Hacker News

You won't get to the kind of change you thought you would see until food runs low and the economy stalls. The American Revolution was rare in that it didn't need to happen. The Founders were just being giant assholes (j/k). While the French Revolution just a few decades later was more status quo. A lot of starvation and poverty just pushed the population over the edge.

What confuses me is that no revolution is required. All we had to do to avoid this was to vote. Voting would still (probably) work.

I agree. The amount of cameras and tracking has gotten out of control. If America actually becomes an "authoritarian" country (seems almost likely) I imagine all these Flock pics with other data mining techniques will be used to send Communist Progressives to reeducation camp.

On the contrary I think Americans are reacting about the same as any other set of people would react. There are always going to be people who, as long as their personal lives are stable, they are not going to do anything to put that stability at risk. America is also huge enough that even if one part of the country is having a crisis, millions of fellow citizens will not hear of it or have any 2nd, 3rd or 4th hand connection to the matter.

But also if a small portion of Americans disparately plan to do stuff like sabotage surveillance camera, it's still newsworthy.

[delayed]

Get out there and be the change you want to see, king

> What has worried me for years is that Americans would not resort to this level.

They'll stop once the police (or ICE, more likely) start dishing out horrific punishments for it.

This is excellent, I second your suggestion for everyone to read this.

Where in the Constitution does it require us to give up our privacy to private companies with little oversight? Seems like there's contention here.

https://journals.law.unc.edu/ncjolt/blogs/under-surveillance...

The thing about that is the governments who most fear the governed are often extremely draconian. I actually do not think that it is constructive and it is precisely that fear that is driving things like voter suppression in the US.

In a country like the US with a fairly democratic process at various levels of government, this just means that people with some strong opinions can subject the rest of the citizens to their desires. This is the universal veto on societal order. We can see that the desire for governments to "live in fear of the governed" usually rapidly disappears when people start destroying water lines and power lines. After all, 'the governed' and 'the government' are the same people just with different factions distributed in power.

A government that can't do anything to police unions is also the government living in fear of the governed. A government that can't rein in (say) PG&E is also a government living in fear of the governed. When political representatives are shot by a right-wing anti-abortion terrorist that is also (and perhaps even more viscerally so) a government living in fear of the governed. And I'm certainly not 100% okay with this.

Lawlessness is superior to the law of the tyrant.

Having lived or spent time in a lot of 3rd world shitholes, including a civil war, I've only really felt freedom in places with lawless lack of government, never places with 'rule of law' -- that always gets twisted for the elite.

Of course the same happens in lawless regions, but power is fractured enough, there is a limit on power they can wield against the populace, as the opposing factions ultimately are a check on any one side oppressing the population to leave. They can't man machine guns at all the 'borders' and ultimately corruption becomes cheap enough that it is accessible to the common person which arguably provides more power to the common man than representative democracy does.

I think this element of factions in competition was part of the original genius of the '50' states with the very minimal federal government. But the consolidation of federal power and loss of the teeth of the 10th amendment and expansion of various clauses in the constitution means there is now no escape and very few remaining checks.

Rape is clearly in the Epstein files.

Murder is implied in the Epstein files with an email about burying girls on the property.

Eating sounds like an unhelpful exaggeration, unless I missed a major news story.

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable.”

- JFK

The real breakdown in the rule of law occurred when the US Supreme Court made the specious decision that amoral business entities (corporations) had the same rights in a democracy as citizens.

All this shit flows downhill from Citizens United.

How many homeowners install mystery-meat Chinese cameras on their houses that feed the data God knows where? Should their homes be vandalized too for their lack of concern for the community?

>What other social issues should be solved with vigilante justice?

Everything you said is true, but I suspect, also irrelevant, because options short of vigilante justice aren't going to be seen by the public as viable for much longer (if they're even seen so now). America's social contract is breaking, and existing institutions make it clear, daily, that they will strengthen that trend rather than reverse it. And as JFK said, 'Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.' That doesn't make the violence laudable, or even desirable. It is simply inevitable without seemingly impossible positive change from an establishment that is hostile to such.

This is a nice description (i.e "where is the limit on this type of action?") of a reason why this approach is low on the list, and why ideally we would solve it with one of the other options.

You don't want to give people "moral license" to do this broadly, but we've hit a point where there are no options available that don't have downsides. Stated another way: Taking no action can also be unethical.

For me, Flock installing these cameras and other people taking them down are two sides of the same coin. One group puts cameras up in public without people's knowledge or permission, the other group takes cameras down without people's knowledge or permission. I find it kind of beautiful, like the ebb and flow of the tide.

the threat of vigilante mob justice is required for the law to work. its the tension that makes sure the rich and powerful want to stay involved, and be held accountable by it, rather than skipping over it and making it irrelevant.

the threat has to be credible, which is where things like this, and luigi are quite valuable

Consider the converse of your statement

I believe in surveillance, but Flock is just the tip of the iceberg and rolling out mass public surveillance is just as likely to backfire as it is to lead to changes. More importantly, once you give folks moral license to do this stuff it’s hard to contain the scope of their activity.

Don’t both sides this. Explicitly point out that the GOP is many orders of magnitude worse.

Doomer vibes are common, but meanwhile, state and local justice systems continue to prosecute many crimes and crime is on a downward trend [1].

[1] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/record-low-crime-rates-are-...

Are you really both-sides-ing this?

I took a look at the schematics for the two fuse boxes in my 2023 Chevrolet and _could not tell which/if any_ fuse was dedicated to a cellular modem.

This was in regards to: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2025/01/...

Counter point: BREAK SHIT

> and for good measure get rid of the tracking device in your pocket that you willingly use all day to send your location to facebook, X, tiktok, etc.

I don't have facebook, X, or tiktok installed on my phone.

I've done this recently. It's only been six weeks so not sure if I'll keep it up, but I have felt very little pain. I put my sim back in my iPhone the other day when I needed an Uber to go to the vet after reading that recently taxis in my city have been denying people with pets even if you tell them you have one when ordering. Sim went right back in my flip phone when I got home and I actually experienced some relief as I did it.

I just want a hot NSA rep. Is that too much to ask?

I don't think OP is glad people came around on it

My friend in college did an internship on high frequency, short pulse beams (I wanna say violet and picosecond? Which I still think was exotic at the time).

Most of his work was dealing with and accounting for reflections that left the machine. If you have a prism that’s sending 95% of the light where you want it to go, when it’s a multi watt laser you can’t just let that 5% go wherever it wants. You will blind someone. So his job was getting black bodies in all the right spots to absorb the lost light.

His safety goggles looked like even more expensive Oakleys of that era and they were (much more expensive).

Unrelated, but I really want to take the opportunity:

How can one know what is dangerous for the eyes or not? Years ago I got an "IR illuminator" (from aliexpress, probably) that I wanted to use with my raspberrypi NoIR camera, for fun. Say filming myself during the night to see how much I move while sleeping, or making my own wildlife camera trap.

But I was scared that it could be dangerous and never used it (I tested it in an empty room, but that was it).

Is there a safe way for a hobbyist to get an IR illuminator and be sure that I won't make somebody blind with it?

> Most places where there are surveillance cameras are places where there are also people

I assume you're concerned about reflections from the camera lens or housing? In my mind, the archetypal camera is mounted on a nice tall pole, silhouetted against open sky, and painted matte black.

> watt class lasers

Surely those would be excessive for someone attacking the sensor, unless they want to remotely sear some graffiti by burning away paint.

Lol that's almost literally the cheapest possible option. You can get these for $3-4 (on a board and with a mipi cable and everything) from China - I have a dozen in a box that I bought to test out a camera array idea before shelling out for nicer sensors.

If shame were a motivator for this administration or the current grifter class, neither of these things would exist to the current Armageddon-level they currently do. That is to say, completely agree with your take here. There are plenty of government-entity examples of this, but my favorite I've seen recently was a video montage of Elon saying annually, like clockwork, that sully autonomous driving would be here in 2-3 years for the last 12 years or so. If these people had shame, he wouldn't be doing that, as an example.

I certainly agree about the lack of shame - but even if you destroyed all of the Flock cameras (and any other public traffic cams) you're still left with no actual protection for your private data.

There's more of us then there are of them - so their wealth can't protect them from everything. They can and do buy privacy so there must be something worth protecting that the masses can expose using their same methods.

while an important consideration, I'm sure there are many on the up side of the k-economy that don't believe that persistent surveillance is warranted or ethical.

America is converting into a radical authoritarian state, yes, but they're not a "fringe". They are, by a small margin, the dominant faction in the US. Popular vote counts prove it.

There isn't a radical authoritarian fringe in the US. There are multiple, competing radical authoritarian perspectives in the US, and I wouldn't be surprised if the sum of them constituted a majority.

They disagree on the authority, not the methods, and help the two institutional parties cooperate to destroy civil liberties by accusing their counterparts of abusing ("weaponizing") civil rights to commit crimes, spy for foreign governments, and/or abuse children.

As your net worth increases, the concern about what you have to lose from a personal safety perspective skyrockets. You start becoming far more paranoid and seeing crime everywhere. Tech CEOs and billionaires will build the dystopian panopticon society 100 times out of 100 because they don't care about other people, they just want to feel safe. If that means mass surveillance for the rest of the world, so be it.

If you don't believe me, just look at the CCP. It already happened there.

The back and forth between "the Left" and "the Right" seems to actually be about who gets to run the prison instead of whether we should run a nation like one.

Yeah, it doesn't seem productive to paint this as a partisan issue

Your assumptions are probably reflective of my downvotes, but I choose my words carefully.

No one said the Democrats are pro-freedom. Both parties are authoritarian. One is just less effective.

Flock cameras can be helpful in all sorts of crimes. They've been used to solve everything from kidnappings to minor property damage.

There obviously isn't a future without crime. This is just a tool to make it easier for police to do their job and deter criminals somewhat, but that is probably marginal.

There will always be kidnappings, there will always be property damage. Having technology available to make it easier to solve those crimes seems obvious to me.

yeah surveillance doesn't mean secure. A few weeks ago there was a solid 10-15 second run of automatic weapons fire on my street in an intersection. I do a lot of shooting and i could tell from the concussion it couldn't have been more than a couple hundred feet from my bedroom window. My neighbors turned in all their camera footage with recordings of two cars and the gunfire to a detective. When i asked them what happens next the detective just said in an annoyed voice "well i'll ask someone to check around..". Like it was plainly obvious he had zero interest at all.

edit: I live in Dallas so, although we sometimes hear gunshots when the Cowboys score a touchdown, i'm not in an active war zone.

We already have mass surveillance, and yet we still have major crimes. It's not working, and I see no reason to believe that removing more freedom will lead to having safer streets. Why are we giving up liberty and getting nothing in return? That's an excellent reason to protest against adding more surveillance.