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kjkjadksjtoday at 12:43 AM1 replyview on HN

Flock cameras would be so easy to disable by motivated people. Dress in nondescript clothing, mask, sunglasses, and just spraypaint over the lenses. This is completely asymmetric warfare because it is trivial how long it would take for you to do this. You could hit dozens of cameras across an area overnight. Meanwhile, flock or the city, whoever maintains this stuff, needs to identify the vandalized cameras, flag them for repair, pay a technician to go out and presumably repair the unit outright. You pay cents and they are paying potentially thousands in labor and hardware costs.

And this would absolutely work at scale too. Streetlights are already being vandalized for their copper and most cities cannot afford to hire more technicians to even keep up with streetlight repair. I believe I’ve seen the backlog for streetlight repair in LA is over 10x what the current street services crew is capable of repairing in a year of constant work and growing by the day.

Municipalities and these technology companies cannot keep up against a motivated crew and can’t afford to scale either. Totally asymmetric.


Replies

mothballedtoday at 1:23 AM

The initial disabling might be asymmetric but when/if you're caught you go to jail for years for something that cost the state maybe an hour tops to fix.

Therefore if only say one of a thousand gets caught, it still costs the people doing it more than the state on average (unless their life/time is worth basically nothing for years on end).