So I definitely agree it's a positive development that these cameras are being taken down because they're absolutely orwellian, but I really don't understand why "the line" is being drawn at immigration enforcement? Were people really okay with this until the point where they found out that illegal immigrants can be tracked by the surveillance state too?
I'd have no problems enforcing laws about illegal immigrants if they actually bothered to check and not just deport random brown people even if they're citizens.
This isn't the "people" waking up and not being okay with this, it is one governmental power (the state) realizing that its own power to manage its citizens (the residents of WA) and its sovereignty is being threatened by another power (the fed) in a new way. The system the state previously used to enforce its own power over its constituents is now helping the competing power to have more power over those constituents outside of cooperation with the state power, so they are removing it. There is no sudden awakening of citizen consciousness here. Many of the actions emerging around ICE stuff are about states trying to combat overreaching federal power.
I'm in the PNW and they put Flock cameras up in my area recently. Nobody likes them (libs or cons), and we've seen some rather creative approaches to uh...disabling them. One person took a pipe cutter to the mount and spirited the whole unit away, another apparently fired a shotgun slug through it, somebody else looks like they used it to relieve their anger problems with a metal pipe.
And yet they drive away in their GM/Ford/Nissan/Tesla/Any car/truck with its connected media unit and telemetry gathering infotainment systems and think “This is fine”.
Hey it's a start. Get people together who don't like Flock cameras and tell them about pulling the modem out of their vehicle and you'll get some bites.
People are probably unaware of the telemetry on their vehicle.
But this is a good point, people get upset when government is perceived to screw them over and not upset enough when the private sector does it. In practice, the private sector screws over the public quite a bit.
Might be logical. The government can throw me in jail, steal my stuff (aka civil
forfeiture), or (as we found out recently) tear gas my kids all without any penalty. In some situations, the government decides they are allowed to kill you.
Companies at least risk significant consequences if they start tear gassing children. For the most part the worst they can do is screw you out of some money, which is not great, but obviously better than imprisonment and the like.
We aren't at the point where it's unavoidable though. Even if we assume that its impossible to dodge random onstar/sirius bloatware crap that probably tracks you, you can definitely still buy a car that doesn't have a 5g wireless modem, 360-degree webcam coverage, mandatory automatic software updates, and ass-warming seats locked behind DRM that forces you to have an online account linked to your credit card.
"On Thursday, a Skagit County Superior Court judge ruled that pictures taken by Flock cameras in the cities of Sedro-Woolley and Stanwood qualify as public records, and therefore must be released as required by the state’s Public Records Act, court records show."
I do think that's an important distinction though; if I have a camera and record a public space, that's not an issue. If the government sets up a bunch of cameras, that's an issue, whether or not it's ICE, the FBI, or someone else using the cameras. I can't imagine the government will set up cameras and do non-scary things with it.
Not the right point to take away. The useful observation is that visibility is key to people understanding how their rights are being violated. Unfortunately this lesson is mostly useful to bad actors. If you're going to install surveillance cameras, don't make them look like surveillance cameras (unless they're part of a theft deterrent system).
"On Thursday, a Skagit County Superior Court judge ruled that pictures taken by Flock cameras in the cities of Sedro-Woolley and Stanwood qualify as public records, and therefore must be released as required by the state’s Public Records Act, court records show."
This video by Tom Lehto talks more about that court case that illustrates citizens can legally do FOIA requests for traffic cameras (e.g. Flock): https://youtu.be/1vQn4MWBln0
The example of Seattle Police dashcam and body camera footage may be interesting. When those things were relatively new, ten years ago or so, someone started filing daily public records requests for footage from all 911 dispatches (among other things). They wanted to build their own database of the theoretically public footage. The SPD complained that the overhead of redacting all that footage would be impossible. Eventually the legislature clarified the status and tightened the request rules, so now you have to request footage for a specific incident, and you may have to pay a redaction fee. [0]
Redactions are necessary to protect innocent members of the public. Going through all the footage from every officer every single day to perform these redactions would require a huge amount of manpower. That may change with new technology, but until it can be automated reliably, the WA legislature got this right.
With shit like traffic cameras, I don't think redactions are necessary, although it would be nice if all license plates were automatically redacted and only accessible with a warrant. Turning the cameras off is an even better idea.
I think it would generally be a good thing for cops kicking down doors to have working body cameras; the state's monopoly on violence is easily abused, and should be carefully monitored.
But if the cops get the wrong address for their no-knock warrant, kick down my door, and find me jerking off in my bedroom - I would prefer the footage not be made public.
NO, the fact that you are hitting scalability problems to do a whole bunch of redacting is a solid indicator that this is going too far on surveillance data.
The only indicator that it was done right, is that the redactions are happening in real time at the camera, only the list of license plates that have full warrant cleared authority for should be leaving the camera itself. (or full car description: color, make, model, scratches, time of day)
Otherwise there is a private company with a bunch of extra-legal tracking information they will monetize utterly illegally
The scaling problem of redacting video only applies to body cameras and I think they definitely aren't "going too far". Body cameras have greatly benefited society. The processes effectively restricting the rate at which you can file FOIA requests are entirely reasonable given the need to redact things to protect innocent people.
ten years ago or so, someone started filing daily public records requests for footage from all 911 dispatches (among other things).
I know someone who until very recently worked for a major city's police department. He said there were people who would request every video they could think of, and it was his team's job to scrub through the video and blur/block out faces of children and things like that.
He said his team was absolutely overwhelmed with requests from randos all over the country requesting things in bulk. Even if his team (~10 people, full-time) didn't take the extra step to redact some images, they simply couldn't keep up with it. Essentially, a FOIA DDOS.
The stress was too much, and he left for a different career.
(Before anyone asks if the PD imposed a fee for video, I don't know. It's possible the fee wasn't high enough, or maybe there's a state law regulating the fee. But I'm not sure it matters since there are plenty of cranks in the world with very deep pockets.)
I think someone even tried automating the redactions then posting to YouTube.
It’s an interesting case that pits privacy against transparency.
I absolutely want the cops to wear bodycams and I’d prefer they can’t even turn them off. But they also need to protect the privacy of victims, suspects, and witnesses. So they can’t just live stream to the Internet either.
How much is the redaction fee? How much would it cost to just pay it for everything?
Florida is a "sunshine state" [0] when it comes to public records which is why it's legal:
- to have mugshots and arrest records posted online
- which in turn leads to "attractive felon" style websites where mugshots are rated.
I'm generally for more privacy while at the same time getting why people push for transparency. Either way you get downstream and often unintended consequences.
Someone should use AI to request such a large amount of data that it DDoSes the whole system. Unfortunately I feel like that would result in traffic camera data just being removed from FOIA rather than removed from use.
If I recall, the FOIA allows government agencies to charge you for the work of processing your request if you're requesting more than N pages or it takes more than a couple hours of work to fulfill the request. I'd be careful about a maliciously compliant response to such a thing. That said, we live in a boring world where they'd probably just respond by threatening you with a felony hacking prosecution for attempting to take down their system.
Washington State Public Records Act has no fee if you simply want to "inspect" the records (bodycams are the named exception); they can charge "actual" costs for storage, but presumably Flock stores the data, so... They cannot charge for salaries, etc.
You can make your own copy of records for free; if you want them to make copies, they can charge actual costs.
I don't think that would be legal... you'd have to get a judge to reverse the previous decision that established the cameras are public record. They would probably just turn them off instead.
What did they think would happen? Installing surveillance systems to monitor people is acceptable, as long as they're only used against the majority? I don't understand the logic here.
It's pretty simple: People will tolerate surveillance technology if it promises to promote order and justice. People imagine them being instrumental in convicting murders, rapists, etc. ICE raids have been shown to be (I'm being generous here) sloppy and chaotic and seemingly targeting towards working people to grind towards a government-mandated quota - not the "bad guys" that plague our streets. Few are interested in a massive surveillance network to clamp down on what are essentially civil infraction of otherwise law-abiding and productive members of the community.
What kind of innane logic are you using here?! Yes, if the systems are installed for a reason approved by the public, and then they're used for a different reason, people don't like that.
I think this is a case of, tools used to fight one type of crime are being used to fight another type of crime that disrupting the community. Kind of an unforeseen consequences situation.
This type of use and expansion of scope was totally foreseeable by anyone paying attention to history. It always starts as some targeted thing, then it becomes the path of least resistance for similar subsequent things as the barrier to entry is extremely low.
> It always starts as some targeted thing, then it becomes the path of least resistance for similar subsequent things as the barrier to entry is extremely low.
This new technology will improve existing procedures. How can you oppose it?
This new procedure will use existing technologies. How can you oppose it?
Exactly. Same goes for expansion of presidential powers. It’s all fun and games as long as your “good” team controls the executive, but there will come a time when bad guy takes over. A good system of government limits the impact any single bad player might have.
In my country you'd have to get a warrant. You'll get pretty much carte blanche for an Amber Alert but the judge isn't going to let you hunt down brown people.
But I guess if you elect judges pretty much all bets are off, no? Just find yourself a card carrying MAGA judge willing to sign off.
This is the most foreseeable consequence I can imagine. It’s up there with “When I throw this baseball where will it land?”. It shouldn’t even require conscious thought.
Flock is a bad actor and untrustworthy (misleading departments and officials about how data is shared/accessed, literally reinstalling cameras that cities have demanded to be taken down). Regardless of whether the local municipality wants surveillance or not, Flock is not a trustworthy company to buy it from.
Dear God I hate this particular breed of techbros. These people don't give a damn about democracy, about human rights or anything else other than their stab at entering the history books in a "positive" light...
> misleading departments and officials about how data is shared/accessed
Many times this isn't misleading, per se, but nudge nudge wink wink. "We trust you to follow your own data privacy policy. It's not our job to police how access to your data is configured." In Washington, for example, there is data that LE cannot collect, and LE cannot pay someone to collect directly for them to bypass that...
... but if someone just so happens to ALREADY be collecting it, they can pay to access it.
Who? I don't understand your logic either. I don't think anyone said this "is fine as long as it's used against the majority". Virtually every large city uses Flock. This is the norm.
Specifically interesting is the section "State and local law enforcement agencies may not provide nonpublicly available personal information about an individual..." which puts police in a bind with Flock data: if the data is public, anyone can request it (including ICE) and they have to provide it to all comers. If they declare it not to be subject to public records request, then they also can't share it with ICE -- which is outside their control in practice, since Flock independently sells access to AI summaries of the data. In the face of this contradiction, turning the things off seems to be the only way to stay legal until the courts get done chewing on this.
They had never picked up a history book so they didn't realize that the systems they envisioned being used to stop the jackboot upon people they don't like would eventually be used to stomp people they do.
Back in a day, you did not have cameras yet, so one had to hire snitches. Luckily this is not the case anymore, as demonstrated by Chinese leading by an example:
Facts are no match for my ability to use short sighted emotion and motivated reasoning to convince myself it'll be different this time. /s
Kinda funny if you think about it, the snitches are cut from the same cloth as the people clamoring for more cameras, more jackboot. If anything they should be pissed about being cut out.
What’s there to understand? Property crime has gone up over time in the Pacific Northwest region. A lot of it simply goes unreported because victims are tired of not seeing consequences for criminals, and deductibles make it not worth filing insurance claims. The issue is that investigating many types of crimes is expensive and takes a lot of people. Cities don’t have the budget or political will to spend more. These cameras make it far more efficient to solve and deter crime, which is a huge win for public safety and budgets.
This decision to turn off Flock cameras is simply bad for residents. It’s the result of a small set of activists pressuring an activist city council.
I agree with this. As a resident of a neighboring suburb to Redmond, I would have welcomed more automated cameras to cut down on street racing, package thefts, and car prowls. In fact I want all of the suburbs around me to implement this so that criminals can't just flee to another jurisdiction and escape justice.
> so that criminals can't just flee to another jurisdiction and escape justice.
I think it's a fair deal so long as you can't escape to Utah/Idaho/Colorado when you realize the dystopia you've created isn't the kind of place you want to raise a family.
Seattle is in such a tough spot. I lived there from 2001 to 2010 and left and then went back in 2018 or so and it looked like the homeless population had doubled, or tripled in the time since. And then I went back again after COVID and it was just sad. The entire downtown area is just homeless camps. There used to be a big beautiful Macy's department store on 4th Ave that's just all boarded up now. You can't browse around outside Westlake Center without being bombarded and accosted by aggressive panhandlers. Even the iconic Pike Place Market was overrun with druggies.
The entire city is so poorly run they just have no answers, and nobody can do anything about it. Pick something. Build more housing, do a basic income. Something, anything. But they can't. And their politics just let it keep getting worse and worse.
> The entire downtown area is just homeless camps.
This isn’t even remotely close to true.
> You can't browse around outside Westlake Center without being bombarded and accosted by aggressive panhandlers. Even the iconic Pike Place Market was overrun with druggies.
I live on Pike Street. There’s homeless, but it’s not “overrun” and for the year+half I’ve lived here I haven’t been “accosted by aggressive panhandlers”. These are areas with constant foot traffic.
Yes 3rd & Pike is bad, but it’s improved since then. Late at night it’s not the best—but it’s never been.
If this is truly your experience, I urge you to visit again. Seattle is a large and beautiful city with a lot to offer.
In general the homeless problem downtown has gotten better but a few hotspots are still bad, notably Chinatown/International District. I used to enjoy taking visitors there until about 5 years ago when a few Asians got their heads bashed in or shot around Chinatown and Belltown. It was a politically inconvenient time to highlight who exactly was attacking Asians, and the issue was swept under the rug. Now we just stay in Bellevue, which luckily seems to be getting all the new Asian small businesses.
This sounds like the perspective of a beat-down Seattlite that thinks all the problems are just "normal". I lived there for a very long time, and have lived in several other major cities since then.
Seattle's problems are not "normal". And they should not be normalized by thinking this is just how it is. It is not that way in other places.
It sounds like your last visit was during the COVID-19 pandemic. Homeless encampment conditions in downtown Seattle and throughout the city have much improved since then. Today, visible homelessness is effectively the same as it was back in ~2005.
All the west coast port cities (SF, Portland, Tacoma, Seattle, Vancouver) imho have always had a similar s.hole vibe. For most of the last 40 years SF was the worst. But now Seattle has the top place. Clearly complex issue with many causes but also clearly someone in SF did something to improve the situation and someone in Seattle didn't do that thing.
Deflecting is a fun game, but I won’t play it. I’m challenging your hyperbole here—on the other hand, you’re making assumptions about me.
Explain to me how “the entire downtown area is just homeless tents”. By all means bring some proof of Pike Place being “overrun with druggies”. Get real.
Walk from Pike Place Market, 1st and Pike, east up Pike St toward Capitol Hill. Count the number of homeless camps you see sitting on cardboard boxes in the middle of the sidewalks. All along Pike St, 3rd Ave, 4th Ave. And then count the number of SPD officers you see (ignoring the fanny-pack guys handing out naloxone). You'll get it.
I don't know why you're being downvoted. I've lived in the area for nearly 20 years and I agree that his description is far exaggerated. It was true in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic (when any eviction or forcible displacement of people was prohibited), but not since then. Today, the visibility of homeless encampments in Seattle is roughly the same as it was 20 years ago.
> The homeless encampment problem in Seattle today is roughly now back at the same level of problem we had 20 years ago.
See, this is wild to me. Seattle has a long-time notorious problem with Tent Cities and even now it's just completely normal. I remember The Jungle under I-5 at Beacon Hill was a big problem. I'm sure it still is.
"The Jungle" isn't at all the same now, and is mostly cleared out from its heyday in ca 2018.
The larger problem with "The Jungle" is that nobody can agree on what it means, and where it is. I used to live on Beacon Hill, and the way journalists used the phrase was all over the place. Incidents anywhere from the I-90/I-5 interchange to the camps under I-5 all the way south to Georgetown, to the camps up in the woods in the East Duwamish greenbelt were all called "The Jungle".
The problem here is that the law and order politicians world wide pretty consistently follow a pattern that starts by demanding surveillance tools to fight very serious crimes and those crimes only. Once they get that, they eventually start another campaign to allow use of the tools that they now have access to for less serious crimes. After a few cycles of this, you get a massive erosion of citizen rights.
>they eventually start another campaign to allow use of the tools that they now have access to for less serious crimes.
Don't forget the part where the useful idiots cheer because "I hate street racers and package thieves" or "I hate cults and drugs" depending on the decade
Weird. There's an article right here showing them turning off the cameras when the line was crossed and now that data can't be used the way they don't want.
So clearly we're allowed more nuanced takes than you think.
"There's an article right here showing them turning off the cameras when the line was crossed and now that data can't be used the way they don't want."
Not exactly true. This happened after the arrests and won't affect those arrests. This also doesn't prevent ICE from installing and using Flock cameras on federal properties (like the post offices). I would also bet that they could still comb the existing data if they wanted to, hence the shutdown of the cameras on the fear that they can't keep the data safe.
Are you proposing everyone make the optimal decision in advance, when outcomes are all speculative, and just be sure to get it right so there’s no need to learn and adapt to circumstances?
I would hope so because no we are obviously not turning back the clock to a time when cameras did not exist.
Most people kind of find surveillance cameras reassuring.
They're installing them in my mom's apartment complex after a vote.
"Those (the Penn family) who would give up essential Liberty (money & power), to purchase a little temporary Safety (a veto over a taxation dispute, trying to raise money from the Penn family), deserve neither Liberty (said money & power) nor Safety (the defense that said taxed money would've bought from the present French & Indian wars)"
It doesn't, but at that point you're not referencing what a person meant, you're saying something they didn't intend with their words. You might as well make your point with your words, instead of misleadingly quoting someone else.
It's kind of funny if you think about it. Franklin spent so many years arguing for liberty, low taxes and limited government that when he tried to argue in favor of taxation and federal power he unintentionally still argued in favor of the former.
A lot of our political discussions and systems these days are warped by a failure to understand the ways that state-versus-federal differences have changed over time.
Even today, it's not necessarily hypocritical for someone to argue that states should do more X while the federal government should do less X.
> Those (the Penn family) who would give up essential Liberty
No, you've got it half-backwards.
He's saying the democratic legislature shouldn't forever give up the citizens' collective Liberty to tax the ultra-mega-rich (Penns) in exchange for a one-time Security payment from those rich near-nobles.
You don't understand why they may want surveillance to curb or investigate violent crime, but not why they oppose surveillance used by the Gestapo to kidnap members of their community? Seriously?
It's like saying I'm hypocritical for loving to write with pencils but being offended when someone else stabs me with one.
> Bro, you said you liked pencils, make up your mind!
No. I'm calling them idiots for giving a bunch of 3rd graders piles of newspapers and matches and expecting the eventual end result to be anything other than a fire.
This shit was wholly foreseeable but they flew right into the sun, not too close to it, right the fuck into it, because they just couldn't stop lusting after the idea of sending the jackboot after someone for a crime that amounts to petty deviance (I'd like to say they were using it to go after petty thieves, but we all know they weren't doing that).
This is just victim blaming people for assuming they lived in a polite society with safeguards for their rights at a higher level.
People are allowed to leverage trust in society to make tradeoffs. Or should we ban all forms of delivery because it can be abused at the extremes of the system to mug the drivers? Should every single store have every product locked behind glass and armed guards to light up any shoplifters, lest it be their fault for being robbed?
You're acting like they should have known the President would take complete control of the government and all other branches should cede while a Gestapo was deployed against the populace. And even then, they would only be buying time. The fascists will install their own mass surveillance anyway whether you like it or not. They're fascists!
Maybe blame every Republican and Republican voter for installing a fascist government instead of a city that had the audacity to think they could leverage stability to make their lives a little better.
And, for what it's worth, I know folk here like to pretend "this is just to spy on you", but that's just your rhetoric. The city doesn't care about where you go. But this kind of data is used frequently rape and murder cases, as traffic cameras are often some of the best evidence available. And the analytics collecter can be useful for all sorts of civil engineering, policy, and architectural decisions.
Now do I agree with the mass surveillance? Do I think the motivations were entirely pure? No, not really. But do I think you're being a bit of a drama queen and blaming the wrong people? Absolutely.
>This is just victim blaming people for assuming they lived in a polite society with safeguards for their rights at a higher level.
Karen (I actually have spicier thoughts about exactly who's at fault here but "Karen" will have to do) who provided the political will to set up the cameras is not the victim here.
Her hapless landscaper (or whatever) is the victim.
This was not unforeseeable. This was playing with fire. For years we build up the police state's capabilities and made it VERY cheap to run (with all these cameras and whatnot). Something like this was unenviable. If not the feds going whole hog on something that some states didn't agree with it would likely have been some states doing their own similar thing in some other policy area. Every government accountability group, every privacy group, they've been screeching for years. It's not like every warning wasn't sounded.
>The city doesn't care about where you go. But this kind of data is used frequently rape and murder cases, as traffic cameras are often some of the best evidence available.
This is a BS red herring. "serious" crime has been very solvable for years with cell location data, metadata, private security cameras, etc. But all that takes "work" (read: nontrivial amounts of money and labor the expenditure of which must be authorized and somewhat justifiable), a single unaccountable bureaucrat can't do all the heavy lifting of determining who to dispatch the boots on the ground to go after from the comfort of their desk
The entire purpose of the government having these systems like Flock is exactly what it's being used for. It's so that the .gov can still do jackboot things (like round up illegals, or whatever) without the oversight of Amazon, Verizon, etc, (companies with public images they care about) saying "hey man, this is too much, we don't like the look for our business" and pushing back. The only reason we're even hearing a peep is any strife here is because the local governments interests aren't aligned with the feds.
The city doesn't care where "I" go until I check the right (wrong) boxes and then they'll be waiting for the chance to harass me. The government didn't "care" until something flipped, and then the .gov was all over them. The same is true for you and everyone else.
And yes I'm being sloppy with with my wording and my reasoning, I could not be, but I don't really care to write to that high a standard.
"I don't respect facts I don't like" is not a very respectable point of view and makes me not want to engage at all.
> with cell location data, metadata, private security cameras, etc
I'm sure you'd argue that the government should have access to all of that data and it could never be used for "jackbooting"?
EDIT: Even if you did genuinely support all that, you're doing exactly what this city did! Making a subjective judgement call about where to put the proverbial line, but still giving the government the ability to use this data because you value its ability to benefit us / provide safety guarantees.
All that data can just as easily be stolen and abused by a fascist government.
> It's so that the .gov can still do jackboot things (like round up illegals, or whatever)
You are quite literally posting in the context of TFA about them turning them off explicitly because they did not intend them to be used for "jackboot things". FFS.
The police (local or federal) don't have integrations with private CCTV, historical location data, etc, etc. When they want that stuff they have to email someone, ask someone, have a reason, maybe even get a warrant, etc. Heck, even to snoop on someone's facebook they create a paper trail going through the law enforcement portal This is not a big deal for "real crime" but for stuff the public doesn't actually support serious enforcement of it's a big PITA, creates a risky paper trail they don't fully control, there's potential oversight, etc. All that constrains how far they can go without local public support.
Being able to just "go fishing" from your desk like you can with Flock (and to a lesser extent Ring), like the NSA can with all our emails and metadata, etc, etc, and all that other 1984 type dragnet stuff, is a categorical difference and nobody should have that power.
If stabbing people is so wrong, why don’t we lock up all the surgeons?
Of all the poor thinking and rhetorical skills out there, the one that drives me the craziest is this insistence that ignoring context is not just acceptable but essential.
A little annoyed, this seems like is has nothing to do with the ICE arrests...
> The city suspended its Flock system because city officials could not guarantee they wouldn’t be forced to release data collected by those devices someday, she said.
Key part is "someday". Seems like the article is implying that flock may have shared this data with ICE which led to the arrests... but there is no proof supporting this...
> On Thursday, a Skagit County Superior Court judge ruled that pictures taken by Flock cameras in the cities of Sedro-Woolley and Stanwood qualify as public records, and therefore must be released as required by the state’s Public Records Act, court records show.
This is the more likely reason. What do folks here think about this ruling?
IMO it seems obvious that this should be public records/data, but would love to hear alternative positions to this.
I can't stand this type of "journalism"/sensationalism.
> Redmond’s Police Department was not among those listed in the report, and has never allowed external agencies to access their Flock data without requesting and receiving permission from the police chief first, according to an Oct. 24 statement by Lowe.
So because the arrests were near a Flock Camera the "journalist" is connecting the two? Even with the statements an information to the contrary?
This wouldn't be the first time Flock was used by ICE and would not be the first time Flock allowed ICE backdoor access against the wishes of the local government or police department in Washington. https://jsis.washington.edu/humanrights/2025/10/21/leaving-t...
So making the connection isn't a leap and seems like a pretty pragmatic action taken to reduce ICE's ability to surveil communities.
The journalists didn't make this connection, it was a topic of discussion at the city council meeting. And the result of that discussion was to suspend the cameras anyway, out of concern that ICE could end up with the the Flock data, even if they hadn't already. It would have been odd for the journalist to report on the outcome and leave out the event that prompted it.
I think we need to revise our understanding of expectation of privacy. The 'you have no expectation of privacy when you are outside' bit was formed before we had everything recording us and before face recognition could track us.
At the very least I think any kind of face recognition should require probable cause.
Its an interesting question indeed. You're saying there might be some expectation of privacy even in public?
The line here is a little different. I could point a camera out my window and record every license plate that drives by my house, and that would be allowed because its recording public activities, and the data I collect would be private—its mine from my camera.
The question here is if a public/government agency pays a private company to setup cameras in public, for the benefit of the public, then should that data collected by those cameras not also be public?
The courts seem to agree that it should be public, and I fail to see why it shouldn't be. Maybe I should read the opposition briefs on it.
You're saying there might be some expectation of privacy even in public?
There should be. I like how this is handled in Japanese media, where there is such an expectation - people's faces are blurred unless they opt in, and publishing photos/video without redating people's identities is not just a social misstep but grounds for a lawsuit if it causes distress for the subject. You need a release for any commercial use of photography, and non-commercial publication (eg Instagram or your art blog) can still get you sued if it infringes on others' privacy.
P.S.: To put it another way, a major purpose law is to clarify and codify the expectations the people. Not just expectations of privacy, but expectations of when we have liberty to observe or record.
We expect that our faces might be captured on someone's vacation photos in public, surviving as an anonymous and unconsidered background detail, and that we can take our own photos like that without getting permission from everyone in the background.
In contrast, we don't (didn't?) expect all the photos to feed into a mega-panopticon that that does facial-recognition on all subjects and cross-references us over time and space while running algorithms looking for embarrassing, criminal, or blackmail-able events.
> The question here is if a public/government agency pays a private company to setup cameras in public, for the benefit of the public, then should that data collected by those cameras not also be public?
This is how NASA operates with the data/images collected from the tax payer funded operations it runs. There is a period of exclusivity allowed for some projects to allow the people to work with the data, but anybody can go down load high res imagery once it has been released.
Awesome, thank you for the input. I suspected NASA was operating this way, but I had no idea there was a period of exclusivity. In the case of NASA, the private companies are those like JPL and the sorts I guess?
I assume it is/was similar with other data collected, like weather data/radar, oceanic current/buoy data, etc?
I read about this regarding Hubble imagery, but pretty sure it applies to all missions funded by tax payers. The teams requesting time from the platforms are granted exclusive time to work out what they need so they can publish their papers for credit and what not.
One of the great things here is that most of the teams are so focused on their specific criteria in the data, they sort of lose the forest in the tree. Once that data has been released to the public, more and more interesting things are being found in the existing data rather than requiring new observations. It's space, so most things only need to be imaged once per sensor. It's not like setting up a trap camera hoping to see big foot the one time he strolls past. The universe changes on a much slower scale so the data is still relevant for much longer.
> Once that data has been released to the public, more and more interesting things are being found in the existing data rather than requiring new observations.
Really highlights the value of the data being public, which I feel is often overlooked now a days. Hard to tie KPIs to value that comes like this.
> You're saying there might be some expectation of privacy even in public?
Sure. The expectation is that your every move in public is not being recorded and stored on a central system that the government, and by extension various kinds of bad actors, can access.
In a society where the government's role is to defend its citizenry rather than participate in their exploitation, this would be an easy choice.
US governments (both federal and local) face some challenges here, because "defend its citizenry" is not really one of its main goals.
If your neighbors were across the street and had their blinds open could you point your camera at their window and take pictures?
License plates were designed to be read and visible and they show that the vehicle is registered, but what about inside the vehicle? Do we have privacy in there?
What exactly does 'in public' mean? And why shouldn't someone have privacy from being recorded and their movements tracked even if they are in public?
None of these things are a given. The rights we have are because we decided they were important. There is no reason we can't revisit the question as situations change.
Might make sense to revisit the constitutionality of license plates, rather than try to attack public recording.
They're demanding you show your "papers" registration at all times without articulable suspicion you've committed a crime/infraction. The fourth amendment arguably protects us from the government requiring us to show us our papers at all times when we're travelling in the most common form of conveyance.
> I could point a camera out my window and record every license plate that drives by my house, and that would be allowed because its recording public activities, and the data I collect would be private—its mine from my camera.
Maybe you shouldn’t be allowed to do that. Permanent persistent recording of the public feels very different than taking a photo every once in a while, and I feel it’s an infringement of privacy even when a single person does it.
Feels more like stalking to me when the government does it. The intent is to intimidate and put the observed parties in imminent fear of imprisonment if they do something those in power do not like. Coupling this with intentionally following them around, with the specific goal of en masse systematic targeting of those in transit, albeit with stationary cameras strategically replaced, has a lot of parallels to criminal stalking.
If you put up cameras on all the intersections on the way of say an ex went to work, and started logging when they were coming and going, it's hard for me to believe a prosecutor wouldn't be able to file that under some stalking-adjacent statute. The fact that they're doing the same thing en masse doesn't make it more generalized, it's just a larger scale of high specificity.
I think it's less of a revision and more a return to a core meaning.
Privacy isn't a mechanic, it's a capability, and most reasonable people DO expect, implicitly, that that they can travel unremarked under most circumstances.
I think most people would agree that a government drone swarm specifically tasked to follow you everywhere in public (loitering outside buildings) would be an invasion of privacy. Especially when it is illegal not to be wearing some equivalent of license plates.
From what I read, the pressure from activist groups on Redmond’s city leadership began before the Skagit County ruling. So it is probably unrelated. But I think it’s still a bad outcome for Redmond. Why wouldn’t you want law enforcement to be able to observe public spaces (which these cameras are monitoring) and identify or track suspects? We want our city services (like policing) to be efficient, right? We want criminals to be arrested and face consequences, right? We all want safe cities and neighborhoods, right?
I think the Skagit county ruling is likely to be appealed. There is a lot of information that governments can redact for a variety of reasons, despite FOIA or state/local transparency laws. It seems obvious that there’s a case for law enforcement to be able to access footage but to avoid handing over that kind of intelligence to the general public, where criminals could also abuse the same data. And I just don’t buy the argument that surveillance through cameras is automatically dystopian - we can pass laws that make it so that data is only accessible with a warrant or in a situation with immediate public risk. There are all sorts of powers the government has that we bring under control with the right laws - why would this be any different?
As for Redmond turning off its cameras - this is just fear-mongering about ICE. In reality, it’s just sanctuary city/state resistance to enforcing immigration laws. Redmond’s police department confirmed they’ve never shared this camera data with federal agencies, but that doesn’t stop activist types from making unhinged claims or exerting pressure. In reality, it’s activists of the same ideological bias as the soft on crime types that have caused crimes to go up dramatically in the Pacific Northwest in the last 20 years. They’re happy to see law enforcement hampered and the public put at risk - the ICE thing is just the new tactic to push it.
Your first paragraph doesn’t just beg the question, it outright harasses it.
…and identify or track suspects?
For starters, we’re all suspects when those cameras are running. Granted, AI-driven facial recognition is 100% accurate, so if you have nothing to hide…
> Why wouldn’t you want law enforcement to be able to observe public spaces (which these cameras are monitoring) and identify or track suspects?
Yeah, why wouldn't I want that? Or Flock "helpfully" proactively flagging AI-generated "suspicious vehicle movements" to LE for investigation? What could wrong there?
> We all want safe cities and neighborhoods, right?
Was it hard not to end that paragraph with a "Won't somebody think of our children?"?
Couldn't they just not log the license plates and only look for license plates on the list like stolen cars, stolen plates, amber alert etc? Why do they a need a list of all cars that the camera saw?
Immigration is similar to the housing crisis and Nimbyism. Voters don't want a streamlined and efficient immigration system that lawfully allows a lot of migrants in (NIMBY). it is also similar to the war on drugs and its failure, ICE won't solve anything just as the DEA only made things worse with drugs.
No matter what, the whole ICE acting like the SS thing will only result in more illegal migration in the long term, like a lot more. Same with europe's far right teasing.
If the "infrastructure" can't support more people, we can build more here in the US. Borders shouldn't be open, but more health and able-bodied or skilled people wanting to migrate, so long as their criminal history is clear, should be let in, infrastructure should be scaled. It's more economic activity and wealth for the rest of us. More jobs, more workers. We need to do that for the housing crisis anyways.
We need more cities, more development, less NIMBY-thinking and less "beat them until they comply" thinking. Too many people who don't know or are unwilling to solve real problems but are eager to see cruelty and violence cause these untenable and regrettable situations.
The lesson learned is that people going to their immigration hearings to stay legal are getting nabbed, and going the legal way is a convoluted recipe for failure.
As soon as enforcement lets up an iota the lesson will be it is wiser to stay off paper and off the visa pathway and go underground. People who aren't arrested and don't present to CBP for entry and don't get a visa, as far as the government knows, don't exist.
The people going to their immigration hearings to "stay legal" were apprehended as illegal immigrants, invited to come up with an excuse as to why they should be allowed to stay in the country, and released. You'll literally see "apprehension date" on their paperwork. The "legal way" is to apply for that stuff, then enter the country.
It's annoying that people elide this. There is an ongoing attempt by the current administration to remove these very recently introduced practices that no one voted for. Or a show of an attempt, really, because they love illegal labor.
But it's weird that for the past decade that illegal immigrants who have been caught are released almost immediately into a dilatory multi-year process of hearings. It's also weird that even those that have not been apprehended are issued IDs, work permits, business and drivers licenses, get in-state tuition as state schools, and in some places get to vote for local elections. There was never a debate about this, and it would have never survived a debate.
It's important to note that none of the countries that they are coming from allow people to do this. You can't just walk into Mexico and be Mexican, or fly to Nigeria and be Nigerian. Any shock that they have is in how easy it is to just walk and fly into the US and stay indefinitely.
> it is wiser to stay off paper and off the visa pathway and go underground.
This is how it used to be. But "underground" is nothing like this; it isn't in-state tuition and business licenses and street protests. It's usually harder than just going back home. In the late 90s, net migration from Mexico was negative. The "wall" (that Hillary Clinton helped push, and had a hand in started modern left-bashing among Democratic administrations) was a bad idea because a lot of people just jumped the border for enough time to make a few dollars, then ran back. People would go back and forth half a dozen times. After the wall, getting across was so onerous that you had to stay.
Previously, if you were a Mexican who hit a bad financial patch, you ran to the US, worked like a dog, and ran back with enough cushion to get your life going again - if you failed again, you could just repeat the process. After the wall when you hit that same patch, you had to commit to trying to make a life in the US.
I think the inflection point was the desire to get cheap labor to repair New Orleans after the flood, but they didn't want to hire the black people who lived there, they wanted to get rid of them, to ship them out to FEMA trailers in neighboring states. That's exactly what they did.
> The "legal way" is to apply for that stuff, then enter the country.
Which is next to impossible, particularly for immigrants who pick crops and process livestock. It’s annoying when people elide this.
> It's also weird that even those that have not been apprehended are issued IDs, work permits, business and drivers licenses, get in-state tuition as state schools, and in some places get to vote for local elections.
Or since those people pay taxes and are subject to governance, maybe it isn’t weird at all.
I don't think the drugs analog works. What this activity by ICE does though is put a chilling effect on "legal" immigration and tourism. Which will over time hurt supply chains, tourist destinations and jobs overall.
I agree with GP, but from the opposite perspective.
ICE doing a good job of removing illegal aliens ("acting like SS" in GP's parlance) will trigger the next democratic president to relax border enforcement. This is what happened with Biden. He let in 7.2 million migrants [1].
There's no way for Trump to deport 7.2 million people in 4 years. Pro-illegal immigration presidents are always at an advantage.
Trump's strict (and good) policies might trigger the next democratic president to just blanket pardon all illegal aliens, and the next republican president can't do anything about it.
> No matter what, the whole ICE acting like the SS thing will only result in more illegal migration in the long term, like a lot more.
How so? What mechanism do you see that goes from "ICE acting like the SS" to "a lot more illegal migration in the long term"? What's the cause and effect here?
Not saying you're wrong, necessarily, just... I don't see the causality at all.
Why fill out the right paperwork and actually attend your court dates and immigration hearings if there is a good chance that will result in your extraordinary rendition to some torture prison God-only-knows-where? Much safer to simply stay off the books.
Well ideally you're supposed to have a valid visa before you cross the border. I don't like the idea of the government promising people a path to amnesty and then going back on its word because there's a new administration in town but ultimately the people they're nabbing are in this situation because they already have invalid visas so I don't think it follows that this would discourage people from obtaining visas like they were supposed to have already done.
My guess is he sees ICE hauling people out of even the courts when they were attempting to abide by the legal processes and will say f-it, why bother, its safer to not adhere. just my assumption of OP's intent.
What was the reaction to SS? or to stick to my DEA example, what was the result of the war on drugs? millions and millions dead because of drug related causes right? how do you think the nation will react to ICE's brutal and cruel, even illegal operations? many would consider them heroes, but the other side will consider them no different than the SS or gestapo, the only correction is to wind down immigration enforcement dramatically, increasing immigration.
Imagine a democrat administration simply reverting ICE to its pre-2025 state. the implication alone and the perception it gives will drive up illegal immigration. "america is open again".
Statistics are showing that the total immigrant population is down by over a million since the start of the year. If you have the ability to leave, why put up with this nonsense?
A large number of people, myself included, are now radicalized against the concept of immigration enforcement. I think everyone has a duty to make sure that ICE is as ineffective as possible and ICE agents are as miserable as possible. There's a lot of talk, for example, about how the asylum system is easily abusable; that's true, but now we will not be able to fix it because no immigration reform compromise that doesn't destroy ICE is acceptable.
My city, capital city, local PD (also in Washington state) put out this press release after ICE blocked up a busy intersection in peak hour chasing someone:
> [Department] was not notified of or involved in this enforcement action. By state law, city resolution, and department policy, [we do] not cooperate or coordinate with federal immigration enforcement.
> Voters don't want a streamlined and efficient immigration system that lawfully allows a lot of migrants
There was a really interesting open ended survey some years ago, in the leadup to the trump/clinton election but I can't find it now sorry.
When republicans voters were asked to describe their preferred immigration policies, they outline a stance significantly more permissive and flexible, and less burdensome, than the one we currently have. More liberal than the reality, in other words.
People don't know what the immigration policies are and so they can't know what they should be either. The anti-immigration sentiment is a stunning propaganda victory decades in the making, no more.
Is self-determination a human right? We certainly decided a lot of nations to the south of us didn't deserve that right. Look up the history of the banana republics some time.
Up until it conflicts with my country’s rights, yes. Not sure what you’re suggesting. Is mass migration to the United States the policy of, say, Mexico?
I'm suggesting that we spent a lot of effort overturning elected governments in South America because we didn't like who they voted for and what their policies were with regard to US fruit companies. US policy directly created instability, civil war, and a generally terrible situation that they are dealing with now. Do you know what a banana republic is?
People want immigrants. It is just that they want them to be second class citizens that are not allowed to earn more than them because of their skin color.
I was resistant to this argument for a long time, but the ICE thing makes it clear that really the core of all of this is racism.
> will only result in more illegal migration in the long term
Why? Wouldn't it disincentivize illegal immigration by making it much more riskier?
Agreed that the legal immigration system needs an overhaul, these are a lot of people living in limbo, paying taxes and not causing crimes with very few rights.
The term no taxation without representation was the reason the USA got founded.
It's a temporary partisan solution, the other party will do the opposite, reducing enforcement and letting even more illegal migrants in, lest they be accused of being a xenophobe.
Not sure of that to be honest, I think that would be a loud minority.
Once democratic cities got a taste of the flood of people coming in that were sent by southern states, they realized how big the issue is and how much of a drag on resources it is.
That's not how it is in reality, southern states (not just them though) have been doing that with homeless people too, not just immigrants.
Republicans did jim crow in the 50s and 60s, we still talk about it today, and the positive blowback from that needs no explanation. Keep in mind that ICE is doing a lot more than cops did to protesters in the 60s, and it is targeting not just one group but several minority groups. not only that, it is all being live streamed, and it is affecting a lot of majority-group americans more directly. If ICE can avoid being disbanded it would be a great victory for them.
If I were exaggerating, I would be talking about tribunals and mass incarcerations of ICE agents, but I'm not.
No, it was Republicans (today) who used to be democrats in that era. parties are made up of people, it was the same people or their ideological inheritors. Many republicans today in congress (especially leadership) were of voting age in that era. a 20 year old in 1969 would be 75 today, younger than the current and former president.
Ironically, there would be little need for surveillance state technology if the on-the-books immigration law had been enforced for the past few decades.
I can think of many uses for "surveillance state technology" that have nothing to do with immigration: It can be used against citizens and legal residents too.
But the sorts of ICE actions that are causing this controversy only have political support because the US immigration laws have been flouted for 30+ years. Regardless of what you or I think of it it’s the reality that lots of the electorate wants deportations and lots of them and that likely isn’t true in a world where the laws on the books were more strictly enforced in the past.
What political support? Is there evidence to back that claim? The most recent polls I've seen about this are Gallup's polls from July and they suggest that 62% of Americans disapprove of how Trump is handling immigration. This includes a majority of Dems and Independents. The trend is more and more people disapprove of Trump on this topic as time moves forward.
I don't have any data to back this up, but it is conceivable the people that want to deport en masse often understand that the perception of such policy is ugly, and simultaneously support it while not wanting to publicly broadcast it.
If I supported mass deportations, I would simply vote for it and never tell anyone so that I could get what I want without getting any of the flack from the associates of the people who are deported. There's not a lot to gain from telling others you want to harm a bunch of your neighbors, but there is a lot to gain if you can give them the boot and not being perceived as having anything to do with their misfortune.
They want deportations because... because someone told them that immigration is the cause of all of their personal problems, which is a lie.
It doesn't matter about the "support" for it when that support is predicated on a complete lie, that immigration is bad for America when it demonstrably is good for America.
No, there are many reasons people want deportations, but mainly people don't think others should get the benefits of being part of a country while flaunting its rules.
In short: "if you want to join our group, you should like our group and add to our group".
Stories like these are what turned people away:
- New York giving free debit cards to migrants to buy their ethnic food because they don't like free American food.
They don't have majority political support. Even many Trump voters are against it. Also Trump has repeatedly violated immigration law, hell Trump tower wouldn't exist without the work of unauthorized Polish workers
Red herring. Political support is due to mass media narrative campaigns, in this day and age groundswell politics is simply infeasible with the power that narrative has in today's culture.
Hence the importance of controlling the narrative by spinning unchecked stories about immigrants eating cats, disproportionate rates of murder and crime, ignoring revenue from immigrants paying taxes, etc.
The fact that sufficient people will vote on immigration as an issue is orthogonal to the realities of laws and enforcement rates and entirely predicated upon perception of such issues.
on the books immigration law has been broken for decades. do you expect people across the border wait a decade to get their turn for an immigration interview only to be turned down, when they can just cross the border?
When laws become impractical, they create 11 million law breakers.
Hundreds of thousands to millions of people have come to the US legally each year for the last thirty years.[0] How is that impractical? In fact the share of immigrants in the US has increased significantly (by 3 times) in the last 50 years, and is above the level of the EU, and is at the highest level in the last 100 years in the US.[1][2] Even if legal immigration was set to zero, that shouldn't give people the right to come here illegally.
To be clear I am not making an argument that mass surveillance is needed to solve any problem.
US vs EU vs OECD: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SM.POP.TOTL.ZS?most_rec... - I'm pretty sure the values here include illegal immigration as well, so if you factor that in the US may be lower than the EU, but again still at historically very high levels.
The biggest illegal immigration source is the southern border. Yes, lots of people have immigrated, but they're a tiny fraction of those who wanted to immigrate. H-1B is a good example, it counts as immigration but it is really not, it is residency contingent on specific employment contracts. Those people with H-1B have no way to gain permanent residency without their employer sponsoring them, which would let them leave the company so employers don't tend to do that a lot.
The comparison with EU is not meaningful, especially since it isn't even a country. The population growth of the US and the world as a hole has also risen by more than that factor, even in the past two decades or so it has more than doubled.
>Yes, lots of people have immigrated, but they're a tiny fraction of those who wanted to immigrate
What point are you making here specifically? Are you saying the law is considered broken unless all or most people that want to come to the US can come? If so, the citizens (or at least the government) of the country are the ones that decide its laws, not people who want to immigrate to that country.
>H-1B is a good example, it counts as immigration but it is really not
The fist link I gave only includes green cards issued, it doesn't include H-1B visas to begin with. In any case, H-1B is not that significant a source of immigration, it seems to account for less than 1 million people in the US.[0] And it pays better than immigrating illegally in 99% of cases, most people would take that. Also by your own metric immigrating illegally isn't immigration either. I don't see what specific point you are making. Are you saying people come here illegally because they don't want to come via an H-1B visa, or are you just making a general point that immigration is not that high?
>The comparison with EU is not meaningful, especially since it isn't even a country
Then why does the worldbank include it? And why use OECD as a metric for anything if it isn't a country?
>population growth of the US and the world
The "highest in 100 years" statistic is in terms of percentage, so that shouldn't be relevant.
The entire point is that they legally in fact may not do so, and have only been doing so because of the lack of enforcement GP cites.
> When laws become impractical, they create 11 million law breakers.
We don't have nearly the same scale of problem in Canada. That probably has much more to do with only sharing an unsecured land border with a rich country.
It isn't. 2/3rds of illegal immigrants come to the US legally (and then overstay). Unless you make it illegal for non-citizens to visit the US, you can't stop most illegal immigration.
We can start with that 1/3rd. Then we remove as many economic incentives as possible to make overstaying visas that much less attractive to tackle the other 2/3rds.
It's weird to see people (perhaps not you specifically) who often support dramatic gun control measures to address a tiny percentage of crime among the first to trot out the old saw that only a relative fraction of illegal migrants got that way by an illegal border crossing. 1/3rd is a lot. 1/3rd is a great start.
Addressing that 1/3rd also would address the real edge cases (as in there are only a few of them) like terrorists and serial criminals.
employers hiring illegal migrants is also an option for them. those employers are not being targeted by ICE. It's the DEA arresting drug users but being buddies with drug lords all over again.
Employers are being targeted [0]. It also can be difficult to successfully prosecute, especially when one can maintain a clean separation between the labor and the enterprise (agriculture is like this with Farm Labor Contractors).
That said, I wish they would step up the prosecutions. It's critical to hammer away at economic incentives for illegal migration.
> on the books immigration law has been broken for decades. do you expect people across the border wait a decade to get their turn for an immigration interview only to be turned down, when they can just cross the border?
No, I don't expect that at all. However the problem with your scenario isn't that they need to wait their turn, it's that they can "just cross the border". That fact that that has been allowed was an intentional policy decision.
How? As a migrant to the US I have generally found the rules quite reasonable, the UX of the websites is poorer than say the UK but the rules seem fine.
> do you expect people across the border wait a decade to get their turn for an immigration interview only to be turned down, when they can just cross the border?
Well yes, that's what following the law means. They can't complain about it, it's not their country, and they don't have a say on the rules.
In a similar vein by your logic, if you are in a hurry, why should you obey traffic laws when you can just run a red light or a stop sign right?
Hierarchy of needs. People want to follow the law, they need food,shelter, medicine,etc.. You can punish law breakers, but if you don't provide a way to lawfully do the thing, you're only breeding law breakers and nothing more.
A missing perspective here might be that even long term imprisonment isn't a deterrent for many migrants. The disparity in living conditions is just that steep.
There is a lawfully way to do the thing. The problem is that the lawfully way wants a very small set of people with specific skills. Canada does the same, most of their immigration are university graduates. The only reason Canada hasn't had an influx of immigration like the USA is because their southern border is the USA, not Mexico.
Most of the immigration to the USA is driven for economic reasons, not political asylum or persecution. There is no right to immigrate in the USA just because you want to, you have to convince the government somehow to let you in.
> even long term imprisonment isn't a deterrent for many migrants
But quick deportation is. Imagine doing the whole trek from south/central america to the USA just to be sent back the next day. That's what deterring a lot of people now, wasting months of travel and money just to have it be worthless seems to be very dissuasive.
A lot of the latest immigration woes would be solved if the Venezuelan government was taken down and some real democratic government stepped in.
Ah, the paper tiger crisis. Clearly the misdemeanor of being in the country illegally requires new technology to be developed for state surveillance to enforce those laws, police cannot possibly be expected to do their job without it /s.
The expectation of privacy and personal freedoms of 350M people seems to be an inconvenience for the state wanting deporting a few more people per year.
They are not being enforced now. In fact the current administration is actively trying to circumvent the law. Which should not be surprising considering how much Trump has violated immigration law in his personal life
Not strictly enforcing the speed limit wouldn't justify the use of secret police to crack down on that either. But there's no xenophobia for speeders, so we don't see this action for them and we don't have to see specious takes like this defending it.
Excessive speeders in the absence of speed-limit enforcement just creates neighbors that don't mind their neighborhood being consumed by speed bumps/dips, I think there's an analogy here in residential areas. And if you have a lot of children in your neighborhood, there IS a 'xx-phobia' for speeders. But speed bumps and dips are an absolute nuisance and sometimes dangerous, so just having cameras identify and a system willing to punish speeders would absolutely be the preference.
So I definitely agree it's a positive development that these cameras are being taken down because they're absolutely orwellian, but I really don't understand why "the line" is being drawn at immigration enforcement? Were people really okay with this until the point where they found out that illegal immigrants can be tracked by the surveillance state too?
People were okay with it when they assumed, I think naively, that only guilty people had anything to hide.
Now that we've got someone willing to throw all rules and morals to the wayside in charge, they've understandably begun to reassess.
I'd have no problems enforcing laws about illegal immigrants if they actually bothered to check and not just deport random brown people even if they're citizens.
This isn't the "people" waking up and not being okay with this, it is one governmental power (the state) realizing that its own power to manage its citizens (the residents of WA) and its sovereignty is being threatened by another power (the fed) in a new way. The system the state previously used to enforce its own power over its constituents is now helping the competing power to have more power over those constituents outside of cooperation with the state power, so they are removing it. There is no sudden awakening of citizen consciousness here. Many of the actions emerging around ICE stuff are about states trying to combat overreaching federal power.
The difference is Trump. This is more important than principles or logic to many people
Which is bad because a lot of them will be right back to insisting on more cameras, more data collection and more jackboot the second he's gone.
I'm in the PNW and they put Flock cameras up in my area recently. Nobody likes them (libs or cons), and we've seen some rather creative approaches to uh...disabling them. One person took a pipe cutter to the mount and spirited the whole unit away, another apparently fired a shotgun slug through it, somebody else looks like they used it to relieve their anger problems with a metal pipe.
Flock cameras, America's bipartisan issue?
Is there a way to see where they are located? Or which cities are installing them? Hadn’t heard of them til this week
You can find them listed here. https://deflock.me/map#map=5/39.828300/-98.579500
And yet they drive away in their GM/Ford/Nissan/Tesla/Any car/truck with its connected media unit and telemetry gathering infotainment systems and think “This is fine”.
Hey it's a start. Get people together who don't like Flock cameras and tell them about pulling the modem out of their vehicle and you'll get some bites.
Except when it’s all tied into the ECU and you can’t remove it. Ugh…
You’re right. It’s a start. There’s also https://www.deflock.me
On some vehicles it’s easier than others. Unfortunately it’s a great idea to research before making a purchase decision.
People are probably unaware of the telemetry on their vehicle.
But this is a good point, people get upset when government is perceived to screw them over and not upset enough when the private sector does it. In practice, the private sector screws over the public quite a bit.
Might be logical. The government can throw me in jail, steal my stuff (aka civil forfeiture), or (as we found out recently) tear gas my kids all without any penalty. In some situations, the government decides they are allowed to kill you.
Companies at least risk significant consequences if they start tear gassing children. For the most part the worst they can do is screw you out of some money, which is not great, but obviously better than imprisonment and the like.
Most cars or trucks used in the US are older than you seemed to assume.[1]
[1] https://www.bts.gov/content/average-age-automobiles-and-truc...
For most people in the US a car is a daily necessity so it’s very difficult to avoid that telemetry gathering.
We aren't at the point where it's unavoidable though. Even if we assume that its impossible to dodge random onstar/sirius bloatware crap that probably tracks you, you can definitely still buy a car that doesn't have a 5g wireless modem, 360-degree webcam coverage, mandatory automatic software updates, and ass-warming seats locked behind DRM that forces you to have an online account linked to your credit card.
Put me on that jury.
Well Tesla cameras don't qualify as public record
"On Thursday, a Skagit County Superior Court judge ruled that pictures taken by Flock cameras in the cities of Sedro-Woolley and Stanwood qualify as public records, and therefore must be released as required by the state’s Public Records Act, court records show."
I do think that's an important distinction though; if I have a camera and record a public space, that's not an issue. If the government sets up a bunch of cameras, that's an issue, whether or not it's ICE, the FBI, or someone else using the cameras. I can't imagine the government will set up cameras and do non-scary things with it.
"And yet, you live in a society. I am very smart."
Not the right point to take away. The useful observation is that visibility is key to people understanding how their rights are being violated. Unfortunately this lesson is mostly useful to bad actors. If you're going to install surveillance cameras, don't make them look like surveillance cameras (unless they're part of a theft deterrent system).
"On Thursday, a Skagit County Superior Court judge ruled that pictures taken by Flock cameras in the cities of Sedro-Woolley and Stanwood qualify as public records, and therefore must be released as required by the state’s Public Records Act, court records show."
This video by Tom Lehto talks more about that court case that illustrates citizens can legally do FOIA requests for traffic cameras (e.g. Flock): https://youtu.be/1vQn4MWBln0
The example of Seattle Police dashcam and body camera footage may be interesting. When those things were relatively new, ten years ago or so, someone started filing daily public records requests for footage from all 911 dispatches (among other things). They wanted to build their own database of the theoretically public footage. The SPD complained that the overhead of redacting all that footage would be impossible. Eventually the legislature clarified the status and tightened the request rules, so now you have to request footage for a specific incident, and you may have to pay a redaction fee. [0]
[0] https://mrsc.org/explore-topics/public-records/law-enforceme...
Redactions are necessary to protect innocent members of the public. Going through all the footage from every officer every single day to perform these redactions would require a huge amount of manpower. That may change with new technology, but until it can be automated reliably, the WA legislature got this right.
With shit like traffic cameras, I don't think redactions are necessary, although it would be nice if all license plates were automatically redacted and only accessible with a warrant. Turning the cameras off is an even better idea.
> Redactions are necessary to protect innocent members of the public
If these controls don't exist inside the organization, they shouldn't exist for the public either.
I think it would generally be a good thing for cops kicking down doors to have working body cameras; the state's monopoly on violence is easily abused, and should be carefully monitored.
But if the cops get the wrong address for their no-knock warrant, kick down my door, and find me jerking off in my bedroom - I would prefer the footage not be made public.
NO, the fact that you are hitting scalability problems to do a whole bunch of redacting is a solid indicator that this is going too far on surveillance data.
The only indicator that it was done right, is that the redactions are happening in real time at the camera, only the list of license plates that have full warrant cleared authority for should be leaving the camera itself. (or full car description: color, make, model, scratches, time of day) Otherwise there is a private company with a bunch of extra-legal tracking information they will monetize utterly illegally
The scaling problem of redacting video only applies to body cameras and I think they definitely aren't "going too far". Body cameras have greatly benefited society. The processes effectively restricting the rate at which you can file FOIA requests are entirely reasonable given the need to redact things to protect innocent people.
ten years ago or so, someone started filing daily public records requests for footage from all 911 dispatches (among other things).
I know someone who until very recently worked for a major city's police department. He said there were people who would request every video they could think of, and it was his team's job to scrub through the video and blur/block out faces of children and things like that.
He said his team was absolutely overwhelmed with requests from randos all over the country requesting things in bulk. Even if his team (~10 people, full-time) didn't take the extra step to redact some images, they simply couldn't keep up with it. Essentially, a FOIA DDOS.
The stress was too much, and he left for a different career.
(Before anyone asks if the PD imposed a fee for video, I don't know. It's possible the fee wasn't high enough, or maybe there's a state law regulating the fee. But I'm not sure it matters since there are plenty of cranks in the world with very deep pockets.)
I think someone even tried automating the redactions then posting to YouTube.
It’s an interesting case that pits privacy against transparency.
I absolutely want the cops to wear bodycams and I’d prefer they can’t even turn them off. But they also need to protect the privacy of victims, suspects, and witnesses. So they can’t just live stream to the Internet either.
How much is the redaction fee? How much would it cost to just pay it for everything?
As another data point/example:
Florida is a "sunshine state" [0] when it comes to public records which is why it's legal:
- to have mugshots and arrest records posted online
- which in turn leads to "attractive felon" style websites where mugshots are rated.
I'm generally for more privacy while at the same time getting why people push for transparency. Either way you get downstream and often unintended consequences.
0 - https://www.myfloridalegal.com/open-government/the-quotsunsh...
Someone should use AI to request such a large amount of data that it DDoSes the whole system. Unfortunately I feel like that would result in traffic camera data just being removed from FOIA rather than removed from use.
If I recall, the FOIA allows government agencies to charge you for the work of processing your request if you're requesting more than N pages or it takes more than a couple hours of work to fulfill the request. I'd be careful about a maliciously compliant response to such a thing. That said, we live in a boring world where they'd probably just respond by threatening you with a felony hacking prosecution for attempting to take down their system.
Washington State Public Records Act has no fee if you simply want to "inspect" the records (bodycams are the named exception); they can charge "actual" costs for storage, but presumably Flock stores the data, so... They cannot charge for salaries, etc.
You can make your own copy of records for free; if you want them to make copies, they can charge actual costs.
I don't think that would be legal... you'd have to get a judge to reverse the previous decision that established the cameras are public record. They would probably just turn them off instead.
What did they think would happen? Installing surveillance systems to monitor people is acceptable, as long as they're only used against the majority? I don't understand the logic here.
It's pretty simple: People will tolerate surveillance technology if it promises to promote order and justice. People imagine them being instrumental in convicting murders, rapists, etc. ICE raids have been shown to be (I'm being generous here) sloppy and chaotic and seemingly targeting towards working people to grind towards a government-mandated quota - not the "bad guys" that plague our streets. Few are interested in a massive surveillance network to clamp down on what are essentially civil infraction of otherwise law-abiding and productive members of the community.
What kind of innane logic are you using here?! Yes, if the systems are installed for a reason approved by the public, and then they're used for a different reason, people don't like that.
I think this is a case of, tools used to fight one type of crime are being used to fight another type of crime that disrupting the community. Kind of an unforeseen consequences situation.
"Kind of an unforeseen consequences situation."
This type of use and expansion of scope was totally foreseeable by anyone paying attention to history. It always starts as some targeted thing, then it becomes the path of least resistance for similar subsequent things as the barrier to entry is extremely low.
> It always starts as some targeted thing, then it becomes the path of least resistance for similar subsequent things as the barrier to entry is extremely low.
This new technology will improve existing procedures. How can you oppose it?
This new procedure will use existing technologies. How can you oppose it?
Exactly. Same goes for expansion of presidential powers. It’s all fun and games as long as your “good” team controls the executive, but there will come a time when bad guy takes over. A good system of government limits the impact any single bad player might have.
In my country you'd have to get a warrant. You'll get pretty much carte blanche for an Amber Alert but the judge isn't going to let you hunt down brown people.
But I guess if you elect judges pretty much all bets are off, no? Just find yourself a card carrying MAGA judge willing to sign off.
Federal judges are appointed.
Kind of an unforeseen consequences situation.
According to the article, it was foreseen. But the people who brought it up were ignored.
> Kind of an unforeseen consequences situation.
This is the most foreseeable consequence I can imagine. It’s up there with “When I throw this baseball where will it land?”. It shouldn’t even require conscious thought.
You have to be covering your eyes, plugging your ears, and shutting down your brain to not be able to foresee these consequences.
They are being used to perform another kind of crime. Much of ICE behaviour this past year has been highly criminal.
Redmond is under no obligation to assist them.
Flock is a bad actor and untrustworthy (misleading departments and officials about how data is shared/accessed, literally reinstalling cameras that cities have demanded to be taken down). Regardless of whether the local municipality wants surveillance or not, Flock is not a trustworthy company to buy it from.
> Regardless of whether the local municipality wants surveillance or not, Flock is not a trustworthy company to buy it from.
That's because the local authorities aren't the final customer. The final customer is the federal government, they want allllll the data.
And Garrett, the founder, has what even he calls a quite literal, not aspirational/visionary/metaphorical, aim that "We want to eliminate all crime."
Dear God I hate this particular breed of techbros. These people don't give a damn about democracy, about human rights or anything else other than their stab at entering the history books in a "positive" light...
> misleading departments and officials about how data is shared/accessed
Many times this isn't misleading, per se, but nudge nudge wink wink. "We trust you to follow your own data privacy policy. It's not our job to police how access to your data is configured." In Washington, for example, there is data that LE cannot collect, and LE cannot pay someone to collect directly for them to bypass that...
... but if someone just so happens to ALREADY be collecting it, they can pay to access it.
Who? I don't understand your logic either. I don't think anyone said this "is fine as long as it's used against the majority". Virtually every large city uses Flock. This is the norm.
It's apparently against Washington state law for local law enforcement to assist immigration enforcement: https://app.leg.wa.gov/RCW/default.aspx?cite=10.93.160
Specifically interesting is the section "State and local law enforcement agencies may not provide nonpublicly available personal information about an individual..." which puts police in a bind with Flock data: if the data is public, anyone can request it (including ICE) and they have to provide it to all comers. If they declare it not to be subject to public records request, then they also can't share it with ICE -- which is outside their control in practice, since Flock independently sells access to AI summaries of the data. In the face of this contradiction, turning the things off seems to be the only way to stay legal until the courts get done chewing on this.
They had never picked up a history book so they didn't realize that the systems they envisioned being used to stop the jackboot upon people they don't like would eventually be used to stomp people they do.
If you don't want to read a book, here is a Wikipedia article
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi
Back in a day, you did not have cameras yet, so one had to hire snitches. Luckily this is not the case anymore, as demonstrated by Chinese leading by an example:
https://t.co/Q1xOiQMmZT
Facts are no match for my ability to use short sighted emotion and motivated reasoning to convince myself it'll be different this time. /s
Kinda funny if you think about it, the snitches are cut from the same cloth as the people clamoring for more cameras, more jackboot. If anything they should be pissed about being cut out.
When history is racist, only racists will read history books.
What’s there to understand? Property crime has gone up over time in the Pacific Northwest region. A lot of it simply goes unreported because victims are tired of not seeing consequences for criminals, and deductibles make it not worth filing insurance claims. The issue is that investigating many types of crimes is expensive and takes a lot of people. Cities don’t have the budget or political will to spend more. These cameras make it far more efficient to solve and deter crime, which is a huge win for public safety and budgets.
This decision to turn off Flock cameras is simply bad for residents. It’s the result of a small set of activists pressuring an activist city council.
I agree with this. As a resident of a neighboring suburb to Redmond, I would have welcomed more automated cameras to cut down on street racing, package thefts, and car prowls. In fact I want all of the suburbs around me to implement this so that criminals can't just flee to another jurisdiction and escape justice.
> so that criminals can't just flee to another jurisdiction and escape justice.
I think it's a fair deal so long as you can't escape to Utah/Idaho/Colorado when you realize the dystopia you've created isn't the kind of place you want to raise a family.
Seattle is in such a tough spot. I lived there from 2001 to 2010 and left and then went back in 2018 or so and it looked like the homeless population had doubled, or tripled in the time since. And then I went back again after COVID and it was just sad. The entire downtown area is just homeless camps. There used to be a big beautiful Macy's department store on 4th Ave that's just all boarded up now. You can't browse around outside Westlake Center without being bombarded and accosted by aggressive panhandlers. Even the iconic Pike Place Market was overrun with druggies.
The entire city is so poorly run they just have no answers, and nobody can do anything about it. Pick something. Build more housing, do a basic income. Something, anything. But they can't. And their politics just let it keep getting worse and worse.
> The entire downtown area is just homeless camps.
This isn’t even remotely close to true.
> You can't browse around outside Westlake Center without being bombarded and accosted by aggressive panhandlers. Even the iconic Pike Place Market was overrun with druggies.
I live on Pike Street. There’s homeless, but it’s not “overrun” and for the year+half I’ve lived here I haven’t been “accosted by aggressive panhandlers”. These are areas with constant foot traffic.
Yes 3rd & Pike is bad, but it’s improved since then. Late at night it’s not the best—but it’s never been.
If this is truly your experience, I urge you to visit again. Seattle is a large and beautiful city with a lot to offer.
In general the homeless problem downtown has gotten better but a few hotspots are still bad, notably Chinatown/International District. I used to enjoy taking visitors there until about 5 years ago when a few Asians got their heads bashed in or shot around Chinatown and Belltown. It was a politically inconvenient time to highlight who exactly was attacking Asians, and the issue was swept under the rug. Now we just stay in Bellevue, which luckily seems to be getting all the new Asian small businesses.
This sounds like the perspective of a beat-down Seattlite that thinks all the problems are just "normal". I lived there for a very long time, and have lived in several other major cities since then.
Seattle's problems are not "normal". And they should not be normalized by thinking this is just how it is. It is not that way in other places.
> I lived there for a very long time
It sounds like your last visit was during the COVID-19 pandemic. Homeless encampment conditions in downtown Seattle and throughout the city have much improved since then. Today, visible homelessness is effectively the same as it was back in ~2005.
All the west coast port cities (SF, Portland, Tacoma, Seattle, Vancouver) imho have always had a similar s.hole vibe. For most of the last 40 years SF was the worst. But now Seattle has the top place. Clearly complex issue with many causes but also clearly someone in SF did something to improve the situation and someone in Seattle didn't do that thing.
Deflecting is a fun game, but I won’t play it. I’m challenging your hyperbole here—on the other hand, you’re making assumptions about me.
Explain to me how “the entire downtown area is just homeless tents”. By all means bring some proof of Pike Place being “overrun with druggies”. Get real.
Walk from Pike Place Market, 1st and Pike, east up Pike St toward Capitol Hill. Count the number of homeless camps you see sitting on cardboard boxes in the middle of the sidewalks. All along Pike St, 3rd Ave, 4th Ave. And then count the number of SPD officers you see (ignoring the fanny-pack guys handing out naloxone). You'll get it.
A single druggie/hobo is unacceptable in a functional society. Just enforce trespassing laws.
I don't know why you're being downvoted. I've lived in the area for nearly 20 years and I agree that his description is far exaggerated. It was true in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic (when any eviction or forcible displacement of people was prohibited), but not since then. Today, the visibility of homeless encampments in Seattle is roughly the same as it was 20 years ago.
> The homeless encampment problem in Seattle today is roughly now back at the same level of problem we had 20 years ago.
See, this is wild to me. Seattle has a long-time notorious problem with Tent Cities and even now it's just completely normal. I remember The Jungle under I-5 at Beacon Hill was a big problem. I'm sure it still is.
"The Jungle" isn't at all the same now, and is mostly cleared out from its heyday in ca 2018.
The larger problem with "The Jungle" is that nobody can agree on what it means, and where it is. I used to live on Beacon Hill, and the way journalists used the phrase was all over the place. Incidents anywhere from the I-90/I-5 interchange to the camps under I-5 all the way south to Georgetown, to the camps up in the woods in the East Duwamish greenbelt were all called "The Jungle".
You don't understand the logic of "there are some crime problems we're willing to accept more intrusions to solve than other crime problems?"
Seems like something virtually everyone believes, and all that changes is where they draw the line of balance between intrusion and safety.
The problem here is that the law and order politicians world wide pretty consistently follow a pattern that starts by demanding surveillance tools to fight very serious crimes and those crimes only. Once they get that, they eventually start another campaign to allow use of the tools that they now have access to for less serious crimes. After a few cycles of this, you get a massive erosion of citizen rights.
This is called "Salamitaktik" in Germany.
>they eventually start another campaign to allow use of the tools that they now have access to for less serious crimes.
Don't forget the part where the useful idiots cheer because "I hate street racers and package thieves" or "I hate cults and drugs" depending on the decade
For anyone else interested in reading more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salami_slicing_tactics
The point is that there is no actual line. There's the premise which then collects the data.
Then the data can be used for other purposes--no line prevents this.
Weird. There's an article right here showing them turning off the cameras when the line was crossed and now that data can't be used the way they don't want.
So clearly we're allowed more nuanced takes than you think.
"There's an article right here showing them turning off the cameras when the line was crossed and now that data can't be used the way they don't want."
Not exactly true. This happened after the arrests and won't affect those arrests. This also doesn't prevent ICE from installing and using Flock cameras on federal properties (like the post offices). I would also bet that they could still comb the existing data if they wanted to, hence the shutdown of the cameras on the fear that they can't keep the data safe.
All of which further confirms that there is in fact a line.
Reactivity isn’t proactively protecting what you belief. It’s reacting to public outcry for the original premise.
Are you proposing everyone make the optimal decision in advance, when outcomes are all speculative, and just be sure to get it right so there’s no need to learn and adapt to circumstances?
I propose we stop letting government do things that are revenue based and pretend they are “in our best interests”.
I would hope so because no we are obviously not turning back the clock to a time when cameras did not exist. Most people kind of find surveillance cameras reassuring.
They're installing them in my mom's apartment complex after a vote.
Really depends who owns the footage. I’m installing cameras on my house but the NVR is local-only.
"They did the thing and the public got mad so clearly they won't do it again"
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
And yet every society makes exactly this trade off.
There is no such thing as avoiding this trade off entirely.
i will never tire of the irony of a man who owned humans being lauded as a freedom fighter.
"Those (the Penn family) who would give up essential Liberty (money & power), to purchase a little temporary Safety (a veto over a taxation dispute, trying to raise money from the Penn family), deserve neither Liberty (said money & power) nor Safety (the defense that said taxed money would've bought from the present French & Indian wars)"
The context of the original quote doesn't prevent others from finding it more generally applicable or well-put.
It doesn't, but at that point you're not referencing what a person meant, you're saying something they didn't intend with their words. You might as well make your point with your words, instead of misleadingly quoting someone else.
It's kind of funny if you think about it. Franklin spent so many years arguing for liberty, low taxes and limited government that when he tried to argue in favor of taxation and federal power he unintentionally still argued in favor of the former.
A lot of our political discussions and systems these days are warped by a failure to understand the ways that state-versus-federal differences have changed over time.
Even today, it's not necessarily hypocritical for someone to argue that states should do more X while the federal government should do less X.
> Those (the Penn family) who would give up essential Liberty
No, you've got it half-backwards.
He's saying the democratic legislature shouldn't forever give up the citizens' collective Liberty to tax the ultra-mega-rich (Penns) in exchange for a one-time Security payment from those rich near-nobles.
https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famou...
Ironically you're correct, and yet I'm still closer to the original meaning than the typical quotation.
you don't understand it or you don't agree with it?
You don't understand why they may want surveillance to curb or investigate violent crime, but not why they oppose surveillance used by the Gestapo to kidnap members of their community? Seriously?
It's like saying I'm hypocritical for loving to write with pencils but being offended when someone else stabs me with one.
> Bro, you said you liked pencils, make up your mind!
No. I'm calling them idiots for giving a bunch of 3rd graders piles of newspapers and matches and expecting the eventual end result to be anything other than a fire.
This shit was wholly foreseeable but they flew right into the sun, not too close to it, right the fuck into it, because they just couldn't stop lusting after the idea of sending the jackboot after someone for a crime that amounts to petty deviance (I'd like to say they were using it to go after petty thieves, but we all know they weren't doing that).
This is just victim blaming people for assuming they lived in a polite society with safeguards for their rights at a higher level.
People are allowed to leverage trust in society to make tradeoffs. Or should we ban all forms of delivery because it can be abused at the extremes of the system to mug the drivers? Should every single store have every product locked behind glass and armed guards to light up any shoplifters, lest it be their fault for being robbed?
You're acting like they should have known the President would take complete control of the government and all other branches should cede while a Gestapo was deployed against the populace. And even then, they would only be buying time. The fascists will install their own mass surveillance anyway whether you like it or not. They're fascists!
Maybe blame every Republican and Republican voter for installing a fascist government instead of a city that had the audacity to think they could leverage stability to make their lives a little better.
And, for what it's worth, I know folk here like to pretend "this is just to spy on you", but that's just your rhetoric. The city doesn't care about where you go. But this kind of data is used frequently rape and murder cases, as traffic cameras are often some of the best evidence available. And the analytics collecter can be useful for all sorts of civil engineering, policy, and architectural decisions.
Now do I agree with the mass surveillance? Do I think the motivations were entirely pure? No, not really. But do I think you're being a bit of a drama queen and blaming the wrong people? Absolutely.
>This is just victim blaming people for assuming they lived in a polite society with safeguards for their rights at a higher level.
Karen (I actually have spicier thoughts about exactly who's at fault here but "Karen" will have to do) who provided the political will to set up the cameras is not the victim here.
Her hapless landscaper (or whatever) is the victim.
This was not unforeseeable. This was playing with fire. For years we build up the police state's capabilities and made it VERY cheap to run (with all these cameras and whatnot). Something like this was unenviable. If not the feds going whole hog on something that some states didn't agree with it would likely have been some states doing their own similar thing in some other policy area. Every government accountability group, every privacy group, they've been screeching for years. It's not like every warning wasn't sounded.
>The city doesn't care about where you go. But this kind of data is used frequently rape and murder cases, as traffic cameras are often some of the best evidence available.
This is a BS red herring. "serious" crime has been very solvable for years with cell location data, metadata, private security cameras, etc. But all that takes "work" (read: nontrivial amounts of money and labor the expenditure of which must be authorized and somewhat justifiable), a single unaccountable bureaucrat can't do all the heavy lifting of determining who to dispatch the boots on the ground to go after from the comfort of their desk
The entire purpose of the government having these systems like Flock is exactly what it's being used for. It's so that the .gov can still do jackboot things (like round up illegals, or whatever) without the oversight of Amazon, Verizon, etc, (companies with public images they care about) saying "hey man, this is too much, we don't like the look for our business" and pushing back. The only reason we're even hearing a peep is any strife here is because the local governments interests aren't aligned with the feds.
The city doesn't care where "I" go until I check the right (wrong) boxes and then they'll be waiting for the chance to harass me. The government didn't "care" until something flipped, and then the .gov was all over them. The same is true for you and everyone else.
And yes I'm being sloppy with with my wording and my reasoning, I could not be, but I don't really care to write to that high a standard.
> This is a BS red herring.
"I don't respect facts I don't like" is not a very respectable point of view and makes me not want to engage at all.
> with cell location data, metadata, private security cameras, etc
I'm sure you'd argue that the government should have access to all of that data and it could never be used for "jackbooting"?
EDIT: Even if you did genuinely support all that, you're doing exactly what this city did! Making a subjective judgement call about where to put the proverbial line, but still giving the government the ability to use this data because you value its ability to benefit us / provide safety guarantees.
All that data can just as easily be stolen and abused by a fascist government.
> It's so that the .gov can still do jackboot things (like round up illegals, or whatever)
You are quite literally posting in the context of TFA about them turning them off explicitly because they did not intend them to be used for "jackboot things". FFS.
I don't think you understand.
The police (local or federal) don't have integrations with private CCTV, historical location data, etc, etc. When they want that stuff they have to email someone, ask someone, have a reason, maybe even get a warrant, etc. Heck, even to snoop on someone's facebook they create a paper trail going through the law enforcement portal This is not a big deal for "real crime" but for stuff the public doesn't actually support serious enforcement of it's a big PITA, creates a risky paper trail they don't fully control, there's potential oversight, etc. All that constrains how far they can go without local public support.
Being able to just "go fishing" from your desk like you can with Flock (and to a lesser extent Ring), like the NSA can with all our emails and metadata, etc, etc, and all that other 1984 type dragnet stuff, is a categorical difference and nobody should have that power.
If stabbing people is so wrong, why don’t we lock up all the surgeons?
Of all the poor thinking and rhetorical skills out there, the one that drives me the craziest is this insistence that ignoring context is not just acceptable but essential.
Clearly relevant regardless of opinion.
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety
Redmond is such an excellent town.
A little annoyed, this seems like is has nothing to do with the ICE arrests...
> The city suspended its Flock system because city officials could not guarantee they wouldn’t be forced to release data collected by those devices someday, she said.
Key part is "someday". Seems like the article is implying that flock may have shared this data with ICE which led to the arrests... but there is no proof supporting this...
> On Thursday, a Skagit County Superior Court judge ruled that pictures taken by Flock cameras in the cities of Sedro-Woolley and Stanwood qualify as public records, and therefore must be released as required by the state’s Public Records Act, court records show.
This is the more likely reason. What do folks here think about this ruling?
IMO it seems obvious that this should be public records/data, but would love to hear alternative positions to this.
I can't stand this type of "journalism"/sensationalism.
> Redmond’s Police Department was not among those listed in the report, and has never allowed external agencies to access their Flock data without requesting and receiving permission from the police chief first, according to an Oct. 24 statement by Lowe.
So because the arrests were near a Flock Camera the "journalist" is connecting the two? Even with the statements an information to the contrary?
:(
This wouldn't be the first time Flock was used by ICE and would not be the first time Flock allowed ICE backdoor access against the wishes of the local government or police department in Washington. https://jsis.washington.edu/humanrights/2025/10/21/leaving-t...
So making the connection isn't a leap and seems like a pretty pragmatic action taken to reduce ICE's ability to surveil communities.
Very tinfoil hat of them.
The journalists didn't make this connection, it was a topic of discussion at the city council meeting. And the result of that discussion was to suspend the cameras anyway, out of concern that ICE could end up with the the Flock data, even if they hadn't already. It would have been odd for the journalist to report on the outcome and leave out the event that prompted it.
Yes. Because Flock literally cannot be trusted.
As an ex-Flock employee in my county alone, Flock's "Transparency Report" only lists -half- of the agencies using Flock.
I think we need to revise our understanding of expectation of privacy. The 'you have no expectation of privacy when you are outside' bit was formed before we had everything recording us and before face recognition could track us.
At the very least I think any kind of face recognition should require probable cause.
Its an interesting question indeed. You're saying there might be some expectation of privacy even in public?
The line here is a little different. I could point a camera out my window and record every license plate that drives by my house, and that would be allowed because its recording public activities, and the data I collect would be private—its mine from my camera.
The question here is if a public/government agency pays a private company to setup cameras in public, for the benefit of the public, then should that data collected by those cameras not also be public?
The courts seem to agree that it should be public, and I fail to see why it shouldn't be. Maybe I should read the opposition briefs on it.
You're saying there might be some expectation of privacy even in public?
There should be. I like how this is handled in Japanese media, where there is such an expectation - people's faces are blurred unless they opt in, and publishing photos/video without redating people's identities is not just a social misstep but grounds for a lawsuit if it causes distress for the subject. You need a release for any commercial use of photography, and non-commercial publication (eg Instagram or your art blog) can still get you sued if it infringes on others' privacy.
https://www.japaneselawtranslation.go.jp/en/laws/view/4241/e...
Japan has set about harmonizing its privacy laws with the GPDR and similar for business purposes.
> You're saying there might be some expectation of privacy even in public?
Not parent poster, but yes!
What people expect are outcomes. The mechanics they know of for how data is/isn't available is merely how they reach their reasonable expectation.
I expect that almost nobody I meet in public is a Stasi informant.
P.S.: To put it another way, a major purpose law is to clarify and codify the expectations the people. Not just expectations of privacy, but expectations of when we have liberty to observe or record.
We expect that our faces might be captured on someone's vacation photos in public, surviving as an anonymous and unconsidered background detail, and that we can take our own photos like that without getting permission from everyone in the background.
In contrast, we don't (didn't?) expect all the photos to feed into a mega-panopticon that that does facial-recognition on all subjects and cross-references us over time and space while running algorithms looking for embarrassing, criminal, or blackmail-able events.
> The question here is if a public/government agency pays a private company to setup cameras in public, for the benefit of the public, then should that data collected by those cameras not also be public?
This is how NASA operates with the data/images collected from the tax payer funded operations it runs. There is a period of exclusivity allowed for some projects to allow the people to work with the data, but anybody can go down load high res imagery once it has been released.
Awesome, thank you for the input. I suspected NASA was operating this way, but I had no idea there was a period of exclusivity. In the case of NASA, the private companies are those like JPL and the sorts I guess?
I assume it is/was similar with other data collected, like weather data/radar, oceanic current/buoy data, etc?
I read about this regarding Hubble imagery, but pretty sure it applies to all missions funded by tax payers. The teams requesting time from the platforms are granted exclusive time to work out what they need so they can publish their papers for credit and what not.
One of the great things here is that most of the teams are so focused on their specific criteria in the data, they sort of lose the forest in the tree. Once that data has been released to the public, more and more interesting things are being found in the existing data rather than requiring new observations. It's space, so most things only need to be imaged once per sensor. It's not like setting up a trap camera hoping to see big foot the one time he strolls past. The universe changes on a much slower scale so the data is still relevant for much longer.
Fascinating thank you.
> Once that data has been released to the public, more and more interesting things are being found in the existing data rather than requiring new observations.
Really highlights the value of the data being public, which I feel is often overlooked now a days. Hard to tie KPIs to value that comes like this.
There is certainly some expectation of privacy in public. California at least has anti-paparazzi laws covering some of this.
> You're saying there might be some expectation of privacy even in public?
Sure. The expectation is that your every move in public is not being recorded and stored on a central system that the government, and by extension various kinds of bad actors, can access.
In a society where the government's role is to defend its citizenry rather than participate in their exploitation, this would be an easy choice.
US governments (both federal and local) face some challenges here, because "defend its citizenry" is not really one of its main goals.
If your neighbors were across the street and had their blinds open could you point your camera at their window and take pictures?
License plates were designed to be read and visible and they show that the vehicle is registered, but what about inside the vehicle? Do we have privacy in there?
What exactly does 'in public' mean? And why shouldn't someone have privacy from being recorded and their movements tracked even if they are in public?
None of these things are a given. The rights we have are because we decided they were important. There is no reason we can't revisit the question as situations change.
Might make sense to revisit the constitutionality of license plates, rather than try to attack public recording.
They're demanding you show your "papers" registration at all times without articulable suspicion you've committed a crime/infraction. The fourth amendment arguably protects us from the government requiring us to show us our papers at all times when we're travelling in the most common form of conveyance.
> I could point a camera out my window and record every license plate that drives by my house, and that would be allowed because its recording public activities, and the data I collect would be private—its mine from my camera.
Maybe you shouldn’t be allowed to do that. Permanent persistent recording of the public feels very different than taking a photo every once in a while, and I feel it’s an infringement of privacy even when a single person does it.
Feels more like stalking to me when the government does it. The intent is to intimidate and put the observed parties in imminent fear of imprisonment if they do something those in power do not like. Coupling this with intentionally following them around, with the specific goal of en masse systematic targeting of those in transit, albeit with stationary cameras strategically replaced, has a lot of parallels to criminal stalking.
If you put up cameras on all the intersections on the way of say an ex went to work, and started logging when they were coming and going, it's hard for me to believe a prosecutor wouldn't be able to file that under some stalking-adjacent statute. The fact that they're doing the same thing en masse doesn't make it more generalized, it's just a larger scale of high specificity.
Feels way different when it's one rando doing it than when it's a government or BigCo with government integration doing it.
I think it's less of a revision and more a return to a core meaning.
Privacy isn't a mechanic, it's a capability, and most reasonable people DO expect, implicitly, that that they can travel unremarked under most circumstances.
I think most people would agree that a government drone swarm specifically tasked to follow you everywhere in public (loitering outside buildings) would be an invasion of privacy. Especially when it is illegal not to be wearing some equivalent of license plates.
From what I read, the pressure from activist groups on Redmond’s city leadership began before the Skagit County ruling. So it is probably unrelated. But I think it’s still a bad outcome for Redmond. Why wouldn’t you want law enforcement to be able to observe public spaces (which these cameras are monitoring) and identify or track suspects? We want our city services (like policing) to be efficient, right? We want criminals to be arrested and face consequences, right? We all want safe cities and neighborhoods, right?
I think the Skagit county ruling is likely to be appealed. There is a lot of information that governments can redact for a variety of reasons, despite FOIA or state/local transparency laws. It seems obvious that there’s a case for law enforcement to be able to access footage but to avoid handing over that kind of intelligence to the general public, where criminals could also abuse the same data. And I just don’t buy the argument that surveillance through cameras is automatically dystopian - we can pass laws that make it so that data is only accessible with a warrant or in a situation with immediate public risk. There are all sorts of powers the government has that we bring under control with the right laws - why would this be any different?
As for Redmond turning off its cameras - this is just fear-mongering about ICE. In reality, it’s just sanctuary city/state resistance to enforcing immigration laws. Redmond’s police department confirmed they’ve never shared this camera data with federal agencies, but that doesn’t stop activist types from making unhinged claims or exerting pressure. In reality, it’s activists of the same ideological bias as the soft on crime types that have caused crimes to go up dramatically in the Pacific Northwest in the last 20 years. They’re happy to see law enforcement hampered and the public put at risk - the ICE thing is just the new tactic to push it.
Your first paragraph doesn’t just beg the question, it outright harasses it.
…and identify or track suspects?
For starters, we’re all suspects when those cameras are running. Granted, AI-driven facial recognition is 100% accurate, so if you have nothing to hide…
> Why wouldn’t you want law enforcement to be able to observe public spaces (which these cameras are monitoring) and identify or track suspects?
Yeah, why wouldn't I want that? Or Flock "helpfully" proactively flagging AI-generated "suspicious vehicle movements" to LE for investigation? What could wrong there?
> We all want safe cities and neighborhoods, right?
Was it hard not to end that paragraph with a "Won't somebody think of our children?"?
You sound like great fun at a party.
No they turned them off because it turns out those cameras are public records and all their citizens can make requests for ALL THAT DATA.
Couldn't they just not log the license plates and only look for license plates on the list like stolen cars, stolen plates, amber alert etc? Why do they a need a list of all cars that the camera saw?
To run fishing expeditions.
We are all speed running our learning on how all of these systems can be used against us.
I have seen so many of these cameras by intersections recently! I wondered what they were.
Immigration is similar to the housing crisis and Nimbyism. Voters don't want a streamlined and efficient immigration system that lawfully allows a lot of migrants in (NIMBY). it is also similar to the war on drugs and its failure, ICE won't solve anything just as the DEA only made things worse with drugs.
No matter what, the whole ICE acting like the SS thing will only result in more illegal migration in the long term, like a lot more. Same with europe's far right teasing.
If the "infrastructure" can't support more people, we can build more here in the US. Borders shouldn't be open, but more health and able-bodied or skilled people wanting to migrate, so long as their criminal history is clear, should be let in, infrastructure should be scaled. It's more economic activity and wealth for the rest of us. More jobs, more workers. We need to do that for the housing crisis anyways.
We need more cities, more development, less NIMBY-thinking and less "beat them until they comply" thinking. Too many people who don't know or are unwilling to solve real problems but are eager to see cruelty and violence cause these untenable and regrettable situations.
> No matter what, the whole ICE acting like the SS thing will only result in more illegal migration in the long term, like a lot more.
I don't follow. Illegal immigration into the US is down right now. So, how did you arrive at that conclusion?
The lesson learned is that people going to their immigration hearings to stay legal are getting nabbed, and going the legal way is a convoluted recipe for failure.
As soon as enforcement lets up an iota the lesson will be it is wiser to stay off paper and off the visa pathway and go underground. People who aren't arrested and don't present to CBP for entry and don't get a visa, as far as the government knows, don't exist.
This is not "the legal way."
The people going to their immigration hearings to "stay legal" were apprehended as illegal immigrants, invited to come up with an excuse as to why they should be allowed to stay in the country, and released. You'll literally see "apprehension date" on their paperwork. The "legal way" is to apply for that stuff, then enter the country.
It's annoying that people elide this. There is an ongoing attempt by the current administration to remove these very recently introduced practices that no one voted for. Or a show of an attempt, really, because they love illegal labor.
But it's weird that for the past decade that illegal immigrants who have been caught are released almost immediately into a dilatory multi-year process of hearings. It's also weird that even those that have not been apprehended are issued IDs, work permits, business and drivers licenses, get in-state tuition as state schools, and in some places get to vote for local elections. There was never a debate about this, and it would have never survived a debate.
It's important to note that none of the countries that they are coming from allow people to do this. You can't just walk into Mexico and be Mexican, or fly to Nigeria and be Nigerian. Any shock that they have is in how easy it is to just walk and fly into the US and stay indefinitely.
> it is wiser to stay off paper and off the visa pathway and go underground.
This is how it used to be. But "underground" is nothing like this; it isn't in-state tuition and business licenses and street protests. It's usually harder than just going back home. In the late 90s, net migration from Mexico was negative. The "wall" (that Hillary Clinton helped push, and had a hand in started modern left-bashing among Democratic administrations) was a bad idea because a lot of people just jumped the border for enough time to make a few dollars, then ran back. People would go back and forth half a dozen times. After the wall, getting across was so onerous that you had to stay.
Previously, if you were a Mexican who hit a bad financial patch, you ran to the US, worked like a dog, and ran back with enough cushion to get your life going again - if you failed again, you could just repeat the process. After the wall when you hit that same patch, you had to commit to trying to make a life in the US.
I think the inflection point was the desire to get cheap labor to repair New Orleans after the flood, but they didn't want to hire the black people who lived there, they wanted to get rid of them, to ship them out to FEMA trailers in neighboring states. That's exactly what they did.
> The "legal way" is to apply for that stuff, then enter the country.
Which is next to impossible, particularly for immigrants who pick crops and process livestock. It’s annoying when people elide this.
> It's also weird that even those that have not been apprehended are issued IDs, work permits, business and drivers licenses, get in-state tuition as state schools, and in some places get to vote for local elections.
Or since those people pay taxes and are subject to governance, maybe it isn’t weird at all.
I don't think the drugs analog works. What this activity by ICE does though is put a chilling effect on "legal" immigration and tourism. Which will over time hurt supply chains, tourist destinations and jobs overall.
It's a pendulum, the next administration will react in the other direction, possibly very dramatically.
Because the blowback on ICE's current 'posture' is going to gut that agency.
I agree with GP, but from the opposite perspective.
ICE doing a good job of removing illegal aliens ("acting like SS" in GP's parlance) will trigger the next democratic president to relax border enforcement. This is what happened with Biden. He let in 7.2 million migrants [1].
There's no way for Trump to deport 7.2 million people in 4 years. Pro-illegal immigration presidents are always at an advantage.
Trump's strict (and good) policies might trigger the next democratic president to just blanket pardon all illegal aliens, and the next republican president can't do anything about it.
[1]: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/million-migrants-border-bi...
> No matter what, the whole ICE acting like the SS thing will only result in more illegal migration in the long term, like a lot more.
How so? What mechanism do you see that goes from "ICE acting like the SS" to "a lot more illegal migration in the long term"? What's the cause and effect here?
Not saying you're wrong, necessarily, just... I don't see the causality at all.
Why fill out the right paperwork and actually attend your court dates and immigration hearings if there is a good chance that will result in your extraordinary rendition to some torture prison God-only-knows-where? Much safer to simply stay off the books.
Well ideally you're supposed to have a valid visa before you cross the border. I don't like the idea of the government promising people a path to amnesty and then going back on its word because there's a new administration in town but ultimately the people they're nabbing are in this situation because they already have invalid visas so I don't think it follows that this would discourage people from obtaining visas like they were supposed to have already done.
My guess is he sees ICE hauling people out of even the courts when they were attempting to abide by the legal processes and will say f-it, why bother, its safer to not adhere. just my assumption of OP's intent.
What was the reaction to SS? or to stick to my DEA example, what was the result of the war on drugs? millions and millions dead because of drug related causes right? how do you think the nation will react to ICE's brutal and cruel, even illegal operations? many would consider them heroes, but the other side will consider them no different than the SS or gestapo, the only correction is to wind down immigration enforcement dramatically, increasing immigration.
Imagine a democrat administration simply reverting ICE to its pre-2025 state. the implication alone and the perception it gives will drive up illegal immigration. "america is open again".
Statistics are showing that the total immigrant population is down by over a million since the start of the year. If you have the ability to leave, why put up with this nonsense?
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/08/21/key-findi...
A large number of people, myself included, are now radicalized against the concept of immigration enforcement. I think everyone has a duty to make sure that ICE is as ineffective as possible and ICE agents are as miserable as possible. There's a lot of talk, for example, about how the asylum system is easily abusable; that's true, but now we will not be able to fix it because no immigration reform compromise that doesn't destroy ICE is acceptable.
My city, capital city, local PD (also in Washington state) put out this press release after ICE blocked up a busy intersection in peak hour chasing someone:
> [Department] was not notified of or involved in this enforcement action. By state law, city resolution, and department policy, [we do] not cooperate or coordinate with federal immigration enforcement.
> Voters don't want a streamlined and efficient immigration system that lawfully allows a lot of migrants
There was a really interesting open ended survey some years ago, in the leadup to the trump/clinton election but I can't find it now sorry.
When republicans voters were asked to describe their preferred immigration policies, they outline a stance significantly more permissive and flexible, and less burdensome, than the one we currently have. More liberal than the reality, in other words.
People don't know what the immigration policies are and so they can't know what they should be either. The anti-immigration sentiment is a stunning propaganda victory decades in the making, no more.
Yes, that's my experience when having to explain what getting a greencard entails, most people have no idea how the whole thing works.
Access to the United States is not a human right. This is a nation, not a strip mall.
This is a non-sequitur response to the thread.
"Turns out that most people actually want a more liberal immigration system than we currently have when surveyed"
"That lines up with my experience describing the greencard process to others"
"Well immigration should not be easy"
Your personal opinions on immigration are not really relevant to the topic.
Is self-determination a human right? We certainly decided a lot of nations to the south of us didn't deserve that right. Look up the history of the banana republics some time.
Up until it conflicts with my country’s rights, yes. Not sure what you’re suggesting. Is mass migration to the United States the policy of, say, Mexico?
I'm suggesting that we spent a lot of effort overturning elected governments in South America because we didn't like who they voted for and what their policies were with regard to US fruit companies. US policy directly created instability, civil war, and a generally terrible situation that they are dealing with now. Do you know what a banana republic is?
You seem to just realize that countries deal with the rule of might, not words. Words are worthless unless you have the power to enforce them.
Very insightful.
People want immigrants. It is just that they want them to be second class citizens that are not allowed to earn more than them because of their skin color.
I was resistant to this argument for a long time, but the ICE thing makes it clear that really the core of all of this is racism.
> will only result in more illegal migration in the long term
Why? Wouldn't it disincentivize illegal immigration by making it much more riskier?
Agreed that the legal immigration system needs an overhaul, these are a lot of people living in limbo, paying taxes and not causing crimes with very few rights. The term no taxation without representation was the reason the USA got founded.
It's a temporary partisan solution, the other party will do the opposite, reducing enforcement and letting even more illegal migrants in, lest they be accused of being a xenophobe.
Not sure of that to be honest, I think that would be a loud minority.
Once democratic cities got a taste of the flood of people coming in that were sent by southern states, they realized how big the issue is and how much of a drag on resources it is.
That's not how it is in reality, southern states (not just them though) have been doing that with homeless people too, not just immigrants.
Republicans did jim crow in the 50s and 60s, we still talk about it today, and the positive blowback from that needs no explanation. Keep in mind that ICE is doing a lot more than cops did to protesters in the 60s, and it is targeting not just one group but several minority groups. not only that, it is all being live streamed, and it is affecting a lot of majority-group americans more directly. If ICE can avoid being disbanded it would be a great victory for them.
If I were exaggerating, I would be talking about tribunals and mass incarcerations of ICE agents, but I'm not.
Correction: it was actually southern Democrats that did Jim Crow. The Democratic party used to be quite different before the civil rights bill.
No, it was Republicans (today) who used to be democrats in that era. parties are made up of people, it was the same people or their ideological inheritors. Many republicans today in congress (especially leadership) were of voting age in that era. a 20 year old in 1969 would be 75 today, younger than the current and former president.
Were they Democrats at that time, or not?
NB: Title edited to add "WA" for clarity. I.e., this is the city of, not a toponym for another entity.
Ironically, there would be little need for surveillance state technology if the on-the-books immigration law had been enforced for the past few decades.
I can think of many uses for "surveillance state technology" that have nothing to do with immigration: It can be used against citizens and legal residents too.
I don’t buy that for a second. Governments always want more control, and this is just another way for them to get it.
But the sorts of ICE actions that are causing this controversy only have political support because the US immigration laws have been flouted for 30+ years. Regardless of what you or I think of it it’s the reality that lots of the electorate wants deportations and lots of them and that likely isn’t true in a world where the laws on the books were more strictly enforced in the past.
What political support? Is there evidence to back that claim? The most recent polls I've seen about this are Gallup's polls from July and they suggest that 62% of Americans disapprove of how Trump is handling immigration. This includes a majority of Dems and Independents. The trend is more and more people disapprove of Trump on this topic as time moves forward.
I don't have any data to back this up, but it is conceivable the people that want to deport en masse often understand that the perception of such policy is ugly, and simultaneously support it while not wanting to publicly broadcast it.
If I supported mass deportations, I would simply vote for it and never tell anyone so that I could get what I want without getting any of the flack from the associates of the people who are deported. There's not a lot to gain from telling others you want to harm a bunch of your neighbors, but there is a lot to gain if you can give them the boot and not being perceived as having anything to do with their misfortune.
They want deportations because... because someone told them that immigration is the cause of all of their personal problems, which is a lie.
It doesn't matter about the "support" for it when that support is predicated on a complete lie, that immigration is bad for America when it demonstrably is good for America.
No, there are many reasons people want deportations, but mainly people don't think others should get the benefits of being part of a country while flaunting its rules.
In short: "if you want to join our group, you should like our group and add to our group".
Stories like these are what turned people away:
- New York giving free debit cards to migrants to buy their ethnic food because they don't like free American food.
- Free or subsidized housing for migrants.
- Migrants protesting with Mexican flags.
You're conflating illegal immigration with immigration.
In no way is illegal immigration "good for America".
The definition of illegal immigration changes to suit those in power, not those fleeing wars.
Nope. It's coded in our laws. It is a legal term.
They don't have majority political support. Even many Trump voters are against it. Also Trump has repeatedly violated immigration law, hell Trump tower wouldn't exist without the work of unauthorized Polish workers
Red herring. Political support is due to mass media narrative campaigns, in this day and age groundswell politics is simply infeasible with the power that narrative has in today's culture.
Political support is due to people voting for it, and in the US system that is the arbiter of who will get to enact their policies.
This is true.
Hence the importance of controlling the narrative by spinning unchecked stories about immigrants eating cats, disproportionate rates of murder and crime, ignoring revenue from immigrants paying taxes, etc.
The fact that sufficient people will vote on immigration as an issue is orthogonal to the realities of laws and enforcement rates and entirely predicated upon perception of such issues.
But if they hadn't been flouted, the US would be a dirt farm specializing in the farming and production of dirt. Hacker news wouldn't even exist.
They'd find a need (or excuse) for it regardless of the state of our immigration system.
This is actually true, since there’s no need for it now and there would be no need for it in your silly hypothetical too.
> your silly hypothetical too.
The stats for Southwest Land Border Encounters are available at https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/southwest-land-border-enc... and the HN guidelines are available at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
on the books immigration law has been broken for decades. do you expect people across the border wait a decade to get their turn for an immigration interview only to be turned down, when they can just cross the border?
When laws become impractical, they create 11 million law breakers.
Hundreds of thousands to millions of people have come to the US legally each year for the last thirty years.[0] How is that impractical? In fact the share of immigrants in the US has increased significantly (by 3 times) in the last 50 years, and is above the level of the EU, and is at the highest level in the last 100 years in the US.[1][2] Even if legal immigration was set to zero, that shouldn't give people the right to come here illegally.
To be clear I am not making an argument that mass surveillance is needed to solve any problem.
[0] https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/green-card-holders-a...
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2024... via https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/09/27/u-s-immig...
[2] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SM.POP.TOTL.ZS?most_rec...
US vs EU vs OECD: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SM.POP.TOTL.ZS?most_rec... - I'm pretty sure the values here include illegal immigration as well, so if you factor that in the US may be lower than the EU, but again still at historically very high levels.
The biggest illegal immigration source is the southern border. Yes, lots of people have immigrated, but they're a tiny fraction of those who wanted to immigrate. H-1B is a good example, it counts as immigration but it is really not, it is residency contingent on specific employment contracts. Those people with H-1B have no way to gain permanent residency without their employer sponsoring them, which would let them leave the company so employers don't tend to do that a lot.
The comparison with EU is not meaningful, especially since it isn't even a country. The population growth of the US and the world as a hole has also risen by more than that factor, even in the past two decades or so it has more than doubled.
>Yes, lots of people have immigrated, but they're a tiny fraction of those who wanted to immigrate
What point are you making here specifically? Are you saying the law is considered broken unless all or most people that want to come to the US can come? If so, the citizens (or at least the government) of the country are the ones that decide its laws, not people who want to immigrate to that country.
>H-1B is a good example, it counts as immigration but it is really not
The fist link I gave only includes green cards issued, it doesn't include H-1B visas to begin with. In any case, H-1B is not that significant a source of immigration, it seems to account for less than 1 million people in the US.[0] And it pays better than immigrating illegally in 99% of cases, most people would take that. Also by your own metric immigrating illegally isn't immigration either. I don't see what specific point you are making. Are you saying people come here illegally because they don't want to come via an H-1B visa, or are you just making a general point that immigration is not that high?
>The comparison with EU is not meaningful, especially since it isn't even a country
Then why does the worldbank include it? And why use OECD as a metric for anything if it isn't a country?
>population growth of the US and the world
The "highest in 100 years" statistic is in terms of percentage, so that shouldn't be relevant.
[0] https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/reports/U... "As of September 30, 2019, the H-1B authorized-to-work population is approximately 583,420."
> do you expect people across the border wait a decade to get their turn for an immigration interview only to be turned down
The backlog isn't a consequence of the law.
Is there a country that doesn't expect people to go through some kind of qualification process in order to immigrate legally? Here's what it looks like in Canada (where I live), for example: https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/se... It's actually quite complex, and depends on additional provincial legislation. And then there's citizenship on top of that: https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/se...
> when they can just cross the border?
The entire point is that they legally in fact may not do so, and have only been doing so because of the lack of enforcement GP cites.
> When laws become impractical, they create 11 million law breakers.
We don't have nearly the same scale of problem in Canada. That probably has much more to do with only sharing an unsecured land border with a rich country.
>when they can just cross the border
This is also a choice for the people in charge of the border. Enforcing a border is a solved problem for a rich, large-population nation.
It isn't. 2/3rds of illegal immigrants come to the US legally (and then overstay). Unless you make it illegal for non-citizens to visit the US, you can't stop most illegal immigration.
We can start with that 1/3rd. Then we remove as many economic incentives as possible to make overstaying visas that much less attractive to tackle the other 2/3rds.
It's weird to see people (perhaps not you specifically) who often support dramatic gun control measures to address a tiny percentage of crime among the first to trot out the old saw that only a relative fraction of illegal migrants got that way by an illegal border crossing. 1/3rd is a lot. 1/3rd is a great start.
Addressing that 1/3rd also would address the real edge cases (as in there are only a few of them) like terrorists and serial criminals.
Yes! Well stated. 33% of illegals would be a huge win, while also aiming at self deportations by targeting incentives.
employers hiring illegal migrants is also an option for them. those employers are not being targeted by ICE. It's the DEA arresting drug users but being buddies with drug lords all over again.
Employers are being targeted [0]. It also can be difficult to successfully prosecute, especially when one can maintain a clean separation between the labor and the enterprise (agriculture is like this with Farm Labor Contractors).
That said, I wish they would step up the prosecutions. It's critical to hammer away at economic incentives for illegal migration.
[0] https://www.cpr.org/2025/04/30/ice-fines-colorado-janitorial...
> on the books immigration law has been broken for decades. do you expect people across the border wait a decade to get their turn for an immigration interview only to be turned down, when they can just cross the border?
No, I don't expect that at all. However the problem with your scenario isn't that they need to wait their turn, it's that they can "just cross the border". That fact that that has been allowed was an intentional policy decision.
How? As a migrant to the US I have generally found the rules quite reasonable, the UX of the websites is poorer than say the UK but the rules seem fine.
> do you expect people across the border wait a decade to get their turn for an immigration interview only to be turned down, when they can just cross the border?
Well yes, that's what following the law means. They can't complain about it, it's not their country, and they don't have a say on the rules.
In a similar vein by your logic, if you are in a hurry, why should you obey traffic laws when you can just run a red light or a stop sign right?
If the light never turned green you'd bet your butt that plenty of people would run the light.
Sure, then don't complain if you get into a crash and your insurance finds you at fault. Actions have consequences.
Hierarchy of needs. People want to follow the law, they need food,shelter, medicine,etc.. You can punish law breakers, but if you don't provide a way to lawfully do the thing, you're only breeding law breakers and nothing more.
A missing perspective here might be that even long term imprisonment isn't a deterrent for many migrants. The disparity in living conditions is just that steep.
There is a lawfully way to do the thing. The problem is that the lawfully way wants a very small set of people with specific skills. Canada does the same, most of their immigration are university graduates. The only reason Canada hasn't had an influx of immigration like the USA is because their southern border is the USA, not Mexico.
Most of the immigration to the USA is driven for economic reasons, not political asylum or persecution. There is no right to immigrate in the USA just because you want to, you have to convince the government somehow to let you in.
> even long term imprisonment isn't a deterrent for many migrants
But quick deportation is. Imagine doing the whole trek from south/central america to the USA just to be sent back the next day. That's what deterring a lot of people now, wasting months of travel and money just to have it be worthless seems to be very dissuasive.
A lot of the latest immigration woes would be solved if the Venezuelan government was taken down and some real democratic government stepped in.
Ah, the paper tiger crisis. Clearly the misdemeanor of being in the country illegally requires new technology to be developed for state surveillance to enforce those laws, police cannot possibly be expected to do their job without it /s.
The expectation of privacy and personal freedoms of 350M people seems to be an inconvenience for the state wanting deporting a few more people per year.
They are not being enforced now. In fact the current administration is actively trying to circumvent the law. Which should not be surprising considering how much Trump has violated immigration law in his personal life
Not strictly enforcing the speed limit wouldn't justify the use of secret police to crack down on that either. But there's no xenophobia for speeders, so we don't see this action for them and we don't have to see specious takes like this defending it.
Excessive speeders in the absence of speed-limit enforcement just creates neighbors that don't mind their neighborhood being consumed by speed bumps/dips, I think there's an analogy here in residential areas. And if you have a lot of children in your neighborhood, there IS a 'xx-phobia' for speeders. But speed bumps and dips are an absolute nuisance and sometimes dangerous, so just having cameras identify and a system willing to punish speeders would absolutely be the preference.
Because American citizens and documented immigrants never commit crimes? Nonsense.