alt Hacker NewsAt this point I think it's necessary to notify anyone who has been tracked after a fixed number of days, unless a court order is used to extend that period. An officer using this for legitimate reasons should have few problems getting that court order. This would at least give people some amount of safety net from stalking by LE.
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It's not that I disagree, but police looking up protestors license plates in order to trigger a "law enforcement looked you up" email is one hell of an intimidation tactic
At this point I think it's time to ban this dystopian 4th amendment violation surveillance state.
We need strong laws against these authoritarian / fascist companies; and we need to elect representatives who destroy their businesses and zero out the investors.
Seriously. Every dollar that has gone to flock or any similar company needs to be incinerated, or else it will continue, because billionaires like Paul Graham _love_ the idea of having greater control over the masses.
A product that provides surveillance with strict controls and limited scope is potentially great.
This shit is just an attempt to turn America into communist Russia -- where the regular people have no rights, and oligarchs run everything. it's evil, anti-American, and regular people need to ensure that billionaires like Paul Graham, and their lackeys (like hn's own dang) stop being rewarded for their decision to dedicate their lives to the destruction of liberty.
They're evil fucking people, and they will never police themselves. They're all mentally ill.
I think this or similar accountability measures is where we'll need to end up with this kind of technology. It's too useful for catching vehicle theft rings and similar kinds of highly disruptive criminal networks to abandon the technology entirely.
LOVEINT has been a thing for as long as electronic surveillance has existed. We fire and/or prosecute people for it. We didn't turn out back on those capabilities.
I'd like to see someone using systems not available to the general public to to look up info on people without a legitimate purpose be treated as a kind of aggravated stalking.
Government employees should be held to a higher standard because they are in a position of public trust, but TBH people at companies like Google, Meta, Verizon, Comcast abusing internal tools for this should be similarly held accountable because they have access to resources far beyond e.g. one hobbyist logging TPMS IDs on passing vehicles.