It's likely on the backend that this is "completely lawful" and was used for "lawful purposes" as deemed by the current US administration. There's probably even subpoenas on the backend.
Flock is required to comply with "lawful" requests and seems happy to do so.
This is largely the same for all major cloud camera operators. See also: Verkada and their facial recognition. These things are installed all over the place in public areas. And you think their facial recognition is compartmentalized to their specific tenant?
In the case of Illinois, this is not lawful, I'm not sure about the laws in Ohio, but if a village in Illinois buys a Flock camera and that data is accessible to ICE, than they have violated Illinois law. So they either need Flock to provide assurances that ICE cannot use the data, otherwise they have to remove the cameras entirely.
Sure but the end result of that is simply that local agencies could not legally use this technology, not that they can just ignore local laws because the federal government wants them to. The federal government can maybe force Flock to turn over data, but local governments then cannot use Flock in accordance with Illinois law. In the case of Illinois, this is indeed causing some local governments to reconsider their Flock contracts.
It's surprising to me this is news. Governments buy and install this equipment and it flags license plates and anyone thought that wouldn't be used for things like immigration control? I'm not saying it's right, just that it's shocking people wouldn't realize that.
It's really not. These systems are bought and paid for predominantly by local governments. Most of whom don't spend any resources on immigration enforcement. Some of which have policies prohibiting such co-operation.
there are at least weekly threads on hn about why people dont want to live in a mass-surveillance state with an astronomical potential for abuse (and plenty of evidence of abuse already: see the flock employees watching kids gymnastics recently)
pretending that it is only "pro illegal immigration" people that are against what happened here is misguided at best, or purposefully manipulative and bad faith
No I get that. My impression is that the angle here is specifically not against Orwellian mass surveillance, but „the evil fascists at ICE use it too“ which I find hypocritical.
Spying on people is a violation of plenty of amendments. Illegal immigration is a misdemeanor not a felony. Stop treating the law as a binary illegal or not. It just leads to brain dead interpretations of the law. There is plenty of “illegal” things people do every day and yet we don’t install public dragnet cameras to stop it. Illegal immigration hasn’t shown any real harm to people that regular citizens don’t also take part in. Immigration has just been used to rile you up because you can scream “illegal illegal illegal” a bunch of times without reading the 14th amendment and understand that you can’t have a country of rights if you don’t extend those rights to non-citizens within your borders.
> Illegal immigration hasn’t shown any real harm to people that regular citizens don’t also take part in
Eliminating competition comes with the territory of survival.
> you can’t have a country of rights if you don’t extend those rights to non-citizens within your borders.
Sophistry. "Rights" asserted by contractual violation are invalid. If you pirate Windows you don't get to sue Microsoft when WGA denies you access. Expectation otherwise is an assertion of dominance by the weaker party.
You don't have a country at all if you don't enforce borders, which become meaningless in practice once you extend ingroup rights to outgroups. But you know this, hence your phrasing.
So assuming you drive, when a police car gets really inappropriately close behind you for a couple minutes and then backs off, then they are probably using their eyes to look at your license plate and having someone run that or texting while driving to do that on the computer in the car. I don’t think there is a fundamental difference between this process and using a camera other than a camera doesn’t expect you to give it a pension.
The cops actions are vetted and have responsible party attached. The camera is used to bypass responsibility of bad actors entirely. Infact the camera is used to enable bad actors instead of catching bad actors. Huge difference in my opinion but okay just shrug your shoulders and claim there’s no difference.
> Illegal immigration is a misdemeanor not a felony.
My understanding is that entering without getting inspected is misdemeanor (or felony in some cases), but that's often not the case. Usually people just overstay and that's civil case. And because it's treated as a civil matter a lot constitutional protections do not apply (to clarify: some still do).
A “misdemeanor”? I don’t really care what you define it as, it doesn’t change the fact that people who come here without any right to be here should be sent home. You don’t even have a country if you do otherwise. People in the UK have realized this, kinda too late, it looks like.
Also non-citizens don’t have any particular rights beyond the Geneva Convention. We shouldn’t hurt them. But we should send them home.
If the citizens want an incredibly generous definition of “refugee” that includes “the country you’re from isn’t run well and you’re poor” then people should pass a constitutional amendment establishing that, and they should still register for such a visa and be approved for it before they enter.
> Shaughnessy v. United States ex rel. Mezei, 345 U.S. 206, 212 (1953); see also Mathews v. Diaz, 426 U.S. 67, 77 (1976) ("There are literally millions of aliens within the jurisdiction of the United States. The Fifth Amendment, as well as the Fourteenth Amendment, protects every one of these persons from deprivation of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.");
You have a brain dead interpretation of the law it seems. You may be interested in the US Constitution Amendments 4-14 should give you quite a few answers to your confusion on how we treat people here. Your interpretation of the laws would make you an illegal for misinterpreting the laws. Let’s deport you.
Ohio dot news doesn't sound credible. Nothing on the About page. https://www.ohio.news/about/. One email contact for statenewsdesk.com, the only indication about who might run this website. WHOIS entirely redacted. I'll assume it's a foreign influence operation until they put some names and faces out there.
If I understand correctly, a police query to Flock makes inferences from the set of all municipality/HOA/BigBogStore flock cameras. Or at least the ginormous subset who haven't opted out of the default settings that make Flock appealing to police in the first place.
If your imagined competitor doesn't offer that feature, then how is it a competitor?
If your competitor does offer it, then why would it even matter whether ICE gets access to inferences derived from the cloud vs. some federation of local storage devices?
Any security camera product can do this, Flock is winning on having an integrated cloud solution with an all in once price that integrates with a lot of other law enforcement tools.
You can put a camera on a pole with a cell router and enable the LPR plugin in your recording software pretty darn cheap. But you probably can't do that with a single subscription apart from Flock.
> Any security camera product can do this, Flock is winning on having an integrated cloud solution
Flock provides a fire-and-forget service. The city contracts Flock, and then the cameras are put up and managed. I'm asking if anyone else does this without Flock's baggage.
Randomly inserting “allegedly” where it doesn't belong isn't a requirement for news organizations, its sloppiness. Inserting it appropriately may be a requirement or at least a reasonable effort to avoid overstepping the facts (and avoid liability for things like defamation where overstepping would harm reputations), but this is not that. The source they are attributing the claim to did not say that the data was allegedly used, they said that the data was IN FACT used. Either of these headlines would be reasonable and accurate given the facts in the body:
“Authorities say Flock cameras' data used for immigration enforcement”
or
“Flock cameras' data allegedly used for immigration enforcement”
Flock is required to comply with "lawful" requests and seems happy to do so.
This is largely the same for all major cloud camera operators. See also: Verkada and their facial recognition. These things are installed all over the place in public areas. And you think their facial recognition is compartmentalized to their specific tenant?
Simplified: you can make something illegal locally, but federal law will almost always win out.
Probably not. A state can regulate how its own resources are used. It can't block a federal warrant.
It's really not. These systems are bought and paid for predominantly by local governments. Most of whom don't spend any resources on immigration enforcement. Some of which have policies prohibiting such co-operation.
pretending that it is only "pro illegal immigration" people that are against what happened here is misguided at best, or purposefully manipulative and bad faith
Eliminating competition comes with the territory of survival.
> you can’t have a country of rights if you don’t extend those rights to non-citizens within your borders.
Sophistry. "Rights" asserted by contractual violation are invalid. If you pirate Windows you don't get to sue Microsoft when WGA denies you access. Expectation otherwise is an assertion of dominance by the weaker party.
You don't have a country at all if you don't enforce borders, which become meaningless in practice once you extend ingroup rights to outgroups. But you know this, hence your phrasing.
My understanding is that entering without getting inspected is misdemeanor (or felony in some cases), but that's often not the case. Usually people just overstay and that's civil case. And because it's treated as a civil matter a lot constitutional protections do not apply (to clarify: some still do).
Also non-citizens don’t have any particular rights beyond the Geneva Convention. We shouldn’t hurt them. But we should send them home.
If the citizens want an incredibly generous definition of “refugee” that includes “the country you’re from isn’t run well and you’re poor” then people should pass a constitutional amendment establishing that, and they should still register for such a visa and be approved for it before they enter.
That's just untrue.
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S8-C18-8...
> Shaughnessy v. United States ex rel. Mezei, 345 U.S. 206, 212 (1953); see also Mathews v. Diaz, 426 U.S. 67, 77 (1976) ("There are literally millions of aliens within the jurisdiction of the United States. The Fifth Amendment, as well as the Fourteenth Amendment, protects every one of these persons from deprivation of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.");
the user 'righthand' didnt define it that way...
its how the government defined it in 8 U.S.C. § 1325
>Also non-citizens don’t have any particular rights beyond the Geneva Convention.
this is also wrong. the constitutions protections generally extend to all people in the US
https://www.courierpress.com/story/news/local/2025/07/22/eva...
https://www.wyso.org/news/2026-05-01/dayton-suspends-automat...
https://www.daytondailynews.com/local/dayton-suspends-licens...
If your imagined competitor doesn't offer that feature, then how is it a competitor?
If your competitor does offer it, then why would it even matter whether ICE gets access to inferences derived from the cloud vs. some federation of local storage devices?
You can put a camera on a pole with a cell router and enable the LPR plugin in your recording software pretty darn cheap. But you probably can't do that with a single subscription apart from Flock.
Flock provides a fire-and-forget service. The city contracts Flock, and then the cameras are put up and managed. I'm asking if anyone else does this without Flock's baggage.
Other coverage:
Dayton mayor demands accountability after plate-reader data breach
https://www.wdtn.com/news/mayor-commissioner-demand-alpr-dat...
Randomly inserting “allegedly” where it doesn't belong isn't a requirement for news organizations, its sloppiness. Inserting it appropriately may be a requirement or at least a reasonable effort to avoid overstepping the facts (and avoid liability for things like defamation where overstepping would harm reputations), but this is not that. The source they are attributing the claim to did not say that the data was allegedly used, they said that the data was IN FACT used. Either of these headlines would be reasonable and accurate given the facts in the body:
“Authorities say Flock cameras' data used for immigration enforcement”
or
“Flock cameras' data allegedly used for immigration enforcement”
The actual headline is, OTOH, just plain wrong.