Paraphrasing the crux of the issue: "It's regular practice in Colorado to list license plates with both versions, the one with 'O's and the other with Zeros in the warrant list."
Insane. Practice.
As always, this story has have nothing to do with the cameras or AI, but "law enforcement has an insane lazy practice" doesn't make for a very good headline anymore.
I've had two police stops in the past initiated by ALPR systems fraudulently claiming I didn't have a valid registration. Presumably because the state that issued the plates didn't share such data. I wasn't motivated to do anything about it but something more severe like this should be fought with a multimillion dollar libel suit against the C-suite and board.
the number of flock apologists comments in this post are a aberration from normal, there must be an artificial factor at play
flock employees are probably already trying to figure out who i am so they can flag me
only half /s
In the video he said that the courts ask "who is the warrant for" and he replied "no one", but surely one could also look up the number plate and find it that way?
Law enforcement, from the same industry that brought you targeted ads recommending refrigerators because you just bought a refrigerator.
Impersonal, tech-mediated surveillance was clearly the next logical step for law enforcement after the events of 2020.
Is there some argument to aid here that this constitutes or facilitates systemic harassment?
Or is that just going to be nigh on impossible to use as grounds for a lawsuit?
Even if there are grounds for a lawsuit, chances are "qualified immunity" will mean the wronged parties get zero recompense
Go after Flock; they are not protected by extension as they are the ones who are alerting the police and have no system-wide removal option according to the Chief interviewed.
Flock should be shut down and their entire c-suite should be sent to prison for human rights violations
Also, not just an isolated incident: https://youtu.be/8BImTddknfk
We need strong laws preventing any AI process from being used for law enforcement at all. The mere presence of AI at any step in the process should result in complete exoneration.
Flock is doing something I find unethical, even immoral, but maybe not illegal.
I want people who break the law to go to jail. I don’t care if they’re cops or c-suite execs.
But what I really want is laws (preferably federal) that make it illegal to build systems that can be used for mass surveillance, and I want law enforcement to HAVE to get a warrant to receive data from surveillance companies, even if they offer it without a warrant, because I want oversight.
We live in a strange time politically where the consensus on ethics is incredibly detached from justice. There is a danger in giving in to mob rules when it comes to the legal system but at this point we've wandered too far in the other direction with clear corruption around Flynn, Ticketmaster and others.
I simply don't find the argument that something isn't illegal compelling anymore since our justice system is so deeply misaligned with society. We live in the era of grift.
> make it illegal to build systems that can be used for mass surveillance
Is such a law realistically enforceable? A lot of the surveillance systems used today are benign services like Push Notifications, SMS and online filesharing sites. A significantly motivated threat actor (like the NSA, Unit 8200, Salt Typhoon, etc.) would have no problem appropriating that data for themselves.
Something like an oversight committee might work better, but there would be a bipartisan effort to neuter them the moment they take action.
maybe we could start small, just add the entire c-suite to the warrant list and shrug when they tell people to take them off.
The cops won't do that because they'd rather be lazy and let Flock do their investigative work for them
"We need strong laws preventing any AI process from being used for law enforcement at all. The mere presence of AI at any step in the process should result in complete exoneration."
Why?
It seems to me that the biggest problem with policing is qualified immunity that prevents proper feedback (or what my dad would have called "consequences").
Without that, the tools the police use are largely irrelevant.
Good luck ending qualified immunity. The current SCOTUS would strike such a law down in seconds if it reached their docket
Why punish the employees of a business when the root cause is corrupt government employees abusing their power?
Edit to respond to smt88:
IBM knowingly selling services to the Nazis specifically to violate human rights is not the same as Flock selling services to cops to aid in identification. In addition, going after 1 business is simply an inefficient use of resources, when the government employees can simply use a different business to abuse their power.
I didn't say the employees should be imprisoned. I said the c-suite, the ones actually in charge. They're enabling these cops to be lazy and not do their job properly, and have directly contributed to numerous human rights violations.
C Suite are employees too. I do not see them breaking any laws, but I do see government employees abusing their power, if not breaking the law.
C-Suite are the top level of the company. Above them is only the board of directors, whose power is limited to firing the C-Suite if they don't like what they're doing. In day to day operations, the C-Suite controls the entire company.
No they're not, they're executives who can only be fired by the board. Equating them with line-level employees is somewhere between naive and isingenuous.
C-suite are officers. Officers have more responsibility for the conduct of the company than employees.
C-suite are officers. Officers have more responsibility.
Sure, and Elon Musk is just a Twitter employee
Do you think IBM executives should've been punished for facilitating the Nazi war machine after WW2?
If you sell a tool and know that it'll be used for evil, are you innocent?
> Do you think IBM executives should've been punished for facilitating the Nazi war machine after WW2?
Emphatic yes
Bayer lost their exclusive rights to aspirin because they aided the Central Powers during WW1
Since I got downvoted, this isn't just this guy.
Turns out police are putting ambiguous plates in the system under all variants, and Flock is lapping it up. The cops who do so should also go to prison.
Cops have qualified immunity and unions with supreme power. No one will go to prison or even reprimanded for this.
I hope you agree with me that is exactly the problem, but AI use in law enforcement only enables the problem to become way worse, with few upsides.
> Paraphrasing the crux of the issue: "It's regular practice in Colorado to list license plates with both versions, the one with 'O's and the other with Zeros in the warrant list." Insane. Practice.
Agree.
> As always, this story has have nothing to do with the cameras or AI, but "law enforcement has an insane lazy practice" doesn't make for a very good headline anymore.
Flock allows them to execute their intent at scale. That's a regression, unless it leads to the realization their intent is harmful and stupid.
(Lots of other reasons Flock is bad too.)
The inability of governments to perfectly enforce laws and regulations shields us from their incompetence and corruption to some extent.
And they think AI will allow them to approach that perfection, when in reality it's worse than actual police investigation
> this story has have nothing to do with the cameras or AI
This story wouldn't exist without flock cameras constantly surveilling the public...cameras have EVERYTHING to do with this story.
"Law enforcement is setting up a multi-county dragnet by putting every version or mistype of a license plate into a warrant list"
wouldn't be a story? It should be! We should have a higher standard for the people with guns and a badge on the street.
Flock is the problem too because their system is enabling the rights violations to scale up.
This wouldn't be a story if the cops did not put the wrong license plate in the system. How is it Flock's fault? Flock is just doing what it is being asked to do!
Let me put in simple terms: Flock flags license plates that are given to it. Someone, somewhere says, license plate "ABCD1234" has a warrant out. And guess what, if Flock sees that plate, it _will_ flag it each. and. every. time!
Tomorrow, say an "Amber Alert" is issued for a pink Ford Taurus with plate "PINKLADY" (when in fact it was a red Taurus with the plate "MADLAD"). Don't you think anyone driving around in a pink Ford Taurus with that plate should be pulled over?
I think if you are driving around in a pink Ford Taurus you are definitely guilty of something even if the plate reads MARYKAY
bad taste isn't a crime lmao
Once? Maybe. And then the cops do their jobs and determine that PINKLADY is not who they're actually looking for, and they go on their way.
Multiple times? Police laziness fueled by AI incompetence
The people getting caught up in this have been pulled over multiple times.
Pigeonholing responsibility onto one party is what allows these mutually-dependent systems to point fingers at one another to escape blame. Rather, the responsibility here is shared. If you want to focus your call for reform on the police (for both making an overly-broad list, and also for harming innocent motorists without compensating them for the damage), then I agree that's more appropriate for this particular problem. But don't absolve Flock.
> Flock is just doing what it is being asked to do!
Well then clearly they are not a problem.
This is precisely what they mean when they say "guns don't kill people, bad people with guns kill people"
they'd only support fully AI-driven guns with zero oversight
"They can't remove it without knowing who the warrant is for" is absolutely Flocks problem.
They're alerting on a license plate but yet somehow they can't turn off that license plate alert using just the license plate number? Fucking bullshit
Wouldn't it be the purview of the cops to update Flock that the plate is no longer of interest and to stop alerting on it? I'm no fan of Flock, but let's put the onus where it is deserved.
The AI is making it way worse because they're continually flagging these individuals even after the police make contact.
Police are starting to use AI as a shortcut to avoid doing actual policing, and that's the real problem.
AI has no place in law enforcement. Its use should result in complete spoilage of the case, and complete exoneration of the accused, with prejudice.
No licensed engineer can say "Well Claude made this bridge for me, it's not my fault". If you're licensed by the state to carry a gun around, your standard should be higher than that, not lower.
AI has nothing to do with this. Cops have been using facial recognition since the 2010's, computers and databases with glitchy connections even longer than that. AI is just the latest boogeyman hiding the actual issue.
Still, AI has no place in law enforcement. It's the hammer that is being used to put screws in. It enables injustice at a far larger scale than ever before. See: the TN woman who was extradited to NC, having never been there, for a crime that the AI "face recognition" flagged as her, and the cops did zero actual investigation, they just took the AI at its word and put her in jail for six months. I also remember a man who was jailed for violating someone else's casino trespass under similar reasons. Bodycams in that case showed the cops says "the software is saying it's him 100%"
Edit: it was North Dakota, not North Carolina.
I'd rather we have cops who are required to actually investigate, versus just taking what a computer program tells them as if it is inerrant gospel
Maybe if the cops can prove they actually did investigation and were only prompted by the AI to do that investigation, I'd agree. But the whole problem is that the cops are blindly using AI to tell them who to arrest, which is such a blatant rights violation that I can't see how anyone could support it and sleep soundly at night
Also, a non-zero number of cops have been using AI to stalk ex-partners. That's just known cases, and it stands to reason there are also a non-zero number of cops who have done it and not been caught. Since a single such case is too many, it needs to stop.
Also, don't forget, "good" cops who aren't reporting bad cops and trying to get them off the force are also really bad cops
Ah, that's was it, ND rather than NC. My bad.
Maybe there were two cases because I thought I remembered hearing about that (or was it Maryland?) but I also remember a similar situation of someone being taken to NC
Edit: the one I was referencing was North Dakota, not NC. But there was a very similar case that I think involved Maryland. The fact that there are multiple cases to confuse in this scenario only emboldens my viewpoint that AI has no place being anywhere near LEO
Why not worry about the AI and work to try to get rid of bad cops?
There is no sense in limiting yourself to doing the next-to-impossible task first.
I'd rather bad cops not be able to use AI to be worse cops, thank you. I think that's the easier task, because of qualified immunity. AI hallucination is an issue well known to happen widely.
I think both can be true. Ideally, we should do more to address the social issues that cause people to drink and drive, but revoking licenses is still a good short-term move. We could outlaw AI policing while we work on deeper issues with law enforcement.
Why the heck are they using both O and 0 on their license plates? Seems like a recipe for this kind of failure.
The cameras that they have to read plates in a lot of different conditions and various states of cleanliness. Some states allow O and some states allow 0, and some states don't care. Combine the two issues and cops get lazy and want to check the plate with both the 0 and O just to "make sure".
The cameras also confuse D and Q with 0 and O. And 5 & S, and 2 & Z, and 6 & G, and 8 & B.
Or at least, enforce a totally unambiguous font, like slashed zero!
Doesn't solve the issue until all 48/50 states have the same standard.
I simply don't understand why our legal system needs a non-deterministic agent injected into it. What value are we trying to capture that isn't already delivered by our overbearing amount of surveillance.
The ability to do less actual work and still get arrests
Except that's not an excuse. What it really means is that potential matches have extremely low confidence, and shouldn't be reported as matches.
It's not insane at all to return both in a lookup. The "reporting person" will often be wrong about slight variations when calling in a license plate and the downside of errors are asymmetric: it is much more dangerous for the officer to think a driver doesn't have a warrant when they do versus thinking they have a warrant when they don't.
The insane part is trying to solve the problems created by homoglyphs in post-assignment.
What's the need to allow both `O` and `0` on a plate if it's supposed to be hard to tell apart anyway? Say there was some reason to want to both characters, why allow assigning a new plate which would match with an existing assignment? It's just a loss of time, resources, and safety for both law enforcement and everyone else to allow duplicate matches to be a possibility.
The funny thing is that disambiguation of glyphs in a font is a solved problem. Slash the zeroes, wide serifs on the capital i, etc. They just...don't do so in these states where it is still a problem.
In the UK this issue was recognised decades ago. They only allow certain letters and numbers in specific places on the registration plates.
Sorry, is it not also much more dangerous for the erroneously-flagged person to be put in this situation? I imagine anyone legally transporting a weapon, for example, would be put in material risk for their safety by this practice.
Also, the widespread practice of people being pulled over for "driving while black".
The police are not your friends. Their job is to arrest. Some departments still have quotas which incentivize their cops to do this even harder.
Let's just arrest everyone then - I'm sure they've committed a crime of some kind during their life.
We're approximately halfway down the slippery slope, and I don't see any way out other than hard revolution, which is very touchy talk on the internet.
Ultimately it's all modern capitalism's fault, else there would be much less incentive for these companies to fuel what is rapidly becoming the effective Fourth Reich
You can talk about revolution on the internet. You can't talk about revolution on websites owned by the current elite, such as this one.
Let me rephrase - you can't talk about it in any venue that's likely to get reach beyond people who are already rightfully paranoid about their rights
https://xkcd.com/1105/
Unfortunately, there are a lot of squad cars and they don't have post-its, they have ALPRs that flag all possible combinations of 1 and I for arrest.
There truly is an xkcd for everything.
The insane practice was allowing "O" and "0" to be used in license plate numbers in the first place. Once you do that, you're stuck dealing with the fallout of trying to distinguish confusing glyphs at distance on a moving vehicle. Many places omit letters that can be confused like this for good reason - e.g. Ontario plates can't have the letters G, I, O, Q, and U.
In the font used for British number plates O and 0 are identical and 1 and I are identical. This link might work for an example:
https://www.dafont.com/uk-number-plate.font?text=OO01+III
Software that handles number plates needs to take account of this. Not all of it does but the glyphs being identical makes it quite clear where the responsibility lies.
My Ontario green plate starts with GV...
> As always, this story has have nothing to do with the cameras or AI, but "law enforcement has an insane lazy practice" doesn't make for a very good headline anymore.
That practice isn't insane. It's what you'd always want.
To the extent that it causes problems, you'd want to fix the practice that doesn't make sense, which is using an alphabet for license plates that contains both O and 0.
Law enforcement being lazy, dumb, and incompetent is not an unpredictable bug. Its predictable. The smartest human capital does not go into law enforcement in this country. They go to other industries. Flock needs to have procedures for whitelisting plates when errors are discovered because these kinds of issues are very common.
Yes, in fact, it's possible to be too smart to be a cop
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