alt Hacker NewsThe flock discourse is slowly climbing the ladder to real discussion. We're at the "mostly intelligent people who are casually interested in the topic being confidently wrong about it" phase (and I know I'm going to get very angry replies accusing me of being one, hah caught you thinking about it!)
> log every trip
> This system tracks the whole of everyone's movements, every day
Funny, because current lawsuits over flock have hinged on the point that they DO NOT have total coverage of roads. Author seems to be talking about Long Island, which is an unusual case, and flock might have total coverage there. But special places need special laws, and an edge case isn't the model for the whole world!
> The Supreme Court held in Carpenter v. United States that the government may not track the whole of a person's movements without a warrant.
No, that court case established that the government needs a warrant to get, specifically, historical cellphone pings from a 3rd party (the cellphone companies).
And overly-emotional language to fool the more credulous:
> It is called Flock for a reason. We are sheep only if we let this happen
Oh please, it's named flock because it's perched on a pole, like a bird, not a sheep.
> feed a national database searched by 59 outside agencies nobody in this town chose
> 0: Opt-in or opt-out decisions the Town made about any of this sharing, in its own words
Well why not? It seems like a lot of the flock discussion takes a bizarre twist where people go "It's useless to try to limit it, we need to ban it outright". Like okay? Do we ban the police when one goes rogue? (I guess that's kind of a bad question to ask, given that "defund the police" was trending a few years ago)
Replies
>Do we ban the police when one goes rogue?
I mean worth a shot right? Do we need armed government funded domestic violence perpetrators? Can anyone make the case for the current situation from first principles?
>No, that court case established that the government needs a warrant to get, specifically, historical cellphone pings from a 3rd party (the cellphone companies).
Flock is gathering far, far more intrusive data than "cellphone pings" including hoovering up bluetooth signals and other identifying information. The court may not have ruled on it yet, but it is absurd to think that the courts would think that the government needs a warrant to collect cellphone pings but doesn't need a warrant to collect far more blanket data, including facial recognition on a mass scale. Hopefully we will get a ruling on this sooner rather than later.
>Well why not? It seems like a lot of the flock discussion takes a bizarre twist where people go "It's useless to try to limit it, we need to ban it outright". Like okay? Do we ban the police when one goes rogue? (I guess that's kind of a bad question to ask, given that "defund the police" was trending a few years ago)
This is a bizarre take. Police are a necessary component for running a society. Blanket surveillance is not. This is self-evidently true because society still functioned before the recent past when they introduced blanket surveillance. Equating, or even comparing, a core and necessary function of society, like policing, with a new and completely optional and unnecessary blanket surveillance system is absurd (and that's the polite term).
You’re responding as if those phrases were intentionally chosen, rather than the stochastic slop that they are.