the actual product.

And the Audit Assistance" they say is to catch police misuse? It is a complete deception. The audit logs track the police officer. But the AI generates the lead before the officer interacts with the system. The AI does the suspicionless searching in the backend. The officer just clicks the prewritten prompt. The audit log captures the officer clicking a button, but it does not capture the unauthorized API calls Flock’s AI is making to the commercial databases to pull the SSNs. They built the logging system to cover their own corporate trail.

 

[Joe King]

^^^^^

"Flock built its business on a simple transaction: A camera photographs a passing car, converts the plate to text, and checks it against a list of vehicles police are looking for."


If that's ALL it was ever used for, as well as using it to see which way kidnappers, murderers and armed robbers went, I think the vast majority of people would be ok with 'em.
....but I also think that it's natural (human nature) for people making and using such systems to see more ways to use such a system.

The police have always sought to use every tool they've been provided to its fullest possible extent until ordered by a court not use it In such a way. Until then, they see everything as fair game.

It'd sure be nice if everyone in government sought to uphold and protect everyone's Rights as their job #1 and where they sought to make sure their departments and agencies always did too.

As opposed to how it is now where they see every new tech as an unrestricted tool for side stepping our Rights and prying into everyone's lives just because they think they might possibly find some detail of someone's life being amiss.

If we want the Constitution to be able to work, we all need to apply it's principles in our daily lives. Both personally and professionally.

 

[searcher]

Surveillance camera saboteurs are getting government officials' attention

Sometimes direct action is the only way to get politicians to consider civil liberties.

reason.com

 

[pmbug]

 

[pmbug]

Knox County Mayor Glenn Jacobs noticed a deliberate exploitation with the county Flock contracts!

Knox County just held its long-awaited Flock workshop on 8/24. The Flock CEO was supposed to show up and answer questions. He didn’t.

Their people called it a “miscommunication.”

Commissioners spent over two hours going through the details with the sheriff’s office and Flock reps. One detail came out clear: the sheriff’s office has been buying these cameras for years in batches priced at $24,990 — just $10 under the threshold that would have required mayoral review. They kept it under the radar that way.

Mayor Glenn Jacobs isn’t playing along.

He sent Flock a letter on August 12 saying he doesn’t even believe their contract with the county is valid. According to him, the total spent under that original 2020 deal blew past the limits that should have gone through full Commission approval. He’s treating it like there’s no real agreement in place. There’s already about 140 of these cameras under the sheriff’s office.

The big expansion of 270 more is still paused. Next real move is August 31. Commissioner Larsen Jay is amending an emergency ordinance that could order every one of them taken down within 30 days.
...

 

[pmbug]

 

[pmbug]

A police chief in Oshkosh, Wisconsin caught Flock lying to his city council, and killed the $8 billion surveillance company's contract less than a day after the council had approved it.

Here's how it happened.

The night before, Oshkosh's council was set to renew its deal with Flock Safety, the license plate camera company backed by a16z and Tiger Global.

One council member asked the Flock rep a plain yes-or-no question. Does this system build a heat map of everywhere a specific car travels over time?

Flock's rep said no.

The council believed him and voted 5 to 2 to renew. By the next morning, Chief Dean Smith's own officers had told him that answer was false.

So he pulled up the system himself. He watched it generate the exact heat map Flock had just sworn it couldn't make.

Then he walked into an emergency meeting and said it out loud: "Because of this misrepresentation, I can no longer recommend Flock."

Understand what a heat map is, because it's the whole trick.

Flock sells cities a tidy little story. A car drives by, we snap a photo, we read the plate, that's all it is.

But the same system can quietly average out where your car goes day after day and paint your routine onto a map.

Not one snapshot at one corner. Your pattern. Where you sleep, where you work, where you keep going back and how often.

A Flock employee later admitted on the record that the software does exactly that.
So the pitch and the product are two different things. The company wins the contract selling a plate reader, then sits on a moving map of your life.

The only reason Oshkosh caught it was one skeptical question and a police chief who bothered to check the answer.

The vote to rescind was 7 to 0. Unanimous.

Flock called the whole thing "one small misconception" from a long meeting and said it was disappointed nobody let it explain.

A surveillance company worth eight billion dollars got caught lying about whether it maps where you drive. Its defense was that the lie was small.

Oshkosh got one honest answer by accident. Congress can make it the rule.

 

[Joe King]

But the same system can quietly average out where your car goes day after day and paint your routine onto a map.

Not one snapshot at one corner. Your pattern. Where you sleep, where you work, where you keep going back and how often.

A Flock employee later admitted on the record that the software does exactly that.

Is there anyone with a pulse who didn't think that that's how it worked?

 

[pmbug]

Is there anyone with a pulse who didn't think that that's how it worked?

Local LEOs and city councils apparently.

 

[Goldhedge]