What is the counterfactual? Without knowing the number of attacks prevented by these tools, we don't know what the baseline would be.

For the record: they prevented essentially nothing in our muni. We're 4.5 square miles sandwiched between the Austin neighborhood of Chicago (our neighbor to the east; many know it by its reputation) one side and Maywood/Broadview/Melrose Park on the other, directly off I-290; the broader geographic area we're in is high crime.

We ran a pilot with the cameras in hot spots (the entrances to the village from I-290, etc).

Just on stolen cars alone, roughly half the flags our PD reacted to turned out to be bogus. In Illinois, Flock runs off the Illinois LEADS database (the "hotlist"). As it turns out: LEADS is stale as fuck: cars are listed stolen in LEADS long after they're returned. And, of course, the demography of owners of stolen cars is sharply biased towards Black and Latino owners (statistically, they live in poorer, higher-crime areas), which meant that Flock was consistently requesting the our PD pull over innocent Black drivers.

We recently kicked Flock out (again: I'm not thrilled about this; long story) over the objections of our PD (who wanted to keep the cameras as essentially a better form of closed-circuit investigatory cameras; they'd essentially stopped responding to Flock alerts over a year ago). In making a case for the cameras, our PD was unable to present a single compelling case of the cameras making a difference for us. What they did manage to do was enforce a bunch of failure-to-appear warrants for neighboring munis; mostly, what Flock did to our PD was turn them into debt collectors.

Whatever else you think about the importance of people showing up to court for their speeding tickets, this wasn't a good use our sworn officers' time.

> As it turns out: LEADS is stale as fuck: cars are listed stolen in LEADS long after they're returned.

Is this related to rental companies reporting cars as "stolen" if they are an hour overdue on their scheduled return?

Can you elaborate on why you're not thrilled about Flock being removed?

The metro area is blanketed in ALPRs and we were the only ones actually writing real policy about them. Now we don't have any ALPRs and can't build policy or shop it to any of our neighbors. We had harm reduction for the cameras and a plausible strategy for reducing their harm throughout the area, and instead we did something performative.

Why is it better to reduce the harm of a practically useless anti-crime device than remove it entirely?

That's a good and reasonable question. The answer is: the cameras weren't going to do any meaningful harm in Oak Park (they were heavily restricted by policies we wrote about them, and we have an exceptionally trustworthy police department and an extremely police-skeptical political majority). But you can drive through Oak Park in about 5 minutes on surface streets, and on either side of that drive you'll be in places that are blanketed with ALPRs with absolutely no policy or restrictions whatsoever.

Had we kept the cameras, we'd have some political capital to get our neighboring munis (and like-minded munis in Chicagoland like Schaumberg) to take our ordinances and general orders as models. Now we don't. We're not any safer: our actions don't meaningfully change our residents exposure to ALPRs (and our residents weren't the targets anyways; people transiting through Oak Park were) because of their prevalence outside our borders.

What people don't get about this is that a lot of normal, reasonable people see these cameras as a very good thing. You can be upset about that or you can work with it to accomplish real goals. We got upset about it.

> What people don't get about this is that a lot of normal, reasonable people see these cameras as a very good thing. You can be upset about that or you can work with it to accomplish real goals. We got upset about it.

An alternative is you can try to convince those people that, while their desire to reduce crime is perfectly understandable, this might not be the way to do it effectively, to say nothing of the potential avenues for abuse (and in current day America, I'd be very wary of such avenues)

It remains an issue of trust for me. You not only have to trust your police and government(s), but you have to trust Flock too - and that trust has to remain throughout changing governments and owners of that company. I have a healthy distrust of both, particularly lately.

Just as importantly, but more to the point, is still the question of whether they're actually useful. To that end, does not the same logic apply to being able to pressure nearby municipalities to remove the cameras?

In any case, while I remain fundamentally opposed to such surveillance, you raise very good points, and I appreciate you taking the time to explain your position in this thread.

I'm fine that we took the cameras down. As you can see from my first comment on this part of the thread: they weren't working, and before we stopped our PD from responding to stolen car alerts, they were actively doing harm. But I disagree with you about the long-term strategy. I'd have kept the cameras --- locked down (we had an offer from Flock to simply disable them while leaving them up, so that they wouldn't even be powered up) --- and written a formal ALPR ordinance. Then I'd have worked with the Metro Mayors Caucus and informal west suburban mayor networking to get other munis to adopt it.

Why do you have political capital to convince neighboring counties to copy your legislation, but not to copy your decision to remove the cameras?

(And you can still pass legislation restricting cameras even when they aren’t in your county…)

Because regulating cameras is an easier sell than disabling them, because ordinary people do not share HN's priors about surveillance technology, like, at all.

I'm not sure I agree with this, unless by "ordinary people" you mean a particular group. In my experience, the vast majority of members of oppressed or marginalized groups are strongly against these things. The only people I know who defend it are those that can hide behind "if I'm not doing anything wrong what do I have to hide"

It's not like we're going to have to argue about this in the abstract for long. Check in with me in a year and we'll see: are there more ALPRs or less ALPRs in the near west suburbs of Chicago? I would put money on a lot more. Dozens more were getting rolled out in our neighboring munis right as we announced we were canceling our contract.

I'm sure you're right, but that doesn't imply to me that "ordinary people" are okay with surveillance technology. At least 1 other explanation would be that they don't understand the implications.

Anyway, we'll check back in a year and see: are they actually effective and used responsibly? I would put money on "no"

I'm not wondering about it; I've watched the two sides of this issue play out. Progressive activists turn out with stuff about surveillance and resisting the Trump administration (I'm sympathetic!) and liberals (we only have progressives and liberals here) turn out talking about public safety and how the camera enforcement is less racist than human discretionary enforcement (I'm sympathetic to that argument too, but as I've noted elsewhere on the thread: the cameras aren't effective here).

This played out over years here; I attended all the board meetings, transcribed them, took notes, kept tallies of who was saying what. I was involved in our last election and the two mayoral candidates squared off on this issue (among several others).

We also don't know the number of attacks indirectly caused by these tools, by instilling a more fraught social environment.

I don't care. The world is a dangerous place, we make it safer by promoting freedom and education and goodwill and faith in people, not by growing the police state. We do know for a fact however that in the near future anything "think of the children" or "just looking for criminals" ultimately gets turned against all of us as the government grows and grows without limit, our rights will become fewer and fewer with the encroachment. It's not "panic" or "exaggeration" it has happened all through history of nation-states.

> Why has the rate of stochastic terrorism only increased since the NSA and Palantir started spying on all of us?

…is this true? What timespan are we looking at? My understanding was that crime has been on the decline pretty much from the 90s up until 2020. And in 2020 the world changed in a way that kind of made everyone go nuts.

Violent crimes stats look the same pretty much everywhere in the west, there are way more variables than "surveillance on/off", probably a lot of socio economic variables if I had to guess, as it turns out most people who are well fed, have a good life and look forward to a brighter future don't just walk around and commit violent crimes.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mirta-Gordon/publicatio...

Let’s start with school shootings which only started AFTER the surveillance apparatus went online.

You're making the same mistake that lots of people do, looking at the big events that make the news instead of actual crime stats. The former doesn't really tell you anything about crime rates.

This is a big problem that leads to things like these surveillance measures, because people think crime is really high even when it's the lowest it has ever been, because of the media environment.

I'm not American so please educate me if I'm wrong but haven't y'all had school shootings every single day for at least a decade or something?

I disagree and think it is very reasonable and very possible. Don't put up cameras everywhere, don't put up listening devices everywhere, don't allow the government to buy this information from corporations. There should be a clear line drawn between me or you or a bar putting up a camera and the government gaining access to that data. It's not hard, it really isn't. Saying what you're saying it just trite and not looking at what is possible.

It's part of the same first amendment that gives you the right to free speech. Go look it up. There is no such thing as privacy in public, and if you feel like you have a right to privacy in public, then you need to read up on the first amendment. The only thing that requires permission is when the footage is used for commercial purposes, then you need permission to use it.

And FWIW, citizens have a right to get the footage the government records. You can get any camera footage from any government building, and even personal cellphones of government emplpoyees if they happen to film something with their personal cellphone while on the job.

The first amendment doesn’t mention recording, although I admit that an argument could be made regarding an implied right. But then why are wiretapping laws allowed? Hiding a recorder in an otherwise public meeting area can violate these laws in some states (notably Illinois and Oregon). Are these laws unconstitutional?

Besides, the first amendment does not give the government the right to record or to benefit from those recordings. Rather, it prevents the government from restricting speech acts of private citizens. Therefore there should be no conflict with the 1st if a hypothetical law prevents the government from recording or accessing private recordings, even if private recordings are considered protected speech.

I actually agree with you but I think two things can be true at once.

- There is no reasonable expectation of privacy in public. Any individual with a camera can record you at any time. (Otherwise the entire genre of street photography basically wouldn't exist, and journalists could get arrested for documenting stories in the public interest.)

- We shouldn't have automated cameras recording all the time and feeding that information into a massive database where people's movements can be correlated and tracked across the country.

>massive database where people's movements can be correlated and tracked across the country.

Video (and audio) recording isn't even the best way to track someone, everyone has a cellphone these days, and turning them off doesn't always stop the tracking.

It's not recording in public that is the problem - that is a right - the separate problem is mining that data and making connections where there aren't any.

Some people say "both parties are the same", but I disagree. With the current administration, they are all-in on mass surveillance, they love Anduril and Palantir, and any attempt to protest their overreach will be met with force, and they are using these technologies to track protesters. The Democrats on the other hand will respond to protests, and we can push them in the right direction. I guess I'm trying to say, be careful who you vote for.

There's no reasonable expectation of pervasive video/audio capture, permanent recording, and complete AI analysis of all actions in public by all citizens forever, either. But that's the direction in which we're rapidly heading.

(Vouched for this comment, which was somehow already dead at 2 minutes old.)

Someone will always say "there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in public", for whatever reason. So someone always has to respond to that, for the benefit of anyone who doesn't know that not everyone agrees with that dismissive assertion.

>Someone will always say "there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in public", for whatever reason.

It isn't "for whatever reason", it is part of the first amendment. Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it hasn't been the law for a very long time.

Everyone has heard the phrase. It doesn't necessarily mean what the person saying it thinks it means.

For example, you can't legally photograph people in certain ways in public in some US jurisdictions. (Because "no expectation of privacy" perverts

There are also restrictions on secret audio recording without consent under circumstances that some people would try to claim are public.

For another example, there are restrictions on how you use that "no expectation of privacy", US-wide (e.g., commercial use of photographs, or cyberbullying).

And that's before we get into common decency, or arguable conflicting laws or principles.

But of course, every single time there is an opportunity for some new person to dismiss a good point with "no reasonable expectation of privacy!" such a new person materialize. And so someone else has to spend their time responding.

No, you can't film people in public restrooms, but that is an exception. There are limits to freedom of speech. You also can't yell "fire" in a crowded theater if there is no fire.

But yes, recording in public is generally very much allowed, and for good reason. I'm happy that we can film our govenment and dissemenate those recordings when they do something wrong. And that is the same first amendment right that gives government the ability to record too. And there are very few restrictions on recording, so yes, there is no REASONABLE expectation of privacy in public - the situations you outlined are all unreasonable. There are limits to free speech, but that doesn't mean recording in public isn't generally allowed.

You can hate it all you want, but it's the first amendment that makes it legal to record in public. I'm honestly glad we have the right to record in public, else the government would be able to hide some nefarious shit that the public has been able to record and dissemenate. If we couldn't record in public, then that would be extremely dystopian. Maybe using AI on recorded data is the real problem you're having, and I agree there should be laws against that - it is a separate issue than recording in public, but it's unlikely to ever be regulated with the current administration.

>The point of terrorism is that it’s a random act of violence.

That's absolutely incorrect. Terrorism is violence used to achieve political goals.

>"Terrorism is the calculated use of violence or threat of violence against civilians and property to intimidate or coerce a population or government to achieve political, religious, or ideological goals" - a simple google search

It's not random at all. Random acts of violence are not meant to achieve any goal - they spur-of-the-moment, unplanned, etc. Terrorists have a goal, they typically have a target in mind to achieve a goal, it isn't very random at all. Sure random people might get hurt in the incident, but the incident itself isn't typically random. Terrorists usually prepare for it, for months or years. Was flying two planes into the twin towers random? No, it was not. Was blowing up the federal building in Oklahoma City random? No, it was not. These were very carefully selected targets.

The stochastic part is who is doing it (random people being incited) vs an organized cell who has members engaging in random acts of violence

Right, it's the inverse of saying a "random dice roll" isn't happening because there isn't a random human throwing a random selection of polyhedra. Different aspects.

That said, even "random" has so many different interpretations that "random targets" it can still be a misleading shorthand. What happens is something closer to "unpredictably unjust and disproportionate"... but of course nobody wants to keep saying a mouthful like that.

Stochastic terrorism usually refers to incitement, afaict.

Edit: it's got a Wikipedia article, which says it's a particular kind of incitement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_terrorism

Terrorism isn't even an actual action. Its a threat of a random action to the public.

For example, saying "there is a planned school shooting at a school in $metro_city", even though there is absolutely nobody doing that - that causes terror. Doesn't have to be backed by any actions at all.

Like, with the shooting of UHC CEO, there was no grandiose statements or otherwise causing terror ahead of time. It was 3 bullets and leave.

They did fail to prove terrorism in court in that case - I think generally there needs to be some attempt to use the terror to achieve a political aim or change public opinion?

Just making people afraid is a different thing.

The Stochastic part is that the proponents of terrorism don't know where it will manifest, they just incite and hope someone's listening. In contrast a terrorist act like 9-11 was carefully planned and had approval up Al Qaeda's 'chain of command'.