A brief recap: a few weeks ago I’d taken the $155,000 Range Rover I was testing out to run some errands with my wife in Plymouth, Minnesota. I was backing out of a parking space in front of my local Kohl’s when four cop cars came screaming up and “initiated a box and pin on the vehicle,” as the police report says. Hands on their guns, the officers ordered us out of the vehicle, patted us down, and eventually told us the Range Rover’s license plate—New Jersey 34 10 DTM—was stolen, they suspected the vehicle itself was stolen too, and they’d used Flock cameras to track me down over the last two days.
The scenario involving my wife and I is just one of many like it. Thomas noted that the system is 99% accurate today, but it’s performing 20 billion reads a month. That 1% error rate, of which I was a part of in June, makes for two hundred million misreads a month.
Fascists don’t particularly care about false positives. The cameras are operating as intended.
Absolutely this, and why they’re fine with executing innocent people on death row, cops killing people who were running away or complying and not a threat, or some DA imprisoning someone for decades on crappy evidence only to be found innocent after half their life is gone.
👉 The system is working exactly as intended and must be destroyed
Yes, the Flock system is working correctly, as a tool for police to stalk and harass innocent people.
Also a tool to give plausible deniability when shit hits the fan.
They always claim everything they do is correct and working. To admit otherwise means opening the department up to a lawsuit they may actually lose their jobs over.
It is working perfectly as intended. It is intended to facilitate fascist authority, siphon wealth from municipalities, and help make cops feel tough so they can more efficiently lord over their communities.
For comparison, if you were hosting some kind of platform or service that only has a 99% uptime, you’d have to pay people to use it.
Yep, even 0.01% error rate looks great, until you run the numbers and it’s 100 fuck ups per day… percentages stop being intuitive at mass scale like this
Well, at least we know this can only happen 98 times, by mistake.
fuck flock!
I like license plates as I think some degree of accountability is important when you are controlling a highly deadly machine. If you make moves that endanger people they should have a way to identify you. I’ve always felt those tinted plate covers were the sign of being a real asshole driver. Now I think if there is anyway to block your plate from flock cameras you should try to do it. Has any coating been effective for this?
Doesn’t matter, they don’t rely on just the plates. They match on make/model, color, condition (specific dents, scratches, damage, repairs, etc), bumper stickers, face matching on the driver and/or passengers, sound, bluetooth and/or radio IDs, and more.
You can make things that fool it, Benn Jordan demonstrates doing this with something that is hard to even notice as a human. But all that’s going to do is draw extra attention to you. In a surveillance state anyone trying to maintain privacy is clearly guilty after all.
What the actual fuck is that license plate though??? Like why does it have two big numbers then two small numbers and then three letters???
It’s hard to be on your side when the first fact mentioned is the price of the vehicle.
He is emphasizing the fact that the cops care about a $155k ‘stolen’ vehicle, and they they are here to protect the wealthy
The guy himself is a journalist who was doing his job, part of which is an extended test-drive of a vehicle, provided by the manufacturer.
People gotta use their humble-brags any way they can.
What? It’s not even his car, it was a review vehicle provided to him as a car reviewer (his job).
I know people here want to talk about flock, but does no one find it questionable a journalist got loaned a $150k vehicle to review? And then another alleged journalist according to the story got pulled over in a $105k Land Rover they were loaned to review? As a journalist, do they also receive homes and women to review? Sounds like some serious corruption right there.
How did you think product reviews happened?
By companies that buy reviews. Not journalism.
You think a free to read website is going out and buying $200,000 (and up) cars every day for a 2 week review?
Even at the height of automotive print journalism there wasn’t budget for that.
Ferrari is famous for cutting access to critical journalists. Most companies expect a blend of positive and negative reviews and lend cars to any credible outlet. American automotive media has typically been pretty bad about the PR regurgitation, but that’s a choice they’re making - hiring people to read the PR, not to write their own.
That definitely happens some of the time, in some places. Journalism still exists, however.
Product reviews require more than a ‘test drive’.
Not journalism.
Ah yes, we all thought ‘Journalism’ was a real thing, but alas, Capitalism/corruption has taken over all mainstream ‘journalism’, and ‘truth’ is who pays the most… …pretty sad…
Oh bless your heart.
If they are automotive journalists, which in this case they are, then yes this is completely normal. People get review copies of games / books / movies / phones. So why wouldn’t they loan out cars?
That isn’t journalism. That is corporate PR and marketing.
Read more product reviews from more varied publications. You will see that there is a range of accountability in the sourcing of the product. Not all of it is direct marketing.
However, you can expect all of it to be ideologically consumerist.
